TAKE AWAY THE GHOSTS THAT HAUNT ME NOW

I swear to sweet christ a ghost follows me around in my apartment. I hear little things here and there, like the doorbell going off when it doesn't, and some rumblings and shouts when no one else can hear anything. I feel my cellphone vibrating in this one corner of the kitchen, every time I'm there my leg feels that sensation through the pocket where I keep my phone, yet it never actually goes off. In fact, I can barely get signal in my apartment. All summer, I lived just one floor above in another apartment in the same building, and I had no problems with cellphone service, but here, I'm lucky if I don't have to dial 3 times before I can get through to the other end.

When I told this to Angela last night, she was the classic skeptic. "Solution: get a new phone, and have your hearing checked!" she said.

WORK DIARIES : DAY ONE

We make lamposts for a living, here in this dark cauldron under the city. My sister says she's got enough money to make it through college, but I don't believe her. That's why I'm working down in the pit, so she can go to college. I was never terribly enthralled by her being courted by intellectual types, but they don't have to make lamposts underground for a living, like me. Perhaps she will marry a nice student who can one day become a good father and husband.

"Let's get goin!" shouts the foreman. He's from Boltsville, where they make bolts for our lamposts. He transferred over so he could "get into the reeeaaal workin!" or so he keeps telling us.

"YOU! GUY STEVOS! MOVE YER ARSE!!!"

I hustle. I've only got about three hundred bolts left to screw in on the main shaft, but if I don't beat the clock, I can't get started on the head chassis by afternoon, and they'll keep me on main shafts for the rest of the day as a penalty. That would be rather fine with me if it weren't for the financial cost. You can make as much money finishing a single lampost as you could working a hundred shafts.

The lunch whistle blows right by my face at usually sometime around 3am, but never at the exact same time. I'm not sure why it's been left without an autmoated time clock, but then again, it is a steam whistle. It's so loud and grating that even with my hearing protection in place, it sears my aural canals and rattles my ear drums. My ability to hear high frequencies is out of whack for several minutes afterward, which is generally fine, but today I've been taken aside by the autocrat, who speaks with more sibilance than I can bear at the moment.

"rgghghgVObwmnuah! Come see me in myofffffmhgggn!"

He tells me that my flow rate has deteriorated to a state of virtual unsustainability and if I drop any lower, he's giving me my papers.

"We NEED these lampost, Stevos! If you can't keep up with demand, you'll have to hope for some better luck when you'e keeping up to life on the street!"

What a day it's been already. I'll have to spend another afternoon bolting in a hundred tin shafts.

When the day finishes at 11am I'll have to make sure I pray to the big Morgantaler in the sky that my sis gets a scholarship.