Read More: A brief Q&A with Brad Rose
Re: Company Meetings
Spent May upgrading my problems. Then, last Friday, my boss fired himself, so we celebrated by setting fire to the air conditioner. I had no plans for the weekend, except to get an organized haircut. Monday morning, I arrived early to work, wearing my perpendicular hair. Normally, I like to agree with everything. No use judging a book by its color. Bloodshot Jimmy, our Chief Embezzlement Officer, chased me around the office with his scythe as if he were looking for a blood bath, while yelling, Who would like to go first? Later, he calmed down, and quite sweetly confessed, I had no idea you couldn’t swim. When the anonymous packages arrived, we scurried out to the loading dock and unloaded them gingerly as acrobats, before anyone could find out what they contained. Exasperated by the invisible red tape, Karma, in Shipping and Receiving, muttered There are a lot of zeros in the accounting office, Milford. Of course, there is no evidence of any human activity there whatsoever, so I reassured her, The company’s AI says nobody knows for sure. We brightly labeled and put away all the clandestine materials, then filed into the company cafeteria. I had the usual for lunch— spit and Polish, no Lithuanians—and talked with Jimmy about the importance of sleep hygiene for effective cell phone reception. Following lunch, when no one was looking, I made clandestine plans to circumnavigate the globe by rail. (Note to self: do not wear old brake shoes.) After all the global looting, I’m sure there will be plenty of time for an honest vacation. From 1:00 to 4:00 we had a meeting about our too-long company meetings. Everyone objected, so it was unanimous—rare for a company dedicated to advertising buried treasure. Then, around 4:10, I went outside for my no-smoking break. I noticed that beyond the parking lot, out on the highway, the driverless cars passed with their lights dimmed, so I stuffed my hands into my safety pockets, and watched the artificial trees sharpen their serrated leaves in the homicidal wind, more real, it seemed, than they’d ever been before.
It’ll be Great
This time, you’ll have to do the exact same thing as last time, only differently, or it won’t come out the same. It’s because of the unintended consequences. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Fortunately, what happens behind the curtain, stays behind the curtain. It’s better that way, especially if you believe it only in your head. Naturally, some people think it’s worse at night, because then, you have no one to answer to, and if you do, they hardly ever call you back. On a positive note, all the glitches and snags are now completely subsidized. You know, the government. It’s not like last time, when it happened in real time rather than the other kind, and no one was prepared until after it was too late. Absolutely no one. Except for that guy from X-Ray. Yeah, that guy, Bones. He claimed he could see through the whole thing, right from the very beginning—even earlier. He said he knew it was going to happen, before it happened. Saw the whole thing coming. Of course, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Some people are just that way. There’s one in every crowd. They stand out because they blend in. One in a million. Like a sore thumb. Anyway, I hear this year, it’s going to be a short summer. Really short. Just June, July, and August. It’ll be over before you know it. Just like that. A split second, and boom. Over. It’s leap year, you know. Not like all the rest. It has a way of sneaking up on you when you least suspect it. The months fly by, and then just like that, That’s all she wrote. Say no more. The End. I hope this time, it doesn’t take too long to get here. Hope it happens so fast your head will spin. Hope it’s here and gone before you know it. Over before it’s started, and not a minute too soon. I don’t know about you, but I can hardly wait. You’ll see. It’ll be like nothing you’ve ever seen. You’ll see. As soon as it gets here, it’ll be great.
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Making Money in Today’s Market
I was whiteboarding our client-focused, seamless functionalities, prior to holistically leveraging our hyper-scale impact portals, when Jeanine snidely accused Curtis of preemptively facilitating prospective e-business dynamic solutions, although she’d neglected to accurately aggregate her own hyper-monetized, mission-critical, value chain. Personally, I don’t like to onboard enterprise-wide synergistic ideas, unless I’ve front-ended the virtual impactful best-practices, but what are you going to do when two normally user-friendly, colleagues suddenly engage in backend, B2B, click bait malalignments of multi-bandwidth supply chain linkages? So, first, I asked Curtis if he’d cloudified the open-source, cross-platform drivers, or at least future-proofed the cross functional design team fungibility outputs? He gave me a sheepish look and said, No. I turned to Jeanine and asked if she’d had a chance to proactively benchmark the optimally aligned, core competencies for 24/7 integrated down-market innovation? She looked gobsmacked. So, then—as much out of resignation as genuine astonishment—I said, Did either of you even bother to elasticize the next-generation distributed metric leadership modules or de-intermediate the bleeding-edge virtualization infomediaries? Nada. Zip. Zero. Is it any wonder why low-risk, high-yield, end-to-end, extensible, niche market, top-of-mind visionary entrepreneurs, like myself, aren’t able to make a dime in today’s clicks-no-bricks, just-in-time, on-demand, bitcoin economy? OK, I said, how much cash do each you have on you? Good. Put it on the table.
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Rucksack
It’s a nice, cool night since those werewolves left. No more howling like motivational sleepers. Now, I’ve got perfect ear canals. Hey, I love those bearings, where did you get yours? It’s nothing serious, but ever since I fell out of that airplane, I’ve been so worried about my sleeping sickness, I’ve got insomnia. You know how I take my privacy seriously. That’s why I like to eat in the dark, even when the lights are on. Why interact with myself, if I can avoid it? In fact, whenever I drive out to Loch Ness Lake, I stay in the passing lane for as long as I can. No, I have no idea why they call it a monster truck. Maybe it’s because of the scales? Alibi? Sure, it’s got to be around here, somewhere. My late father used to say you should always tell the truth, even when you lie. Of course, I don’t want to take all of the credit, so I wake up each morning, one day closer to death. Say, what have you got in your rucksack, Billy?
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Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles, and lives in Boston. He is the author of three collections of poetry and flash fiction, Pink X-Ray (Big Table Publishing, 2015), de/tonations, (Nixes Mate Press, 2020), and Momentary Turbulence (Cervena Barva Press, 2020). WordinEdgeWise, from Cervena Barva Press, is forthcoming in 2021. Six times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and three times nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology, Brad’s poetry and fiction have appeared in, The Los Angeles Times, The American Journal of Poetry, New York Quarterly, Clockhouse, Cloudbank, Lunch Ticket, Hunger Mountain, Sequestrum, Folio, 45th Parallel, The Baltimore Review, Steam Ticket, Into the Void, Right Hand Pointing,Blink Ink, and other publications. His story “Desert Motel,” appears in Best Microfiction, 2019. He is also the author of six poetry chapbooks, including the recently released Collateral, all of which are published by Right Hand Pointing. His website is: www.bradrosepoetry.com Selected readings can be heard at http://bradrosepoetry.com/audio-readings/ A complete list of publications is available at: http://bradrosepoetry.com/2019/03/a-list-of-publications/
Read More: A brief Q&A with Brad Rose