Ask an Editor

MANY of our faithful readers have been writing incessantly to The Bulb’s editorial staff wanting to know just what exactly our “set-up” here at the The Bulb Building “is like.” Are we as zany as our features, you demand to know? As highbrow as our poets? Billy Jean Johannesburg from Joplin, Missouri, wants to know if The Bulb operates like a Willy Wonka Candy Factory mated with a Jurassic Park Dinoworld, whimsical and dangerous and cloying and ferocious.

UNFORTUNATELY, due to my overwhelming and sundry social, biological, and mineral neuroses, I must admit to never having left my own office, not once, not even for an instant! So I cannot comment as to the overall leitmotifs of The Bulb and its multitudinous workspaces.

HOWEVER, I can tell you about the snug, untainted, sterilized room that constitutes my world entire. Let’s take a look!

ENTER the thick, oak, arched double doors. They are difficult to pry open, no? Notice instantly the room’s six walls; my office is a geometrically perfect hexagon, as you must have surely guessed even before entering, must have guessed simply from reading my work, for are we not all but chambermaids in the great honeycomb?

EACH of the six walls, excepting the space occupied by the thick, hard to pry open doors houses a bookshelf that stretches from floor to vaulted ceiling. The bookshelves are lined with rare books from distant lands with brilliant spines, written in languages you’ve never heard of. Don’t linger with them; it does nobody any good. Notice next the blood red carpet. It is plush enough for lovemaking. Notice the candelabras suspended from the ceiling by gossamer. There are no windows in this place. Notice the three identical redwood lecterns forming a half circle near the far wall. They each support a weighty text. The texts are as follows: The Oxford English Dictionary, Grey’s Anatomy, Exotic Flora and Fauna of This World and The Next. These are my reference guides. I have visited and revisited their pages. “What an office!” you cannot help but whisper aloud. Your dainty whisper is swept away by the vast solitude of the room so quickly that you cannot remember if you ever spoke at all. And then, as if an afterthought, you’ll notice in one of the room’s many corners a whicker chair, it’s back caved in, pulled out from a tiny maple writing desk, a writing desk that would look uncomfortable in a children’s classroom, stifling at best and impossible at worst. Cramped, you think, this man must surely be cramped, and among all this space!

CRAMPED, dearest reader, cramped is the hand that loves you.