The last brief that I filed contained two words; “target engaged.”
I do what I do because this is my job. The business is compartmentalized. I am only given enough knowledge to do the job to which I have been assigned. When I first got into this business, I spent some unbilled hours in thought; I wondered to what larger effort my job contributed. Those unbilled hours were wasted in the delusion that I was smart enough to understand the larger effort. The reason I was chosen for the work is precisely because I had a sufficiently low intelligence that I would do my assigned jobs with efficacy. I had convinced myself that I was smarter than they thought I actually am.
But it was that I spent time to think about this nonsense, instead of nuzzling my face into your neck … that allowed me to understand that I am in fact as stupid as they assumed. At that point, I saw you again, like Shane said, the “cracks in the ceiling spelled ‘hell’.” Six to twelve isn’t an easy stretch, and for all I knew back then, I was in for the full six at least. You didn’t get me through it, I’m not going to lie to you like some shitty song. I got through it because it wasn’t really all that bad. I was surrounded by criminals like myself, a few of them even did some of the same things that I did. But the system there was built like a factory assembly line. If I did the tasks assigned to me, I would click gradually toward the end. Twelve years became six years, and by the time the Prime Minister got his cleanup fees, six years became eighteen months. One year, a man barely has time to plan his next move, but eighteen months, it was sufficient. United Crushing behind me, Employee Equity in front of me, I could have done three and come out happy.
Yes, I thought of you. I thought mostly of your breasts, of the shape of your arms, the way you looked at your son, the way you pretended not to love your husband. All the shit you and I fucked up, huh? The lives we exploded, all that pain we manufactured just for the hell of it. We took a space that was filled with happiness and we filled it with misery. It’s what we do, I guess, one of the perks of the job.
By the way, I was mentioned in the Gravity Light Collective project that MikeW did with Whammy Deck. Please have a look, he’s trying to get support for his clean rare earth element thing with — supposedly — my original designs for Whammy Deck. I haven’t actually looked at them yet, but if he fucks it up, that’s on him, I have nothing to do with that part. Here’s the link for the project: http://www.WhammyDeck.com/