/dev/null

Television night with Music and BEING. Apartment strewn with clothes, bottles, ash-trays over-flowing, cake and candy wrappers, coffee cups and cartons emptied of fast-food, junk-food, food-flavored processed food product.
Colorful slaughter on the big TV.  BEING and Music deep in the couch. Music sucked cigarettes, BEING his bong. They stared hard into the grim eye of The War.  I preferred not to.  See.
Cheesy crunchy chips, beef jerky, beer.  Enemy vehicles blown to bits. “Our” planes over The Enemy City.  Loud significant explosions.

Monthly visit to The City Haven for Adults, see Uncle Joe.
Former salesman, private detective, writer of detective novels, screenplays. Uncle Joe had money stashed. Or so I’d been told. Also told he’d gambled it away. Then again, who was paying for The Haven? Senescence ain’t cheap, unless you live it on the streets, potential guest cadaver of The Death Squad.
He’d been a newspaper columnist, numismatist, a player of horses. He never married, though, allegedly, women craved him, even in The Haven for Adults.

Staff meeting. Topiary Techniques Auditorium. Horticultural Technicians, green-and-yellow t-shirts. Back row, Friday evening, work day done, go home.  Now.  Run.
Victor commandeered the small stage. Stack of papers width of several phone books dramatically dropped loud. Thud. Heads up. Tirade. Paper replacement forms processed last financial quarter, over $250,000.
“That’s $250,000 lifted from Topiary Techniques,” said Victor.

Americana dream a step away from flesh-candy; shocked me from sleep, naked, shivering with touch of mortal, sensitive to the slightest things: unable to bear even routine decay; no longer firm, nor young, nor fit to profit from exchange.
The bah-sheep shorn again, poor fleeced multitudes, dead weight on my conscience, their fate burdens my soul.
Heaviness of chest and gut (doom-coronary? gas-bloat?) then stabbing pain. I’m usually too numb to fear, but verily we’re facing nasty shit, horrifying scene.

Bartleby at The Accounting Firm murdered a ficus.  Stems, leaves, dirt mashed into the carpet of his office. Two jagged branches lay like antlers on his desk.
“I can’t replace this,” I said firmly. “It’s not in the contract.”
“They’re fake,” he said. “You’ve been in here fifty, sixty times, Plantman, and still you haven’t noticed.”
I sniffed a leaf.
“Not the trees, you ass. The Loved Ones,” said Bartleby. “The goddam Loved Ones.”

What is a girl’s desire in the world of men?
The Office Women, the “Datists,” convert raw numeric to “actionable” info.
Datists sit smartly at squat machines. Squarish, sleek machines. Explosion of words, images, connections; algorithms of deception; comedy of ease—click clack click—terror’s brilliant pixel-hues.
“Do not fear us, we cannot replace you, you have souls and lips and skin, mutable, we see you feel you smell you. . .” hum the machines.

The Company Gym. Buff bodies.  Faces taut with grim determination.  Diets optimized by scientific know-it-all know-how proven computer-charted-and-corrected scientific method.  Belief systems built on strong foundations of clinical experimentation repeated for accuracy under stress-increased conditions, peer-reviewed.
Hard labor builds hard selves.

1. College Degree Required
Bright  April Fools noon, months ago.  Drunk. Barely stand.  Advertisement for horticultural technician read:  “Topiary Techniques seeks. Indoor Landscaper. Work with plants. College degree required. College degree a must.  Will train.”
Clean office spacious new.  Expected vegetation, overgrowth, jungle loam, hedge-cutters, machetes. The secretary took my resumé told me to sit.  I sat.  Photographs of plant arrangements prettied walls. Shelves of pristine plant pots—metal, plastic, terra cotta.

Note: Certain critics among our “journalistic peers,” so-called, have impugned the integrity of The /dev/null Staff with accusations of “unprofessional and unsavory tactics” pertaining to the reconstruction of this particular sequence during The Plantman’s ordeal on earth. The Staff did hire a professional hypnotist to delve into this part of The Plantman’s past prior to The University and his subsequent employment at Coolman Associates Advertising Agency.

The Coolman & Associates Human Resource Manager coordinated writers, designers, client accounts.  Killer for the company.  In eight AM out eight PM.
Sexy in her way.  Frantic.
Turned me on. Two years older than I was, then: she was twenty-six.  We eased into chummy, casual, quick to jest, but cautious. Wary of terms.
“Hell,” I said. “We spend our lives here. Who are you?”
“Good point,” she said. “Work, work, work. Love?”
“Love the town all night, let’s go!”