Section 3 - Saturday morning, early; outside Ed-Center I
By 8:30AM Saturday the sun had been up for a while, signaling to anyone interested that the day was going to continue to be a pretty one. Not so for Herf who trudged back down the path; he’d needed a flashlight to trudge up “just” eight and a half hours earlier.
It didn’t really register with him that the birds were happy or that the squirrels were happy; he even missed that the joggers and their dogs were happy at that somewhat early hour. Herf was finally accepting how unhappy he was. And that he was choosing to end his four year forced-patience streak. He was letting the long repressed real scowls out.
But finally getting honest with his feelings wasn’t sufficient. He was getting angry and he was liking it. It kind of scared him and that was the real problem. He had no idea who he could turn to, who would sympathize with his predicament. The few friends he had were “online” and mostly out of work. They thought he was one of the lucky ones.
So sure, he was lucky: he’d attained a 14 gourmet-cup caffeine-induced jittery stupor; and then he’d set the ISD’s computer-world to rights in only a few hours. He should feel more than “lucky;” he knew he should be on top of the world after such a magnificent disaster-recovery. But he didn’t; he wasn’t. He felt deeper than ever in a pit he’d realized was of his own making. And that made him feel even worse.
Which gave him a sudden frightening confidence: confidence he possessed sufficient rope at home; confidence it was of sufficient strength. However, he wasn’t so confident in the strength of his living room’s (pseudo, he wondered?) ceiling beams. So rather than continue on home he did a full-body 9-1-1 and drove to the nearest Emergency Room.
His mental fire needed no more fuel but he couldn’t help thinking how, come Monday, his ISD would’ve viewed such desperate, self-destructive actions as the ones he’d envisioned just now as more of a technical-communications inconvenience rather than a “human tragedy.” His tragedy. That was how low the kid-caused nightmare in the computer lab had taken Hereford Bolton IV by Saturday morning.