The Masked Man Finds the Fifth Room

They made us wear the teal shirts today. Team building corporate whitewash tealwash or some such crap.

Our manager, sorry, team leader, opens six big boxes of shirts and hands them out by size, embarrassing everyone by shouting out the size he guesses we are as he gives us our shirt, then we snooze through a meeting about pep and marketing that, I shit you not, includes a slide entitled Market-zing! and it It wasn't coherent.
It was nearly coherent.
On the bluff above the fog that surrounds the periphery of coherency, there it shat.
Then we all go outside to freeze our asses off while they take our picture in our teal shifts.

I look like a fucking clip art cow cartoon in this thing.

The sun, of course, burned a little, but as soon as the wind blew, we were immediately reminded that it is February outside.
This weekend at  the club I

saw a face 'I ought to know

bought a shot for the lady who might

do weather for channel

nine

but she denied it

so I kept it to myself.

We all rush back inside and try to catch up. 
To cyberspace and back before quitting time, an hour wasted, probably a good thing, shouldn’t complain, one paid hour that we didn’t actually have to be doing any work.
By lunch it seemed like a dream. 

Was it real or was it fake?

Do we learn from our mistakes?

Other Titles for today’s blog that I could’ve used but didn’t:

Da Masked Fatman

Field Marshal Dimas von Kedmarn

D’Macrimonious Man

The Man in the Shadow Mask

The Masked Man was the Fifth Beatle

“internet anonymity is morally corrosive.”

-BroPair

This whole masked-man thing is getting old. A dead horse.  And the snail has it by a nose.

I asked my guru for advice.  He said ‘eight of swords’ and closed the door.  A canopy of solid darkness.  I asked Arushi at the front desk what she thought this meant.  She said “Death’s essence wears a wool uniform and the voice of your father.”  “My Uncle Russell just died,” I offered.  She said “the Hawk will guide you on your journey.”  So I left.  There is no finality.  I went to the club.  I went to the black church with the earthquake choir.  Salvation is free but it’ll cost’ya.  I stayed out until morning envying the hygge glow of domiciles passed on these steel streets, walking until that weird dawn light comes, weird and thawing.  The name Arushi means the first rays of the rising son.

I told the weatherlady that a persistent winter gives way to a sympathetic spring, but she pretended she wasn’t listening. After a few more drinks I tried explaining that I was trying to hit on her.  “I’m not trying to hit on her,” I told her friend.  Her friend called me a dirty slut and said I shouldn’t mansplain my own actions.  “I wasn’t mansplaining, I said, slurring, taking another shot, “mansplaining is unwarranananted.” I watched the sparse brown grasses dance like wallflowers by the service road.  I watched the orange streetlight glow recede and the night turned black.  I walked into the woods following a railroad’s sirenic lull. A fire truck was driving in the park.  Where had it been? Life is my dream and I’m looking like some rifle-toting end-of-the-worlder, fresh from his trailer park somewhere out past Chino. This mask is less an article of clothing than an attitude, less a mask than a glaze. Which brings me to why I took up stripping on weekends.  Haha.  No, not really.  In my ESL class there’s a girl from Ecuador who works as a hotel maid, she lives there- the hotel provides workers with housing- and she invited me to come by sometime so I decided to head that way, about 3am on Sunday morning, figuring it’s a good 5 hour walk so I cut through the forest merged into ecstasy. We like to think we are the masters of the universe but we are merely passengers along for the ride.  In the woods I stargaze, surrounded by the beautiful tapestry of starlight through the branches, a clear night, no streetlights, no cars, no malls, it’s amazing how many stars you can see and the perspective this gives you.  You forget about the emptiness, especially in our 24 hour-a-day world where we are bathed in artificial lights all the time.  When I come out of the forest I could be anyone.  A masked man in various guises.  How rash you are, the pre-dawn birds shriek.  Some runners pass, all tight clothes and sharp breath.  It’s a disease you know, they’ll infect you with their energy and make you want to start running and start leading a healthy lifestyle.  So I stop and have a cigarette to detox myself and I get an idea for a Court-ordered DNA test Game Show! More runners pass. I get a little screwed around by fog but come through the looking glass transformed, mindfully bracing myself step by strenuous step into less a losing bum than a winning bohemian.  Entropy is inescapable.  At the Holiday Inn they say my friend has the day off so I decide to go to church.  Who knew that would happen?  I ache in every limb.  I imagine her byegone girlish laugh, pulling the sheet up over her eyes, and here I sit on a Monday, a guy in a teal T-shirt, size medium, trying to overcome his insignificance.