Recently, while cleaning out the area beneath my desk, I came across several soda cups. And by “several”, I mean 867. No, really… I literally had 867 cups under my desk. And by “literally”, I mean “free from embellishment or exaggeration”. Eight-hundred-and-sixty-seven… just 133 shy of 1,000.
Sitting on the floor and holding a stack of cups in each hand, I had a brief moment of head-tilting clarity. Something suddenly occurred to me that has no doubt been occurring to many of my coworkers for the last 866 cups:
“Dude. Why are there so many cups under your desk?”
I suddenly saw myself through the eyes of someone disconnected from the cups. I saw myself swimming through piles of loose cups like Scrooge McDuck swimming through his piles of money. I saw myself as an old man, alienated from my family and complaining about them to colorfully-decorated stacks of cups, seated around a long table. I saw myself wearing a large hat made of cups, flattening cups and laughing. I saw myself drinking, strangely, not from a cup, but from a dishwashing sponge, which is something someone might do when they’re batshit crazy from all the cups, which start out under your desk at work, but eventually take over everything else.
I saw myself on Oprah, and Jill was crying, and Oprah was shaking her head while they rolled footage of a bulldozer pulling down a wall at our house, and cups spilling out into the yard.
Dude…
I was like a zombie lurching to a surprised stop and asking, “Whoa. I’ve been eating WHAT ?”.
…why are there so many…
I was a dog, suddenly self-aware and wide-eyed, slowly removing my tongue from beneath my tail and looking around balefully.
…cups under your desk?
I was a drone, disconnected from the Borg collective, and blinking rapidly with dawning realization.
I had to act quickly, before I lost my focus and sudden awareness. I had to act while I was still un-undead, un-dog, and un-connected… while the whole cup thing made as much sense as eating brains, picking a fight with Jean-Luc Picard, or tonguing my own asshole.
I suddenly felt like I had to lose some weight. Not from around my midsection, but from the middle of my head. I had to lose several hundred cups that have been weighing me down. I decided to throw them away… all of them, to a cup.
And so they went, into the shitcan.
“Dude. Why are there so many cups in that shitcan?”
Over the course of the afternoon, several people saw the long stacks there, heaped like cordwood and leaning like pairs of giant chopsticks out of the trash, and stopped by to see if I was really throwing them away. To see if I had come to my senses, or if something terrible had happened to me. One person called me on the phone to ask if I was okay. At least, that’s what I think she asked - she was laughing pretty hard, and I think there were other people in her office.
I peeked around the corner at the trashcan several times that afternoon, but resisted the urge to rescue them. I ended up leaving for the day, ignoring them as I strode past, thereby resigning them to their fate there in the can.
I suspect there were several colorful phrases uttered in Spanish that night when the cleaning woman came upon that heaping pile of cups, growing from the garbage like some kind of telescoping monster-plant.
Note: The previous remark is not meant to generalize or stereotype all cleaning women as being Hispanic. I say that because the specific woman who cleans our office is Hispanic. Sometimes when I’m there late, she asks me about my pictures of the boys, and she laughs at my butchery of common Spanish words and phrases, such as “muchachos“, “lápiz“, and “¿Usted ha visto mis muchas tazas finas de la soda?“.
Regardless, the next day they were gone, and I feel a lot lighter without them.
Literally.
Running My Numbers: A Bill Self Portrait, (ala Chris Jordan)
Soda Cups, 2008
28″ x 56″
Depicts 867 soda cups, the number used by Bill every 8 years
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