literature

Char - Office and Park - HTML

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A few dry leaves from near the front door toss themselves through as I trudge into the office building. The scene is chaotic, blind panic so frantic it looks like we hired a circus to perform it. It's too bad really; hiring a circus might have distracted the auditors currently visiting our humble workplace, and entertained some of the employees almost assuredly about to be laid off. To my desk in the back I cartwheel, avoiding the crazed file clerks running around with stacks of papers teetering in their arms. Tom, lead on the projects team, is their ring master, directing them all with continuous airy hand waving that seems to be ineffectual but probably directs the whole process. Daphne from accounting's red bulbous nose looks exactly like that of a clown, and she looks about as sad while trying desperately to handle the paperwork needed  by the auditors.

Actually, it's less like a circus, ordered and carefully timed, and more like a jungle. My boss is the hunting panther, top of the food chain here but now wary of these strange hunters more formidable than she, always on the lookout for stragglers among her prey. Max from across the aisle sputters a hello like a nervous chimp, with his goofy face and arms always long enough to grab a donut from the middle of the staff meetings table. I shuffle a few papers around on my cluttered desk, looking absentmindedly for what I was working on last night. The heavy thrum of insect-like assistants fills the air, and Max makes that weird hooting sound he always uses to get my attention. The panther is stalking her office and so I wheel myself out to the entrance of my cave. He's meeting a date from the night before at the Watering Hole this evening, and won't be able to make it to the weekly poker game Tom hosts. I tell him that Tom canceled already, something about his work eating him alive. Max gives his famous full-mouthed grin and salutes me, before ambling back towards his similar detritus-covered desk. I return to my own to begin sifting through the day's offering, sniffing out the important grubs that will sustain me through the day until the sun sets and the jungle goes to sleep.

Finally my lunch break comes, and I escape the jungle to seek refuge in the outdoors. This walk  through the park always calms me down, allows me to regain some of my sanity, my humanity. It's a jungle in there, but out here, it's like I've entered a temple. A sense of peace settles upon me as I bite into a kosher hotdog sold near the entrance; an anointed bum begs a few alms from my now empty pockets. He thanks me anyway, knowing that the park will eventually provide his own mana one way or another. Everyone is always kinder in a park, more giving, freer with their smiles. A few old priestly grandfathers play checkers at the marble tables, this holy place giving them a air of wisdom and authority. A white Frisbee flies through the air like a fluttering dove, and laughing children chase after its promise of happiness and joy.

As I cross the bridge over the Sticks River, the wind picks up and it begins to rain, and that peace I found becomes sodden and cold. Low-hanging branches claw at my face like the hands of the damned, and the whispering of the quickly rising wind turns into a howl of anguish. I want to turn back, but by now I am too far along my route and the shortest way back to the office is forwards, braving this sudden turn for the worse by facing it head-on. The stinging rain pelts my face, feeling more like a torturous fire on my skin than the cool cleansing that I wished for upon entering the park. My shoes are soon drenched through from the wet grass growing up through the old paved path, the good intentions behind its creation now lost and forgotten. The gate comes into sight, with a police officer standing next to it; his name is Pete and he's looking for an old man known to beg in this area who might be connected with a recent murder. I answer him as truthfully as I can, pointing towards the crimson marble checker tables that now look like sacrificial alters. He grudgingly lets me through, and soon the office building comes into sight.

Walking through the front doors again, I commiserate with the dead leaves clustered just within the entrance. They made the right decision coming to this place, even if it isn't their natural setting. It may be a jungle in here, but at least you know who the demons are by the name-tags they wear.
Now I call this a character but really it's the character of a place, a setting expressed through the lens of heavy description, a place given the power of a character. Read it and you'll understand what I mean.

Hey, now it's in HTML!

I honestly don't remember the origins of this piece. It looks like something we did for a writing prompt, such as, "Instill scenery with character and theme" or something. What I ended up with was a short day in the life of an average office drone who finds that his world can change around him due to his perspective. First he sees a circus in the antics of his fellow office workers, followed by a jungle when survival becomes the prevailing mood. On his lunch break he seeks refuge in a temple-like park, which quickly becomes more like Dante's Inferno when the weather shifts. Basically all I did was use as many words in each section that had connotative connections to that section's theme, such as the anointed bum begging in the park or calling the narrator's cubicle a cave. These are all words that work in each sentence and make sense, but together and done heavily enough they transform each scene. A visual interpretation of this piece might be pretty interesting, I can see the different sections actually transforming around the narrator from circus to jungle to temple to hell-scape. I like this piece because it does what it sets out to do, you really can see each new scene as it changes, it's easy to visualize I guess. I don't know if I learned anything useful from it, other than that it works, but I also believe that this technique works best for short scenes and becomes less interesting the longer the scene goes. I remember I changed each scene only when I couldn't think of more ways to work in words for each theme.
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