Creative writing logs| fugitive from my office

Fugitive - creative logs, take one

I am a fugitive from my office.

I once had a friend that kept a box of disguises. She'd teeter down the street in daylight in stilettos, smudged gray blue pearl eyeshadowed Garbowing her eyes, silk scarves fluttering down her thin shoulders. Thelma and Louise glasses perched smartly on her narrow noise. The next day she's be in a fedora and overalls.

I worked for a schizophrenic that would come into the office as different people- my desk would be rearranged, the pictures of my family painstakingly flipped vertical in there faux wood grain frames.

My friend Mike would slip into a sunburn and third world countries. He'd talk talk talk about his hippie parents and the latest shameless namedropper at the new "It" bar. He'd listen to Jonathon Richmond while falling in love again with some artist or baseball player that would break his heart. He kept losing his keys. He'd drag his long bony frame over the stucco window ledge at his apartment complex. Always he fell inward, somersaulting onto his single mattress thrown on an paper espresso cup strewn floor. Eventually he got evicted. The last time I saw him, he was different. He was wandering downtown San Jose in a muted Hawaiian shirt. He walked past a "be seen" café, scooping up the remains of a discarded rice krispie treat.

But these stories aren't quite how I got here. Today I am wearing part business part freak. Mostly, I am thinking of the equivalent of my aunts "stories." Like shoddy daytime TV, the correspondence I watch unfold through me is there always, emails develop the latest. They zing past the glow of the monitors like incoming green Jell-O in a cafeteria food fight. Always flinging, occasionally flaming, these free-flow letters have become a sort of obsession for me.

It started when I was informed that I was a pod person. Then I was downgraded to a marketing weasel. I started writing for the sale.

It is said to start with the truest sentence you know. Well, looking at results, the sale is the eventuality of my efforts. I tell myself that success is poetry. So far so good.

Except for the persistence of these emails. I seem to need an editor at night. I dream in genre. I read the absurd. I need it. I squirrel away these emails like a refrain from a blues song.