It’s Wednesday. Yesterday was a bit much. Things went sideways and the repercussions are still being felt. The people around my little fruit stand were appreciative, those in the belly of the fruit stand show little or no interest in my situation. I could be wrong.
In any event, I am in the belly. I got up early and left for work early and arrived at the belly early. Things happened after I left for the day and I am busy trying to figure it all out. Yancy is trying to take the reins, justification for whatever hat he is wearing today. I did some work yesterday though I was not asked to. It seemed to me that fruit stand passes would need to be distributed and each card would need to be entered.
I recorded each number as well as distinguishing marks on various badges. Then after all that a higher up requested the cards and I had no choice but to hand them over. Such is my lot in life. Being in the belly of the fruit stand Iam subject to the whims of many.
I have made a plan regarding sheepish Bill and his cabaret performance tomorrow. I thought about taking a full day but decided to take a half day, though a half day would be four hours, I am taking three hours. I sent Yancy and my counselor an email and was told by my counselor not to include Yancy in my email even though Yancy would be greatly affected by my absence and I felt he should know.
Everything at the fruit stand seems to be on a need to know basis and they don’t seem to want anyone to know anything. It’s their house, it’s their cards. The house always wins.
I voted yesterday. It went well. My candidates in column B won. That rarely happens. Iam glad they won but they have a lot to do, a lot of a mess to clean up. Bill was into watching as much of the results as they came in, before he headed to bed. I was going to stream the Diplomat or the West Wing, or maybe the SCTV documentary but I stood aside and let Bill watch what he wanted to watch.
I tried to resist but I knew I would be drawn in and I was, watch the results until it was time for me to get to bed.
Now it is 11:50. 10 minutes until lunch. Violet needs to take her break at 1:00 and being the amiable person that I am, and being a team player I am taking my lunch earlier than I would like.
And the lunch was me sitting in the concrete park, talking with Bill and then talking with Mike. Smoking a little cigar, surrounded by weed smokers and one or two cigar smokers. Not bad company overall. I return to the belly of the fruit stand smelling like cigars and weed. It could be worse.
I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich surreptitiously at the desk while Violet does her lunch thing.
Mike is terribly worried about his beloved Wade. Wade has been working as an election worker. Yesterday, being election day, Wade was unreachable. Today he is unreachable. I tried to reassure Mike, that could be why he is incommunicado. Mike asked me to call, and I did. I got to Wade’s voicemail and the mailbox was full. So, we have to wait and see and hope for the very best.
the Google Gemini rewrite as a Gore Vidal essay
It is Wednesday—that most tedious of mid-week markers, when the previous day’s absurdities have not yet curdled into history, but remain hovering in the air like heavy, unasked questions. Yesterday, predictably, went sideways. The minor tremors of our petty bureaucracy are still vibrating through the halls, though as usual, the distribution of concern is entirely uneven. Those who gather around my modest little fruit stand—the civilian spectators, if you will—expressed a touch of sympathy. Those entrenched deep within the belly of the enterprise, however, displayed that chilly, practiced indifference so peculiar to minor middle managers. Or perhaps I misjudge them; perhaps they are merely exhausted by their own insignificance.
In any case, here I am, trapped in the subterranean belly of the machine. I rose at an ungodly hour, departed early, and arrived at my station well before the curtain lifted, only to discover that various betrayals and administrative blunders had transpired after my departure yesterday. One spends half one’s life trying to decode the inscrutable motives of total nonentities.
Naturally, Yancy has seized the moment. He is busy attempting to grab the reins—whatever reins happen to be dangling—to justify whichever absurd title he has assumed for the day. Yesterday, out of a misguided sense of civic duty, I performed a task no one had explicitly asked me to do: I meticulously processed the fruit stand access passes, recording every serial number and identifying flourish on the badges. No sooner had I finished this painstaking archival work than a grander authority figure materialised, demanded the cards, and swept them away. I surrendered them, of course. Such is the lot of those who dwell in the lower depths: we exist merely to serve the fleeting whims of shallow despots.
Tomorrow brings the spectacle of sheepish Bill’s cabaret performance. I had originally intended to take a full day’s respite from the asylum, but settled instead on a modest three-hour departure—a compromise that seems to satisfy no one, least of all the timekeeper. I sent a courteous note to both Yancy and my counselor. Whereupon my counselor, with that paranoid instinct unique to institutional lifers, scolded me for copying Yancy. That my absence directly affects Yancy’s meager empire was deemed irrelevant; in our little republic, everything is conducted strictly on a “need-to-know” basis, the overarching policy being that no one should ever know anything. It is their house, after all. Their cards, their rules. The house, as the sharper intellects always remind us, invariably wins.
I voted yesterday—a rare exercise in democratic optimism. Miraculously, the candidates aligned in Column B actually triumphed. This almost never happens in my experience, where the worst are routinely elevated by the impressionable. I am pleased, I suppose, though the poor devils now face the Herculean task of scrubbing clean a Augean stable of accumulated incompetence. Bill, ever the political tragicomediate, was desperate to watch the returns unfold. I had intended to retreat into the fiction of *The West Wing* or the nostalgic irony of *SCTV*, but I deferred to his obsession. I tried to resist the morbid pull of the television screen, but like any student of the American Empire’s ongoing soap opera, I was drawn in until sleep finally rescued me.
It is now ten minutes to noon. Violet requires her respite at one o’clock, and so, playing the role of the agreeable courtier, I adjust my appetite to suit her schedule. Lunch consisted of sitting in a bleak concrete plaza, conversing first with Bill and then with Mike, puffing on a small cigar while enveloped in a cloud of ambient marijuana smoke and stray tobacco fumes. Not the worst company one could keep in this republic, truth be told. I returned to the belly smelling faintly of vice and rebellion. It could, as always, be infinitely worse. At my desk, I surreptitiously consumed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while Violet took her leave—a covert act of sustenance behind enemy lines.
Meanwhile, poor Mike is beside himself with anxiety over his beloved Wade. Wade volunteered as an election worker yesterday—a noble, if hazardous, pursuit—and has subsequently vanished into the bureaucratic ether. Unreachable yesterday, unreachable today. I attempted to offer Mike some mild, stoic comfort—election administrators are, after all, notoriously overworked—and offered to dial the man myself. I reached only a voice message system, choked to capacity with unanswered calls. And so we wait, trapped in the quiet suspense of everyday life, hoping that the republic has not entirely swallowed him whole.