For the worth of life.

 Boring walls. No boss. Not a bad deal. Undisturbed and with unfettered access to stores of food. A decent job anyone might want to keep. 17 dollars an hour. Not bad if you can get it. 

I think my life is worth a lot more than 17 bucks an hour, an asymmetrical trade that can't be bought back. 

There is a lot of heady language being wiped around about the connections between the worker in america or the worker anywhere that the worker toils for wages and the people of Palestine in Gaza facing decimation. The machinations of global war, the turning of age old mechanisms, might seem as though they have nothing to do with working for a living. And they don't if that's how you want to go about it. Fundamentally though I think the link boils down to what is a life worth, and who gets to set the price. 

I know, like I know that my life cannot be bought for 17 but I must sell it incrementally to secure food and housing, that the people of Palestine must also sense that their lives are worth far beyond the constraints and torment they have lived under for decades.

In all honesty I am woefully ignorant about the particulars of this history. I have a glancing familiarity with its poetry through Mahmoud Darwish. Though what does one need to know about torture? What are the particulars that I need to be aware of in-order to unequivocally denounce geocide and confinement and incarceration and destruction? Here, I suppose, is where anarchism becomes a philosophy of elegant simplicity. I'm not squabbling about a states right to defense, or even sovereignty. I am not squabbling about the need for currency, or the economic utility of wages. I understand, in an infinitely fractional sense, the horror of being contained. That when your life, or the cessation of your life, becomes of economic interest to larger entities,  your ability to make a choice is always being filtered through someone else power over you, and in the infinitely abstract space of survival. Will they give me such and such day off? Will I not go in if they don't give me the time? Will I have the cash saved to weather the unemployment? I don't need to know much because I just know that when you are bound up in the fist of some terrible, deadly, oppression, eventually all there is is to lash out. You quit playing by rules of respectability regardless of whether is will work out in your favor. Because to keep idly accepting the limiting, claustrophobic conditions of your existence would be to leave your humanity at the door. 

It is simply not about Judaism as a faith. It is perhaps about land and indigenous occupancy right. I wouldn't know really. It's about what a life is worth, and the value it loses when the economic prosperity of certain people run opposed to the continued existence, not even the flourishment of some others. My clans are not dying, nor are my children being strafed by US supplied ordinance. I just know that one freedom beets another. The value of one life illuminates another. That a war to exterminate hospitals and houses simply can't be defending anything worth keeping, and that a people divested of their homes have always presented inconvenient narratives for ruling class, for the settler colonial state. Through their lens Palestinians become animals. An Arab scourge to be demolished, lives and histories pounded into rubble. As the inherent worth of humans everywhere has always presented an inconvenient narrative to the factory foreman, to the capitalists.

The goal is Palestinian liberation. Less would be to fail. Less would be to continue, each and everyone of us, to rigidly abide a system which is killing us. I am unsure what a measured, and by measured I mean feasible, form of resistance might look like but what I do know is that Palestine must be free. Israel must cease its genocide.

The goal is an end to the wage economy. 

From the river to the sea.  

This is in part dedicated to my friend Zahra. Whose Instagram stories keep this constantly on my mind. Her poetic and effective curation of cats in bombed out rubble, and kids posing in the skeletons of their homes could do nothing less then make this a struggle for the worth of human life. As she is an exemplar of what is best in people. Their kindness, their creativity, their sadness, their humor, and their heart. 

Working For the Weekend

 I spent eight hours today staring at a wall. It's not as much of an exaggeration as you might think. From 9am to 5pm I sent four emails and rang a couple people up and got some people their custom shirts from the back. In the remaining seven and a half hours I sat in my wheelie chair and wrote in a little note pad and clicked around on my mouse and keyboard to look busy. Why wasn't anyone giving me anything to do? No one bumping me some quotes to fill out. Customers coming in and asking questions I couldn't answer. I intensely watched people having conversations in an attempt to learn something. Or at least look like I was learning something. the husband of a friend of mine from Highschool/ elementary school came into my place of work to hand out a flyer for a party the casino he- I guess- works at. I thought about saying hi. Of asking after Charlie and saying that I enjoyed getting their Christmas card from a couple years back. But in that space I am not that. There, I stare at a wall for eight hours. I do nothing and my ass goes numb in a chair so I wander around putting the tags down the necks of shirts. There are worse ways to make 16 dollars in an hour. For sure. Though, my ass could get fired for doing nothing. So I sit in a semi wound twitch all day. Trying my best to not look like I'm enjoying doing nothing. Sweeping a more or less clean floor. Touching shirts in a kind of pantomime of productivity. I do not say hi in these conditions. In this situation I do not feel as though I have a self. I do not have a heart. All that is inside of me is a solid void. I sit and I have no future. Answering the dreaded "so what's new with you?" is a toll I will not pay for connection. People I knew once pass through my job often. Sam Elliot, the artsy gay boy who I loaned Scott Pilgrim to in Highschool. Mr. Schmidt, my third grade gym teacher. I don't say hi. There is nothing new with me, I want to say, I'm just working some bum ass job that I hate in order to not starve, and as much as I was trying to wrap my head around the idea of it, it's still terrible and terrifying in a way I was not prepared for. At all. I could talk about the gig I have coming up. Or the things I am trying to write or the jams I've been in, or the debut as a (bad) actor. But none of that is "happening' really. Those things are reprieves in the torrent of small violence that the world throws around every day. Those are not happening to me. I do them because I must. The mini comic I wrote has no barring on how the events of my day will play out. Nor on me sitting in that room. Nervous and still. Tense for eight hours. Listening to the static hiss of retail space ceiling tile speakers. The same dozen songs or so for the day. Coming at me from slightly different directions. At least it isn't loud. if the speaker system was actually clear it would be game over. 

