Part One

You will wonder throughout this story what it was that made me snap, if snapping was what it was. That’s what they call it now, of course, a “snap”, as if in the previously quiet forest of my mind a twig was broken by the cautious footstep of a monster, and it was somehow this snapping of the twig that unleashed the monster from his cautious approach and let him rampage through my consciousness feeding on id and ego and all other inhibitors causing me to act briefly as if I’d gone insane. At the time, I called it “becoming a superhero” (and still do).
As I recall, I simply stood from my desk, sharpie and pad of postits in hand, and walked away from my job.
I said nothing to my coworkers, not good-bye, not see you later, not kiss my ass. I made a decision and an immediate secondary decision. I walked off the set of the mediocre performance of my current life and recast myself in a grand opera. In my recollection, I can see no madness here.
I made a singular gesture concerning my leaving, my willful absence, my “snap” as it were, on a postit that I left pasted to the front door of the building. On the postit I wrote, in fat sharpie font, 177.3 HA.
I won’t be going through the trouble of decoding all of my messages for you, but that one was the Dewey decimal classification for the book “On Bullshit” which we had recently added to our library system.
Having made my mark, I turned promptly from the front of the building and stepped in front of an oncoming car.