Ｅｖｅｒｙｂｏｄｙ Ｗａｎｔｓ Ｔｏ Ｒｕｌｅ Ｔｈｅ Ｗｏｒｌｄ: Chapter 2
Or, The Graduate (2025)
Will To Power is not found in plywood toilet cubicles but you started masturbating at work as an erotic treat and now it’s an important part of your five a day. You strain. Your hamstrings tug. You lift onto your tiptoes and stifle a groan. Then you cum. The white globs of vitality bob in the water and you flush them away. The sight makes you sad but you already put whatever Viriditas it granted you to good use in the presentation. They were silent throughout and largely so after.
This is a good sign you estimate. If they thanked you for doing this presentation you know it means they hated it. Politness is the veneer of incredible violence and you think Ballard said something to that effect. If they said thanks and great and please do that again you would know for a certainty that they wanted to sodomise you with machines of unspeakable torture and rub salt and chilli pepper into the gloopy aftermath. But they were silent, or mostly so. So it’s all good.
You exit the cubicle and wash your hands. Some friendly fire is stuck to you like ectoplasm. You wash with soap and then hot water. Taking time to caress the suds over and in between your fingers because it’s meditative and it’s on the clock. You have strong hands you think. Thick and meaty spades that go bright red in the hot water. They would be better holding a lance or a sword or a musket but they’re poking out of a thin polyester shirt. You look in the mirror and remind yourself that they were silent, mostly, so it’s probably all good.
You head back to your unenclosed cubicle. You turn on the death box and space out for a few hours. The office is quite nomadic and people stride and roam about – winding through the gongs and image boards. Sharron comes over. She’s okay and occasionally funny but mainly a fat cow waddling her way into a bitter middle age. She asks you to do something and from her tone you can tell she’s asked before. You say yes and of course and I’ll do that right now but can’t recall what she’s referring to. Either way she’s some sort of clerical person and it’s ultimately for this reason you look down on her. Advertising agents are sad and miserable and wretched and Sharron gets paid more than you but your caste strive and, as you well know, that’s all that really matters in this world.
You reconsider this hierarchy as you slink out of work early with a tinnie from the Friday fun larder (it’s not Friday). This is why you like the refugees on your commute who mope outside of the hotels they are billeted in. They strived to be there, wretched as their current position be. It is why you admire them but despise to go visit your grandad in his care home. You either strive or fade into background noise and that’s somehow worse than dying. In fact dying won’t do. You have to be killed by something. Killed by your ambition or your enemies or yourself. A guy died in your office last month of an aneurysm and no one says it but you all know it was stress. That was worthy you think – at least on paper – but there must be scales of worth. Perhaps you should take this advice. Go to the jungles of Burma and die a freedom fighter in another man’s war. You want to be Tamerlane. You want to be Taksin the great. You want to be…
Your phone rings but you miss it on purpose. Then Slack pings. White cold fear grips your temples. Your heart races and your throat dries. You’ve been caught and the jig is up. You could maybe tolerate the shame were it not for the progress meetings sure to follow. You consider going nuclear right there. Scorched Earth. Holocaust. Tennōheika Banzai. A Pearl Harbour pre-emptive strike, quitting and massaging the CV rather than suffering the blot of being fired or, god forbid, an improvement plan. Say your grandad died and you have mental health now and you’re teetering above the gorge as you speak and unless they surrender you will livestream the descent screaming the company name the whole way. You down the flat coppery slime in the can and throw it at a bin. You miss. You pick it up and put it in. You know that one cannot abuse Mother Nature and expect no repercussions.
You read the message.
“Hey [REDACTED], huge fan of the slide deck. We wanted to ask you a few more questions about it. Could you join us in meeting room 3 at 5?”
-Ben Shread-Hewitt
Art courtesy of Sam Young, the renowned crypto-catholic and critical thinking extremist.