A-Minor

BY MICHAEL J. SOLENDER

Did I want it just because it represented a metaphoric cleanse of all the crap in my life? Or was I there at Sheila’s insistence?

“It will change your outlook on everything, really,” she decried, “You’ll wish you did it ages ago, it really opens you up.”

It probably was a bit too late to be wrestling yet again with the decision that I’d already made and committed to. I was after all lying face down on the cool faux leather massage table like a Thanksgiving turkey, ready to be carved, my giblets exposed and my other finery pressed against the saran lined surface where countless others before me had toxins, real and imagined, flushed from their bowels.

“There’s really no pain at all Mr. Dracon, most find the warm water quite soothing, the tubes are really quite flexible and I’ve done this many, many times,” my colon hydro-therapist was reassuring me I was well on my way to a colon massaged nirvana that promised spiritual as well as bowel centered enlightenment. “We use closed systems, Mr. Dracon. All waste is discretely transported into the drain line without offensive odor and without comprising your dignity.”

I wished all my travails would find their way into such discrete transport. Work continued to give me migraines. My constant indigestion, I was convinced, was due to work but Sheila insisted it was because I was “compacted” and I wasn’t purging as nature had intended.

An increasingly marginalized corporate Klingon, each successive emperor I dealt with was enrobed in the finest suits crafted from invisible thread. “We want change agents Dracon,” my current boss sent me into the line to test their resistance, “You need to be the one telling Operations we’re not going to support them on this one. It’s ill conceived and Info Systems is looking for us to take a stand.”

“Then you bloody well take it,” I thought, half out loud but it came out, “They’re going to push back, do we really want to fight them on this? I mean do we really need to know how they make the sausage as long as they get it done?” We always used porcine references when describing Operations. The guys on the line were Oinking grunts, their bosses Porkers. Making sausage was any operation that we marketing types didn’t understand.

The entire scene, reminiscent of Knute Rockne sending the team in to win one for the Gipper, played in my mind as I awaited the euphemistic proboscis that was about to enter the wrong direction down my one-way street.

What if I liked it? What if it was erotic? What if I got…excited? God, now I became obsessed with an entirely new set of fears.

The rip of the Velcro covering being discharged from protecting the probe had me instinctively cross my legs.

“Now Mr. Dracon, again, I need you to relax. This won’t hurt a bit.”

That’s precisely what I was worried about.

Michael J. Solender is frequently on someone’s shit list. Follow his blog at extreme peril here: http://notfromhereareyou.blogspot.com/