Selia had taken to drinking heavily to prepare for work.
Like work itself, it had become a ritual, a chore that she needed to executed in order to get through. Tonight, due to certain other responsibilities, such as detective’s appointments, she was running late with this chore.
Gin and Lemonade was her drink. Without obnoxious levels of taste, it had a faux purity to it that made her forget about capitalist imperialism and animal cruelty for just a moment. Anyway, it dulled the idiot senses.
It was fine to be drunk at work. Encouraged almost. Most of the attorneys at Smithikins, Pillipilli and Leeb-du-Toit were strung out on something, that was how they got by. There was no way you be do that job, she had long ago concluded, with any level of efficacy, and remain in a ‘normal’ human state.
There was no way to not smash your head repeatedly against the endless panes of glass in the endless glass-walled meeting rooms until they shattered, no way to stop yourself from picking up the large shards of glass lying everywhere and gouge ugly wounds in your stomach.
There was no way, really, to deal with the self-obsessed drumbeat of the utterly hopeless issues of the abjectly futile clients on their manifold quests to be swallowed up whole by a destiny of looking backwards at themselves pleading with the future to turn out to have some meaning.
It didn’t end, the papers, the keystrokes, the pitter-patter of precious people with pernicious needs. It didn’t end, even at the end of anything it never ended. Whatever it was it just bled into the tragic outcome that was its continued existence.
And all the while the people paraded by with their puffy chests pretending to care about this and that. Pretending to pause, and with some manic pomp, portray a royal fool in a holy gown issuing pronouncements on every conceivable topic.
“Selia, isn’t this Moth Epidemic a dreadful thing?”
“Selia, those fools at the Capitol had better get back to work soon”
“Selia, I’m sure Mark would want you to move on”
So it was fine to be drunk at work.
The partners of SPL led by example.
Smithikins kept multiple bottles of whiskey on his desk, drinking from them profusely, even during client meetings. He would fly into a rage if someone refused to drink with him.
Leeb-du-Toit carried a man-purse of “medical supplies” at all times. Sometimes when you were in a meeting with him you’d think the room was shaking, but it was him.
Pillipilli was the sane one, in that no one had seen him or her for many years. A rumor suggested that the portrait in the foyer of a person wearing a peculiar mask was in fact Pillipilli, and that he came from a remote African tribe. However Selia preferred to think of Pillipilli as some kind of Legal Mystic, that had transcended The Human Law and wafted off into a void governed by such detached, impractical notions as Principle, Fairness and Common Good.
Anything less failed to allow her to believe that these hideous lawyer creatures were indeed human, or some at least pitiable form of sub-life, since they created truly created nothing on average, knew very little of special note, and were so mentally stifled by the concrete diapers their brains wore, that outside of their cloistered beehive of self-fulfilling meta-importance they were almost entirely bereft of any redeeming feature whatsoever.
Selia: Pillipilli…
She was crying now, of course, as that was what a good, mad, girl must do, and be damned if she would forsake the forsaken sisterhood after all these millenia of bristling euphoria and brooding disdain.
Selia: [Throws a glass across the room] Be damned!
Perhaps she would cut her hair off.