Creeping up into the sky
I was talking to a friend the other day and she said, “How was your day?” Taken aback by anyone who isn’t my mom asking me this question, I issued forth a confused look. “You’re actually asking how my day was?” I said. “Oh,” she told me, “well you usually don’t do anything and so I don’t want you to get all up tight about it.” That is, actually, an acutely stated character assassination of what my life has been like for the last few months. And so it was the not asking that was actually more representative of true concern. Thanks, G. I really do appreciate it. Because the canvas has been startlingly empty, and I do appreciate the not looking.

I tend to be the kind of human who thinks that life is life, and while there does appear to be various shades of prevailing and awesomeness, that is, incredibly, it. Sitting at a bar a couple of weeks ago with a friend, he looked over at me and offered words of shame and derision. “Look at us,” he said, “all slumped down in our beers, it’s totally pathetic.” Not knowing exactly what he was talking about, I asked for clarification. “What do you mean?” I said. “Where, exactly, should I be right now, and what should I be doing?” The whole sitting-at-the-bar slumped down in a beer was not quite the life-quantifying paradigm that he had imagined his Friday night to be. There was something better that he had worked out in his mind, but what I don’t know. He never answered my question.

While I may be pretty assured on the whole life-quantifying paradigm or the lack thereof, I understand the nature of boredom pretty well, and I think those are the delineations which most people try and transcend, most of the time. I happen to be particularly locked down right now, locked in the lock groove. You can feel it taking hold, the workaday workweek kicking it to you. It’s enough to make you want to get out of your chair, bounce your head off the wall, just to have something to talk about later. And so this I do, for no particular reason, just because. You can feel yourself at times, willing something into existence, like a ball of clay in your hand that you’re giving shape to, for no reason at all.

I am hustling out of work tonight when I see crazy N. It has been a long day and I’m practically running to my car when I spot her. I don’t know if it’s because we’re similarly bohemian-looking or if it was my strange declaration that we could have been brother and sister separated at birth, but we have become workplace allies. It’s nice. I wave goodbye to her as she approaches. “See you tomorrow,” I say. She makes fun of my lethargic goodbye. See you tomorrow, she repeats in the mock-appropriation of my farewell. I can’t help but laugh at her languid impression of me, which isn’t too bad. She asks me what I’m doing tonight, if I’ve got a hot date that I’m in such a hurry for. Sadly, I tell her that I am just going home. She cannot reciprocate any of my lethargy, however, as she tells me that she’s on her way to the park, to get drunk. “Are you serious?” I want to know. She produces from her car a large beer in a brown bag and tells me I should come along. I think this over for a minute. It has been a long day and I’m totally frazzled. Introducing something foreign to my nothingscape would be alien and unnatural. I just don’t know. It might wreak havoc on my tightly conscripted existence. But fuck it, I think, realizing this nice day. I’ll go, just because. And then, suddenly, all at once, you can feel it taking place, the amorphous ball of clay, and the narrative locomotion. Or whatever it is you call it.

Going places/ smashing faces
The grocery store by my work has a luncheonette that features two slices of pizza and a soda for $2.99, and so I can sit in there at lunchtime with the other workers of the world, the most unfathomably mundane place in the world. A ceiling-mounted television monitor plays nonstop deadpan drivel up above. It’s as though even the news is extra-mundane in the mid-day, nothing seeming to do much of anything. Still, though, there we all are, feigning attention, as there’s nothing much else to do. It’s kind of funny, this random cross section of workers: the postal employee and other uniformed workers of the world coalescing as one. I almost feel like there’s probably some fraternal handshake that I should be enacting before realizing it’s really only the fifth day, and I’m a temp. Already, I feel like I deserve a gold star. What the hell is wrong with me?

The way my job is set up is in numbers and production. Every exam you score is monitored, and while they like you to score efficiently, they want you to completely whip ass and do as many exams as possible, which isn’t entirely reasonable. One of my coworkers, I have been told, scores over one thousand questions a day, which desecrates my current total of about 250. I shake my head in light of this pronouncement. One thousand, I think, before totally spacing-out again. You end up grading the same question for days on end, and it starts kicking it to you. I have methods of breaking down the time, look at the clock, annoy the girl next to me, who has taken to punching me in the arm at full force. “Do you want me to move?” I ask her yesterday. “Nah, it’s cool,” she lets me know. Judy, the 70 year-old retiree, who is our supervisor, presides over us. “Do you want me to throw you out of here?” she says with authority. “Don’t think I won’t do it,” she says facetiously. Order is restored, which it often has to be.

