Wednesday, January 14th 202,6 I am listening to Maria Callas at my desk. Yancey was in this morning, and it went well. He asked me a few questions I answered them as well as I could, and he seemed satisfied with my responses.
Mike was at my apartment last night for an hour or two, then he left to go back to his place, where his beloved will be joining him at some point this evening don’t know if they’re taking into account how things actually work in the real world with time, and whatnot, but I’m sure they will find out.
I was thinking of John Carroll. John was someone whom I admired at my first job at HBJ. My brother Brian was not impressed with him, but I thought he was smart and funny, and he did not feel the same way about me. I was an underling, and he treated me as such.
Still is probably because of the grace of my mother that I was working there, and he probably recognized that and probably felt that I was a fool and should have been fired a long time before.
John was very close to Nick Lattanzio, and I was the third wheel. Not invited to partake in their Odd Couple trivia discussions.
He was an avid bowler, which is where my brother came across him when working at HBJ. John did have awful skin. The lesson of not picking your pimples and leaving acne scars it was a lesson that he did not heed.
John had a sister, Annie, who was nice enough. She certainly liked to drink, and I think that is ultimately what killed her that would have been decades since I had last seen her.
I don’t know why, but these people pop up in my head every now and then, and I feel compelled to write something about it. The rabbit hole led me to the obituary for John and Annie’s brother Michael, who seems to have been in the closet. Of course, I could be wrong, but that’s what I get from that.
Am I living in the past? Will John Carroll ever do a search for himself and find this entry in this here blog? Of course, there are many other John Carrolls, including a university called John Carroll University.
In any event, it’s lunch time, and I am going out to smoke a mini cigar. It is a pleasant afternoon, temperatures in the low 50s, upper 40s, whatever they want to call it, it’s nice.
Just had a phone call with Bill. It was lovely; he had so much to say, and he tried to say it all at the same time, which caused him to get tongue-tied, which is what Bill is.
I’m going to head back inside in a few minutes. Nothing else to report. It’s Wednesday, it’s hump day, just a couple more days to get through until I get a 3-day weekend. That’s something to look forward to…sleeping until 9:00 a.m.
I was able to keep Yancey entertained playing various female artists like Res and Grace Jones. I was entertained, as was Yancey.
gemini google rewrite as a Thomas Pynchon essay
The Callas Protocol and the HBJ Occult
The date is January 14, 2026—a timestamp vibrating with the low-frequency hum of a future already decaying at the edges. I am hunched over my desk, a terminal in the great network, bathed in the sonic high-treble martyrdom of Maria Callas. Her voice spirals upward like a double helix, decoding the morning’s Entropy. Earlier, a character named Yancey materialized, drifting through the office ether like a man following an invisible treasure map. He interrogated the silence; I provided the requisite verbal counters—shibboleths, really—and he withdrew, ostensibly satisfied that the machinery was still greased.
Last night, Mike occupied my coordinates for a span of two hours before retreating to his own sector to await his “Beloved.” One wonders if they have consulted the Master Clock, or if they operate on a rogue timeline where the Real World’s friction—the sheer drag of minutes against hours—doesn’t apply. They are out there now, maneuvering through the temporal slush, destined to collide with the inevitable realization that Time is the only house that never loses.
My thoughts, meanwhile, have been hijacked by the ghost of John Carroll. He haunts the archives of HBJ—a corporate monolith from my formative years where I functioned as a low-level node, an underling in the shadow of the Great Desk. To me, Carroll was a titan of wit, a fast-talking architect of the lunchtime gag; to him, I was merely a smudge on the glass. My brother Brian, always the skeptic of the local hierarchy, found him negligible. But I knew the truth: I was there only by the intervention of Maternal Grace, a cosmic pass-key that John surely recognized, looking at me with the weary disdain of a man who knows exactly which cogs are destined for the scrap heap.
The social geometry was merciless. John and Nick Lattanzio existed in a closed loop, a duopoly of Odd Couple trivia where the questions were more ritualistic than inquiry. I was the Third Wheel, the external observer, the uninvited guest at the feast of Felix and Oscar.
John’s extracurriculars involved the heavy physics of the bowling alley—that’s where Brian clocked him. But the real data was written on his face: a lunar topography of acne scars, a tragic Braille telling the story of lessons unheeded, of fingers that couldn’t stop picking at the subcutaneous mysteries of the self. There was a sister, Annie, a spectral figure of kindness who eventually dissolved into the amber liquid of the Bottle—a slow-motion suicide that concluded decades ago in a different zip code of memory.
And then, the Rabbit Hole. The digital descent led me to the obituary of the third sibling, Michael, whose life seemed coded in the unmistakable ciphers of the Closet. A “private life,” a “longtime companion”—the usual redacted biography of a man living in the margins of his own era.
Is this the Past, or is the Past just a suburban development I haven’t moved out of yet? Will the “John Carroll” of the present—perhaps a different iteration, perhaps the one synonymous with the University—ever deploy a search engine and stumble upon this transmission? A feedback loop across the decades?
Outside, the atmosphere is holding steady at 50 degrees—or 48, or 52—the Bureau of Meteorology is playing with the sliders again. I step out to ignite a mini-cigar, a small burnt offering to the afternoon.
The telephone screams. It’s Bill. He is a linguistic pile-up, a man trying to evacuate a lifetime of thoughts through a single-lane exit. His words jam together, a phonetic gridlock that leaves him tongue-tied—a condition that is, for Bill, the only true state of being.
I retreat back to the interior. It is Wednesday, the Hump, the apex of the weekly trajectory before we begin the long slide toward the Three-Day Weekend. The goal? Nine o’clock A.M. unconsciousness. A temporary secession from the grid. Until then, the playlist remains operational: Res, Grace Jones, the high-priestesses of the groove. Yancey is entertained. I am entertained. The system remains in equilibrium. For now.
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