kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"lint.1"

words

F&C 2005/01/19 :: Lint :: http://www.stwa.net/scrawl/viewtopic.php?t=18138

Twelve midnight, and I can't get a thought out of my head. It's a little piece of lint lodged deep in the recesses of my brain, warring with the 9 o'clock meeting with the VC tomorrow and that tidy-bowl commercial from the late 80's.

This is midnight. Every midnight.

VC--might as well be the Viet Cong, I feel like I'm selling out.

Cold sweat: I am.

Venture capitalists; vultures is what they are. We're not dead yet! Just ... I suppose we're starving to death, crawling through financial desert. And so they swoop in--worse, we sought them out. Come here, Mister Vulture, no--no! Over here! Come swoop down, peck our sides, see that we live and regurgitate some of your drugged nectar to this old fledgling. Give us money. Fatten us for the slaughter.

Yeah, I've got nightmares. I've got a car analogy for it all, too, but people seem to be tired of that. Cars are just so useful for analogies, and it doesn't hurt that I did project management for Ford three companies ago.

There's fear there, too--I'm too old, too disconnected. Not respected. Or worse, not deserving.

Every midnight, it's something. There's always some element of stress to wake up to; some element of stress I'm trying to escape by finding sleep. Some element of stress that's keeping me tied up in mental tangles, ropes, cords--yeah, that's another thing that will keep me up all night. But that's not the main problem.

This little piece of lint lodged deep in the recesses of my brain I call my Conscience. Note the capital letter--it's not what you're born with, or what you're taught. Or it _could_ be what I was born with, and I simply never noticed it. Perhaps it was a slow learner--or underdeveloped--or perhaps this conscience thing people talk about it more abstract than that, it's hard to say; I've never been inside anyone else's skull. But it seems to function the way I've heard a conscience is supposed to. It chastises me about Sharon; about Carol; about people I can't even remember. It sits a military tribunal, the sort you see on Hollywood shows, and sounds off the charges against me. And while I can respond, it doesn't hear me.

It's not _me_. It's a foreign body my own mental body is trying to reject. Or a foreign body trying to reject my own mental body. That is fear that will drive you straight to padded walls and comfortable restraining jackets.

No, I'm not going to take a power drill to the skull to get it out. I saw that movie. Too much like the happy ending in 1984. My life is a lot better than that, even if the chemical depression makes it similar.

But it does keep me up at night.

Today's in-flight narration is on the topic of my abject worthlessness. I'm sure you've heard the story. Everyone hears the story at some point in time, right? How everything you admire is shit, and how everything worthwhile in your life you don't deserve? Right, I'm sure you've heard that. Except most people seem like they can tuck it away, go on with their lives--they know the truth one way or the other, and they can work with that.

I just don't know.

I want to deserve what I've worked for--but what if I don't?

What if I don't?

Tonight, the conscience is the VC. If he knew how worthless I was, if he knew the things I did--he wouldn't touch me with a ten foot pole, let alone ten million dollars. No, I'm really not that horrid--I don't _do_ those things! But they're in my head, so what does that mean? He knows my thoughts. That's all it takes. But I need that money--the next round of funding, just to keep going. Just to keep going. The money's not just for me--no, it's not for me at all, really. It's for the company, and the company deserves it, the people in the company--they need it. For some of them it's not very much, but it is a living wage, and they need to be thankful for that. And I need to be thankful that I can help them get that. But the VC, the VC in my head keeps screaming at me like a drill sargeant, like my mother, keeps screaming at me until I'm curled into a little ball of anguish, cold tears rolling over hot cheeks, stinging goopily in my ears; salt-blood taste in the back of my throat and a pain--a core of pain of shouting of noise of turmoil of static SCREAMING at one pinprick of a point in my skull--make it stop make it stop make it stop--

And then exhausted, muscles lax, completely helpless and hopeless--it lets go. The mind is done. Emotions drained. Heart is calm. Eyes are heavy. Thoughts are slow. Numb. Done.

End.

Until the sweet, sweet morning comes around.