Start the work day off with $13,000 of tax money siphoned back into my pocket via the loose budgetary regulations of a large state agency, my supreme clientele, strained through my commission plan. Tell me how this circuitous arrangement makes any fucking sense— I’ve been extorted and as the proceeds slosh around our CommonWealth, the leakage drips its way back down to me, and I can eat something and pay my bills, never to afford my own land or offspring, and of course it’s taxed again in the process. America is a sheep-shearing operation. Whither the rams that wither to wethers, castrated and sweating under hair and fat.
If you haven’t yet noticed, I am an animal lover with so much compassion— it hurts— to see such noble things in their states of domestic subjection to man, that lying and arrogant creatura who would condone the things they care for to digging through the floor of confinement, to destroying the elegant carpet woven as a testament to our selflessness and magnanimity— what we supposed made us superior to the beasts of the wild— beware of taking food from human beings! Such a thing leads to domestication of the most wild sort— even a beautiful wolf will return to the place it found easy sustenance and lose its passionate drive to pursue prey bounding through air across the forest floor. It’s time for my second cup of coffee, or is it my third?
Cup 1, as the rising Sun penetrates a glass wall, singeing my right ear and the side of my face, I look a right half moon still hanging in the late spring morning. Silver steam expressed in profligate, my coffee screaming knows of certain death, an end inside me. Should the sunlight hit tomorrow I will know an identical of the same species— the world as will and representation not being up for debate but coming up for contestation— Tat tvam asi, enflamed with passion, and mistaken on the nature of aesthetic experience— desire never quiets, only wants ever greater beauty.
Cup 2, as the day drags on and steel nerves fray. I could be the greatest poet of all time, eyes flitting around the room. I cut steel keys to fit locks and doors all around this paltry city of hospitals, apartments, laboratories and nursing homes. To quote Mr. Schmitt, “they have put us out to pasture.” White-knuckling at 10 and 2 or 12/24V current ripping off a steel door of perception rated for ever greater fire. What is secure to me? Thankfully, nothing but what I hold in my hands.
Custies clear out and an all too brief lull sets in. The room is full of thick fluid— this week the air conditioner is broken and a swamp is forming around us. Mark Thomas strides jingling out of the warehouse to give us a “Hey boys!” and tell us, my man Tom and I, about how often he jacked off and thought about his father’s death this weekend with a grocery store donut in hand. The guy was in his nineties and to Mark it’s still a cosmic slap in the face— he has visitations in dreams, in his backyard, in his garage. Saw the old man sitting in his Cadillac, and so he doesn’t drive it. Given the right sign he’d walk to work from Peabody, still arriving at 5 in the morning for no fucking reason. All the employees scatter when a customer trudges in, and Tom and I are consigned to act as extractive therapists to so many men— listening to men who spend their days alone in cars and trucks, or wandering the halls of derelict housing complexes or the tunnels inside the tunnels give elegies for their fading lives. Last winter I watched one customer one-up another who just found out his sister was dying of breast cancer.
You know the type— always working harder than everybody else, they couldn’t do this job without me, I don’t kiss ass I just get shit done, I’ve been in the same position for decades, my back is starting to hunch, I’m growing moss, my own biome how slow I turn in orbit imperceptible to even me— congratulations, asshole, you made yourself indispensable, you’re part of the firmament. Here’s a pat on the back over an empty early grave. Here’s a little plaque, lead and plastic for an artery, and a raise commensurate with officially measured inflation, cover ya cost of livin’ with a wink and wagging tongue. You will not buy your way into Heaven by ransoming your accrued and unused paid time off, but you may get into heaven because you’re an innocent moron and the Good Lord doesn’t punish mental defectives. Through no fault of your own but that massive crack find salvation between two cheeks turned, kissing your own ass generously, now tonguing— finger painting— turning to me with a shit eating grin and asking “you like?” No, I do not like. And you stink. You’re filthy. Now go on and win the grief Olympics against Mr. My Sister Is Dying.