Thu, 19 May 2005

habitual
The closest bar to her apartment was in a bowling alley, but the lanes close at ten except on the weekend and the bar itself is open until two, and she always went out with friends on the weekend, so the actual bowling aspect of the bar never really came up, except for an occasional league in a back booth buying pitcher after pitcher. After a couple months she knew everyone there and they all left her alone, mostly. After the lanes close down you can’t even tell the bar is open from the street, so it isn’t the place that gets a lot of new customers, and that’s how everyone likes it. On weekends, with her friends, she didn’t mind the meeting people, as pointless as it is, as they were the sort of women where one of them would meet a guy and bring him back to the table and talk around him, about things he had nothing to say, and maybe he waited it out and went home with the woman who pulled him over but mostly they left, vaguely humiliated, and they would discuss his latent faults. Here, however, such an intrusion would require some thinking, some making conversation and not being uncomfortable and weird and keeping everything on a certain level, and after work that’s the last thing she wanted to do.

At night she had dreams of an office complex built like a hive, each cubicle a shrine to a different god, the leftovers of rituals in the breakrooms, pitch and feather and blood on the tables and floors. She had developed this dream, creating new rooms, tunnels into the earth and rooms of primitive computers which spat out dot-matrix reports of exterminated employees. During work, she transposed this dream-office upon her actual office, so that the minor dramas of the workplace were scrambled and rebuilt in her ears as realtime histories of secret rites. The first month of her job people would occasionally speak to her, and she would give them a terse reply, as little as necessary, as having to actually participate in the scene shattered the illusion. Soon she had the entire eight-hour shift entirely free of interaction, and so her job became palatable, dredging up material for her dreams, which would in turn allow her to work in peace, and so on. This process proved to be quite an effort, so her time at the bar was used in the way most people actually use sleep, as a time to shut down and process the day’s events, here aided by alcohol, the only drug she still had a use for.

Three years of this went by without a hitch, until the bowling alley decided to institute Wednesday Rock ‘N Bowl, blacklights and Ozzy and double the usual lane rate from ten until two. The inhabitants of the bar were understandably thrown into fits, some vowing to leave, some filing complaints with the manager, but she didn’t really pay any attention the first week, which was a bit of a flop. Week two started to see more people, mostly junior high kids with missing parents and disgusting ideas as to public displays of affection, but even this wasn’t too much of a problem. The fourth week saw the introduction of postironic college students, prepared to relish and mock and drink, and it was here that the problems came up. Now the Rock ‘N Bowlers were infiltrating the actual bar, and started coming during the remainder of the week, ordering goofy drinks and complaining/delighting in every trivial detail. Now college boys with elaborate facial hair and internet-bought trucker caps tried to buy her drinks and ask her about her secret dreams, and she had to stare them down until they broke inside and went home to stage suicide attempts. This left her little time to decompress, and soon the effects began to show at work, where she referred to the executive vice president in charge of sales as “the second and final skineater”. At night, her hive-dreams were unravelled by visions of faux-jewel faux-fur faux-soul holocausts, and she kept waking from these unsatisfying visions, her eyes opening to the shadows of trees before the streetlight wave back and forth across the ceiling. Initially she tried to imagine the shadows as shapes, then she let her eyes unfocus and tried to hypnotize herself with the flicker of light, and finally she grew to hate the sight of her ceiling and nailed quilts over her windows, but it was no use, the sleep and the work and the bar were all now little more than vaguely different locations which housed the same dread and exhaustion.

Eventually she had to burn the whole city to the ground.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #