That plastic duck just keeps staring at me...
Where did he come from? What does he want? Why won't he
BLINK?!? These are the questions that rush through my mind as I try to pry my attention away from that damnable plastic duck that someone put on top of my
monitor. It's yellow, like a little
duckling, but sports a full complement of adult-duck-like features, from the large
webbed feet to the facial features often found in grown-up ducks. It's about the size of my thumbnail, and it's looking
RIGHT AT ME! Why can't I take my eyes off it? I have
work to do! I can't concentrate with it standing there, mocking everything I
know and
love!
That duck flies in the face of my every hope and dream, telling me I'm not good enough, I'm just a poor
loser sitting in front of a
workstation all day. My
zerg action figure, my holiday
Jack ball, my
killer-tomato stress-reliever, my
South Park 2001 calendar, none of these things can rebuild my withering self-esteem as this judgemental
harbinger of plastic doom mad-dogs me into
submission.
And yet I can't find the
strength to remove it. I can't bring myself to just knock it away like the one-gram
polyethaline toy it is. There's something in that
stare, that
paralyzing...
Whoa, you fell down, little guy...there you go, back where you belong...
Now where was I? Oh yeah...that
paralyzing gaze bores into my very soul like some sort of '
laser'. Yeah, like a laser, a
red one, accompanied by a high-pitched
whine and immediately followed by a puff of smoke, like in that episode of
Automan...