RED

“Freedom without opportunity is a devil’s gift.”
Noam Chomsky

Monday.
Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday.
Monday.
The weekend slur, the weekend blur, passes me by like an invisible invisibility unnoticeable to the untrained eye. Nothing but a two-day vigil of tiredness and desperation where I mostly find myself heavily wedged on a coffee stained sofa watching the box with drool coming out the left corner of my mouth. And all I fear is Monday, and all I desire is peace. And it takes time to achieve harmony and when it finally installs itself briefly into the dire existence of being it’s already Sunday evening. And then…
Monday.
January.
Morning.
Hello.
Start.
1.
A.
Now.
Now.
Now.
And I don’t know why I put up with work. Is it to support my life? What life? Work demands life. My life. Most people feel like that, like this. World of piss. Work is shit.
Strife and stutter, back pains and no gains, and working for food and appearance and yet no money, and money ain’t worth shit, and many hours put in and a lot of tax put out and nothing comes of it, and yet back we go on board the train to the office, and too tired to clean and too tired to eat, and we work for food, and we are given to and stolen from, and you age and I age and we age and mature, and then we retire and crumble and decay and die and rest. Rest?
Is this how it is? How we’ve evolved? Did slavery never end? Did it merely change its name to something not fully so provocative… employee!
Postman, waitress, cashier, cleaner, warehouse worker, bus driver, construction worker, office manager, teacher, nurse, trucker, clerk, secretary, doorman, bartender, whore, pimp, drug dealer, sailor, barber, car dealer, train conductor, carpenter, priest and the man in blue patrolling his empty power down the street.
Bad pay, bad hours, bad jobs, boring jobs, monotonous movements, mouse arms and no charms. Toil, strife, fret and what do you get? Money. Money for what? For food so you can continue living? So you can continue working? You are a slave and so am I. Daily whipped. A mundane existence, and there’s nothing to do about it. I’m at loss. I’ve given up. Why bother?
I wouldn’t call myself a poor man. I’ve got that trendy apartment, a wardrobe full of shirts with strange words in the color of the month and I have a cell phone. The latest, the best, the coolest and people at work ask me how much it was and I tell them and I smile and I cum in their envy. And I have a girl. Model. Big tits. Skimpy clothes. A real slut whom I fuck and she fucks me for my place, my view, my job, my life and my future. And I use her to experience the envy of others.
World Wide Web.
Every day. Morning till night staring into the pixel cosmos of my computer screen (sometimes night till morning) and so fucking boring and yet I prevail. Like a zombie on stress pills. A slave. And I know I’m not a bus driver and I know I live the material life envied by others, but slave I am. And my trade is designing. Goon of Satan, in cahoots with some sinister demon, shaping the face of the Earth. Plastic surgeon and life is pointless.
Monday. Design, purpose, advise, construct and out a website comes. New and fresh and cool and hip and rich I get and drunk I become. And the website sells paperclips in all the shades of the rainbow from brown to grey and in the evening I go to the Spit Club to drink a drink called Poo, just because it’s in to be nasty and controversial.
Tuesday. Continue working. At night see the Slut and answer the messages bleeping up on my phone and watching the digital faces of people I know in their drunken fake mirth. And all the talk is about where I am, what I do and where I’m going. The future is a stroke of the clock. Time is a bomb and death is the detonator.
Wednesday. Homepages. Meetings. WWW. @. ☹
A world of symbols and signs. And at night the same thing again. I drink my Poo. See the Slut. Right in the face. And she’s got new plastic lips.
Thursday. Web. Slut. POO.
Friday. WEBSLUTPOO.


