Ftrain, by Paul Ford

I worked all weekend; went to the office. That office is the root of so many bad decisions. Not the worst slippage ever, perhaps, but on Saturday I enlisted in the cause of General Tso and fought in the sodium wars. And on Sunday I ate the full-sized, not snack-sized, bag of Pop! Chips. One day we will take away exclamation points from food marketers by law.

(I should note here that I was overeating because I am plowing through dreadful tasks at work--busy-work in misbegotten computer languages that will break a working system, albeit for a sort of greater good. Such things come to everyone but it is depressing. Thus treats.)

This is an­oth­er death I have imagined. It's the heart-attack fear again. It is most prevalent at meetings or events in which I am not emotionally invested. A concert, or during a meeting over redesigning the forms for subscribers. The hairspray slends are in from Iowa, informing of us wonderful ways to waste money on overdesigned electronic trash. They say "enterprise legacy web-based $$" and I think "cat grep awk ping sed."

In the meeting someone is speaking and I slump. Paper-thin, the wall of my heart has ripped open. I see the conference table receding, the white puffed hair of strangers, the look of concern and panic, all receding into into oblivion. A new Photoshop® layer, my body at opacity .25, appears; and slowly it lifts through the ceiling to heaven.

Or it's strangers. A meetup discussing the Semantic Web. I sip my Diet Coke and someone discusses, for the eighth straight year, the limits of RDF/S. I take notes into my transponder. It's not all slends; I am not the only wider here. Widers and slends work together in nerdery. But the slends live longer. The Powerpoint® slides retreat into smallness. And I am slumped and large in my folding chair, and no one knows exactly what to do.

On the train I fear rarely. On the bridge less so. In the house not at all. But amongst strangers, the judgers and slends, who may find me wanting--especially as in the last year I have pulled out of myself and gone wandering through the big world, ended up on committees and panels and at conferences again--I am presented with the vision of myself, among strangers, especially nerd strangers, suddenly expiring, like a beta version.

Weight: 314 lbs