Tick tock

The alarm ticks a reminder that I am of the earth. I will always be enmeshed in the warp and weft of this ticking and beeping. The summer solstice is controlled by time; if I chose to reject the time I report at work, I can have my summer. Till then, I have prostituted my summer and my soul for a roof and two square meals.
“Emily, prostituting her soul for two square meals and a roof,” would be a good status message for Facebook in the morning. My friends would “SMS” and “Comment” and “Email” me to make sure I was functional. Conversations would brink on depth, but the ticking of their clocks would suck them back into their own conformity. For the next few weeks they will invite me to events that I would love to attend if I could afford them or if I did not have to work each rare and gorgeous Bay area summer evening at this “job”.
Said “Job” involves a computer with a clock. It is to this clock that I must pay timely respects at the start of my “day”. I have tempted fate by “logging’ in late, just making sure managers are alert. They are salaried, not hourly workers, who work extra hours and days and evenings and nights and weekends for the sole privilege of being managers. Their job is to make sure that there are enough (a calculated number) of people on the (counted) number of phone lines answering a (predicted) number of phone calls for the (arbitrarily created) 24 hours of the day.
So, O great civilizations, how foolishly you enumerated time into one dimension, ignoring Mozart and God and oceans and the Milky way! All this enumeration and all we do is enumerate after all these centuries? We enumerate our brothers killed in war as if we did not die with them. We enumerate the enemies we kill as if we will not meet them on the other, un-enumerated side.
Last week we enumerated Michael Jackson’s greatness in number of albums sold. Today we enumerated Bernie Madoff’s sentence to 150 years for cheating an enumerated number of people who enumerated their future life needs and entrusted Bernie to magically super-enumerate the enumerated tokens of their toil- but wait- his capacity was not enumerated correctly- and now we say, let his (un-enumerable) self rot in jail for 150 years, although we all know his years on the earth are already enumerated quite stuntedly.