The sofa keeps my naked body in a solid grip.
Impossible to get away. I lie in my own glue, in my own choice, which is my life. Head pounding after last nights binge. The phone is off the hook and off the buzzer, and the net is down and I ain’t going back online. A forged peace, and so much to do to attain it. I’ve locked the door and shut the blinds. Pretending I’m dead. Maybe I am. Is this hell? I don’t believe in Satan. I believe in God and God is evil. He doesn’t need a demonic enemy. There is no yang only yin… gin…
For fucks sake!
…
Loneliness is a virtue. My only refuge. The secret haven I inhabit in a world where everything is on a downward spiral, unconsciously trapped in the glowing light of the loopy box known as TV.
Suicide, hara-kiri. To be or not to be that is the same. I am and I am not. A walking shell. A ghost that awakes quarter past eight five days a week waiting for the one day when the gold comes in, and I have thought of death. Everything seems so much simpler in a coffin.
I manage to get to the bathroom. My urine runs out of me and it smells. I forget to flush and I return to my padded furniture. The box is still on but there is only static there. That’s how I meditate.
I find a white or black dot on the screen and I focus on it whilst I turn up the volume. And the hum starts sizzling and buzzing like a wave coming at me; like the crashing sea, and I shut my eyes and I drift away. Hours pass before I think another thought. I am a ghost. Perhaps not even that.
A mirage.
I stand in front of my hallway mirror.
My body is bony and thin. I seldom eat and when I do it’s junk. My hair is short and dark. I wash it daily. The color of my eyes is not of importance. I never see them.
I lie in my sofa. Masturbating. Got nothing better to do. I think about the Slut, but it doesn’t make me cum. I think about some situation I would find erotic, but to no avail. Finally I shoot my load when I perceive myself inside my mind.
It’s natural.
Egoism didn’t create the world, but that’s how it will end. I’m going mad? Should I kill myself?
The deadline for the current website I’m working on is Tuesday so Wednesday would be better… Oh non-entity God. My life is a calendar. My soul is stress. My heart’s got cramps. And I work so hard that all the time I have when I’m not working is lost in a delirious insomniac wake with alcohol. The drunk finds a false strength in the intoxication.
Maybe there’s no need to take my life?
Work will take it for me. Rip out my heart, and quench all appetite.
Karoshi.
That’s what it’s called in Japan. Dying from too much work and stress. And work is all my brain is focused on, except in those tranquil moments before the altar we all call TV. And when I sleep the trauma of burning the midnight oil visits me in my dreams. It’s a nightmare and I awake and it’s still there. The stress and pressure to complete, and meet, the deadline and the deadline and the deadline. Roads towards death. Highway to… well you know…
And now when I lay here in my sofa, in the silence, I look at my watch and I plan Monday. Just that thought cuts a deep ice-cold wound into my spine. Strain. Pain. Load. Burden. And to be better and better than everyone else, and they in turn want to be better than you. Than me. I.
Sometimes I awake early on Saturday in the belief that I’ve overslept. Sometimes I even go so far as getting dressed before I realize that the weekend has at last come. Sometimes, sometimes, I get strange looks from the cleaners in the office when I turn up on Sunday morning with a bewildered forehead. I go home, back to bed. Stress and pressure.
I am deteriorating.
Frosty sweat. Shivering. Naked. In my sofa with all the lamps turned off, but it’s midday and the sun gives light to my living room. It’s warm, but I’m cold inside. I am dwindling away… I am going mad. I must be!
Why else would I see a red ball? Honestly, that’s is what I see. A red fluffy little ball (no bigger than the ones used in tennis) waving at me with one of its tiny arms, blinking its big round eyes, and tickling my stomach as it comes bobbing towards me across my chest. I can’t see a mouth, but it has got to be there because the ball is saying something. At first I can’t make out what it is, but when it gets closer…
“I am Red. I have been sent here to get your attention!”
The ball stops, suspended gently in front of my face.
I don’t know what to say. Red does.
“Do I have your attention?”
I nod.


Simon stared at the talking ball. At first he presumed himself to have completely lost his marbles, but because he could feel the soft body of the ball against his skin he thought otherwise. He wasn’t certain, but he hoped for the best, and decided to consider himself sane at least for a while.
It called itself Red and Simon presented himself as Simon.
Now they were strangers no more, yet Simon couldn’t help feeling a bit shy so he sat up and pulled the blanket, that was crumbled up into a bundle by his feet, over his naked body. Red hovered upwards and hung there in the air as if gravitation had no effect.
“What do you want?” Simon asked with a feigned authority.
“Your attention, and now I have it!”
It was gone.
Dissolved. Vanished while Simon blinked his eyes.
He got up and began looking for the red ball amongst the cushions of the sofa, even pulling the piece of furniture out so he could search behind it. Maybe gravity had got hold of it and pulled it to the floor? It could be injured, or dead?
“Hello… Red?”
No answer.
Simon sat down again. He felt like laughing but couldn’t. He had obviously been hallucinating. The pressure had driven him to it. Sweat poured from his forehead. He went into the bathroom to have an ice cold shower.
The water flushed his body bringing it back to its senses and his mind into reality. Like waking up out of a fretful dream. The cold drops quickened his brain and he felt much better. He looked down at his feet. There sat a petite fluffy ball getting soaked, its blue color turning darker by the second.
“I am Blue,” it gurgled.

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