Checking out some of the people in here. Everyone I work with seems to be in some state of transition, although such is the nature of temp work. There is no real stasis, and therein lies the beauty of it. A lot of these people are retires or recent college graduates, with nothing else lined up. I try and figure out exactly where I fit in. I’ve graduated college long enough ago that I probably defy the transitional student-type while still not being able to align myself precisely with the retirees. I don’t know. There does seem to be some kind of schism between the people who are really busting ass and the people who just don’t give a fuck, as evidenced by the numbers. I realize we’re all getting paid at the same rate, whether you score 200 or 1000 a day and so I take my time. Some vibe of paranoia manifests, though, as the monitoring system in place lets no mistake go unnoticed. One misstep and they’re calling you over to see why you erroneously scored that question a 2 when it should have a been a 4. No wrong move goes unnoticed. “Are you sleeping over there?” Judy wants to know. I’m probably about another day away from being fired, I realize, as my numbers are presumably low. Out in the hall, I see Judy and ask her, “Are my totals really that significantly lower than everybody else’s?”
“Oh, no,” she tells me, “they’re on average. I was only fooling around with you.” Oh, I say. I guess it’s settled, then. I’m not getting off so easy.

Like a brown bird nesting in a Texaco sign I got a point of view
A girl I know says things like this: “fuck this shit,” and, “motherfucker.” She will size up a given situation and then spontaneously issue forth the expletive of choice. It’s as though the burbling cesspool of emotion within her has become too much to handle, and she just cannot resist dispelling that feeling, little pools of ash and soot made palpable in the air. It’s similar to the reaction you have when you stub your toe on the living room furniture and just cannot hold back, which makes you feel that much better for two seconds. Such is the case when hanging around with people, you find their behaviors rub off on you. And I can’t help but feel some resemblance to the burbling cesspool of emotion in relation to this day: charcoal gray seems to stretch interminably across the sky, and perpetual rain clouds hanging over head, following you around, cartoon-like. You can’t help but think tersely under your breath, fuck this shit. There, that’s better, now.
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I have explained my job to a coworker in the following way: “It transcends monotony,” I told him, “in a way that verges on actual torture.” He kind of laughed it off, opting instead to think I was explaining some Guantanamo Bay scenario, but he’s new yet and has all kinds of time to figure out how serious I am. Sitting before a computer monitor for large portions of the day does something to your brain. Aside from the cancerous tubers it’s planting in there, you find yourself on some distant island, the person next to you tapping on your shoulder as you, feeling the tap, respond a full five minutes later to her inquiry, the vibrations from the tap slowly making its way up your spine and into your brain, which is five minutes behind actual time. “Oh, did you say something?” you ask, as she looks at you with embarrassment for you over her question being answered ages ago by someone else. It’s quite a predicament. It’s a scenario which should have me thwarting all use of computers on my free time, but here I find myself, not getting paid, and sitting before the all-mighty compute. Tapping on my own keyboard has me thinking things, like, “Shouldn’t I be getting paid for this?” and, “Is it time for break yet?”

I am making a mixed-tape (CD) for someone, as a present. I did not think of this idea on my own, it was a request. And I am very obediently carrying out this request, as I do. Back in the day, when you would actually make a mixed-tape, with one of those Dolby noise reduction/ high bias cassettes, the process was seemingly a lot harder. You had to dig through your albums and find exactly what you were looking for, quing up the appropriate amount of space between songs. Exhausted and giving up in the end, the final product was the end result of being too tired to mess around with it anymore. But here, now, with every song you ever heard on iTunes, right there in front of you, the variations are endless. Endless possibilities and configurations do you have before you, to totally confuse and frustrate, making the old-school cassette model of the mixed-tape seem far less inferior, from an exhaustive effort point of view. I have actually been sitting in front of the computer long enough to have a sore neck. It’s a tough job, I reflect, and I’m not even at work right now. I should probably just go to the store and buy an actual present. But that would require venturing out into the day, where you will find me in a department store, with an entirely new series of problems, cursing out loud. Have we had the life as endless options via mixed-tape epiphany before? Yes, I think so. And it’s demoralizing to have to experience that again.

The tape (CD), on further inspection, despite time spent, is the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life. If I were operating the decks, the patrons would be sprawled out on the ground and snoozing. Every song, even to me, has ended up sounding the same. My OCD was really kicking it to me, I realize, as I tried to match textures and fucked it all up. I’m contemplating all this as Kari-Ann makes an entry and hears what amounts to an aural funeral. “Kind of a gloomy mix,” she says. And she’s right: the worst. Leaving, really, only one response to this day, week, and year: Fuck this shit, motherfucker.