Patrick L. Sullivan

So I meet this guy and he’s a corporate juggler. I’m like, I don’t understand what that means but he explains it to me.

Apparently in corporations when everybody really starts stabbing each other in the back and nothing gets done they organize everybody on these retreats and go hang from ropes and stuff. And sometimes they hire this Jerry guy to come in and juggle and tell jokes and everything’s fine again until the next directive from the higher-ups about wasting paper clips or whatever.

They even have a title for him: Forward Operations Consultant.

He’s also an artist and artists always make me nervous. They’re so artistic.

Anyway I do the dumbest thing which is ask how much he gets paid to juggle for these people and when he tells me I’m like, this is how revolutions start. Here I am with my art degrees and it’s all I can do to keep myself in Ritz crackers and diet Dr. Pepper and this guy is making tons of cash Juggling for The Man.

I’m thinking there are two options (if you don’t count suicide, which is just sort of a given): One would be do get in on this juggling racket somehow. I can’t juggle but I could pass him the stuff and hand out flyers afterwards.

The other is to form a Trotskyite Anti-Juggling Party. Here’s what Trotsky had to say:

“Society in which slave owners were the ruling class, existed for many and many centuries. The same is true of feudalism. Bourgeois culture, if one were to count only from the time of its open and turbulent manifestation, that is, from the period of the Renaissance, has existed five centuries, but it did not reach its greatest flowering until the nineteenth century, or, more correctly, the second half of it. History shows that the formation of a new culture which centers around a ruling class demands considerable time and juggling, and reaches completion only at the period preceding the political decadence of that class. “

Pretty snappy stuff, I’m thinking, and it would sure make a nice change from the overnight shift at Toys R Us.

Francis

PS: Here’s a picture of Trotsky. Close your eyes and imagine him juggling. It would be hard in that heavy coat, plus it’s probably cold out.

Francis D. Spackle is the nom de plume of Francis E. Spackle (b. March 15, 1972, Perth Amboy, N.J.).

After attending Forsdyke College (majoring in Exasperation Studies) Spackle worked for three years as a coat rack at the Swarthmore Arms Hotel in Pittsburgh.

He began writing his experiences in crayon on the backs of discarded envelopes and in 1997 took a cardboard box full to the publishing house of Spundle & Feely, where he was given a hot shower and proclaimed a genius.

Since then Spackle’s work has consistently topped the bestseller lists: “Skidmarks of My Soul,” “Dry-Heaving to High Heaven,” and “Travels In My Colon” have been made into films.

These diary excerpts have never been published and were probably written during the early 1990s. Spackle has become a recluse and refuses to be interviewed unless by George Clooney wearing a zebra-striped jockstrap. Mr. Clooney has declined comment.

So it’s Wednesday and it’s raining and grey, like my mood, which is always grey and sort of rambling and nonsensical in a disorganized sort of way, you know?

And so my upstairs neighbor is a nurse, I think. She keeps weird hours, weirder than me, and she must have been watching some sort of horror movie last night because I woke up at about 3:15 a.m. to the faint sound of a woman screaming and some kind of power tool going “Rarrrr rarrrrr rarrrr!”

In my old building this would be normal but in my new nice place it is not so I listened some more and finally went out to the living room and turned on the TV and sure enough there it was: “The Drill Bit Murders.”

I saw that movie high on a mixture of amyl nitrate, rubbing alcohol and Venezuelan goat cheese the summer before I got sold into white slavery by my old Scoutmaster. I thought it sucked then but now it seems pretty good.

Well, I have to go to the new therapist now so I will check in later.

Francis