Stephen Blatt Rules

I thought I'd start my blog with a sarcastic swipe at my current and temporary employer, Stephen Blatt Architects. I answer their phones, sort their mail, smile sheepishly, etc. The woman at the temp agency called me last week and said I would be needed for receptionist work and "admin," a Latin term I'm not familiar with. Everyone at Stephen Blatt seems to be speaking English, however. I am writing this blog post from their Dell Precision 330, which gives me shit occasionally. But the computer is perhaps my best acquaintance in the office. Together we process and destroy junk email. The Internet is a constant soothing serenade.

The financial guy in this office is C. Cromwell. To protect anonymity I would normally say "Charles C.," but I can't resist the Anglo-pull of his surname. For the curious, you may find him in your Who's Who. Charles is scruffy in a bulldog-on-the-chesterfield sort of way; his big belly completes a satisfyingly round and sanguinary bearing. He has a trusty fireside baritone. Usually he comes in late and smells of aftershave, maybe Old Spice. The other day I caught him napping at his desk, head down on folded arms--a barefaced rest technique I perfected myself in Algebra III. Every day in 12th grade, I came to class early to get the jump on my fatigue. The wet-behind-the-ears student teacher didn't bother me with attendance, and soon enough I became invisible. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of a test and jot down poetry of difficult-to-render associative fancies sprung from my subconscious. I don't think C. Cromwell does this. He manages some residential property and deals in wampum for Blatt. "That's why I'm tearing my hair out all the time," he says, referring to having two professional commitments. His wispy brown hair is combed and left alone with retired musketeer flair.

A pomegranate comes floating into my imagination, red and leathery, and I project it mentally into my physical surroundings. It travels through the air across the reception area, disappears through a passageway in the wall, maybe turns the corner and heads down the hall to C. Cromwell's office. A gift from me to him.

I take a bite of cinnamon raisin bagel and notice how the dough squeezes together where my front teeth have left a bite mark. At the microscopic level the airy cells of bread try to spread away from each other. They have springiness. And maybe their natural expanding is the afterthought of their mother yeast.

I'm not done yet trying to be my biggest self. The suggestion of a bite mark left on my body calls into question what unseen enormity could be treating me as its bagel? My thoughts on the subject yaw in sloshing consciousness. I am tickled by the sight of an office plant's prickly green leaf-spears. The plant is just two stems, each 5-7 inches long, emitting from a woody stump with chopped digits splintering. The 3.5 inch diameter titian plastic pot of soil is itself divulged in a simple blue-grey ceramic with a clean ridged rim. The leaf-spears are the lacquered green of fake plastic vegetation. They shoot off the stem thinly like bullet tracings at a jagged upward angle and splay out from each other like the fingers on two hands joined at the heel to create a supplicant Vee. They look like they could be clapping; stiffly clapping; slowly clapping.

Every posting should have a link. For more satirizing of office culture, read Nicholson Baker's short but labyrinthine novel, "The Mezzanine": "This book may hold the record for the most footnotes in a work of fiction," says a fan. http://j-walk.com/nbaker/mezzanine.htm