LUDIC LOG

Everybody is driving this morning, and they're going the same place you are: to work. And if you're not driving to it, you're coming from it, or trying to get away from it; maybe you're even driving because that is your work. Driving, like most other activities in today's life, is all done relative to its relationship to one's job. It can without risk of inaccuracy be said that the action of most stories either describes the characters' work or what they do to fill the dead time between work. Too many books have been written about the meaning of life and not enough about the meaning of work; for the pointlessness of work surely contributes to most people's sense of the pointlessness of life. Our Percy, then, is thrice-cursed: not only must he work, and work at a particularly meaningless job, he can't even drive to it.

Percy doesn't have a car, and he doesn't even know how to drive (the former fact having strongly reinforced his decision not to alter the latter), so he has to take public pransportation. Where he lives this translates to a mournfully inadequate bus system that makes up for its cheapness by lateness, unreliability and miniscule service areas. Percy has only avoided become fit from all the walking he has to do to get to work through a studious regimen of weekend beer-drinking and junk food consumption. Percy hates the bus; you can't write for the lurching, you can't breathe for the fumes, and in his case at least, you can't read because there's a schizophrenic behemoth drooling over your shoulder.

It was Nick who first coined the term "psycho magnet" to describe Percy's talent for attracting the mentally disturbed on buses, trains and planes. If there was a psychotic, a schizo, a sexual deviant, a sociopath or simply a run-of-the-mill senile old fool in a public place, they would without fail find the seat right next to Perce. Nick, of course, enjoyed this immensely and refused to sit next to him in public just to see what kind of nutcase found their way into the empty chair. Percy had many amusing theories as to why this phenom took place, but secretly and in quiet moments it gnawed at him.

Today's chemically imbalanced interruption was a particularly heinous one: he was surely seven feet tall and easily over three hundred pounds, dwarfing even mighty Charlie. He had a doughy halo of flab around every part of his body and an unpleasant catbox smell, and he stared unblinkingly over Percy's shoulder as Percy tried with little success to read Blood Meridian. Percy was unable to concentrate on the narrative, as he was having premonitions of what might happen if whatever this monster thought was happening in the outside world turned scary and he decided he'd have to defend himself. No doubt he thought Percy was some sort of Venusian brain leech and the only way to protect himself from having his thoughts sucked out was to squeeze Percy's head off, or take a torch to him, or some such. This nagging fear altogether spoiled the literary experience for Percy, and although the huge thing did nothing but sit frozen and stare for the whole trip, Percy's nerves were quite frazzled by the time he arrived at his stop. He was almost glad to have a lot of filing to do this morning so he could take his mind off the whole distasteful affair.

Randy Berridge is on his way to the school, where he works as a teaching assistant -- that is to say, an indentured servant whose field of toil is academics rather than agriculture. Six dollars an hour and lots of blank time in which to pursue the next level in his increasingly futile higher education are his rewards for doing most of the head of the economics department's work for him. He is indifferent to the work, accepting it as he does most things in his life with a pleasant, it-could-be-worse nonchalance. He chugs along the interstate in his clean white Toyota pickup, listening to Blue Oyster Cult on his car CD player. People in other cars are angry, greedy, morose or insane, but Randy is right and happy. It's a hot and sunny Friday morning and in only six hours he can go home and play the guitar; it seems to him that right and happy is the only way to be.

Inside a mist green minicar assembled by South Korean laborers who receive even less pay for assembling automobiles that Randy does to grade term papers, Hortense is fretting. There is something about beginnings that sickens; the first day of school, the first job, the first inexpert sexual experience all bring with them a queasiness and dread that instills a fear of doing anything new. It is the rough memory of this change-sickness that makes most people reluctant to enter into any new enterprise, and thus is the progress of the race retarded. Few are those who favor the advice of their heads over the protestation of their guts.

She starts a new job today, cause enough for her stomach to twist and her throat to constrict; add to this the stress of moving into her new apartment and the little shocks that came with it, factor in the moral crisis she finds herself in working for a man whose political ideology is anathema to her, toss in the upsetting dream she just had, and it's just damn lucky she's not a edgy postal worker with a large collection of mail-order firearms. Also, she's getting her period.

Parking, locking up, and walking, oversized bag in hand, into the large and showy converted storefront, she catches a look at herself in the pane of glass, her pallid face reflected against a huge white placard reading "JONAS FOR THE NEW CENTURY" in garish red. She looks for a long moment at her hair, her face, her clothes that she would wear only for work: sometimes, when she is not too sad, she almost thinks she is beautiful. She goes inside before the reflection turns inward, and he is there waiting. The thick clublike hand extends, the blandly attractive face splits into a rehearsed smile, and his stupid ugly tie cries out like a foghorn. "Good morning, Hortense! Welcome to the show, heh heh." She smiles what he knows is a false and charming smile and they exchange office pleasantries as he shows her to her new desk; beneath silk and nylon, beneath a flat lily stomach, her guts give another anxious jerk.

Speeding past her office window is T.J. Cole's blue '94 Geo Metro; T.J. is also starting a new job and she's late already. She sits in the driver's seat. frantically downshifiting and behaving in the funny way people in vehicles do when they're nervous or in a hurry but are too restricted by their environment to move. She taps her steering wheel nervously and smokes a pre-coffee cigarette, a decision which will probably come back to haunt her later in the day. She listens to a tape of Toni Basil singing to Mickey in Spanish as she pulls into the parking lot of the building; it looms unattractively above her as she runs awkwardly in uncomfortably across the lot in her discount store flats, its by-the-numbers architecture seeming to admonish her with its gray shadow. She makes a panicky search of the building directory and is further tizzified by the listing: Informational Consulting Technologies, floors 10, 11 and 12. An elevator to her right is already going up; she makes a frenzied dash and narrowly escapes being caught in the pneumatic crush, and presses "10" figuring she might as well try the bottom and work up, since she's already late.

Nicky in the arms of Sister Morphine, Price in the bosom of fat millions, Hannah in the favors of an officeless independence, Monica, Charlie and Sheila with their night jobs: they are still asleep, and each one of them dreams, very happy and content. Don't you envy them?