Wandering the Desert: Thoughts on the Fine Art of Letting Go.
ONE OF MY DOGS HASN'T BEEN EATING THE PAST FEW DAYS, just went off her biscuits, decided that only venison and salmon jerky will do–she gobbles that down with reckless abandon, haughtily nosing conventional duck and trout out of reach. She's done this before; the expensive Pacific Stream Salmon soured in her seeing nose–hence duck and trout in the first place. Despite myself, I can't help but think, Well, fuck you, dog! Up yours! You don't have to walk yourself, feed yourself, pick up your own shit. You don't have to earn money to buy your food, pay your taxes, be a productive member of a society! Allen my rabbi and chess partner, thirteen years dead speaking through me What? You think I can just make food rain from the sky? I can't spend an extra $30 each month on different food, just for you, asshole! Do canines dream of socialist wish fulfillments? You live in ol' buttermilk luxury that would make 15th century French monarchs green with envy!
Then I think to myself again, by the way, fuck you, Corey. Fuck you for getting comfortable! Fuck your cells for getting cancerous! Fuck the Nagasaki sauce chemotheraphy that saved your life! Fuck the radiation that killed tumours, shocked nerves, rendered your penis inert and your efficacy inept! Fuck 80%! Fuck 27% Fuck statistics and their curated expectations! Fuck your ten-year-old slow ass computers, never good enough for any job; always one step behind, always on the goddamn B-team! Fuck your terminally unique mind, out of step with this milquetoast century! Fuck your ambition to be anything more than try-hard average, to claw your way into the bourgeois sun with the vainglorious beautiful! Fuck your anarchical luck, side-lining you from the world, while not having the decency to kill you.
Death over détente; it would have been so much easier than this hurry-up-and-wait game. Peeping purpose with perfect clarity and hamstrung by motherfucking cellular quislings. No one realises the thin ice on which they tread; one moment part of the mise-en-scène of an industry, with clear value and a position in things–a place on the map. Then Cancer happens. There is an outpouring of support and protestations of care and love, but treatments take longer than anyone realises, and before you know it, the world has moved on out of necessity. "Nothing personal, kid... We just have bills to pay, you know? Get well soon. Let us know when, you'know... You're all clear." All clear? This isn't a cold, or the flu or a bad case of the roach-coach runs, this is cancer! There is no "all clear!"
My wayward dog, sidles over, bats me on the knees, What's your problem, human? I'm hungry!
My problem? I think, scratching her ears lovingly, My problem is your infantile expectations! My problem is Charles Darwin! Millennia of selective breeding and you can't grasp the concept of suck it up, buttercup! She trots off to parts unkown. She'll be back. I would gladly buy her different food, two bags a month, one for each dog. Where is the child-support for dog-owners? My co-canine-parent long AWOL.
I have got to transmute shit to gold, have to find work. I have to show up in industry again as useful, unbroken, unfucked. I can't be manual, or run camera–the threat of chemo, its utility in my chest, riding my collarbone like a brand of defenciency. 20 years of skill-set accumulation wasted for lack of others' imagination. Starting over from ABC's, pleading proof that I am not my extensive résumé–as if it was ever a guarantee of fuck all–that I can do something else to those who see people as cogs in the machine. Unless I have done exactly a thing, I'm unqualified for a shot at proving I can do that thing. Why all this excessive education if they think I can't learn a role? Has nobody ever heard of on-the-job training? Billy Shakes said, "Let's kill all the Lawyers!" Ah! But Billy, my light, my brother, my comrade in mental arms! You've never had to contend with HR professionals, those mercurial cerberuses of obtuseness! Those archons of asininity, whose analytical powers involve little more than daily horoscopes and a ouija board!
Resistance as trauma response; protection from what once threatened to kill me. Do I even want my old life back? If I dare set foot on the well-worn track, the uncertain familiar of my last 20 years, am I not just begging for another tumour? In my nightmares, bird-dogging a train. I think I can catch up, but the carriage hammers on. I dig and dig and dig, my legs turning to rust, I can catch up! Although, what is my plan when I do? Will snatching the holds at 50 mph tear my hands off? Roll and snap my ankles like balsa wood? I shed my baggage, strip off my coat leaving nothing to drag, leaving it all behind, down to birthday suit and shoes, still digging and as I hit a 45 miles per hour impossible for my human insides and I feel the snap, crackle and pop my fibulas and tibulas become strangers, come apart, ragged. My talus in splinters, Achilles tendons rip and tear, tibial ligaments vaporise, calcaneofibular ligaments ground to dust like dreams deferred. I'm running on bloody stumps, bitumen stabbing every shrieking nerve. All that's left is a public tumble against quicksand knees, drawing ragged frustrated breaths between gasps of burnt rubber ground. The train is arcing up a golden hill, rimmed with brilliant birds. Onlookers gawk in stunned silence at my naked human wreckage. Then a soft hand on my shoulder, rolling me onto my back. A small girl, backlit, golden hair loose in the breeze. She has no mouth, and her eyes all apologies, she hands me one of my bloodstained shoes.
