An Office Worker pt.2

6. 

Slave or not isn’t really relevant anyway. THEY always find a way to get to you in the end, THEY being the little voice(s) inside your own head…

There was only ever one voice I heard tell me that I'm not good enough, and it was my own. No one ever told me not to reach for the stars, to find my own happiness or live this life the way I truly need to to let me be me; if they did, I never heard a word of it because I was too busy listening to my own self tell me these things. 

To some, I imagine this may seem a bit woe-is-me; that's fine. You can think that if you want, I don't blame you. If I didn't know me I might think the same. But I do know me very well, so if that is how it sounds then thats just how it sounds, but to me it's very different. 

Perhaps you don't have this problem and were blessed with high self-esteem and decisiveness, perhaps you're not so introverted and neurotic as to fly into a wild sort of thought paralysis over very simple things. 

These tangents I go off on mean nothing, but I feel them so viscerally; I feel the anguish, the emotional turmoil I create in myself over what? Speculation, on my part. I can't say with any certainty that anyone in my life would react to the news of me leaving with shame or disgust the way I envision it. I am my own worst enemy, truly, and it's this constant inertia that contributes to my intense melancholia. Each day I'm becoming more of what I hate about the world. I’m a job with benefits, financial security but none of it means a damn thing. I'm ungrateful in my first world kind of way.

I am, however, not as selfish as I once thought. I hurt so because every day I give more of myself away; to my parents, to my friends, to the people I work with and for. I kill a little bit more of myself by modeling myself to the image I think they desire. It's not me. It never was. This is not something you can hide, deny or run from for any length of time. You can't run away from yourself; you're always right behind you. 

So this is me now, and I'm learning this, but nothing ever gets any easier; not that I want it to, though. I just want the peace of mind and trust of my own heart so that I can live guilt-free in my own image. 

7.

  My own image consists of sexual tension and intelligent emotional reserve. Cougars like me. I like me too, what a pity. It looks so easy in the movies, with the partner of choice already on their back, legs spread, anticipating. It takes a lot of work to get to that point, work I am not as good at as I would like. Saves on trips to the clinic, however. 

  It’s not all that bad being sexually frustrated; some esoteric practices will even tell you how abstaining from releasing the sexual current will do all sorts of nifty and beneficial things for you. I believe most of them but they’re really just full of shit and need to get laid themselves. Too many headstands leech all that semen into the brain…

Watching porn on my phone just to stay awake.. Nodding.. Feeling the flow of currents I’ve been instructed to suppress. Time for a headstand.

  Ineffective technique results in an awkward boner while inverted. ‘This is therapeutic’, I think.. 

  This is what happens when you realize you will never live up to your ideals. Options present themselves and avenues open up, almost magically. Try door number 2.. Oops! Just excuse her, she’s breast-feeding. But she’s.. Doing… a….. Headstand? America’s got talent, sure enough; if you need more proof, there’s a television show, must be true then.

8.  

Is any of it supposed to make sense? Who came along and decided to start making things orderly anyhow.. These fucking fascists are trying to kill my creativity, leaving me late and locked in back here with a dangerously flatulent mentally ill man. Nudity is the least of anyone’s concerns.

Normally I carry around my fancy little notebook but this creature is different; it prefers chaos to order, pocket-mangled pieces of printer paper to 90g Clairefontaine, gel to fountain pens. It’s raw, there’s something even slightly devious in it, like lusting someone hard imagination-style when you’re sitting right next to them in a crowded room. It’s ok, we all do it; consider it a compliment. You know what they say, great minds fuck each other. Or if they don’t, they really should.

Boredom. Lability. 

I can’t even sit down right, I’m so loaded with bullshit ideas filling this drunk head of mine, even though I haven’t had a drink in days. I’m afraid my spine might break under the pressure, snapped clean in twice or thrice by the weight of ideas sloshing around up there, best to remain standing and at full attention. 

I’m asexual now, that tends to happen over long periods of not getting it on. It’ll pass. 

Finally the ideas let me rest my ass for a little and I sink back in my chair, smoking a mental cigarette. Great minds fuck each other..

9.

 Lunch is over now, so it’s time to drag my carcass all the way back across the hall, resemble someone who is actually doing something other than nothing. I don’t know if anything ever gets done, really; it just seems that way, playing a part in some grand conspiracy straight out of the X-Files. 

