This Is The Part Of The Evening Where I Listen To Roads By Portishead And Stare At The Ceiling Pensively.

What I See

I’m typing this as I sit in the office. For all I know, someone is going to walk up to me with a crisis any second. I’ve usually been going “home” (I’ll explain the quotation marks another day.) and engaging in this exercise this week but I’m afraid that I simply won’t have the motivation after the work day is done so here I am. I type fast. As odd as it is to say, I’ve been typing since I was a kid. I’ve been told that I’m an angry typer. Now that I’ve just typed that, I’m cognizant of the noise my typing is making.

The office is quiet. The people with offices are all buttoned up in them.

I’m buttoned up in my thoughts but not really. I guess I’m trying to be buttoned up in them. How the fuck do you manage to be truly present in your thoughts? Shit. That reminds me of all the talk of mindfulness. Practice mindfulness so you can be a better employee. The CEO should practice mindfulness so that maybe he doesn’t feel so bad when he has to lay off a bunch of people. Maybe the homeless should practice mindfulness so that homelessness might suck less.

I’m getting political now. I’m sick of people who are sick of everything being political. There is a political dimension to everything. Nah. Nope. It is deeper than that. Everything is political. There is no divorcing the personal from the political.

See, the piss of the political class gets on me. There is no escaping that. Even if I never mentioned the name of a politician or a political party or anything in my written emo ruminations, the forces that these things exert touches my thoughts whether I want to acknowledge it or not. I’m choosing to see these things. The bitch of it though is I feel like I cannot un-see them even if I want to. I don’t want to make myself into some kinda god damn martyr but there is a real price to pay for awareness. It ain’t pleasant and it really kinda sucks.

I woke up one day and I took a look around. It didn’t use to be this way but every job I saw was some kind of temporary or contract job. A job that offered barely a living a wage and that offered terrible or no benefits. I don’t know when exactly almost every job I came across became like this but that’s how it is now. I’ve been in such jobs. Those precarious gigs offered by companies who have smiling minorities plastered all over their websites. Look, listen to me, okay? Almost any organization that has pictures of smiling minorities in their advertisements is up to some shit. That’s just the way that it is. Apparently, since the year 2005, almost every job that has been created is a contract job. You ever hear the term precariat? It’s a portmanteau of proletariat and precarious. That’s what we’ve got. We’ve got a work force that is in a permanent state of precariousness drifting from temporary job to temporary job for years and for years. We’re a nation of Uber and Lyft drivers. We barely noticed that shit. Do stand-up comics who get HBO specials talk about this? Is this a plot point in romantic comedies? Hell no. Most of us have been too busy working to notice.

I guess being a flake who constantly had to look for work has its advantages because that had a lot to do with me noticing that trend. It’s not like it’s hidden. You can Google it but it just doesn’t get emphasized all that much. After a long day of working hard so that the boss can buy another Bentley, who wants to think about the fact that a lot of us find ourselves in a terrible position?

What else do I see? I see more transients in the suburbs. I’m a sheltered kid from the ‘burbs. I’m used to going to an urban area and averting my eyes when the stench of the homeless tickles my nostrils. Thing is though, I don’t have to go to an urban center to see homeless people. I see them more and more in the suburbs now. I see people sleeping rough. I see people panhandling. I bring this up to people I know to see if they notice this too and I’ve gotten asked if I called the cops cuz that’s scary. I’m no sociologist. I’m an expert in precisely nothing. I think what I’m seeing is the decay of a society. I find myself wondering how many of those sleeping rough on the streets of the suburbs once owned houses there.

See. You are being psychologically abused. Yes. You. I’m talking to you. You are being gas lit. The TV tells you that the economy is booming, that jobs are being created left and right and that the country is becoming great again but you know that that’s all complete bullshit because you have EYES. You actually live in the world that they supposedly are describing. That fucks with a person.

So, I see what I see and what I see is a society that is decaying, rotting. What is society becoming?

A fascist police state. It’s nascent right now but fascism is here and it will get worse. Trumpism is conservatism in America. The media loves to parade around these allegedly sane and respectable conservatives who don’t much like the Trumpster but here’s the thing, THEY FUCKING LOST. The man is the party now and Trumpism will be with us after one too many Big Macs finally stops his heart. A certain segment of this fucking country loves him because he says the shit they say in taverns loudly and proudly. He’ll make all of those dirty, criminal Mexicans disappear. We got ourselves an efficient deportation task force in ICE. We got privately run facilities that ICE throws detainees into. Children are being ripped from their mother’s arms. People get abused in all sorts of ways in these facilities. Right now, the people subject most to the police state are undocumented immigrants and people of color. That who it is today. It’s going to be somebody else tomorrow.

