noise to signal

Squinting into the wind

Tired punks wearing red dye and eyeliner clutch secret laptops under thrift store coats, riding clumsy convoys of express busses to nameless officeparks. There they revise recalcitrant algorithms in the eternal semidusk of cost-saving cubefarm lumens. Mall-bought headphones scream softly in their ears as they type in jagged attacks, raging against and babying their shuddering machines. Each one a day job, each one admitted to with a shy mumble of confessed capitulation that lets them nurse nightdreams of other lives, other choices. They trade aggro for passive-agressive in friday afternoon meetings that drift inescapably into the evening, each bus leaving without them another tick on a clock both oscura and obscurely significant.

Later, hag-ridden and haggard, they clutch serial beers as their brains unfold from the rigid origami their days demand. Sure, I still play, they say, but you know, not much lately, we've been busy at work... Brushing pointedly past memories of post-commute practice sessions derailed by talk of faster processors and real wood dashboards, 401k distributions and taxes on dividends. The songs still come, of course, or the paintings, or the words, but they come obliquely, softly, like mumbled conversation in a language nearly remembered, or a bit of scent sneaking by on a breeze that stirs up blurred memories which would come into focus, maybe, if they could just steal another sniff. But now it's gone, along with the edge of the memory they can still nearly see, off in the distance, if they look hard enough...

No. It's gone. Best not to keep staring after it. The squinting makes the eyes water.