But the topic of the times would now be closed for the remainder of the evening. Eventually, even the bar would close, but until then Werd would talk only about work. Werd worked developing training programs for corporations. He worked mostly on the production of videos. When working for a client, he would spend weeks on site, so he traveled frequently. This month he was in Midland where he commuted in a daily cycle between a room at the Velour Hotel, the corporate headquarters of Dow, and the bar.

Another, he waves.

The bartender understands that Werd will be ordering a different drink each time. And he understands that this scrawny man with the wiry red hair and the round spectacles will be difficult and attempt to throw him for a loop. This time it will be absinthe or an Income Tax Cocktail. The bartender walks off, unaffected, to search for vermouth and bitters. Werd is struck, now, with an idea for a video he's working on, that instructs Dow Managers on how to fire newly-bought employees.

Werd pulls out a pen and reaches for a cocktail napkin:

Scene. Long shot. Fisheye, A long long corridor. At the end of the corridor is a tiny person in an office chair, perhaps 100 meters off. The person speaks and is clearly audible: "Perkins... you're fired." Outside shot, camera points up, at the base of a building. Perhaps 200 meters up glass moves outward glittering from the path of an office chair being flung through the window. A man in a suit appears, tumbling head over heels straight at the camera. Lens cracks. Blackout.

Satisfied, Werd drains his income tax cocktail and gestures for a Jaegermeister. He proceeds to tell the bartender a long answer to a question the bartender has not asked.

"What am I doing with my life Johnny? I mean I'm gonna be thirty in a month, I got nothing to show but a lousy job, and a closetful of manuscripts. I got everything I need to buckle down, I mean really buckle down, plan out the next ten years, make lists and execute them ya know. Figure out what I'm doing with ym life. I mean, jeez, this hotel room I got—top floor, no AC—hotter than hell up there Johnny.

I gotta focus. I can't focus. The heat and this damn numbing job. You ever worked for a transnational Johnny? They fly you places. At first it seems romantic. At first. Helping secure capital and all. Then you look back at who you were but the door's locked. There's bars on the window. You expand your credit, get fat, and then you can't move anymore. You gather moss and investments and assets and you buy things, they get more expensive and less fun, tossing off cash. It's like falling in love too many times, Johnny, you ever fallen in love too many times?

I gotta figure out a way out, Johnny, I gotta get back. But I can't get back.

It's gonna be Y2K soon, everything's gonna change. You ever think about—huh? Yeah, I'll take another, gimme a, uh..., can you mix me an International Incident Johnny. It's in the book. Yeah. Thanks. Y2K. everything's gonna change. I'm sitting here at this bar in this big highrise, and there's neon on the glass and a cyberjuice espresso bar downstairs, but I might as well be sitting here in a fedora, and this might as well be like, an art-deco joint from Berlin in the 30's. You see? This is going to be old-fashioned. And quaint. And next year I'm going to be an anachronistic 30-year-old moving like an ashen ghost through a transformed world. A world of hyperviolent Woodstock concerts and full-scale military assaults against obscure countries that aren't our enemy. A world of killing and fabulous computers. There's a noose tightening around the population—the wealth gap—it's a razorwire garrote that's going to sever us into two species, and those two species are going to be at war. But not for extermination or submission or acquisition. It will be a war of domination. A few frail giants will walk across the hardened shells of the rest of us, and we'll be crunching like cockroach exoskeletons underfoot. We're going back to slavery, and it's going to have a brand new name.

Outsourcing.
Prison labor.
Global economy.
Expansion of capital.
War, slavery, ignorance.
Not: Strength, peace, freedom.

Ever read Orwell, Johnny? Ever read Marx? It's one of those crazy things. Like a particular form of insanity: sanity. I pick up a bottle like this, see, oh, hey, sorry guy I wasn't trying to take your beer I was just demonstrating, so I pick up, uh, an empty bottle over here and I see clearly the fingerprints. I see the people slaving in the heat of the brewery, their union busted. I see their children's scars. I see migrant workers moving across a field of hops while pesticide rains from above. I see minimum wage and less.

I tell you: you read that shit and it wrecks you. Like a virus of the mind. Like God or truth. I don't have a family Johnny. Because, well, mostly because nobody loves me, but also because I see the family as a fiction. The family is supposed to take care of you and teach you morality so that the state doesn't have to provide for those who can't make it. I get so lonely sometimes Johnny in that hotel room that I'll program three movies in a row. I was watching David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, some Coen brothers. Natural-Born Killers, Silence of the Lambs. Hyperviolent art movies of the nineties. A new theatrical experience freed of good guys, if you get me. A world without redemption or heroes or love, just killers who fascinate and mesmerize us in their unflinching viciousness. What a sick fucking country this is. This is our art, and it doesn't resemble art. Oh sure, it's beautiful and hypnotic but it has no flesh - it has scales, it isn't human. Np motivation toward an improved world, nothing sustainable.

I used to think maybe I was an asshole, or clinically depressed, or maniacally introverted, because I hated parties and would rather stay home. Write novels to put in a drawer. Parties, with their suspended motivation. Like a psychological vacuum, an ether, in which one drifts into the bliss of a moderate amount of alcohol. Like a swimmingpool on a hot day, you go in and are refreshed by the clarity of the cool water, glittering and amniotic, relaxed by the exertion required for slow movement. And you don't think about... books... or computers... while you're in there, Johnny, because that shit ain't waterproof. And you're in the pool with a lot of people, maybe total strangers, and you're all almost naked and wet, and it isn't awkward at all. it's comfortable. Very comfortable.

I like swimming, Johnny, but I like to swim laps, swim underwater, go off the diving board. I like to swim in a direction.

What... Brad. Right. Brad not Johnny. Johnny is my name. Sorry Brad. Man, how embarrassing. Well, I guess you must get a lot of people in here forgetting your name. Oh. Not really, huh. Well.

Well, I read this book the other day and now I know. I don't have a good time at parties. and it's not because I'm an asshole- what?

Well, maybe I am an asshole, that's not my point, my point-

Asshole, yeah.

Why you want to go and say a thing like that Brad? Asshole. Fine. Get me another Sino-Soviet Split it's in the book. Jeez. Make yourself useful, seeing as how you aren't going to listen my troubles. Where'd you learn to tend bar anyway? Correspondence course... Asshole...

...