Scented sheets,
bright light,
bath toys,
soap and water,
coffee,
milk,
newpapers,
mown clover,
lawn blower,
con trails,
car locks,
leather seats,
touch screens —
interleaved and interwoven, the practical arts assail his senses
as he moves from the bedroom to the bathroom and back, to the kitchen, the front yard and the car on his way to work. He sets his briefcase on the passenger seat, locks facing forward, and opens it with one hand while he steers the car out of the driveway with the other.
Open or closed, the briefcase is a reliquary. It contains things even he does not know about or recognize. Inside the briefcase are two stitched notebooks. One is marked "Work" and contains the timed and dated notes, ideas, lists and tasks that surround his every workday. The other is marked "Personal" and contains the notes, ideas, lists and tasks that define his life away from work. The "Work" notebook also contains important information he may need to cover his ass in meetings. "Jim has promised QA report by Tuesday," is the most recent example. The "Personal" notebook contains no CYA. He is exceptionally proud of the fact that that none of its many secrets: hopes, dreams, insights, aphorisms, books to buy, drawings and diagrams, things to pick up at the store on the way home, phone numbers, passwords, can be used against him in a court of law. Its latest page of entries reads,
Great products still need great promotions.
The flow of money from corporations to politicians allows corporations to control the language and form of contemporary law and politics. Everything that occupies the average employee's mind — the prices of things: insurance, house notes, milk and gas; the fear of things: job loss, sickness, terrorism, etc., is secondary and symptomatic since all these things serve the corporate agenda. All things, birth, death and everything in between, down to the last sensory perception and bio-chemical interaction, measured and controlled as electronic equity transactions, is the ultimate goal of monopoly capitalism. Everything else is marketing.
Capitalism is the dominant politic in the world today. The dominant artifact is money. Money is also the dominant goal and the dominant value system.
The difference between taxes and profits is unrecognizable once taxes are converted to corporate contracts, tax loopholes, protectionist regulations and other forms of subsidy. This does not take into account additional, regressive forms of taxation such as corporate owned gambling and pharmaceutical drug addiction.
Free markets are for individuals. In a truly democratic free market there would be no such thing as corporate citizenship. Democratic free markets are nonexistent.
All governments ultimately veer toward fascism. It is the political and psychological equivalent of a big-budget action movie. It has the greatest entertainment value. It appeals to the largest number of people. It has the highest ROI of any early adopter business model.
Call Frank and get a lease price on a new Lexus.
Find out where Suzanne wants to vacation.
Finish book this weekend.
Suzanne smells really good lately. What is she wearing, eating?
There are file folders in the briefcase containing whitepapers, reports, schedules and time sheets. There are pens, a calculator and a notebook computer. There are two smart phones.
There is also a draft manuscript in the briefcase. A novel. He has been working on it for three years. Although he tried to be disciplined about it, for the first two years he found his writing to be either disciplined or inspired, but never both at the same time. After much trial and error and with the full cooperation and participation of his wife, he finally succeeded in creating an efficient and reliable ritual of inspiration. For the past several hundred evenings, after the playtime with Allison, an early dinner, dishes, "quality time with Anna" as his teenage daughter by a previous marriage laughingly refers to his and Suzanne's parental efforts, and an hour or so of TV or a rented movie, the couple retires to the bedroom where they give each other a full body massage, a skill learned at a local YWCA. Then they make love. His wife is a muse, a daughter of Zeus. Suzanne, The Muse of Sexual Fulfillment. You've seen the movie. Now read the book. Once they enter the bedroom, he is in her thrall. It has been that way from the beginning and remains so after five years of marriage. Afterwards, naked, covered in a thin film of sweat and inwardly soaking in endorphins, he goes to his desk in the next room where he substitutes the bland, mechanical prose of his prior efforts for the straightforward truth of his be-here-now imagination, one page at a time. To his mind, his novel is not only a reliquary. It is a reliquary of reliquaries, capable of containing any and all other reliquaries. Because it is inspired by individual acts of love, the majority of its contents remain a secret, even to him. Best of all, it is almost finished.
