Bad Habits - Pictures of a slow day - October 28 2004
Don’t shake it like a Polaroid picture
An ugly repressed memory crept to the surface recently. It came, claws out and baffling, and I struggled to make sense of it.
I was teleported back to Boston where I worked as a temp for a year.
If the repressed memory had stopped there, would that not have been enough? But, alas, no, it continued. I was “working” at Polaroid. I never did figure out what my job was there. I assigned myself the task of reading the newspaper every morning, but that was handily completed by 10:30, which left a lot of time to kill.
After that, I’d set out on my rounds. I visited each cube on my floor daily as dedicatedly as any fictional doctor, dispensing healthy doses of Jane. I, Marcus Welby, M.D., making cube calls. I felt OK about this because the real Polaroid employees didn’t seem to know what their jobs were either. Sure, they knew they were engineers, but they had nothing to engineer. I only hope it was because of the recession.
Leaving smart people with this much down time is dangerous. I bore witness, happily buried till recently, to some scary events. Like the time I walked into a cube and found two very short men dancing shirtless around a chair. It’s a hazy, half-developed image, but I believe they were singing the munchkin song from the Wizard of Oz in eerie, high-pitched voices and whooping their shirts around as they danced.
I stood paralyzed at the entryway to the cube. They laughed to me and called out, “We’re doing our troll dance!” I squeaked an eerie high-pitched sound of my own and ran off.
Troll dance, indeed. Engineers should never be shirtless.
See, this is what happens in the desert, which is where I am for a few more weeks before I return to civilization. The merciless sun smelts out mental impurities. All the things you’ve hidden away safely in the dark corners of your mind are ferreted out and overexposed. Only instead of producing a strong, steely mind, I believe it might be the path to some sort of bastard metal ... and pure madness. Constant bright sun is just as detrimental as constant gloom.
The memory came back when I heard my recycling bags in the entryway start slowly falling over. My first thought was: Is it a troll? Then, more realistically: Had a midget gotten into the house? But this only begs the question: Has the sun already baked my brain? Perhaps at this point there’s nothing to smelt out; perhaps at this point my mind is one giant slag heap.
One of the troll dancers with too much time on his hands was one of my main office pals. Luckily, for his dignity, I can’t remember his name. I suppose the memory burbled up because I have quite a bit of time on my hands out here in Las Vegas.
While I haven’t developed a troll dance (yet), I did spend more than 15 minutes on cell phone conversations with stuffed animals yesterday. “Hello? Yes, you want to speak to GlowBug Baby? Hold on, let me see. GlowBug Baby, can you talk?” Cookie Monster, GlowBug Baby, Puppydog, Kittykat, Lamby, Care Bear — they all got a turn. My daughter, who will literally beat the phone out of my hand if I put it to her ear, was all about watching her stuffed animals chew the fat.
Unlike the troll dance in a cubicle in Boston, I don’t want to lose the pictures of slow afternoons with my 10-month-old in a condo in Vegas. They may get a little out of order, mis-stacked and re-shuffled. But I hope they stay, vivid and clear, forever archived in the scrapbook of my mind, to pull out some slow day in the future. To that end, I really hope they’re on Fuji film.