ref: a00feb029ddcea6188f4324169e5f2b6a389de4e
dir: /troff/_-0309.ms/
.PP .ps 10 Part of the deal had been to surrender his position on the team. That was fine with him; this whole thing had been a confusing time sink from the start. He had never really understood his role in the first place. .PP .ps 10 After the papers had been signed he never heard from Cy\-bra, Dimension Man, or anyone else on the team again. He figured it was just as well. These people had never seemed to like him, anyway. .PP .ps 10 It didn't take long for him to settle back into his old routine. None of the last few years had seemed real, and mayeb they really hadn't been. Stan picked up more or less where he had left off, delivering the mail and not speaking to anyone unless he was spoken to. .PP .ps 10 All of this was in service of getting on with his real work. He couldn't continue paying his material into a system that denied him ownership (and access to clear recordings) of his songs. Whatever success the Chief had helped him attain, the spoils could never be equal to simply doing the right thing. Each of his songs was an insurance policy against old age, poverty, madness... He couldn't just turn them over to the enemy in exchange for a little temporary security... Comfort. He placed the box of CD\-Rs under his bed with his cassettes and affirmed that all of this had been an expensive figment of his desperately impoverished imagination. .PP .ps 10 For some weeks he came up with no new material, just practiced and refined his fingering on the trickier passages of old favorites. He had started to worry something was broken inside of him, but soon enough the familiar flow of bland, underdeveloped melodies once again began to trickle into his consciousness. It felt like taking the slow boat home. .I This .R was the work he had dreamed about. This was the work he would do. .PP .ps 10 A light had flipped off inside of his head, forever. He noticed, but he didn't care. .PP .ps 10 Thirty years later he died.