On work

God this is giving me a headache. Stinging sweat drips into my eyes, columns of letters and numbers flicker through the fog of my migraine. Some people rob citizens or sell their ass to support their drug habit; me, I am trapped in this newest echoing Kafka-esque nightmare of a job I assured my boss would be simple.

Halt! I challenge you on this “Kafka-esque”! What the stink is it supposed to mean? You find yourself changed into some sort of monstrous vermin? Yes, it does feel like it. Some sort of insect slime pools under my chair. My shades slip from my slippery face carapace. My clicking mandibles feel sticky and fuzzy with congealed ichor and plaque, where's the Sensodyne? But wait, get this done first.

I am trying to create a mathematical formula to determine the ideal title for a best selling novel. The point of the exercise is to produce something like this (Scotsman story on the mathematics behind Murphy's Law) or this (formula to calculate the funniest sitcom) for the Daily Mail. These press items, you will of course note immediately being a media-savvy blogging type, is your typical spurious PR page-filler, plugging British Gas amd UKTV Gold respectively in this case.

I have been poring over the lists of New York Times best sellers over the last 50 years, converting the titles into numbers and manipulating the arrays in different ways and converting them back to letters again, like some sort of a sordid and fevered Cabbalist, in order to determine what is the single perfect book title that manifests all of the rules and patterns laid out.

I can't help but feel a sensation of "this is your life", spread out before me: a never-ending Excel spreadsheet stretched over a surrealist landscape, littered with empty syringes, a sprawling Jekyll-and-Hyde game where Jekyll classifies paper clips in an incomprehensible never-ending labyrinthocracy and Hyde rots in a pointless narcosis.