Someone is coming. I turn and pretend to code. My breathing is heavy and my thoughts are elsewhere. What will happen to my family if I die? My kitten, my ficus tree and my subscription to Sports Illustrated all need to be taken care of. But I must be like Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita. I am a warrior and a warrior must fight.
Not the system and not the man. I fight the structure, because once you break down the structure - things happen. I haven't read far enough in Marx's book to know what happens, but things are going to happen.
Everyone else has congregated in conference room B to recite (not sing) the birthday song to the group leader - the manager of managers. I take this opportunity to disrobe. There's still a mark on my stomach from when I dropped the cigarette after I fell asleep on the couch last week. I hope it's not there forever, or I'll have to explain that to everyone who sees me shirtless. Pools, beaches, romantic interludes, rap concerts ("Take yo shirt off, twist it 'round yo head/ Spin it like a helicopta'"), karaoke jams, street fairs and so forth. Could this mean I'm going to have to stop painting my chest for cold weather football games?
But today my chest is being painted for a reason other than the reckless support of things athletic. It's to help spur a revolution. What does one draw on ones chest before going into battle? Horizontal lines, sure. I'll draw the Linux penguin, but since I don't have a yellow sharpie his feet and beak will need to be red. And I'll draw the hammer and sickel from the Soviet flag. There's a lot of white space on my belly, so I'll draw a big unicorn fighting a dragon. It symbolizes my idealism. I realize these are drawn upside down to the rest of the world, but if anyone asks, I'll just say that it's about chaos and anarchy.
My markers are running dry, leaving just a few multi-colored rings around my thighs and calves. My socks and shoes will stay on. Mostly because when I've stayed late, I see the janitor doing a crappy job or skipping our floor altogether. I know this carpet is just filthy.
People are returning from the meeting now. I'm going to hide under my desk and behind my ergonomic rolling chair until things settle down a bit. It will give me a chance to load my stapler and make sure things are in working order before I go into battle.
I accidentally fell asleep for about a half an hour and there's a nasty note in my email inbox about missing our group leader's celebration. I'm going to make an example out of the sender of this message. This bitch was my project manager about six months ago. He gave me a mediocre performance review, too. He's going down.
I slip out of my cubicle and keep low, the stapler, already unhinged and in its most violent state, is in my right hand and I feel the upholstered walls with my left. The victim-to-be is talking on his phone, rather than sending out pissy email. I take his nameplate off the wall outside his cube, with the intetion of throwing it into the corner of his cube's interior, a diversion that will cause him to get out of his chair (the same ergonomic kind as mine).
The nameplate diversion works. He stands up, picks up the nameplate and turns around. There's a look of terror on his face as he sees me jump on him - wrapping my legs around his lower torso and my arms beneath his armpits. I begin biting his neck and jamming the stapler into his back. He's leaning over, screaming, "Get the fuck off of me!" and I do. Then I slam his head into his desk, rendering him unconscious.
I run by my desk to pick up my clothes (I left my car keys in my pants pocket) and sprint to the stairs. The faces of the people who I pass are exactly as I hoped they would be. I've touched people. I've awakened them to the Uprising. The revolution.
Nobody follows me out of the building. My run slows to a jog. Once at my car I put my pants and shirt on. I hurry out of the office park's parking lot and make the short trip home. The song lyrics take on new meaning for me. "I'm not a girl, not yet a woman." Yeah, I've done something brave and amazing today, but I still have a long way to go.
When I get home there is a voicemail from the boss (the group leader whose birthday it was) telling me that I'm fired. Stupid bourgeois bastard. I began washing my facepaint off, which made my skin irritable because of how much scrubbing it takes to remove Sharpie marker, when suddenly there was a knock at my door. To shorten the story, there was a police officer on the other side of the door and I've been assigned 100 hours of community service, most of which will be spent supporting the Friday evening bingo racket at the VFW.
