There have been many times that I’ve left where I work wanting to do something horrible, criminal, cathartic.
Many times also that I’ve written whole diatribes in my head that don’t quite make it down. Several of them did make their way into notebooks, but most of them evaporated when I was out the door and on to play music or make art for the night. My recent tenure at the perennial service job, after 8 months of travel and almost no wage slavery, has been marked by two differences: a much deeper calm overall when performing my job (from both complete knowledge of how to do it and the weathering relaxation of having done it so much… I know my position is not in jeopardy and nothing is as new, painful and sharp as it was when I began there) and a consistent after-hours habit of alcohol.
I used to get out the door ASAP and almost never stayed for beers, instead riding my bike to my practice space to play music or go directly home and read, draw or write. At the least to drink alone, at home, away from the place. The redirection of leisure time has been intentional, medicinal for panic, but slowly and inevitably putrefying. I knew it would not and should not last and my taste for it has faded as my sense of ever shorter weeks, ever less artfully lived, has grown. It did keep me from having to pay attention for the last few months, but the grind of flagrant class separation right inside the workplace always grates on me, focuses my anger. After some steps to organize my life a bit more, I realize that the fallow period is necessary and in fact I have been having an amazing life recently, full of practice in adapting to ever-changing situations and thriving on the changes.
I’m not sure how so many Kids, Electric Animal Kids of the Post, can focus so totally on the surface, on partying and on clothing, on fashion and on physical delight, entertainment, distraction, confusion, tourism of the mind, colorful novelty, all through work. I am truly envious lately and do not consistently have the artifice to conceal it, even when I want to seem positive, constructive and confident. You are what you are, until you can dream. Well anyway, we work on and money is such this clear and obvious issue and some people just have it coming out their ass and the world trumpets rainbows for them, it is true.
And it is true that almost all of my problems could be solved by money now: loan debt unpaid, the fear of reprisal, the anxiety of owing and knowing that payment must one day be made, frustration at the meager checks I must offer wholesale to rent and bills leaving less than half of less than $1000 a month for tools to better my life with (not counting food because I am on food stamps and would be dead in the water without them), the constant limitation on options of travel, education, tooling, art supplies, music equipment, dreams, nutrition, transportation, gifting. It is true that in a day in the summer, the place I work clears enough money, after taxes and electricity and food costs and insurance and payroll and stolen booze, in One Day, enough money to zero out all of my debt. And in One Week: enough for me to travel for years, go back to school for years, start my own business and go to bed with 7 expensive hookers of all genders for 3 nights in Vegas to celebrate. I have most of my self order down: I accept the constant work of maintaining the right path and opportunities come in more ways than just money, but material conditions have so much to do with human misery and the often miserable attitudes of others I work with and my own.
A few of the people I work with come from mad money. You can tell because they are regularly completely, insensitively, blithe and oblivious to notions of lacking necessities. I hate sensitivity because it covers up critical information and is usually something rich white girls are intensely concerned about, but some of these rich white girls are downright cruel when it comes to rubbing relative wealth and definite privilege in the faces of people they work with, because their sensitivity is reserved for more exotic, absent and fashionably oppressed (or strictly self-relevant) labeled groups of humans and/or animals (Indigenous People, Chinese Girls, Puppy Mill Puppies, Rich and White Women Who Are Socially Powerful But Slightly Older and Therefore Touchy About Their Appearance and Age). To be clear, these people are merely the product of the world they are brought up in (x) their own will and individual judgments (x) desire. They are not arch-villains, they are just hooked up and don’t give a fuck. New boots, 5 touch iThing phones per year, nice lipstick, done hair: they look like money, they get more money. Families sent them through nice expensive schooling: they sound like money, they get more money. Money gets money. Victory gets victories.
You start to win, you fucking run with it. If you have kids, you may forget to imbue them with a conscience and depending on how sharp and what kind of brain they have, they may range from not giving a fuck to giving only a detached fuck, studiously analyzing the fuck that they give, getting richer writing about how they do really kind of give a fuck (without getting dirty-hands) or actively profiting from the total fucking over and killing of people with a lot less money (which can proceed directly from the other mentalities with little warning). Once everything becomes comfortable, I think you forget how uncomfortable it can be, how your life can be consumed with the pursuit to maintain a minimum, torturing you if you had dreams at all, dreams that you now think cost too much money to ever be real. The constant little accomplishments and triumphs of those who have, sting incessantly. I know how much faster I could be moving if I had money, but instead: it takes 3 months to buy a guitar, 8 weeks to afford to fully fix my bike, half a year to save for a trip, 3 months to scratch up enough to move to another apartment.
What I really really don’t get, Electric Party Animal Post Kids, is why the masses of ones of us who do NOT have all this money and privilege, dare ignore the problem and keep striding into oblivion. Get. Fucking. Organized. We could all buy a house together, but there is this fear that people will flake out.
Will there not always be a sea of piss-poor kids who don’t care if they’re paying rent or mortgage as long as its cheap? If you have nothing already, are you seriously worried about defaulting on a home loan, assuming that in fact you can’t find people to live in your owned home somehow for a year, in a country that literally bases its economy on debt and bankruptcy? You’d only be average.
We could all start our own sandwich shop, lunch cart, after-hours coffee bar, but there is this fear of being at the top of something bigger than you? Or something? Or just: you don’t want to sit down with some paper and beers for a month and then put monies in jars for 6 months and then dump out the jars and start your own company with your friends and never collect a paycheck again?
We could all split a hyper awesome phone plan, but there is this fear that that would be awkward somehow and that it isn’t appropriate or full enough of decorum and independence?
We are wasting are time as lone little serfs, earning nothing with our nothing money, while mad fucks just summon whirlwinds of cocaine and BMW’s by hanging out in 10g suits and crazy bitches get hit in the face with diamonds and hundred dollar bills just for wearing designer $250 jeans and lip gloss. Dirty fucking people, we are wasting our time pretending we are separate little princes and queens, literally following a way of life, of custom and habit, based upon merchants pretending to the trappings of aristocracy. We belong together, arm in filthy arm, making our money fester and multiply, not trying to live separate lives in paupers kingdom.
I walked out without drinking for once in awhile tonight and thought to write this down.
