From Ch. 1 Part 2:
Bill drank beer because it was a depressant and relaxed him. It calmed him down and after the second one, he felt a warm and numbing sensation move up the back of his spine and into the base of his skull, and it was good. Beer is a mix of water, grains, and tiny little specks of life called yeast. These little specks of life, like all life, have to eat. So they eat the grains and drink the water and they fart out this thing called alcohol. The wonderful thing about these little yeasty beasties is that their farts can really mess a person up. They can make a person act funny, speak funny, and if a person drinks down too much alcohol, they can even die.Drinking yeast farts was a great past time in Bill’s country. Though there was a time when drinking yeast farts was illegal and people who made them were arrested and put in jail. This was mostly brought about by ugly women that were tired of being told by drunks how ugly they were. That’s not on the record, it’s just something I noticed at the time. I was still new to this job then, but I saw it all the same. When everyone else in the country realized how mean the ugly women had been, they used democracy to change the law and then they all had a drink, and it was good.
All too long ago, a great violence erupted in the peaceful vacuum of space and spewed forth a hot mess of everything that has ever been. Of course, there was no one there to see that moment, that great source of everything that will become, but we’ve observed the evidence of that particular event and took notes and they have been added to the record.
Some time after the hot mess cooled, it got heavy and grouped together into larger and larger pieces of stuff. When that stuff got big enough and cold enough, some of the stuff started grouping together in different ways. I suppose you’d think of it as a puzzle. Imagine there are trillions and trillions of puzzle pieces all smashing together. Now imagine that suddenly, the puzzle pieces smash together and the puzzle is complete. That was life.
Of course, there was no one there to see that moment either. But be sure that we’ve observed the evidence of that particular event and took notes and they have been added to the record. We were so sure of our notes, we decided to experiment on it. Or so the record reflects, as I wasn’t there when we began this little beast of a thing.
So about six billion years ago, we put the trillions of puzzle pieces in one spot and began waiting and taking notes, all of which have been added to the record.
Living alone was never something that came easily to Bill. He found himself walking from bed to couch and back four or five times a night before sleep would finally overwhelm his mind. Too much caffeine, he thought. And the next morning he would forego his double espresso soy latte and drive straight to the office. It was a coffeeless morning that Bill’s boss would call and ask Bill to join him in his office.
Bill’s office building was a tremendous sky-scraping affair that he had to enter by elevator from the subterranean parking structure five floors below. And thank God that Bill had that underground elevator to get upstairs. If Bill had ever entered through the front doors of his building and looked up, his overwhelming sense of being alone in the world would have been magnified by the thousands of feet of building looming over him and he may well have just shrunk to the size of a penny on the sidewalk and kicked into a storm pipe never to be heard from again.
Ever since Bill began living alone in his one bedroom apartment, last month, his performance at work has been slipping. It all started when he quit drinking coffee after lunch, in an effort to escape the nightly pacing between bed and couch. He would return to his cubicle after lunch in the cafeteria feeling overwhelmingly lethargic and unable to get his shit together. He would look at his computer’s screen and then to his coffee mug and then back to the screen and still nothing would happen. In the four hours of work that were supposed to follow Bill’s lunch break, he would accomplish an hour’s work. The drop in efficiency was observed by his superiors. Notes to this effect were made and placed on the record.
When Bill’s pacing continued every night, he decided to stop drinking coffee in the morning. And so he did, that next morning. And that was when the call came.
Bill’s job is to make copies. That is, one of his supervisors will hand him an assignment and he will make four copies of the memorandum and forward it to the four people that report directly to him. They would then go out and make four copies each and pass them along to the four people that reported directly to each of them. Their subordinates would then make four copies, and so on, until some poor college student working for credit was researching market trends in Marrakesh and writing a summary of his findings and passing that back up the ladder, each person writing a summary of their four subordinate’s findings until it arrived at Bill-- the collective efforts of dozens, summarized in four brief reports, that Bill would then condense and pass along to his superior where, unbeknownst to Bill, although at moments suspected, it would continue upwards in a similar fashion.
Bill liked to sigh.
Ultimately, the summaries arrived at someone a few floors above Bill who decided that what he read wasn’t worth the while and tossed it into a waste bin. It was a terrible data collection process if you ask me, and I said so in my report.
Bill liked coffee.
Bill was thinking about coffee and how he couldn’t sleep well at night when the call came for him. Line two. He picked up on the second ring, unsure if he had actually heard it on the first one.
“Hello?” Bill said.
“Bill?” The voice at the other end said.
“Yes, sir?” The record shows that it is doubtful Bill recognized the voice at that point of the conversation. Most signs, alpha and beta wave patterns included, indicated that Bill was actually in a near sleep state wherein his mind was unable to focus on reality. A quick search showed it to be a common side effect of the yet undiagnosed insomnia Bill was suffering. I found it interesting and made a note of it and included a quick reference note on alpha and beta wave patterns. Your brains are so interesting.
“It’s Howard, upstairs. Bill, I’d like to see you in my office in fifteen minutes for a team syn-synch.” The record defines syn-synch as: Synergize and Synchronize, a conference intended to maximize efficiency and output and generate a greater flow of communication between levels of task agency. It also says “see: meeting”
“You got it, Howard. Fifteen. See you then.” And the line was dead. Bill hung up and stared at the telephone for ten minutes and then progressed to the elevator, where he boarded with the same empty look on his face and pressed a button that he believed to be where he wanted to go and off he went.
For thousands of years, people have enjoyed the stimulating effects of coffee. The potent effects of the bean were encountered by people in feathers and leathers and the such thousands of years ago. And they enjoyed it. Then people in steel and armor with swords and guns shot all of the people in leathers and feathers until they were all dead. Then they took their gold and coffee. Or rather, that’s a summary of what the record says. The people in steel took it back to where they lived with another stimulating substance: Tobacco.
For hundreds of years, people enjoyed both of these things, often together. Personally, I don’t get it. While I’m sure for all of you it provides the euphoric and driving sensation all of the billboards claim, I’m afraid my chemistry just isn’t right for it.
Sometimes, the people that enjoyed tobacco died before other people would. And some time ago, they realized that it was caused by a thing called Cancer. That is, the little pieces of stuff in the tobacco would go into a person and cause their puzzle pieces to melt. Slowly, the people would melt enough of their puzzle pieces until they would start melting on their own and then they would die. This troubled doctors, whose job it was to make people better. Doctors were paid to make people better. So the doctors made a note of what would happen and they put together a record and tried to stop puzzles from melting.
The doctors who wanted to keep people alive went with other people to the government in Bill’s country. They knew that if enough people wanted something, they could have it. That was called democracy and it was how Bill’s country worked. The people went to the government and told the government that this tobacco thing was killing their countrymen.
Here’s the problem, a lot of the fellas in the government were friends with the fellas that made tobacco. In fact, some of the fellas in the government made a lot of money making and selling tobacco. Money, the record says, is a currency used to get what you want and make other people do things they don’t want to.
The folks in government knew that they would lose a lot of their friends if they told them they couldn’t make money killing people anymore. But they also knew that they would lose votes if they let their friends continue to kill people. According to the record: Votes are how government is formed, through democracy; can be bought (SEE: MONEY).
So the fellas in government decided to make a compromise, like wise Salomon. Which is why they were in government, their wisdom. The government decided to put a warning on all tobacco products that said, in effect “if you use this, you will get cancer and die.” And this is why I wish my chemistry worked the way yours does, human. Because even though those products will give you cancer and melt your pieces until you die, people still buy them with money and use them. What stuff!
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