“The case of the disappearing work”. 

 -Did you do it? I did it. No you didn’t. I did it. Where is it? It’s right.. Shit. You didn’t do it. I     didn’t do it. 

-If you didn’t do it, someone else must have done it. Nah, just let it for tomorrow. I might be dead tomorrow. You’re dead today so what does it matter? I’ll let it for tomorrow.

Tomorrow: “Fuckin bastards always leave this shit piled up here for me. Sick of it!”

  Another day of more of the same: dodging authority, escaping responsibility. It’s not that I’m opposed to any of these things, it’s just that I don’t give two shits enough to go out of my way to do it for a system that doesn’t give two shits for me. Unfortunately, most people have adopted this mindset and so no one wants to give a shit about the no shit-givers. The beatings will continue until morale improves, a sign once said. When you put it like that, the beatings will never stop.

10.

  Finally made it through the day and out the door. It’s good to see everyone else sharing the same enthusiasm as me for leaving. Some stay and slowly commit themselves for eight more hours at a time, securing their failing health and mental status. It’s pretty bad when you have to go to work to escape your home life. Just saying. I really do feel bad.

  Me, I just go from one plane of tedium to another, different one. Most people do, I guess. Sure, there’s lots of motion and goings on but for the most part it’s just the second wave of animated boredom. It only really hits you when you stop to think about it but it’s not so bad, at least there’s more enjoyable sources of entertainment at home; we can console or kill ourselves in any manner or speed with many methods available and easy payment options, to boot. It’s win-win.

 Me, I choose to drive myself slowly insane by degrees of creativity. Sometimes I listen to angry music and give myself miniature concussions by chronic head-banging, sometimes I listen to nothing but the rats gnawing away at my own grey/gray matter. Most times, though, it’s a combination of the two. 

 I’m allergic to television, seem to have picked up the condition sometime during young adulthood, though watching other people travel enthralls me. I like to fill my head with knowledge of places I’ll probably never see anyway, but that’s depressing. I don’t really need to go there anyway because my heart and mind have been there, tasted the food and the culture; a part of me is there already. To travel in the physical sense seems a tad redundant, not that redundancy has ever stopped me from doing anything.

  After feeding my travel tapeworm, I lock myself away in my room and thoughts for a few hours before bed; reading, writing, recounting, discounting. 

 Things start shutting down, gears grinding to a halt..

  I fill my lungs with some form of contentment and let my dreams sort out the rest. 

Goodnight.

An Office Worker pt. 1

1. 

  By the time my alarm screeched, my uncle was dead. Well, he wasn’t really dead, I found out later, but it sure seemed that way; I’ve always had strange dreams, so to call them weird is redundant. What else is new? Mornings have never been a favorite, and there's always a bit of grumbling and a lot of negative internal monologue on the drive in to work. “What grand conspiracy is this, and whose ingeniously devious idea is it?” I wonder; it's disappointing I hadn’t thought of it myself.

2. 

  The phone rings, something about the tone on the other end of the line makes me want to curl up and die but it's probably just the fact that it's a Monday and I'm not sleeping in bed. I think of Office Space. I think of Fight Club. Then I stop thinking. This, I feel, is a sorely overlooked talent in people, that by all outward appearances you can have a conversation with someone but they’re not hearing a word of it; they’re off snowboarding and probably having sex or whatever it is that goes on inside a person’s head when they space out but it’s usually better to remain in the dark about such things. You can read subtle body language and recognize cues in the voice, seemingly placed there purposely so that the other person can feel validated that their words are being followed and assimilated. A primate could do it. That’s where I come in.

  With the aid of my opposable thumbs, I place the receiver back on its base, record and report the information given me and proceed back to my corner to hide; or think I can, anyhow. It gets me through the day to imagine a cloaking device shielding my work area, keeping me safe from prying eyes. I think of Predator. 

  How come we don’t have cloaking technology yet? Or do we? I’m sure it’s confidential. I don’t work for the government, though: I work for the crazies. The patients are here, too. I know it’s not PC to say such things but whatever appropriate catch phrase they’re using these days escapes me at the moment. Mentally ill seems accurate, or handicapped; that’s how I feel walking out of here so I’ll go with that.

