Mise en Garde
It was 3:30 on a Friday afternoon. Most people were packing up, looking over that last email bomb to drop before heading away, beating the rush out to the mountains or the seaside for some kind of getaway. A certain phylum of these office workers stood around by the kitchen areas, sipping coffee that tasted more like grounds than the beverage most people know as coffee, or, failing the stomach for that, water from the water coolers that tasted ever so slightly of popcorn, as did anything consumed in or near the kitchen, ever since the last all-nighter, in which a few teams stayed late and cooked unhealthy amounts of microwaveable popcorn in the communal microwave. They were huddled around, making small talk, the bulk of them waiting for the early leavers to leave, and then they'd settle in, digest those hastily sent off email bombs, browse the web for a little while, and just generally take advantage of the free internet, phones, and relative peace and quiet before heading home.
One person in the office wasn't doing any of these things. He was, incidentally, the one who'd finally ruined the microwave for any further use by popping a bag of natural vegan popcorn (whatever that was, and there were a few arguments about what needed to be done to make popcorn vegan), which left behind an odor no one could imagine ever coming from a simply bag of corn kernels and fake butter-like spread. This had little to do with what he was doing now, though.
If he were asked, he would tell the asker he was meditating. In fact, he was meditating on just exactly what he would say and how he'd say it, should anyone ask him what he was doing. He pictured... no, he envisioned himself leading off with a dramatic pause, crinkling and uncrinkling his eyes in the way you'd picture a sage, living on a mountain, with all the answers, doing, and then slowly, ever so slowly answering, "I'm meditating."
As it happened, no one asked, because the subtle dance between those people leaving the office and those people returning to their desks from their kitchen break was just beginning, and were entirely too caught up in thoughts of hitting the slopes or hitting http://www.superbad.com/ or whatever it was people hit these days to ask about some guy sitting in his cube with his eyes shut, humming ever so faintly.
What he had been thinking about, before he transitioned into his meditative state, was how he was going to destroy the world this weekend. And how it involved some pretty dense physics.
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By the way, this is ish no. 500 at http://www.sanemagazine.com/
Crikey.
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