The Sandwich Artist
I used to have a job at this ubiquitous sandwich franchise in my old neighborhood. I'm not kidding you, it was a really terrible job. I worked for this flinching woman who sat down in the basement all day 'portioning,' which basically meant putting the little meat and cheese packets together. You know what I'm talking about: slices of lunch meat and cheese in various combinations, between squares of wax paper. Everything was placed on a scale to make sure each customer got exactly the same portion, and to make sure that wasn't much. When they train you they actually stand there and weigh your sandwiches and say things like, 'This sandwich looks lettuce-heavy,' or 'Only enough olives so the customer can actually feel like he is getting olives on his sandwich. Never use more than two fingers --that's the best rule for customizing.' There was this line in the employee manual that I loved: 'The absence of a true separation barrier insures that the construction of the sandwich is a cooperative process, a collaboration between customizer and customer.' God, that was an awful job. The worst part of it was the way the customers stood there staring at you while you built their stupid sandwiches, watching your every move. I swear, people are worse than dogs. I've actually seen people drool on themselves. I'd love to have a video tape of people watching their sandwiches being prepared, just standing there completely slack-jawed like zombies who've never seen condiments before. This one attractive, very professional-looking woman used to come in all the time and per her instructions I'd squirt a big gob of mayonnaise on her six-inch veggie, and every single time she'd say, 'More,' and I'd make another pass with the mayo bottle and still she'd say, 'More,' and she'd have this blank, disturbed look on her face as she watched her sandwich completely disappear under an almost transluscent blanket of mayonnaise, and it was so disgusting I just wanted to vomit every time. By the time I was wrapping and bagging her sandwich she'd be red-faced with shame. I swear, sometimes it felt like I was selling the filthiest pornography imaginable. If the average person saw themselves the way I saw them across the sneeze-guard every day, seriously, I bet they'd fall over with embarrassment.
An Epidemic of Prophecy in Boston
Some years ago I developed a curiosity regarding the possible genetic components of visionary episodes and manic-episode prophecy. You may have heard of the interesting incidence of apparent familial prophecy that broke out amongst a prominent Boston family some years ago. The head of the family was a distinguished internist at Boston Mercy and came from a long line of steel money. This particular man's family --the doctor, his wife, and five children in their teenage years-- experienced a simultaneous manic-prophetic episode and took to the streets declaring prophecies that were impressive in their delusional consistency. In other words, there seemed to be some shared genetic component to this particular strain of madness --a shared coding, if you will-- in that whatever prophecy the father, say, was declaring across town would be taken up with equal zeal and rigorous detail by the other members of the family, wherever they might be. Oddly enough, often these seemingly random and moment-specific prophecies would prove to be uncannily accurate, as testified to by scores of reliable and impartial witnesses. The doctor might prophesize, for instance, that a passing flower cart donkey was about to sneeze, and the beast would indeed, a moment later, sneeze. Meanwhile, across town, the family's eldest daughter would likewise predict a sneeze from a ragman's ass, with similarly inexplicable accuracy. The entire family was said to be frighteningly good at sinking ships.
--Alistair Woffolk, M.D., A Moment By The Hearth Fire. 1899.
6:43:28 PM 
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