Calling It Off

I hit Play.

Blue screen. Static. Then the neighborhood nutjob shuffles by in housecoat and slippers. Left to right, right to left. He disappears down a hallway, reappears, looms Frankenstein-large in the frame, his hair a greasy mess. Sign of the madman, the freak from whom children should run away, run away! He sidles up to the living room window, inserts two fingers between the Venetian blinds to sneak a peak at the world outside, where the mail spills from the box at the end of the drive and a month's worth of newspapers dot the lawn like some sick and persistent dog's copious, decomposing turds. He mutters to himself. He shuffles.

It is fresh evidence, taken this morning, and it confirms what I fear.

I hit Stop.

This is me? This? Me? Yes: this: me. How?

People might conjecture: genetics? Life's sometimes sad trajectory? Happenstance? A conspiracy? Simpler than that. Crazier.

The path from Norman, the stable guy next door ("What's he do again?" people might say. "An accountant? An adjustor?") to the sour-smelling crazy man with all those cats and the station wagon full of empty milk cartons and the yelling about the government and black helicopters and people not making eye contact with you anymore can be a brutally short and straight one. A matter of minor mistakes. You see, I was never the kind of guy who had goals for being, you know, like the kinds of things the TV "doctors" preach. I didn't have milestones and performance objectives, five-year plans written down in little notebooks. None of that stuff. I just did my thing. Lived. Like my father used to say, you get up and have a cup of coffee and figure out what's what, then you go out and do stuff. That was my motto. Go out and do stuff. So I did. And I think now that when you live like that, when you're just kind of floating like that, well, you don't have a hold, you don't have a grip. And things can happen. And then things can get out of control. So I guess if you're going to have a motto, you better have a good one.

* * *

They must have a motto, too, some pithy sentiment to motivate them as they start the day, limping and scuffling through the special safety glass doors, feeling their way to their desks. Maybe it's a Helen Steiner Rice poem pinned to their cubicle walls or a Rod McKuen screensaver. Or it could be that they have a banner strung across the entire office, some kind of play on words to do with inspiration and brightness and light bulbs. It's got to be something to do with light bulbs, of course, because that's how they get you, after all. That's how they sucked me in. Those wonderful, last-almost-forever, too-good-to-be-true light bulbs. Special emphasis on the "too-good-to-be-true" part, although not quite in the way you might imagine.

* * *

I don't turn the lights on anymore. Instead, I creep in the dark, sometimes shuffling carefully along the wall, sometimes on my knees, sometimes even low-crawling like I'm stretched out under barbed wire with machine gun bullets snapping overhead. Or I use the night vision function on my camcorder and wade through a wavering sea-green underwater world that's always a half second too slow. I want to believe that nobody knows I'm here. Who would be at home and leave all that shit on his lawn? Who would be at home and never turn the lights on? But I know they're watching. They've been watching for a while.

I don't turn the lights on because when I start doing that, I'll start burning them out, and when I start burning them out is when they'll try to suck me back in...