  The thing about working in a psychiatric facility is that the lines of sanity blur and soon enough, you're milling around rather dumbly in another world that doesn't exist outside of your own mind. There's a good chance you have a touch of it already, for even considering working in such a place. It goes to say that the staff is more looped than the patients but this creates an interesting dynamic; It’s funny, but it hurts to keep laughing at it. Would it kill a person to just act fucking normal for once? Normal. Right. Whatever that is. 

  My name is not an incredibly important fact; I exist, like everyone else, even if I do try to deny this fact most days. You can only rationalize denial for so long; after that, you can't help but notice it gets a little ridiculous (not that I haven't tried, though). I am employee #676433, for short; aka Shane. Lol. Jk. It's a very abbreviated society we live in, there's never enough time to form even words anymore, and that makes me feel rather indifferent. Whatever is going on out there affects me in only an abstract way and in a detached manner; it seems irrelevant, certainly doesn't seem real. People give such strange looks when you inform them  of your unwillingness to stay up on current events, like you're some kind of fucking alien or ignoramus. Well, I'm not but reserve the right to think this of you by your desire to "stay in the loop", and if in doing so it doesn't leave you bitter or filled with hatred, I commend you. 

3.

  It's necessary to live two lives; one for business and one for everything else. People need their vices, please don't take it away from them; office life is bad enough, they shouldn't have to be subjected to dealing with shit without the help of some kind of slow poison. 

  You're stuck in a cage with the best and worst in people for eight hours a day, five days a week and sometimes on weekends. You have no say. 

  You have even less to say due to the knowledge of its uselessness; to call it desperation is an understatement. 

  Some days you just want to hurt people, but you don't. And you won't, though some do and you always seem appalled at learning of workplace violence, as if you're somehow above it. Fantasy can be its own slow poison. Whatever gets you through the day without a body count and/or criminal charges. 

4.

  There's a fire in your belly; don't just do something, stand there. It's ok, someone else will know what to do so you rely on that faint glimmer of hope to carry you through all this. Another day, dripping with hope and reeking of aspirations to reach the stars, crushed yet again under the oppressive foot of the demigod you call your boss. And it's never just one, is it? There seems to be an endless line of command, people controlling the people in control. Everybody's looking for something but there's nothing to be found; not where they're looking, anyhow. 

  Authority only makes you look silly. It means nothing. Treat me like a human being and you will have my respect, despite our differences. The best one in power is the one who doesn't have the power, at all. You're swimming with sharks every day, and there's blood in the water. Your blood. Swim faster. Better yet, stop moving and let your self sink to the bottom, this way you're forgotten and excused from daily living. 

5.

  So you're wondering, "if you hate your job so much, then quit. get a new one.". I don't hate it, quite the contrary. I hate the realization of the futility of my existence that it imposes on me every day, and that's just not something you can escape. It's all made up like bad fiction, this work "ethic". Sure, I have morals too. And responsibilities and obligations and everything else we made up and strapped to ourselves as some unquestionable law, but the whole thing is just funny to me. It seems more like voluntary slavery. Worse, obligatory. And this is our life.

  It's expected of us to show up and possess superhuman abilities to summon smiles and ooze jolliness through our pores like some bloated toad. This all seems real, but every once in a while we're faced with something that slaps us square in the mouth with a glove and challenges us to a duel: to look inside ourselves and find the missing link, to understand that this is not all that there is, that there is something out there and within us that makes sense, and that is what we must do. But then comfort sets in, and suddenly, slowly, the image gets further out of reach and then you're 72 and your health is failing because you ate shitty food and drank shitty drinks and were just not nice to yourself. When you retire, all the ones who don't care about you, never did, and some who really do will come congratulate you and wish you well on your way. On the drive home you have a massive heart attack and the car you're not capable of steering anymore causes an accident, permanently disfiguring someone else you never even met, whose life you also just ruined and inherited all your bad karma. It's fucked up the way things happen.

  It's a job, it's not your life; it's not even real, no matter how long you hold your breath or cross your fingers. Somewhere, someone is creating their life right now; drafting their own great spiritual architecture in their own image. They're not a slave and neither are you.