David Newberry, Writer

Sometimes I write things down. Often in a group setting, in response to prompts. Other times alone, in response to, you know (*gestures all around*).
All work (c) David Newberry, date listed. 

Just An Office // 11 February 2025

This isn’t an office. This is a maze.

This isn’t a maze, though, it’s more of a complicated hallway designed to keep you from finding an exit. This isn’t really a complicated hallway, in the end. It’s just a metaphor. 

For work. In an office.

But it isn’t an office. It’s an angle. A platform from which you can view the rapid decay of your one and only timeline. As the pieces crumble away, like a sandcastle at tide, like cake at a birthday, like Venus De Milo's arms, you exchange them for currency. Not because you want to, but because you somehow started owing it to someone else before anyone even explained the agreement. I don't know, maybe it's not all of that. Maybe it’s just an office. 

But it’s not just an office. It’s a shortcut through the jungle of meaninglessness towards an endpoint of identity. A scene that gets set for us so we have something to say when the people we end up sharing space with inquire “So what do you do?” What do I DO? Well, I guess I go to an office. But it’s not an office. 

It’s a mystery. The kind laid out in a tableau-d line drawing, collected with other mysteries in a volume with a brown cover purchased at the book fair in the school gymnasium. The kind you stare at and stew over, trying to decipher all of the ways that this tragedy frozen in time could have unfolded, before flipping to the back page where the answers are written upside down in italics, turning the book over, seeing the answer, and thinking “Oh, is that it? That’s dumb,” and its on to the next mystery in a permanent search for even one single moment that makes you say “aha!” But that never comes. It isn’t coming. It’s not a mystery. It’s an office. 

But it’s not entirely an office. It’s also an animal. An animal in a zoo. Walking straight until it encounters an immovable object, turning, walking again until it again encounters an immovable object, turning, and walking again, and turning, and walking, and never finding an exit. 

In this way, I suppose, it is just a maze. Or an office. It’s just an office. 

Wikipedia Entry for Cottage Hospitals (An Introduction) // 21 January 2025

A cottage hospital is a mostly obsolete type of small hospital, most commonly found in the United Kingdom.

The original concept was a small rural building having several beds. Advantages of such a hospital in villages include the provision of geographically closer care (which avoided long journeys to larger facilities) to deal more immediately with emergencies, and the way in which familiarity between the local physician and patient might improve treatment. This local knowledge of the patient would probably have been lost had they been referred to their nearest urban centre, as was typical for poorer patients.

Though unknown to many, the legacy of cottage hospitals surreptitiously lives on via their separation into two unique divisions: Cottages, and Hospitals. The summit that led to the division of powers took place at a remote resort hidden amongst the Scafell Pike mountains in the Lake District region of Cumbria, England. During the negotiations - which were more of a draft, really - the two newly founded organizations took turns demarcating any practical, social, or metaphysical area of jurisdiction they wished to exert exclusive control over. 

Hospitals went first, and selected technology. Cottages second, choosing quaintness. Hospitals - cleanliness. Cottages - lake proximity. And so on down the list. Sometimes their choices played off each other and balanced out, such as when hospitals chose the forefront of scientific knowledge and cottages retaliated with folklore. Other times the choices were as disparate and illogical as could be, as was the case with hospitals’ selection of aggressive lighting and cottages’ absorption of well used b-list boardgames. 

Over the weeks and months that followed, as the list of all possible conceivable things was whittled down, choices became competitive, and areas of clear overlap began to emerge that led to some heated disputes. Initially, this could be settled through bartering. Hospitals, who ruffled some feathers when they unexpectedly chose fireplaces, agreed to give it up in exchange for cottages’ choice of x-ray machines which - while controversial and baffling at the time - turned out to be a stroke of strategic genius. Over time, however, progress slowed. Hospitals staged a two week walk-out over skylights that threatened the very foundation of the project. It was after a forced international mediation led by the Swiss (which took place on neutral ground in Geneva) that the process was able to continue. 

In the end, before negotiations broke down completely, a very short list of areas with shared jurisdiction was agreed to, which included only four items:

• Ghost stories

• Family gatherings

• Hastily prepared meals 

• Memories that take place in the body 

   (...to be continued)