Everybody's Got Nice Stuff But Me
So there's this great moment in the world of customer service: you're completing a transaction, and it's usually not an especially impressive one, when the guy in question - in a moment of grand, high theatre - snakes his arm around the credit card terminal, a fat shield of flesh manouvered to prevent your (that is to say, my) prying eyes from making the mental notation of his PIN number.
Dirty peon or not, I've been the victim of nefarious deeds digitally perpetrated upon my damn-near worthless plastic, so I can definitely understand the sentiment. But c'mon - thanks for the confirmation that we co-residents of The Most Progressive Town To Have Ever Existed (someone, somewhere, stand up for a pat on the back) have sunk to such an elaborate and theatrical level of callous assholism, as a raison d'etre. Those yard-mowing half-wit grocery-boy types, mouthbreathers, dumb as fuck; we're either the kind of people Randy Newman had in mind when he wrote "Roll With The Punches" ("Nice shoes little boy - can you tie them yourself?"), or perhaps the kind Dylan was really thinking of when he dreamt up "Idiot Wind" - it is indeed a wonder that we still know how to breathe.
Customer service was a snap choice - most likely a bad one, the way that most quick and unconsidered college decisions tend to be, calculated as a means to generating some extra spending money (this would be the 1980s, back when college students were from an economic sub-strata that might actually need or desire a side job for spending money). In retrospect, it was a real Faustian bargain, sell your soul kind of stuff. Once you drift over to the dark side, you're already - young and bright-eyed - moving down the path of turning into your job: you are stuck, this is you, and this is not impressive at all. "So...what do you do?" "Well, I ring up things for important people (an importance well-advertised, colossal, great brains, great projects, great greatness), and then I thank them as they slip away, muttering conference details into cell phones, power point, drafts, dots, motes, sketches of the concept, quadrilingual pre-school offsping (Ohayo gozaimasu. Dozo yoroshiku. Tomorrow, we start with Ni hao, wo shì David, and build from there.) in tow." I don't build things, design things, knock 'em dead on college radio, have subtitles streaming below me, or hold a doctorate in post-structuralist pataphysics; I make a petite amount of money, but not enough to count. A varietal of humility (not necessarily the most idealized one, which gets no real-time respect anyway) - it does give me something to work for - I have come to know, to bask in the amber glow of The Good Life, which is the carrot dangling before that tired, tired horse, at three or four above minimum wage, but there must be hope - onwards and upwards. Previous generations toiled until they died in stinking shacks in ratty sections of town without giving up, but hey - at the end of the day, a shack is a shack.
Another busy holiday comes, and then it goes - gotta love those holidays; they do have a phenomenal way of running you into the ground, which I do celebrate when payday rolls 'round - and I put my hours in through the majority of it - slow, sluggish days, followed by the sudden appearance of wave upon wave of the freshly tanned, all radiating health, a conspicuous lack of the kinds of minor gripes and grudges we lesser mortals tend to pass along to our own kind. This is the paid escape (a short, 3-day weekend, so this is a quick trip to the beach holiday, not a Christmas on the Mediterranean holiday), and I should be fair - I'll get mine soon enough, though I'll not be running off to anywhere - money's a little tight at the moment. Fair enough I suppose, for I am tired, and I am weary, and I could sleep four thousand years.
Downward mobility - what a fantastic (let's all ruminate, for a year ,or ten), axle-breaking pothole in the great freeway of progress we're all allegedly whizzing down. Put forth the idea to me as an 18-year-old; I would have sworn that you had completely, absolutely lost your mind. But I do also recall a flash of very unpleasant intuition, roundabout the age of 18: life is about to be no fun whatsoever. And what a ride it has been - precipitous vertigo drops, strange turns, weird phone calls, errors in judgement that never stop flashing back upon you - oh you will be reminded of those errors in judgement; for they are as strong as titanium - their staying power is phenomenal indeed. The love of simple being that I think I once wallowed in (windows cracked open, the smell of cut grass on a May afternoon as the distant sound of lawn mowers, and the more proximal jangle of Fables Of The Reconstruction merge into a crystalline Idlewild spring) is not often a presence in my day-to-day life now - every second awake has an edge, a hint of hysteria, something will stab through at any second, and turn your week into a fresh new catastrophe. Your lovers will fall quietly away - those soft 4 A.M. accents from Carolina East and West, Cochin or Chengdu are but a fading Fellini dream, a slippery screen kiss that slipped away into the sundown of a decade once lived. Your money will go - log in to the online account, your identity validated by the reassuring authority of technology - and you are now liberated to let your tears flow, anxiety reigns supreme, a spontaneous blizzard of autoimprovisational accounting. Your status - well, your status was a phony, arrogant delusion spawned in a secure upbringing, and your comeuppance will last a thousand years. Meanwhile - you will scramble and run, oh you will run hard my friend, straight into the ground, with the fat hand of fate ready to throw down another slap, just hard enough to get your tired ass running all over again.
I suppose this is very good for writing; there is no shortage of material, though I don't know if I'm able to properly evaluate it's quality (If you're a poor man, your standards must never, ever drop, and you must never, ever be half-assed about anything at all, at any time. Period.). Between legitimate work, and minutes and hours wasted on public transport (I once added up the hours, and multiplied those hours by my wage - we don't call them salaries anymore), I don't have much time on my hands, wedging in a second job is so necessary it's actually evolving into something of a fantasy - the erotics of employment, especially of a variety you don't feel compelled to apologize for. A notebook for the bus - I noted I was getting a lot of great reading done while shuffling from place to place, and it did occur to me that I could probably get a lot of writing done as well. I keep my modest pad close at hand - random moments of calm, strange breaks in the tension, and then the words wash over me, oceanic in vastness and greatness.
So, another afternoon's intrigues and insinuations ebb and lurch towards their logical conclusion. A brief esacpe from tiny armies of Sirk's bleak and lacquered matrons, neo-urbanist refugees questing for exquisite finger foods with French (sounding) names; the multi-lingual descendants, swaddled deep within German-engineered strollers, with flustered nannies walking amok have likewise been left behind. I flee to the loading dock for a quick moment of escape, sunshine. I note a trio of sparrows, co-conspirators creating pop for my ears only - lined up on the soaked and rust-flecked railing, shrouded by the lowering mist that has turned the afternoon into a living Japanese watercolor. The trio improvises, with an intuitive sense of elegant harmony, before flight into the pale skies.
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