At work, May had a meeting with the other floor managers. It was decided that Suzi would no longer be allowed to shelve books. Her duties would be restricted to working the helpdesk, a task that is no easier for her but involves less risk of injury. Suzi hates this. Not only is she bored at the helpdesk, but she feels like this not so much a move to protect her from injury as it is the first step in what will be a series of decisions to "put her out to pasture." May thinks Suzi has always understood that her responsibilities were, in an unofficial way, limited; but as long as there was no official bar to what she could or could not be assigned, she felt she was the equal of any other employee there. No longer.
    A new employee was assigned to tackle all the jobs Suzi used to handle. Suzi was assigned to train them. I've often heard stories about people who must train their replacements, people who have to ensure that their own companies can count them irrelevant. This, however, seems worse. Suzi has to train somebody who is there to replace those parts of her that are dying away. Every new task she teaches this person is, on her part, an admission that she's definitively given up just that much more ground up to the disease.
    After teaching the new guy the system by which art books are shelved, May asked Suzi if she thought the new guy could handle the job. "Sure, I guess," said Suzi in her uniquely soft, drifting way. "But he doesn't have a passion for it."

    I don't think Suzi would mind hurting herself on the job. I think, if she were allowed, she'd work herself into the ground. I don't know if that's just. I don't know as how I'd call that dignity. I think whatever that terrible drive is, it was something we once recognized as a sort of fearsome strength, a brutal willpower that was not good, but true and essential in the way that all pure things seem to cease to be moral issues and become facts.
    Whatever it is, we don't see it around much anymore.
    I think it's buried in some unmarked slave's grave. Maybe near Talcott in West Virginia. Maybe near Leeds in Alabama. I don't know. But its ghost shows up, in dim outlines, barely discernible, here and there. But it's dead and just too stubborn to know that we don't want or need its kind anymore.
    At least, that's what I think.

    But I'm just rambling madly. The situation is what it is. Anything else said is just so much wasted words.

    I can't think of anything more to write for today.