xxiii
prev.cont.It’s funny when a meeting ends early and the person running it says, “Looks like I can give you back a few minutes of your day!” Is that some kind of joke? You haven’t given me anything back. You’ve just created a void in my life. There’s nothing I’m going to do with these extra twelve minutes but sit here and think about how I'm living in hell. Thanks for that.
Every day a new and more demented circle of hell opens up in the above ground. None of them have any of the poetic intrigue of the circles Dante wrote about. There’s no meaning up here. No cool visuals, like fences made out of human faces. In its mundanity, the above ground is worse than the hell Dante imagined.
Today’s circle was web-based feedback forms. The powers that be are demanding that, at the end of the workday, I hand the doctor my phone and ask them to write about what I did well and how I could improve. I’d rather shoot both of us and pray that we end up somewhere better than here.
Whoever came up with those forms should be ashamed. But it’s not their fault, probably. They’re just following orders, as we all are. The evil is the same, even when the evil acts aren’t so clearly evil. Incidentally, don’t things go wrong when you go around “just following orders”? Are there not a handful of historical precedents that indicate that?
There must be something I can do to make things go more smoothly. It’s not enough to “sit with the absurdity” anymore. It’s been well-established that all of this is stupid and ridiculous, and you have to laugh, but what comes after laughter? We all know the answer, but I’ll say it anyway: tears.
On the bright side, we’re well past halfway through the weird year. It’s all downhill from here. I’d been tricking myself into thinking that time moves slowly, but it doesn’t. It’s moving the same as it always has. It was always going to be August 15th right now. It was never going to come any more slowly just because life sucks.
I saw a fashionable old lady in clinic who had cancer all over her spine. She hadn’t been diagnosed before today, but it was already too late.
To make matters more dramatic, the doctor got a phone call on his Apple Watch while describing the x-rays in excruciating detail. It was a surgeon calling, and he sounded breathless: “There’s been a mass casualty event, and 10 kids are coming to the emergency room. We may need some help.”
The doctor sent the lady on her way, and we walked over to the emergency room together. He quizzed me on brainstem anatomy along the way, which was obviously the most appropriate use of our time. When we arrived, a different surgeon (who’d recently told my classmate that if you want to be a surgeon, you have to let it become your “whole life”) told us he had it covered. No dead kids. Just a car accident. The mass casualty thing must’ve gotten lost in translation.
It’s all so weird, isn’t it? I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully appreciate the layers (who has the time?). I guess the lesson is that I should stop wishing time away. It’s disrespectful to the people who wish time would slow down. My wish for faster time would make the cancer lady’s now-numbered days go by too quickly. Why waste a wish on something like the passage of time, anyway? It’s going to happen whether I wish for it or not. Why not wish for more time for the people who want it? Or a cure for cancer. Or world peace.
No time to think about any of that. Time for another meeting, a new circle of hell.
exit