by Heraclitus

Created on: November 02, 2008

Heavenly Torque

Exponential dread overtook Marlon Diogenes Morris as he listlessly thumbed the remote. A cumulative dread, this rote act segued into an unanticipated tipping point. Once again he'd come home spent from the job he resented, washed up on the beach of his couch with only enough energy left to contemplate how the job robbed him of enjoying his evenings. Searching for something edifying on television he instead found himself channel surfing televised waves of emptiness. The same commercials replayed daily with metronome mindlessness, onslaughts of maddeningly metastasized kitsch. Endlessly repetitive car and drug commercials dominated. He was a Pavlovian dog with severe dehydration.

The front door swung open to the inside, momentarily blocking Marlon's view of the entrant. With a rustle of plastic and a momentary struggle, his wife Jade pushed through the door laden with item stuffed plastic bags from the grocery store. Dropping the bags, she reached back outside the door, retrieving an additional bag. Closing the door behind her she fastened Marlon with a syncretistic gaze, part greeting and part mood survey, for he had become sullen under the duress of his help desk job.

"How was your day?" said Jade in her usual, almost sing-song way with a genuine but slightly guarded smile.

"A day, just like the rest," said Marlon blandly. "I'm just glad the weekend is almost here."

He rose against fatigue's gravity, kissed Jade on the cheek, and helped her take bags into the kitchen, conscious of her observation as they put away groceries. She was worried about him. Marlon wanted to assuage her concern, but right now he didn't care. He'd been laid off from his network administrator job six months ago, one he'd worked hard to attain. To make it even more personal he'd had the kind of life where some hadn't even expected that much from him, and he was proud of having easily outdistanced all low expectations. He had a beautiful wife and two lovely daddy's girls, Tai and Tasha, not yet ten years old, whose bedtime hugs swallowed up all the years that small minds had branded him a loser.

Or so Marlon had thought, surprised at how forcefully his vocational cul de sac had revived old insecurities considered vanquished. His sudden unforeseen ejection from a career he enjoyed into a stressful job he despised encased him in a cynicism that made him wonder if in some unfathomable way he was becoming like his namesake, Diogenes. Had his deceased father been unknowingly prescient

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