Work is going a bit slowish the day, Tuesday-after-a-holiday like. Tim idles behind the counter, staring off into space at gods-know-what with jaw ajar. The obligatory and presumably consumer-friendly elevator music has been discarded in favor of a rousing and somewhat questionable selection of the Girl Talk. Not my call, of course, being more loosely disposed towards the mixing boards and harpsichords.
Wolf and the Gem are sitting at one of the dining tables, gossiping and talking everything but shop. I suppose I would join them there, but can’t quite trouble myself to do so as my thoughts wander beyond the room. Thinking about electrons, mostly. Millions of billions of tiny electrons spinning about in the tips of my fingers, inexorably gravitating around their protons and neutrons for all time. Then again, I’m wondering if atoms ever really ‘die’, or if time and due process merely shift them about for eternity.
It’s really starting to bother me actually, stretching my thoughts as far back into 11th grade chemistry as they will possibly go. Further even than that, I’m reminding myself, remembering that I’d taken 11th grade chemistry in the 10th. 11th was a private school year, parochially stripped of the biological sciences. Spent instead learning about man’s place in the environment so intelligently designed as to have a few flaws here and yon. We’d gone to a recycling center that year and learned from a gruff overalled mainstay of the program that most of the shit people throw into the recyclables are not, point of fact, recyclable. Thin plastic, for starters.
Thin plastic that I find myself looking at back in the now and here, one of those take-out containers we dole out by the hundreds every day for fat fuckers’ caramel rolls and oatmeal bars and crispy whatsits. Sitting there atop the recycle bin brazenly, a bulky unrecyclable travesty that likewise leaves its consumers feeling unduly good about themselves the rest of the morning. I recycle, ergo sum on his (or her) crumb-encrusted lips.
“Gerroff,” I grumble as I pick the vaguely unclean thing up and drop it into the proper trash.
“Hey! Hey! What are you doing?” the Gem pipes up from the table. “Why did you do that?”
I shrug. “It’s non-recyclable. We shouldn’t even carry the damned things.”
“Non-recyclable?” and I swear that she’s up on her tiny feet and stomping towards me rather quickly. “Non-recyclable? Look- Look!” she exclaims, fishing out the box and shaking it at me in an incredibly irritating fashion. “See those arrows on the bottom? See them? Do you see?”
“Look, you daft cow,” I begin, near about as much as I can take. The music is maybe making me nervvy, or perhaps I just hate the very sight of Gem after five or so months of coworking the same shop. I push the box away, incredibly careful not to make any contact with her tiny hand. “Just because it’s got the arrows doesn’t make it so. As it happens, cheap thin little plastics like this are not recyclable. They get burnt off in the process by the millions. Haven’t you ever been to a recycling center?”
“Look,” she says again with a gesticulative thrust of the box, and I dare say I thwack the thing from her hand. The box lands, oddly enough, in the recycle bin once more. She stands there nonplussed, a look of moral outrage growing on her cleaver of a face.
“Fucking spastic,” I mutter as I march back round the kitchen towards the office. “I’m going to look this up!” I shout, and by God and the Wikipedia I fully shall.
“You hit me!” she says after me.
“I never even touched ya!” I reply, feeling a bit like something out of a Spencer Tracy film. Course, there wasn’t any contact. Of course of course, I can only tell myself, a dozen conflicting arguments flaring up within. She shouldn’ta been pushing the box in my face - s’about time - shun’ta done that man - in for it now - and the like, tempestuously rollicking against each other. But I sit down to the big desk and jiggle the mouse as the computer screen crackles to life, doubts and thoughts subsiding as our erstwhile question takes over.
Of course, now the moment has passed I find myself less interested in the recycling question, wondering instead about my earlier atomic problem. I type, wondering what the easiest way to phrase my query might be. how long do atoms last seems about right, and sure enough there’s a spot at the top, tailor-fit to my question. I follow the link and read on, learning after a minute or so that atoms either fade out after a malformed nanosecond or else last forever until otherwise dickered with.
“Hmm, interesting,” I say aloud to myself, feeling fairly well satisfied that the train of thought had reached its destination. Disembarked, I’m wondering what’s new on the Facebook. I punch in the address and go, and at a cursory glance am somewhat surprised to see myself already logged in. I don’t stop to ponder; rather, I’m looking through the Home splash, seeing who all is doing what. Surprisingly, there are a dozen friend requests showing red in my upper left corner. I begin to peruse them, don’t-know don’t-know thought-we-were-friends don’t-know and the like, paring and picking and choosing perfunctorily.
Finally I’ve got the list back down to nothing pending, and I’m starting to check the bulky array of messages in my inbox. Jesus wept if it isn’t filled with spam! Big meaty hunks of noble cause, fundraisy spam all sent to me by one Sara Kimball, whose name I don’t quite recall. Join now, donate this, perfunctualate that. “Who the holy hell is this?” I hear myself exclaiming as I’m skimming and deleting, skimming and deleting.
“The hell is who?” Wolf asks from behind me, and I explain to him the Kimball spam situation. “Unfriend her ass,” he says with a smirk. “I only keep fifty friends at any time, bumping people I don’t talk to or can’t remember knowing too well. I figure fifty people is the most I can physically deal with at any one time.”
“Huh,” I reply as I go through the unfriending and block process with Miss Kimball. “That’s a fairly new idea. Am I in the top fifty?”
“For now. Just don’t ever cross me,” he winks and we share a laugh. “The Gem’s fairly pissed at you,” he adds after a bit as I’m scouring the friends listing. I can’t say I remember half of these people, if that.
“I didn’t even make contact with her,” I begin to say, and suddenly my body freezes as I see the name in the top left of the screen: Shoshone Dirker. The Gem. “Oh Jesus Christ,” I whisper. “Is there any way to undo anything I’ve just now done?”
“Why, what did you- oh wow. HA!” And after a double-take Wolf laughs once more. I explain to him the mix-up, I think rationalizing to myself that we share so many of the same friends I’d simply thought it had been my own page. “Wow. Don’t tell her,” he admonishes, and I heartily agree. I log off and we exit the office, indeed intent never to mention this again.
“Well?” the Gem snaps, feigning to nurse her hand over a cup of tea in the kitchen.
“Like I said,” I say. “They’re not really recyclable. It’s a corporate thing.”
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