Pls fix me
Len Sander
Imagine this: When I looked at Moritz as Max, I wanted to think that I looked at myself for a second, at a version.
When I read about Moritz, I thought I had read Mortitz, which would have been accurate, as he is dead, and now we call him that. An eternalisation in the shower, so to speak, a giving in and up to the death drive, a descend to the Eternal Source. What would his dad have said, Freudianly. Why did he have to fall asleep surrounded by the scent of a mouldy British bathroom.
I imagine that Mortitz cosplayed. I guess that his cosplay was more suicidal than mine. He worked for 72 hours straight. He found a place in the Eternal City.
The last thing Hari from Industry saw was a tag saying ‘wanker’.
***
In the glass towers of Canary Wharf I try to locate traces of Moritz’s life, attempting to make a sketch. It feels like a Sunday. All the buildings are connected underground. I ascend through a labyrinth of doors and barriers, each of which demanding me to justify my existence by demanding to see my staff ID. I’m a staffer, they call me that: staff. A staffy office that is empty, has been emptied as it seems, only my line manager remaining, we call him that: line.
I gaze out the window that replaces an entire wall and see a clean taxi racing along the street below. My manager wears a sorrowful expression and he is in distress, stressed out as fuck. I ask him whether he is British, effectively asking him whether he is a foreigner, which clearly makes me the foreigner. To punish me he makes me create the most complicated PowerPoint slide of a map of a structure of an architecture of financial data nods. In the bathroom I make myself look clean, slick, then watch the water rushing out from all taps in terror, and find the traces that I looked for.
***
I try to compose a list of terms, create a vocabulary, a jargon of sorts, but too much time has passed since, mashing it all into a grey mass. Pull some slides together. Pls fix. Alignment, disruption, framework. Etc. Capitalisations are a sign of High Self-Esteem. Never underestimate the capitalisations, says the free-wheeling Capital.
In English, we pronounce Excel with emphasis on the second syllable, not the first, my manager says. I think: Makes sense, we’re trying to ex-celle. We compete with the most hardworking people in the world; that’s what Mortitz must have thought. You rarely hear this phrase in Germany anymore: hard work. He had to move to London, to the city that is the City, in order to work hard and talk about it. True hard work is this: water rushing over one’s head, washing away one’s life.