The reality is this, okay? We’ve got a septuagenarian ex-game show host with a mean streak and a thing for vindictiveness who has control over a nuclear arsenal and the most sophisticated surveillance grid ever devised. I’ve reminded people that this septuagenarian ex-game show host could possibly end human civilization and it gets laughed off.

An unwillingness to engage with the world as it really is could be deadly.

That’s what I see.

My desire is to become better at writing. Why? My sense is that it could lead me to a more fulfilling life. My standard answer to the question, “Why write?” has been that I find it satisfying but it’s more than that. As a human being, my desire is to lead a fulfilling life. In fact, that might be the thing that I want more than anything you care to name. I don’t think it will lead me to anything like financial security though. Financial security is elusive. There is tension there. This world is a bitch to live in like that. Everything is so god damn expensive. This shimmering dream of a world that might really be a nightmare has us all running ragged for a collection of dead Presidents that is just big enough to make it through another day. 

This is gonna sound like bullshit but I also connect my writing to the struggle for justice. Writing is a vehicle for conveying truth. Words can bridge the gap between human beings who are profoundly alienated by the endless chasing of nickels and dimes. People who work jobs that leave them bleary-eyed and bored and angry need to know they aren’t alone. Maybe I can reach out and touch a few who are on the same frequency. Maybe I’m not even qualified to do that but I figure that I’ve got to try. Why the fuck not? 

I get the sense that I’ve got to challenge myself. I gotta try and write something that takes some effort. I was thinking an essay of some kind. I’ve got to give it some thought. I don’t know that I can pull it off and maybe I can’t. I might learn something from trying. 

If this reads like inspiration porn, I apologize. I hate that shit. 

The blank space and the blinky-blinky. 

Fan blowing and gettin’ down to the slow beat only they can hear. Move its head to the right. Move its head to the left. Do oscillating fans get together and have raves? 

I’m a straight man. Sometimes I don’t even know what turns me on anymore. I mean, I do but not really. 

I have an appointment with a therapist on Tuesday. This time I’ll go to the right address. I don’t really know what to say to him. 

So, what brings you in? 

Scream my lungs out. 

Or punch the wall. 

Or throw something. 

I’m tryin’ to try

but if I die

I’m like, “Okay. Yeah.”

Sunday afternoons are a bad trip

without a sitter

without a map

without old men with kind eyes

who tell you exactly where the fuck you are

and how to get back home.

Fuck

Fuck. 

When the boss on his shit again and I got a head full of commie propaganda on a Monday

When it’s one way and I need it to be another

God damn it, good looks don’t pay fuckin’ bills. 

Fuck. 

She whispers it in the dark

when she wants that love harder.

At the sky 

when you got nothin’ but the rain, your sweat, your bones and a raw deal. 

Gotta watch who hears you say that 

Not sacred 

but it’s something, ya know? You feel me? Am I talkin’ crazy? 

Fuck. 

I get lost in the night's machinery

with nothing to see but what there is to see

synthetic angel glow and Internet Protocol that never sleeps

keeps me company

and that troubles me

Stuff that’s hard to take

The suburbs and what came from them

the fact the world was made before I had any say in it 

the truth 

especially when I know it’s bullshit and I can’t get a refund on it 

when my words are bullshit 

when I don’t feel ‘em 

when I phone this shit in 

and when just having written just ain’t enough 

the stuff I can’t catch with my syllables 

but I want or need to catch 

See, that’s all this is. 

What you’re watching (if you’re still watching, who has time?) is me trying to do that 

Wondering if it’s too early to leave the office

Sunday afternoons  

Imagination of a boy

I am the imagination of a boy 

too old to be a boy 

I'm cool as fuck 

mysterious

my soul tastes like sugar, baby

mainline me maybe 

break me 

like a third world insurgency 

and i'll write shitty punk songs about you 

that i'll stick in the mouth of some dude 

I play on Twitter 

cuz normie Twitter is lame 

and so is this life thing

c'mon, let's be real 

in the only way possible 

at the hour of late night radio in the 90s 

about psychedelics and demons 

in the only way possible 

when you're so lonely 

that you do this shit 

life and it's lameness 

tell me what the fuck that means to you 

and maybe i'll fall in love with you 

and we can be scared together 

and righteous 

and kinky 

we'll text each other and play cooler versions of ourselves to each other 

and it'll be hot as fuck 

and that'll be a thing that happened 

be one of those things you worship 

and don't remember quite right 

because 

sometimes that's all you got keeping you alive. 

I just love how all the follows I get on this account are porn bots. All of them.