Waking, vomiting, brushing panic-sick off my teeth then carrying on with the great lie to the world, reality left in the darkest corner behind the scenes. Truth is, I should have walked away a long time ago. I achieved everything I set out to achieve, it's just that it happened backwards. I reached the apex of my success right out of the gate, it distorted my expectations and everything subsequently felt hollow, trite, unsubstantial. Hebrew school words like wet fish to the face; mit’ametzet "Determined," stubborn in a stupid way. I had thought having such huge success early on was guarantor of a bright future: it wasn't, in fact it closed far more doors to me than I would have otherwise experienced–it made me even more unrelatable than I already am. More alien, a threat. Someone somwhere, screams from the top of insecurity mountain, "death, to the overachievers!" I am the sunk-cost fallacy in flesh.
At least chemo is honest, it spared me from ye olde eternal marketing bullshit. Proposition: the more PASSION you have, the more it facilitates success! What are you PASSIONATE about! like they give 1/3 of a fuck... We need someone who is PASSIONATE about data analytics! Because this job pays peanuts and passion is the only benefit you're likely to have. PASSIONATE about Project mangement! Zounds! The sad desperation of the middle-management set made a virtue! What are 13 things PASSIONATE people do differently? Not waste their time with inane lists on the internet? PASSIONATE about food service! Only when being served! What's your PASSION? Our PASSION is diversity! Really? I never would've guessed based on your hiring demographics. What PASSIONS drive you!? Are you PASSIONATE about sales? Depends, do I get 80% commission? PASSIONATE about customer service? We only want PASSIONATE people for our senior road-warrior marketing internship! I guess the niave must be passionate to work for free. Are YOU our PASSIONATE social media badass? I could get tickled lying to complete strangers. Wanna be a part of our team of PASSIONATE fundom officers? I'll be passionate if there's free doughnuts. Are you a PASSIONATE retail jedi? There is no passion, there is serenity. Never played Knights of the Old Republic, hm? Share your PASSION with us! And for Godssakes, be anything but real!
Maddness when one can speak to an entire planet and no one gives a minim of a fuck. Even Spring Sun is muted by a dull ache of the soul. Toska, Russian word roughly translated as "sadness," "melancholia." A man needs a mission. Men have no intrinsic value, we are what we do, what we produce. What we can carve out of stone and soil. Women have an entire industry that tells them how valuable they are, how deserving. The Sisterhood is like the Marines, they leave none of their own behind. It's been beaten out of men, solidarity. The gentlemen's clubs, the instutions where men can look out for eachother–as women do–now non-PC, the vengeful screech their appeals to injustice. Where do guys down on their luck go, other than the gutter? The way of men was the way of the gang, so where's my gang? Legislated away for the new ethos of fighting history's ghosts? If what I already possess, have cultivated, won't cut it, and I can't do the most basic of manual tasks–MAN-ual, right? Ditch digging, warehousing, using my hands for a time, what else is there for me but to gather dust? Accumulate irrelevance like moss on a house no one wants, all the while chuckling to myself at the secret just beneath the pavement, It just as easily could have been you, pilgrim, but for now, it's me. Another schmuck amongst the ranks of the unsung and I'm sorry this is so dour, but America needs a dose of the real; so ginned-up about Washington misrule, yet ignoring their own brother.
Puzzle dog returns, sits and stares with her amber eyes, Human, I'm still hungry! Why don't you feed me? We try this again. I have no reason to believe things will go any differently. Things will go as they must. I must surrender to uncertainty, to discomfort and wait actively. Survivorship is life at the firewall! Incompatible with the Human condition rendered down to Instagram platitudes that passes for taction. My thoughts return, Fuck your vanity! Fuck your pride, your inability to ask for help! A flare sent up, arcing into waning winter sky while I take refuge on incomprehensibly isolated rocks, naked before the storm. This time I can appeal to the tribe, scattered and atomised. Like my wayward dog, I need a bone to chew between industry's cracks; something different, something untried.
"We have a soul at times. No one’s got it non-stop, for keeps.
Day after day, year after year may pass without it.
Sometimes it will settle for awhile only in childhood’s fears and raptures. Sometimes only in astonishment that we are old.
It rarely lends a hand in uphill tasks, like moving furniture, or lifting luggage, or going miles in shoes that pinch.
It usually steps out whenever meat needs chopping or forms have to be filled.
For every thousand conversations it participates in one, if even that, since it prefers silence.
Just when our body goes from ache to pain, it slips off-duty.
It’s picky: it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds, our hustling for a dubious advantage and creaky machinations make it sick.
Joy and sorrow aren’t two different feelings for it. It attends us only when the two are joined.
We can count on it when we’re sure of nothing and curious about everything.
Among the material objects it favors clocks with pendulums and mirrors, which keep on working even when no one is looking.
It won’t say where it comes from or when it’s taking off again, though it’s clearly expecting such questions.
We need it but apparently it needs us for some reason too."
— Wisława Szymborska