And before that...

Letter of Resignation
    by Marc Nelson

all day long I drink coffee
and try not to forget me.
sit sit sit.
all day long I sit.
I sit, eyes glaze, I glare.
I sit and sit, and I stare.
the cursor flashes so I push
all day,
and pretend to work
like this:
click clack click
click click click.
my whole life a clerk
I quit.

__________________

Today sometime in the 10 o'clock morning hour, a transformer went kablooey somewhere that mattered to my building. I was typing, and then there was a loud surge in my machine and the machines around me, and then nothing. Lights, monitors, power indicators, all sighed and then, for one brilliant, peaceful moment, there was absolute silence... before the humans had a chance to wonder, before the fire alarm went beserk, before the power went sort of halfway back up in a sickeningly loud crescendo, there was pure silence: a pause. A suspension. It was beautiful.

Then I was outside. It is in the 70s today, a cloudless peaceful sky, the grass is grown in and cushions your butt without dampening it. I sat on a hillside with someone I like, and we chatted. When we went back inside, only some machines worked, and ours weren't among them, so we went to Emilio's and ate well, treated ourselves to a beer. I've never drunk a beer at lunchtime on a workday before, and the first sip tasted illicit, like that very first sip of beer from my father's Miller Lite can when I was two. But no one pulled this beer out of my hands, I was allowed to drink it in peace as the restaurant slowly filled up with the temporarily displaced. I drank and I ate, and the sun continued to shine.

It's over now, the hum is back, the sun could fizzle like a spent bulb and I would not know until I read about it on My Yahoo!. Everything and everyone is working again, but still. Today was slightly different.

I prefer days that are different.