The Ubiquitous Slime

I was in an office this morning wearing a necktie and a jacket in addition to an Oxford shirt with a collar and pants, socks, and shoes, and the usual underthings. I had been escorted there to wait and for a few minutes was in the room alone. It was a quiet room, and I was pleased to wait. I have become good at waiting. It is one of the best accomplishments of my life considering at one time I was a miserable failure at it. But now, I can sit in a quiet room alone in an uncomfortable clown suit, clutching my fancy binder I recently repaired with carpenter’s glue when the cardboard liner came away from the fabric when the crappy rubber cement job those Chinese fellows gave into many harsh instances of dew point, and I can sit there and not bob my ankle up and down, and not fidget, and I can simply sit. I have worked long and hard at this skill and I consider it one of the finest skills a person can learn and exhibit. And were I a stealthy employer, I would train a camera on the candidate and I would let him or her sit for several minutes to sweat, and I would see how good they are at waiting, and I would include that sociopathic test of mine in my metrics.

After a few minutes of my happy waiting exercise ensued, the attractive young lady walked into the room, sighed, and said, “Jeez, the least they could have done was to turn on the TV for you.” And she took a remote control from the desk and she turned on the television that was stuck up there on the wall. Thankfully it was not tuned to Fox “News” or events might have gone much differently today. No, it was tuned to MSNBC’s coverage of the Holy Pontiff visiting these Untied States of America today.

So that young lady assumed I was miserable sitting alone in a room and perceived that the answer was to flick on a television set to ease my misery. It was quite impossible to imagine that a person could be quite content sitting in a room doing nothing for ten minutes without any noise or flickering images. It is an odd sickness of every step of our lives.

Every breakroom in my workplace has blathering TV sets going on and on. Every bar and restaurant I frequent has them, blah blah blah. Try to get away from a television set today. It’s impossible. In a way that is weird and has crept up gradually and

hey wait. Mysteries of Laura is on the tube right now. Fart fart. Fun fun.