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.
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