This is the third job I've quit in just as many months. In that way I have no past. I have no cohesive line from the year before to now to four years ago to now. In my country I am sparred the worst of peoples judgments because I am white. Cuz' my momma raised me to be a kind of facsimilia of middle class. Or my  families penchant for bookishness and a life of the mind cast us in that direction. Whenever my coworkers and my boss talk about the homeless people who stop in for free shirts and who pass out on the benches near our store front, all I can think about is just how close I- and any other worker- are to being in that situation. I feel a kind of kinship with the social death of it. I have no life in so far as in America work is your life. Everyday I keep pressing on toward my own very real death I feel my relations dying as well. The older people I love, who seem invested in me- or some facsimile of me- are cut out the more and more my relationship to employment becomes adversarial. It's hard to explain just how much of a combat making it through the eight hour work day is to someone whose been doing it as long as you've been alive. As I quit job after job it just becomes a quilt of failure which separates me from these folks. You can only ask someone for a reference and just fucking walk off so many times. To a certain logic I have my imminent death coming. I can't get my shit together, I can't eat. 

It struck me today that all the people who love me -barring, probably, my mother- love me on the condition that I am not homeless. That I am not nearing death. Love is a very easy idea to maintain when it does not require the heavier lifting of actual sustained care. I have seen my own love for people dissipate when the love they require exceeds the love I am willing or able to give. And where I to fall out of the social order, to be- as is becoming clearer and clearer with every passing day- unfit for the life of an eight hour work day all the people who I file in my heart as beloved would most likely cease to be. either in that their capacity to help on such a scale is just dwarfed by their own need to keep themselves afloat, or by an inability to adapt what are more or less low input relationships to a higher resonance of interpersonal need. I do not long for survival because survival would cost me everything. I would rather die and leave behind a smattering of mourners than go on and drag myself away from all the people I love because my need has become too great. This is what I think of as the minutes crawl by at work. 

To not have a past is to also not have a future. For the eight tense hours I don't have a 'next move'. I have lived on impulse long enough that to do so anymore is to my detriment. I keep thinking about how many weeks there are to go until I can quit. 50. Maybe 40. I want to leave my home in the hopes of finding a life that doesn't feel like a holding pattern. I want it to all feel worth it at some point. I could quit this job, I think to myself, just leave. I've only been here for a few weeks so I don't need to give notice. I bet the ball bearing place is hiring. And then what:? work there and hate it? Quit that place too? Leave in 50 weeks when I take off for a new mid sized American city. The future rhymes with the past. I knew I would pay for my actions and here I am.  

I have a dream where I'm killed. I'm arming explosives and then I am running down a street from someone with a lot more power than me. I have thrown a grenade or killed someone and now I will be chased down and vengeance will be enacted. I had another dream perhaps where I was Sue Storm, the powerful matriarch of the fantastic four. The first family of marvel. My girlfriend jokes that I need a big roost to rule. I love her so much it hurts to know I am all by myself, nothing but a worry. I clean the dishes but she could do that. And I will die. There is no other destiny for me. No roost to rule. it's true. I would love an airy kitchen to lean on counters in. to chase grandkids and console the children the woes of their lives. to hold the great grand babies. A great mother at the head of a long lineage. Passing on the best of myself to stronger generations, and keeping the worst as a coming home gift for the absentee god who left us all to rot here on earth. We have lived not at his behest but in spite of his animosity. We are powerful in that way. I try and dig in to the idea that continuing is the only way to get there. to get anywhere. But continuity requires choice and I have precocious few. precious few. precious few. 

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I got fired from that job, probably not long after writing that. It was a mercy, really. That plunged me into depression and financial anxiety. I just couldn't hack selling t-shirts.