Dr J versus Larry Bird 2
Continued from last week...
I don't know where the hell I was going with the ponging sound last week. I mean, I didn't know where it would take me, to be honest. I headed down the stairs, and out on to the street.
It's not as if I expected it to bring me to a bar or club or anything. I'm not stupid. It was a ponging noise, after all. Ponging noises don't take people anywhere, there are cabs for that kind of thing. I had assumed it would stay right back where it originated -- at the computer, or so I thought. There was a distinct lack of knowledge going on about the whole procession of events.
But there it was: not bringing me anywhere but accompanying me, nonetheless. A steady, patient, *pong*. Happening just when I was letting my guard down, each time. Which meant the noises where getting further and further apart, at least at the beginning, as I passed the time since the last one went off and began to subconsciously relax... and then there it was.
"Maybe I need a vacation." I didn't say that out loud, for fear of scaring anyone passing me by on the street. As it was I figured I looked a little like Lon Chaney or someone lurching around the streets. Lon Chaney when he was the wolf man, obviously, I don't know if he lurched around in real life. I'm assuming he didn't. This little voice inside distracted me from the ponging noise. I realized this later, having been distracted, of course, like someone with a phantom limb not noticing their limb is phantom until they try to pick up a pencil with it.
"Maybe it's some defective chip or something, something the government planted in my head, and it's malfunctioning, and that's what the ponging noise is. And they're not going to get around to fixing it in time because it's some government agency, and you know how they operate: huge budget, bored and incompetent staff, unimaginable amount of bureaucratic manure to wade through in order to get a purchase order in the system for getting someone to take a look at the request for someone else to come out and take a look and attempt to fix the problem before figuring out it was some other department's problem, and then another jaunt through their equally bureaucracy-laden system which was wholly incompatible with the previous department's system so it took twice as long to massage the data from one group's system into the other's."
"I know exactly what you mean." This came from the gutter. Which meant two things: 1) I said that last bit out loud. 2) Someone was speaking to me from the gutter. Not quite the Great Beyond, but still weird.
Sure enough, when I checked the gutter I'd just passed, there, mouth pressed up to a storm grate, was my audience.
To be continued?
disclaimer:
This week's issue has been brought to you by a pretty severe lack of sleep. I don't know how new mothers do it. Survive on so little sleep, that is.
So there you have it.
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