Wednesday, April 22, 2009


The ice age is coming/ better get a sweater or something (pt 2)

Most days, on returning home from work, TD silently retires to her bedroom to smoke approximately four joints, before rather seamlessly rejoining in the main room, to carry on about the night in this self-induced state of amnesia. Whether trying to avoid this same fate or it was just grim stoicism at hand, I had remained unemployed and relatively sober for the majority of six months, content to get by on blistering anecdotes in exchange for handouts from passersby. This went on until about five weeks ago, when grim fate did intervene, like some inverse edition of the television show itself, fucking everything up, and causing me to seek out drugs. I would stumble from TD’s opium den-type quarters, a confused and hazy sheen having fallen over my eyes, in such a state of lurid confusion that I actually did report to work the next day—often times to the total consternation of myself, when at about eleven-thirty every morning I would wonder what the hell I was doing in such grim surroundings, at work.


My only saving grace was wondering about the content of my fellow coworkers’ lives in between trips to the bathroom. Most of the people there seemed to be in pretty reduced circumstances, having fallen on tough times, because of the “economic crunch”, or whatever (which had become a welcome euphemism in my mind for the collapse of everything, and/or a good excuse for never having a job). I tried hard to find somebody to align myself with, and because of my rather successful unemployment streak, chose to chat it up with a forty-something housewife. We had probably been leading similar lives, I thought to myself, and conjectured that we might have something to talk about.


“How do you like it here?” she asked me on my second day, solidifying the fact that she also knew, intrinsically, that we had something in common. “Oh, you know; it’s OK,” I lied, always trying to conceal the fact that what this person may have been doing every day for the last ten years is to you evocative the most grim variety of despair, and actually, made you think of diving lemmings and death. “Oh, that’s good,” she answered. “I actually just started a couple weeks before you did. It’s going really well for me.” “Yeah?” I asked her with some hint of amazement, looking deep into her frozen face for some sign that she must be joking and secretly thinking of lemmings, too—just joking around for effect—a joke which we would be laughing about, momentarily. But the punch line never came.


“It’s really coming along good,” she continued, “I just kind of dove right in” (sic). I couldn’t believe that she enjoyed the droning, rather repetitious tasks we were completing for eight hours a day and stared into her face for some indication of the joke, which then made her uncomfortable. She finally bid me adieu, and as she did I stood there at the precipice, trying to avoid all of the cliffs in my mind. On my way home that night, I had hoped that TD would be around when I got there, I knew I was going to need something.



It was sometime during my third week when I defected. For some reason the job we were doing seemed so horrible that taking two hour lunch breaks and infinite trips to the bathroom to hang around and make calls from as though it were my personal office, seemed like perfectly acceptable behavior to me. I was just returning from my “office” one day when my boss interrupted me. “Can I talk to you?” he asked seriously, motioning me into his own office, which smelled markedly better than my own.


“What’s this I hear about taking long lunch breaks?" he wanted to know. "We offer a half-hour lunch period and two paid breaks.” I kno! I said to him. It’s just not enough for me. I then erupted into a rambling characterization of the ineffectual nature of the job, before suggesting the movie rental “Modern Times”. My boss had never heard of this movie, but nevertheless he did not seem to appreciate my rental suggestions. Our employee/employer relationship had at this point not broached the point of movie rentals.


“Look,” he finally said, “maybe if you feel like this place is some kind of concentration camp, you shouldn’t be working here.” There was a brief silence, during which I stared back at him, waiting, hopefully, to be told that I was fired. But then, inexplicably, he said something else: “You know, it’s funny: at the other location, where people go out to smoke cigarettes in back, there’s a fence which runs around the perimeter, and last night someone said it looks like some type of prison camp.” We both had a good laugh at this joke, although I guess it’s not too funny.


Life is a raw deal, and employment pretty much blows— unless you’re SG, in which case you have everything figured out. It is my lack of ability to figure things out, I think, or my massive ability to sum everything up so well which seems to be causing Problems--all deductions figured out between marijuana cigarette breaks in TD's opium den.