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// "The Giant Monster That Eats Anada Staffers" \\
(( 03/02/02 by Infernal anada511 ))
\) ________________________________________________________________ (/
Its breath is the ozone tang of eight-bit computers in a hot room
mixed with oily old coffee stink and the funk of suspiciously stiff sheets.
Its skin is like bread dough and its eyes are sunken scabs. Its hair is
coarse, thinning and in need of washing. It picks at various lesions with
chewed, ragged nails. It doesn't flush and it doesn't say excuse me. Shel
Silverstein drew it once, cried, and threw the drawing away. He did not
write a silly song about it.
It creeps along phone cords. It rolls like a marble along psychic
fault lines, dropping into depressions and black holes in the emotional
landscape with a pippling noise like a golf ball heading home. It smells
tears, and eats the airwaves around candles and Smiths records. It does
cartwheels along scars and swings from the fingers of purging bulimics like
a capering monkey. It doesn't mind getting puked on.
It can make itself small, but it's fucking kingsize at home, baby.
It makes a bed out of the bones of surrender, and it blows bubbles in blood
with straws and giggles (a sound like rusty file cabinets slamming). It
lolls around, popping poems and drawings and screenplays and notes to lovers
and suicide pacts and first chapters of aborted novel fetuses into its mouth
like bonbons. It smacks its lips and burps. It's a rude little fucker.
All staffers have seen it, although some discounted the experience,
putting it down to alcohol poisoning, sun spots, burst blood vessels, or
in one memorable case, an incorrect self-diagnosis of Pokemon overdose. The
only ones who've seen its true shape, predictably enough, are the ones who
it ate, who got the guided tour, so to speak. The rest of us have bite
marks, which none of us recognize. Some of them look like deleted files or
torn up scraps of paper. Some of them look like college diplomas. Some
just look like shrugging shoulders.
There are those who say that it doesn't kill the ones it eats. Those
of us who've been closest to its teeth know that's a load of shit. Just
because you keep breathing doesn't mean you're alive. Just because you
still move doesn't mean you haven't quit. Dead people can watch TV and file
papers and cash checks and jack off, didn't you know that? But when it eats
you, and you stop creating, it's severed all the soul-cords with its chompy
fangs and you're a corpse. The end. The rest is just credits rolling.
It'll put all sorts of treats over the honey pit it uses to trap you,
if you're not fool enough or sad enough or unlucky enough to open its jaws
up and walk right in. It puts money, and nice baubles, and booze, over the
bamboo and leaves, and when you scamper over to get it, bammo! You're
monster food. Smart people know how to use these same baits to keep the
monster at bay, but there's no one set of rules on how to do this -- all
God's chillen gotta figure that one out for themselves.
Don't get eaten, compadres. Don't quit. The monster is watching the
herd right now, looking for the slow ones, the dawdlers scoping out the
graveyard, thinking the grass is greener over there without considering why.
It's licking its lips. Better do something! Better do anything.
Because if you do nothing, he'll eat you.
I hear it doesn't even hurt. But I'm not about to find out.
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/|/| `
( @ @) anada511 has been brought to you by Infernal.
) ^
/ ||| (c) 2002 Anada E'zine www.anada.net * Anada is cat-friendly.
/ )|||____________________________________________________________________
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