American Fez

The Footloose Ghost of Christmas Past

At our company Christmas party in 2003, Janice made a lurid exhibition of herself on the makeshift dance floor, jerking and gyrating her body suggestively to Marvin Gaye's song 'Sexual Healing' in a manner more suitable for a strip club than the office conference room. It's not sexual healing she needs, I thought at the time, but emergency sexual brain surgery. 

Too much booze mixed with recent disappointment in love. We've all been there, I suppose. According to water cooler gossip, Janice had just been dumped by her stock broker boyfriend. 'No surprise there,' I remember telling my fellow gossipers, 'that's what stockbrokers do, after all: they dump things.' Fortunately, Janice was only in her early twenties back then and her market value would rise again; and fall again, obviously. But such fluctuations in her romantic fortunes never again supplied inspiration for wild interpretive choreography, at least as far as I'm aware.

Janice quit many moons ago, but I still recall her impromptu performance as the festive season approaches, as if her Josephine Baker silhouette were the first window of my mind's advent calendar. She appears high-kicking and pelvis-thrusting in my consciousness like the first snowfall, heralded by distant sleigh bells and upbeat holiday music. And I must admit I miss her and messy youthful indiscretion. 

Alas, these days our Christmas party is short and sedentary and extremely boring. There is no toe-tapping never mind Janice's energetic twerking. We don't drink as much, either: maybe a drop or two of Sauvignon Blanc rather than the gallons of rum laced egg nog washed down with dry martinis we used to consume. And as for affairs of the heart, our portfolios are low risk retirement plans and corporate bonds. We are too anxious about what the new year will bring to celebrate the old one's passing.

It's Immaterial

The best advice is two thousand years old: be in the world but not of it. After all, aside from a few cynical tech billionaires, who want to be the poster boy for this planetary exhibition of greed, neurosis and dysfunction? Although we have no choice but to be here now it is surely best to pretend that we are not. I suppose this means acting like a corporeal ghost; an earthbound spirit who walks through the walls built by everyday life, occasionally clanking your chains and wailing. But it is important to vanish when a politics appears on the news otherwise you may turn into a violent poltergeist.

I mostly haunt my place of work were I am a revenant for old colleagues and a harbinger of doom for new hires. Some bug-eyed, melodramatic clairvoyants claim to have felt my presence at fancy restaurants, but only on moonlit nights when the expense account is full. 'I am currently out of the office but please leave a message with the Ouija boardroom and I'll get back to you.'

Meanwhile, I'm materializing at home, communicating self-indulgent and otiose messages via this digital seance called a blog. Perhaps you can feel the chill in your browser as my phantom words appear on the screen? The powers-that-code have tried exorcising old-fashioned blogs many times. They've sprinkled holy Twitter on them. They've chanted Facebook prayers. They've invoked the power of Instagram and Tik Tok. But nothing can cast out this unquiet spook that is still in the Internet but no longer of it. 

Quacks

Head office told us to get all our ducks in a row. Reading their memo, I glanced out of the window as our entire flock of ducks flew south. They weren't so much migrating as fleeing a polluted pond for luxury coops in warmer climes. The only remaining waterfowl on our roster were a random goose or two, notoriously difficult to organize, and that awkward ugly duckling we hoped might develop into something with resale value.

I spent a great deal of my time following web-footed wet footprints around the office, trying to shoo the geese away from the conference room in case they attacked other clients that were in the building. This is a total shit-show, Peter said, indicating a goose going about its business on the lobby. But I guess if we call that crap "guano" we can claim it's imported and charge twice the normal rate, he added with a shrug.

But for all Peter's gallows humor, an uneasy feeling stalked the office, permeating every nook, cranny and cubicle, as if someone had switched the air conditioning controls from 'auto cool' to 'auto fear.' After all, most of us had worked there long enough to remember when we'd been entrusted with promoting the Dodo. What a spectacular failure that assignment proved to be. 

Perhaps we should diversify our portfolio in duck-billed platypuses, Deborah suggested, an entirely new kind of animal but still retaining the old duck theme, then we could maybe expand into beavers and otters. It was not a bad idea but wishful thinking at this point. Sorry Deborah but we need immediate solutions to very pressing problems, not pie in the sky dreams. Then what about just plucking the damn geese and selling their feathers to mattress manufacturers, she replied, throwing her hands in the air with exasperation.

Sorry again, Deb, but even though the situation's dire and that's a practical proposal, do you really want to be associated with a company with a reputation for butchery and hack practices. I don't. I glanced over at the ugly duckling, gloomily pecking at a balding patch of linoleum in the lobby while trying to ignore the hissing geese that surrounded it. Come on, I thought, turn into a swan already you worthless piece of crap.