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2:39 p.m. - Monday, Nov. 03, 2003
The Dark Hour of the Soul
In the dark hour of the soul, you need Cliff Yablonski's website. You need because it makes you laugh, and nothing else can make you laugh in this, the dark hour of the soul. But you're at work, and you don't really want all the nincompoops wandering around behind you to see that you're looking at Cliff Yablonki's website at work. How come the dark hour of the soul always comes when you're at work, where you have high-speed internet and could really benefit from Cliff Yablonski's website? At home, you can look at whatever you like, but you've only got dial-up internet. But you don't really care, because, as I mentioned, the dark hour of the soul doesn't happen at home.
So you stop by the Starbuck's and, in a hollow voice, you say, "Barista, gimme a vanilla latte with skim milk," as if it were the gun you were going to use to blow your brains out. And you take that vanilla latte, and you drink it. It tastes like crap, but you don't really care. You're beyond tasting things. You just want to look at Cliff Yablonki's website.
But you can't. You're at work.
You need to laugh. It's true that you were digging out stumps with a pickaxe yesterday, so now your whole upper torso is so sore that it hurts to laugh. But you don't care. You want to laugh, you want to hurt, you just want to feel something in this, the dark hour of the soul -- something besides crappy, I mean. You already feel crappy.
You hear the conference calls on the speakerphones, and they sound like the voices of the dead, centuries upon centuries of the dead, saying: we, too, were once parties to conference calls. And you know it's true. And you know that someday, in the mere blink of an eye, or after an aeon of suffering, you will be conferenced in on that necrophone, and that knowledge is the only thing that sustains you in this, the dark hour of the soul, since you're at work and you can't look at Cliff Yablonski's website, godammit.
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