The Tumours Made Me Interesting Read Online Free Page B

laughed. “Fuck that, dude. If those fucks upstairs don’t like my freak flag flying, they can throw me out of here themselves.”  
    He turned his back to me and bobbed into an unstable Cossack dance that might have been amusing had it not been for my burning esophagus. Sometimes I envied Jerry to the point of hatred. He was stuck in the same day job as me and somehow he hadn’t fallen prey to it. Somehow he retained a personality. When you watched Jerry go about his daily interactions, you got the sense that he really lived life. He always had a story to tell and unlike most people of his age, he didn’t have to recycle stories from his delinquent teenage years. His stories were new – always some new girl or vaguely dangerous adventure. He had lived a thousand more lifetimes than me and he was only a couple of years older. It wasn’t so much that his life was more fulfilling than mine that bothered me, no, it was because he had the decency to ask me about mine. What’s more, he never responded in a judgmental way when I admitted my weekend had been spent watching DVD box sets of television shows that no one else in the world remembers or cares about. He bothered me because, save for his attitude toward public nudity, he was the sort of person I wanted to be.
    “Look at 'em,” Jerry said, still Cossack dancing. “They’re all ignoring me!” he yelled. “Ain’t ya ever seen a naked dude before?” He commando rolled out of the dance and sat up on my desk. His genitals were spreading like an oil spill. “Look, if you’re feeling up to it, you should totally come out with me tonight.”
    The concept actually made me laugh. Jerry had a habit of asking me to go out clubbing or bar hopping with him and although a part of me had a strange desire to accept the offer, the anxiety-ridden cripple that made up my greater self always refused. “Nice offer, Jerry but look at me? Think I need to get an early one.”
    “Suit yerself, man,” he said with a firm back pat, “but the offer stands. Nothing gets rid of them gut nasties better than drunken debauchery.”
    He leapt from my desk and began mock flying around the office cubicles yelling, I am Super Batman! I remained soaked in vomit and wishing I was Super Batman.

    I’d managed to get myself more or less cleaned up. I flushed my soiled shirt, clogging up the unisex work toilet pretty bad in the process. I just wore my singlet and suit jacket and from a distance, I looked comfortably banal. My keyboard was still an issue. It was caked in vomit and my tentative keystrokes were met with a squishy resistance. It was official: I needed to request a new one. This was easier said than done. In the 13 years I’d been an employee at The Nipple Blamers, I had never been given a technology upgrade. I was the only one in the office still using a computer less powerful than my piece of shit wristwatch. It drove me crazy. While the other staff were enjoying widescreen LCD monitors, Blu-Ray burners and computers faster than male orgasms, I was stuck in the mid-nineties. My primary mode of data transfer were floppy discs. I had three which I had to juggle my important data between. The fact I was able to fit my important data on these discs indicated how unimportant my job was. I didn’t have internet access, which meant I had to commandeer other computers to read the fusillade of work e-mails that arrived daily. I had to stoke a bellow-desk furnace with coal just to keep the monitor illuminated and my keyboard possessed an ancient alphabet, no longer in use by the populace. It was a cruel timestamp, never letting me forget how long I’d been here.
    I unplugged my rancid keyboard and walked it toward my supervisor’s office. I’d requested tech upgrades before and it was always met with, I’m sorry Bruce, we’ve blown our tech budget – try again next quarter and I’ll see what I can do . I needed stark proof that an upgrade was necessary and my fetid vomit was the