Feign With The Best Of Them

If it hasn’t been written it doesn’t exist. Pretty good line he thought. But this too shall pass he thought. All of it, it’s all going to pass. The only thing that won’t pass is the process of passing. That’s a start he thought. He had been doing this a lot lately, blocking thoughts into lines and quotations as if these were the only thing that mattered. Maybe he needed to get back to timeless processes instead of sophistry. Maybe. Maybe he needed to produce, at any cost. Who gives two fucks if a timeless process is at the heart of x if x doesn’t bring home any goddamn bacon? Here he goes again. Bring on the rant about substance over style and a million ways to tell the truth and das man and pretty soon he’d be telling you about kids these days and how he walked to school in the snow. Boring. He wanted to be a change agent but he’d lost his own agency years ago. Now just because the loss of his agency was slow, doesn’t mean it wasn’t radical. And it would take some radical act to get it back. But perhaps along, with his agency, he’s lost his balls too. He could feign with the best of them…but it wasn’t enough…anymore. As a result of the epic embarrassment at the hands of the grocery store clerk. That bitch. She had no right. She was inappropriate to say the fucking least. She would have to pay and pay the fuck up. He didn’t snap but he was bent all kinds of out of shape. Just thinking about it, which he did on the hour ever since, three weeks ago, tightened his stomach in forearms into marbled cysts. Fuck her! I pulled the goddamn number from the machine, I followed protocol…a fucking deli clerk, are you fucking kidding me? he thought.

If it hasn’t been written it doesn’t exist. He would have to write about it. Was he actually going to write to a grocery manager? Was he going to be a complete hypocrite, a testicleless hypocrite who writes a letter to the editor, only it’s not an editor, it’s a guy who wears a nametag and  helps stocks shelves when things get really busy. Was this letter going to help him get his agency back? Would this turn the tide for him? Did a deli clerk with an attitude turn out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back?

Turns out, things were written and one thing that was written was an obituary. Nothing about regaining or losing agency was mentioned in the obituary.