The Gaussians

I'm not very good at articulating. I don't presume to be grasping at straws when I say that I have a sturdy hold on the English language. Strong vocabulary: check. Strong grammar: check. Spelling: dubble check. Never mind all of that when I'm speaking: I get choked up, stuck finding a word, making silly mistakes such as ending a sentence with an unavoidable preposition, confusing you're and your and too and two and to and there and they're and their and doing and doing. Sometimes I have to take a deep breath. Sometimes I have to get that ringing out of my ear.

But then I realize, the ringing isn't coming from within my ear. It's purely external: the sound of a bell. I look around and see no one; there's that awful feeling of utter vacancy: the feeling you get when you're alone and yet sense a presence there; its eyes candidly watching, waiting to catch you unawares; the stale air wisps under your nostrils at the sudden whoosh of your head returning to it's standard position: obediently straight forward, with the attitude of mindless labor; your own two eyes staring noiselessly and endlessly at the clock which reads 2:30; the computer screen flickering its seamless, digital image relentlessly at your face, displaying the products of a certain urban outfitter; your right birdie finger emulating the movement of a carefully swung oar during the championship Moloka‘i Outrigger Canoe race, enabling the screen to shuffle aimlessly through pages and pages and your mind to capture the visible digitalization of myriad pairs of jeans tight enough to make your mother blush; your wallet curiously appears onto your otherwise empty cubicle desk; credit card facetiously slides out of its multifaceted holster upon receiving a secret push from an unknown source; 2:45.

You hear the bell ringing. No. The bells. Many bells.

To your right you see the apparition of what appears to be something bell-shaped. Your mind wanders back to the days when the general consensus was the Earth to be bell-shaped; those days when followers of Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss ruled the planet; you remember Pop-Pop recounting old tales of the mysterious disappearance of many Gaussians in the late 1700s. An extermination, he had proclaimed it. He was just trying to scare you, wasn't he? One day, the Gaussians will return.....A day when bells are no longer seen a symbol of One, of the whole, of purity.......

You realize that the bells are not alone; footsteps now accompany the heartless, ostinatonous chiming of the bells. Could it be them?

The apparition of the bell-shaped figure becomes more solid than an ancient stone that has been safely guarded within the Nutty Putty caves of western Utah Lake since the prehistoric era; a time long before said caves were formed. You realize you've seen the bell-shaped shape before: a Christmas decoration that hangs ever-gleamingly at your drab cubicle. It looks mysteriously like the one on your right; you dangerously continue staring, attempting at a conclusion of a previous encounter. It dawns on you, as across the bell-shaped apparition read the words Merry Christmas!: the bell has lost its symbolism. You feel sudden doom; imminent and insatiable death; despair seeps in exactly the way a banana cannot pierce the side of a T-1 Jayhawk.

The footsteps grow louder. The bells' ringing becoming an increasing nuisance as each chime causes a slight shudder in your heart. The word tintinnabulation grows ever weary in your mind, your conscious mind. You see the image of one great Poe flash before your eyes. Presently you wonder if the subconscious realm is playing what is known in 1990 vernacular as a mean joke. In your imaginations, the improbability that you will be completely able to come up with a perfect end to this blog post maxes out at one. You recall that one equals one hundred percent. It all makes sense.

Bell-shaped shapes. One. The Gaussians. All illusions. An awful way to describe the feelings of utter vacancy that exude from the cube-shaped work-area you call your desk between the times 2:30 and 2:45, when the rest of your world is at break.

I hesitantly turn back to the international super web; back to electronic commerce; dreaming. Cue the eerie feeling of being watched; cue the candid's eyes.