The Terminatee

Today, after hearing the postman's knell and signing his proffered forms and opening the Official Lawyerese Letter whose punctuation I could correct if I dared, I became the Terminal Man, opening a surprise chapter in my zigzag story, a chapter likely to unfold unto the terminus of my days and ways.

Of course, the Terminator's declaration is merely one version of events (and we know from Marcel Proust how subjective and fickle memory is), but in the corporate world (as opposed to the legal world) it is the only version that counts.

My feelings range from guilt to remorse to sadness to fear to anger, and, not least, to liberation and lightness (though you are right to say those two L words are not feelings per se; hey, I'm struggling here, okay?).

A sense of freedom is granted (yes, there's a cost I am paying) to anyone who would dare exert a modicum of dignity in the arena (the arena we spell w-o-r-k). How dare I return fire after a fusillade is launched at me! Some nerve!

I don't plead heroism or victimhood.

Besides, as you all know, Pawlie Kokonuts is a fiction.

It didn't happen; it's all a dream, in't?

I've quoted these favorite and shimmering lines of William Butler Yeats before:

"What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass."

I share these words again, dear friends and loved ones and anonymous readers. (Scroll down through the link above; cool pix.)

I've often referred in joking fashion to Mr. Soren Kierkegaard.

And now his celebrated leap of faith awaits me.

I will put my faith in the blade of grass. Or the drop of dew.

I will take the unnameable breath of this moment, and treasure its exhalation.