Later arrival than usual at the Windmill finds me surrounded by farmers. They are here to plant their wheat and hoe their fields. To my right is a pick axe, perhaps the very object that will be weaponized and used by one of these raging agriculturalists to puncture my chest and tear out my still-beating heart. Or maybe it will be wielded in a surprise attack from behind, severing my spine and, upon its withdrawal, hatcheting into the rear of my skull, bringing the spastic shaking of my spinally severed body to a humanely rapid finis. The attacks might start with shovels and rakes, or maybe the crude approach of suffocating me by mouth with unworn gardening gloves will lure the farmers into more satisfyingly savage rebukes involving chain saws and power lawn mowers against my needless, irritating body.

The kids seem nice. The farmers look like teenagers. They are gathering mulch and bagging it up, I guess to replace it with fresh mulch. I don’t really care about the farmers.

Today has felt like the steady beating of a drum, one which marches on to the next thing. I have had ideas of leaving all this to memory. All the websites, all the pages, all the stories. Jobs are opening back at corporate, jobs I could easily fill unless age bias is the scourge it was when I was the person doing the hiring. I don’t want to go back to Time-Warner or Time Inc., and certainly not CNN. But something in news or publishing with limited programming requirements. My last job at CNN would work today: Product Development, or Product Management.

Believe it or not I do not want to be known as the Payphone guy for the rest of my life. I thought of this when CBS called last summer. I remember thinking I’d be happy to do this, even if I don’t think I’m quite the character they think I am. But I also thought I would be happy if this was the last spot I ever did. There are days when the subject matter is fun and all. But other days the word itself sounds like a dog that will not stop barking. There are so many people out there, people I will never know, to whom my name is synonymous with the  subject matter. But there are countless more who have never heard of me and never will, seizing on the subject as their own personal irony, not to be shared.

…

I had to take leave of the Windmill. I had to be fast. I saw what was going on. The old man. I had not noticed him at first. How did he elude me? He was in charge of the young farmers. I watched him smiling and laughing, talking up the kids like they were his own. He was their Manson. He was their cult leader and brain washing megalomaniac who would once and for all organize their minds around the necessity of my annihilation, my summary and consummate destruction. By saying “We’re finished up here” and directing them to pick up the farming implements he was, in fact, directing them to the metal shed in the back where they were to set aside a space for my dismembered and hatcheted body. I saw the boys pick up what looked like long metal spears and smaller shovels, grinning and following Manson’s jolly-sounding orders. “Manson!” I shouted. “How are you even here?” No one heard my frantic yawp through their blaring smiles.

Seeing the plan for my murder set in motion I preemptively skedaddled, leaving the whooshes and whoopses of the choreographed movements intended to decapitate and amputate and discombobulate. As I made my subliminally desperate escape I saw that the mulch they were bagging was nothing more than the preparation for burials, one of them mine the rest of them for others who visit the Windmill. This pleasant-seeming little garden will soon be Long Island City’s most thriving cemetery, with not a single tombstone to honor the dead.

…

OK, then, I escaped the Windmill to the ghetto coffee shop.The older guy, I’ll call him Farmer Bob, seemed to be in charge of the kids, who I took to be from the neighboring school filled with students and mad dogs focused on my disintegration and disappearance. I think the kids might have been doing some of this as community service. Gawky youths.

So, I am thinking I’ve had enough of the Flaneur life. I can do better. And I can do it for as long as I want, then move on to other things, those things being pursuits I can plan for as I sit at my corporate desk. I am, still, a free person. No debts, no responsibilities, and nobody who even cares about or needs me anymore.

Just let it go, man, let your lazy unproductive life go and do something else for a while. Put these 15 years behind you in favor of putting the next 15 ahead. You liked corporate well enough, even if the CNN finis was a hopeless grind. But that wasn’t your fault. You were hired for one thing but when the tech director quit to open a Mailboxes Are Us franchise you stupidly agreed to do his job, too. A steady parade of complaining programmers and website developers marching into your office to complain about each other and about their sorry, hopelessly employed lives was not what you needed. No one needs that. You stood by your mantra that having “reports” was the most over rated corporate badge ever. And even that term “reports” you found distasteful. But moreso were the braggards who boasted of having “dozens of direct reports” (as if that’s even possible).

YOU DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE. Don’t stop hearing yourself say that. GET OUT OF YOUR CURRENT LIFE BEFORE THE WINDMILL FARMERS GET YOU.