Texas Re-Attempted: Threshold

All is prepared. Tomorrow I set out on my journey - the long drive to London through the ashes of the crash that claimed 7 lives. Dark shapes have been circling. A co-worker died a few weeks back. Tripped on the stairs and broke her neck. She was the one who trained me on my first day. Then David got cancer. Then the wing mirror got smashed from my car and another co-worker turned all of a sudden to attack me with that brunt of psychological dexterity I have seen in the bullies and alphas of my life. All around me images of cruelty and death have swerved into my path. A dark cloud gathers around England, and I hope my plane will pierce it and rise aloft into the Texan sun.

The long list has been ticked away. All that is left are the words I have stored at work. These are the things that ravage me, and I have saved them in a word document - my secret chamber between calls and conversations. To copy-paste:

They all try to make out that the other is stressed. That is their objective in all they converse.

Jenna has another road rage story and makes barest eye contact between the islands of her monologue. Brent yells across the room "Where's um..." He tries to think of a name - any name. He tries to fill the air with useless words. Asking who's in, as if it matters.

Jenna and Sophia - they say everything in a baby voice. It is all they know now. And behind them Brent repeats the same joke to Sophia, over and over, the same impression of Sophia, over and over... never different. It is now a ritual - a rite they share.

Brent, Louis and Matt fall back into that natural habit of saying non-sensical things to me - even though they had stopped recently when I was more verbal. Something about me has slipped - they see again the breach - the hole that they must fill, for terror I will not fit into their framework. They sing each other's names for no reason - simply trying to get a response - reduced to nonsense-speak by their terror of silence.

Am I any different?

Emily - the painful silences while you think of something worthy for her attention, and feeling idiotic when you make small talk - like youre boring her. I have done the same.

Definite problem. Definite hypocrisy. Neither extreme is acceptable, but how to find balance? How, when everything reduces me to hostile silence. What do I really want? Perhaps an edited life, where everything speaks concisely and powerfully. Perhaps I like my job because it's a language of facts and not the unspoken rules of co-existence that drive the others and reduce them to retards.

And Matt. Poor, sad, competitive, pathetic Matt. The slow and deliberate way he pretends not to hear people and makes them repeat everything and requires everything to be stated directly to him. His is a language of annoying and forcing people to repeat themselves, like a surgeon laying victims out on a slab - defence through attack.

I am angered by my inability to explain these mannerisms to others in the ironic way they are enacted, and my own inability to deal with them by expelling them through sound.

They make casual attempts to distract each other, and it never seems to get old. Like my harassment of Diana, perhaps? How is it that I can speak perfectly well to people on the phone but cannot contend in the small talk between-call snippets, except sometimes with Brent (Why is that? Because I am just as disillusioned as him?). Then again, all I do is agree with him or give monosyllabic exchange.

And yet, if I gave voice to it, I would have to point out every little thing that annoyed me, and it would take forever. How do other people look past this - and is that the right term? Or are they simply focussed so inwardly that they make themselves immune to others? Are they more isolated than I am? More insular than the silent writer who tries and tries again to empathise with strangers?

The sexual way they go after her. Nothing else for Sophia but innuendo and ironic rape. And Kerry... she copies Jenna... because she sees her as the alpha female, always spilling her every mood and anecdote and expecting adoration.

All is boredom, wasted energy - what would become of them if they used every drop? Would they ever reach a state of silence? Is that me? Is that why I get so tired?

There is nothing between me and them, or us and customers - only mechnanized emptiness or unregulated nonsense. Oh, for a common structure, organic and emotive - a story to follow.

I'm turning into a serial killer...

But I do feel slightly better for writing this. I wonder if this is how they feel - little junkies getting their minature fixes while I go cold turkey.

Now all is expelled. I have made my peace with friends and family, work and paperwork. All that remains is Laura.

I saw a sign today. A disused rugby field fenced off from the public. The sign read "Private Property". And there was a sign next to it reading "No Dogs Allowed". Surely they only needed the latter sign. Or were they afraid that members of the public would shove their dogs over the fence and bid them enjoy their freedom? Or, even worse, were they afraid that dogs would take the initiative and desert their forbidden masters, frolicking in the rugby fields of misanthropy?

Maybe I'm back...