How To Disappear Incompletely

Let's say you work in the business district of a very large city. And let's say that, though you have no emotional investment in that sort of thing, you end up working in one of its many corporate offices because you're new to the town and you need a paycheck to balance out your financially reckless recent past. Inevitably you wear the bare minimum uniform: white, button-down shirt, "slacks," black leather shoes, & c.

And inevitably you find that certain kinds of people who would maybe give you a second glance if you were walking around in what you normally wear (which outfit is really no big deal, but does set off certain signal flairs as to probable tastes in music, film, books, sex, and casual dining), regard you as a kind of pervasive, fine mist.

We've all had to do it, to a greater or lesser degree, and with a greater or lesser degree of enthusiasm. It's vaguely discomforting at best and completely shattering at worst. You feel as if a certain structure of which you have become a nodular automaton has bent you into an elbow in its pipework. So you get depressed and drink too much when you get home, and try as best you can to make the most of that suppressed impulsiveness you have to stifle.

But this sort of atmosphere IS conducive to some other thing, which you wouldn't really quite expect, and that is a kind of freedom afforded the invisible. In other words, you start your stint at this corporation sort of whistling to yourself on the elevator to pass the time, pausing to swallow hard as you ascend and the pressure inside your skull bulges out against the thinning pressure in the elevator. And then, as weeks pass and you get more comfortable, you suddenly find yourself humming, then half-singing, and then practically belting as you walk down the halls because, well, who the fuck knows who you are anyway? And what difference does it make? And why not wear the same thing every day, week in and week out? These are sort of nihilistic freedoms, sure, but freedoms afforded by committing yourself to the anonymity so necessary to that corporate dimension in which you are stranded, starving, a throbbing, pink brain in a remote-controlled body.