The past is a light train to unknown trash scapes
In the words of Steven Malkmus (just to get the indie rock reference out of the way), C’mon in: welcome to Riversource, the terribly-named insurance agency we’ve been temping for, which is so unabashed in it’s terribleness that we have been moved to self-congratulation over our four day stay. So terrible is it actually, that we can only revel in the experience and take it all in, to forget it forever (Although, to be really creative, and to invoke the name, which is hilarity-inducing to no end, we could say that there is just no end to the source of this river—which if we had to imagine it, is an interminable well of dirty dishwater-type substance that is ladle-fed to the employees in lethal doses each workday—which may or may not account for the look of massive chagrin everyone seems to wear around.)

These are our co-workers, who are evenly split between being so horribly subverted that they are no longer recognizable as human beings and those who have been taking massive doses of lithium and thus coming around and greeting us with all the enthusiasm of a Saturday Night Live skit. “Hey,” a woman says me today, “it’s the Ry-man,” she says. “The Ry-meister.” “You just really like saying that,” I say to her. “Yes,” she tells me. “Yes, I do, Ry-meister!” That’s OK, though, because while the robot faction of the workplace is interesting in its own right, the lithium-infused populace is just that much more entertaining, and so we will hang around with those people, if only to scheme cupcakes and other office delicacies from them, when we are not busting ass like never before. This is the lesson you learn right off while working for an insurance agency: they are efficient to no end. Never are you left unattended for one moment, with nothing to do. They are prepared to wring every last bit of production out of you. Oh, did you need something to do? How about that stack of copies over there? That’s OK too, though, because we have invented things more conducive to our skill set, like collating papers, which we do for hours on end while spacing out like never before. “Oh, yeah: I’ll only be another minute here,” we say, shuffling the papers up before dropping them on the floor and having to start over again. Alternately, we hide in the bathroom in a Fonz-like scenario, where we take comfort in the latrinalia scrawled on the walls, which feature such bon mots like “I hate it here.” Today was our fourth day. It probably won’t be much longer before we end up scrawling our own offerings on the bathroom wall. “Please kill me,” or otherwise.

Although, to be fair, within the miasma of dread which has been our everyday existence for the last few days, we take comfort in small glimmers of light. On the way in to work this morning, we see this electronic sign that features the message, Expect good things. We do expect good things, actually, because everything is bad. Probably the worst. But you need a context to ascend from, see. And we have found one. There’s only one way to go, and we are definitely down with that.