Sitting
on a bench, he looked across the sea watching the colors melt into
each other as the sun set. The general unease of the “panic
attack” was receding and the thoughts concerning recent events
raced through his head and materialized. What had gone wrong?, he
thought, where was the exact point that the infrastructure of his
life crashed down before his eyes.

The
memories flickered through like a cinema projecting on to the
flickering ocean landscape. His wife leaving him was the first and
by far most lucid one. She left him for another man, one who was in
a very lucrative and well-paying career on Wall Street where there is
excitement at every little turn. Stanley started imagining the idea
Wall Street, the myth that is portrayed in the movies. He hoped this
new man would get caught with some crazy embezzling scheme, but he
knew that this would not happen. His ex would live happily ever
after without any help from him, and could see that much in the
shimmering sea of his mind.

Then
he saw himself back in college with friends. The kind don't care
about your misgivings. The ones that give as much as they take and
this was what made Stanley happy. I look awful, that haircut wasn't
even cool then!, the disembodied voice located in Stanley's head
yelled, but another, more reasonable voice popped in to refute the
previous voice's claim as bullshit. This is because the look
past-Stanley isn't what mattered, but it was the how felt at the time
that was at the foremost part of present Stanley's mind, and that was
that he was a certain kind of happy during this time that was unlike
any other time in his unsavory timeline. He had his inventive
programs that sorted music by the amount of times a in a playlist
utters the word “fuck”, there was a program that created a
simulation of how long it would take the snow to melt outside his
dorm...

A flash similar to that of flicker film that Stan Brakhage would make
bursts across the water, upon the water triggers the most recent and
most unpleasant memories which occurred the very same day. He has
been working this same job as an Information Technologies worker for
a decade now and razor sharp cut in his soul that had been left by
his wife of twelve years was still one year raw. But none of these
days that Stanley had lived up until this moment had been as bad as
this one. This day was the day it all piled up to high. All the
disappointment and the disrespect for his functioning in society.
The perfection that he puts into the maintenance of the computing
machines in the office space, the connections that are made in one
computer and then connecting to that of multiple computers is
orchestral in its beauty, yet is gone unnoticed. Everything he
created was a pile of rat dropings in the eyes of the genral public
and he saw no way out as he moved forward in his life, as disaster
around him accumulated.

As
the memories of the details of the day illuminated in his mind again
and then reflected off the far reaching ocean, the buzz of panic in
his body began to return. The beating in his chest, the dulling of
sound, formulating on full cylinders. He remembered the monotonous
and eventually thankless work of inserting the hundreds sound cards
in to computer towers. A man bumps into him and then insults him by
the incorrect name, making him realize that many people call him by
the wrong name. Then the end of the work day crept to a breaking
point as a piece of paper was found on his desk in his small 3X3
cubicle located in his dank and dull corner of the office. It read
“Feedback Report” in large bold letters and on it was a single
minus by performance and then a signature from his superior, Gunther
Brahms. 

There
was no explanation of why the minus was marked. There was nothing
else on the sheet except the slight red mark. Maybe this was a
mistake and maybe this was just an error of a hand motion, thought
Stanley. The excuses he made to comfort himself were replaced by the
cold hard logic of the truth that this was in fact a bad report that
seemed to have no actual feedback on it. He didn't seem that
important to waste time on that, and the negativity cycled as well as
a ringing that was beginning as Stanley stared out over the ocean.

The
panic attack was work in the most complete way now and he just
continued to stare straight ahead. Images of the ocean were burled
and oscillated in schizoid and erratic abbreviations and color
drifted in and out as desaturation took over the space where he sat
in the field. He was in a city, he retained that much in his short
term memory, but now he in a field staring out over the same ocean
and didn't know why. His head throbbed in pain. Yet the thoughts of
his feedback review continued to stick with him and this made the
deconstruction stronger and it ever more immediate.

He
heard crickets, no, it wasn't crickets. It sounded like more and
more like white noise or feedback from a radio. This layered on
itself exponentially into deafening roars in his head and tear of,
what he assumed to be pain, trickled from his eyes. Distortion
remained to destroy the past, present, future, and the totality of
the physical world around him. A multi-colored fuzz was soon the
only reality he knew to be, or at least the only one that he could
pin down as “real” with the memory of his unappreciated IT job
distant and unassuming in this new reality.

And
he sat. Waited...