After Consideration

Duties now include spider-removal. If it's been seen, but you can't find it, but nobody's going to be able to concentrate on their work until it's been found, you could perhaps pretend to find it, take it out the door, throw it onto the nearest ferry, watch it reach the horizon, and return to work, explaining the length of your absence by the ferry's lack of gumption and the astonishing distance to the horizon from here, and did they want you to make sure it was far away or only pretend you did, your mission in this building being to excel in all spheres and fields, including the ones you have no interest in and the ones no one else has an interest in but you. And if it re-emerges from under a cabinet you'd until then assumed nothing could get under, nevermind something with Ikea pencils for legs and a body the size of a small human bollock, moving towards the phone hub at panic-on-carpet's terminal velocity, you must loudly declare it to be not the same but a close relative of the one you just this minute, while eating a burrito in no great rush, thoroughly witnessed leaving the postcode.

Dichotomous Ramification 1

I was thirty. We went to Lisbon, for pastries and balconies and hills. On the balcony you could eat a box of pastries and look up and down the hill. It was a loud urban hill paved with taxis and mosaics, which they swept at night with water, sending the cartons and papers down the gutters in a stream that stopped for the traffic lights and left behind the phrase "glistening cracks", which I disappointingly haven't been able to construct an unforced-sounding sentence around this week, but maybe next, maybe next.
Pessoa has a statue sat getting polished by photography outside a good cafe. There was an empty chair next to it and sometimes there seemed to be a queue for the chair, sometimes there were fifteen art students drawing pictures of the statue and the statue's photographers. I sat next to it and poked it in the eye.
Across town his house is mostly now a tall library, but they still have his room and his books and you can go in and look at the margin notes and lie on the bed and crush the hat.

Orality Corner

-[question]
-There was concern, about the start of the last bit. Either it was an unforgivable lack of proofreading or it was a deliberately unfriendly, unnecessary, pretentious whim. In a moribund slew of fragmented tedium.
-[response]
-Slew is no exaggeration after five-ish years, we feel.
-[response]
-It doesn't appear to be leading anywhere. And the eyes crave things to be glad about, and they feel themselves beginning to require an explanation, they say, or they might stop letting through the light that bounces off these drab and baggy lumps, until a more reader-friendly tone is struck.
-[response]
-Slews can contain lumps.
-[response]
-Yes, but they have no say in where we choose to point them. They said it was only yesterday they felt that a quiet word must be had, if a general improvement in stimulus is ever to be gained.
-[response]
-Verbatim. And somewhat highfalutin' we admit. We can't imagine why.
-[response]
-While you were passed out.
-[response]

Big Super Normal Time

, but using the phonetic alphabet when stood two feet away, while neither one of us was in a blizzard or a war, was too much, and it was only my long-standing and well-known commitment to appearing professional when I can be arsed to, that stopped me asking him if he was taking the piss. Maybe he'd always found the sound of y hard to distinguish from the sound of q, and used the names yankee and quebec as a confusion-reducing courtesy to my thick-eared and disengaged face. I asked him to repeat himself.