Corporate Battles

Silence transports me into the other world. The world that teases me through furtive web pictures and discussions and articles populating the bottom right
side of my monitor. The other 13 inches or so of the monitor are taken up by my militarily erect, ordered regiments. The other world enters my waking
dreams, uninvited, always a surprise guest, yet always welcome.

That is the world of sensuous escape. When I can close my eyes and imagine the too-strong sun, the ever-present shouts and hums and the rancid
smells of an Indian market in the summer. Where I can see fat rain-drops fall on dry earth, the first one sending up a tiny cloud of dust as it nestles into
the very aridity it will soon consume.

I sit here, day after, in the modern equivalent of a luxurious salt mine. One keystroke here, one comma there. There, now the document's done. Oh wait,
that sentence is almost too evocative. Can't have that. Insert a "leverage," a "matrix," here; add some bullets, shorten some sentences, chunk some
information; staccato bullets of the corporate world.

It's the lunch hour now, and the office empties like one collective person rushing toward the bath-room after a hearty Mexican meal. The frenzy mounts,
then dies as suddenly. I covet this time of silence. Silence from the two programmers who discuss their logical forays into some language or the other,
loudly and unrelentingly. "Well, if we approach it from this perspective...," and "But I think we need to leverage this other information according to this
paradigm..." Silence, blessed silence.

The lights go out, silently, leaving only the ghostly glow of my monitor to illuminate my cubicle. I clap my hands, move around, asserting my presence, my
life, my existence. The lights detect I am alive, and they blaze on. The tapping of my keyboard intensifies and more black soldiers join the others. The
army grows stronger.

But the guerrilla warriors of the other world also continue to assert themselves. Sometimes they launch rescue missions from my ever-present
head-phones, where B.B. King sings only to me. It takes only one word, one heart-felt twang from Lucille, one moment of unguarded weakness from me,
and they breach the defenses. Then it's off to a blue smoke-filled cafe, empty, in the dark depths of early morning. Just B.B and I, and he sings to me as
only he can.

"D'you think that document will be ready for tomorrow?" I am rudely interrupted. "Yes, sure, it'll be done in about an hour, okay?" B.B is only a whisper
now. I banish him for a while. The other world recedes.

Time for a spell check. Shit! Word still doesn't recognize, "Intranet." Great! Oh well, what can I do? The army is being spruced up for its first battle. Some
spit-polish here, a missing period there, and my men are ready. No point in getting mawkish I admonish myself as I make twenty copies, and hand them
over to the secretary for tomorrow's skirmish.

Tomorrow, in the review, they face the battle-field for the first time. Mangled bodies, some cannon-shot holes, some victims of semi-automatic fire, a
blood-bath. So I labor to make sure they have what it takes. But I am not nervous. My men are strong, precise, unambiguous, targeted and prepared.
Ready for battle, ready to face the designer suited enemy.
I wonder where they will go once I say good-bye. Perhaps to affiliates around the world, ending their days in an archive somewhere. In the meantime I
have other regiments to create, armies to assemble. A never ending cycle. I await Nirvana, to never start the cycle again.

But between then and now, there are many periods of silence. Silence in which I can gather words I love into sinuous rivers and streams. Into the blazing,
baking heat of the sun, and the seductive sweetness of ripe mangoes fresh from a tree. Into the eerie black, endless quiet as a train makes an
unscheduled stop in the desert, and I sit at the door and look into nothingness. Silence in which I send no words out to war. Instead I nurture them in my
mind, like children, orphaned and alone. Silence in which I am a technical writer no more. Silence to dream. Calm silence. Not the dead silence that
haunts the aftermath of bloody battles.