Bovine Birth
or
Having a Cow Isn't Really a Big Deal:
A Journal Entry
.
I’m back. Had to splash some water on my face. It’s 6:07 am and I’m just into my second to last hour of my eight-hour graveyard shift. The eyes feel like tumid, rubber balls skipping in my sockets. I’ve been reading The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Becket’s Molly, Molone Dies and The Unnamable, some financial self-help book Tanya gave me, and White Over Black, a book covering American slavery in detail.
It’s quiet of course. Only the faint buzzing of the florescent lights color the silence with a jaundice sound. I had to go splash some water on my face and refill my thermos. The city bus just passed the office with a gargling woosh. A speeding car verooms away…I keep hallucinating…and I really don’t mind the hypnagogic fantods I’m beginning to doze into as my shift comes to a close. Vehicles pass with audible buoyancy, as if I can see them in Matchbox diminutive on the desk before me. Ghosts whisper a warm darkness. Th fire hydrant just outside the lobby, as my vision focuses beyond the office, darts in with color, ultra-yellow in the contrast of morning on night. A couple expeditiously cross the lobby, the elevator shuts and churns behind them in servitude.
Drank all the tea down. Had to gulp it in an attempt to feel awake. The busses are louder now. Hear the verroom-shoosh of the cars multiplying with the light of day. The phone is insolently silent. I don’t want it to ring in earnest, but it’s plastic prostration and super-console one thousand glares as a gratuity of my abeyance, it’s function keys laid out like laminated, extirpated teeth. It’s 6:20 and my forehead aches like a jackboot tipped javelin has jammed its rusty rod into my cerebellum.
An early morning employee has entered the building. What was his name? He told me yesterday. Shit! I expect myself to remember names. I’m isolated for hours though and then in come the bushy-tailed maintenance men ready to shake hands and clean shitters, and I just can’t remember their names. That’s o.k. though, Carmel called Steve Yesterday morning when she came in. I think I’m cognizant enough to say College Park El Conquistador if the phone rings. I would submit that El Conquistador would suffice as a greeting. Does each greeting have to include some advertisement for the establishment? Hell, I should answer the phone with an infomercial spiel and a brief overview of my accomplishments in case a would-be employer calls inadvertently.
Arrgh, my headache might easily be the result of bovine birth from my skull case. If my head popped like a bloody embryonic sack revealing a muddled, long-legged calf, that having gestated in my brain for the last few days, finds itself limp kneed among the living with a dead, headless humanoid slain by its birth flaccid over the office desk, I wouldn’t be the least bit astonished. Of course I wouldn’t, I’d be dead.
- David Goyette