A Serviceable Future

Greasepalmed dawn, the sluggish hand of God wiping away the black painted forehead of heaven. A sourceless grey light on this particular morning. Days pass in transactional blurs and sit unused on shelves like extra products. It’s been over a month since I got back from New York City. Between then and now the leaves caught fire and fell, I quit my job, gave up cigarettes and weed and alcohol, renounced restaurants, returned to nutrients, to home cooking and house made sauces, found work as a mail carrier and a classroom assistant, read some books, and an election of some vague import was held, from what I hear.  

In all that time, in those slackened spiraling weeks, I’d generously estimate one day’s worth of conscious, motivated action. A fine mesh filtering of turbid hours. The lean meat of the mind doesn’t hit our caloric minimum, so in a sense, thicketed time has its purpose, its fibrous function. Unremembered days aid digestion.  

I’m going to work again soon. The weight of a schedule will quicken my steps and widen my vessels and boost my biceps. External obstacles fortify the soul, clarify interests and crystallize vision, if you have inner minerals, a spine. If not, if a person is a bag of mucous, then all pressure causes uncontrollable spurting. I believe I rediscovered my bones and my organs, eyes as muscular extensions, not fingerprinted mirrors. Looking at it like this: not resisting gravity or withstanding depredations of the hated world, but carving out spacetime, headbutting the aether.  

The world isn’t waiting for a moment of weakness; it’s working by the millisecond to sap and exploit and plunder, press into service, fold and stuff into a drawer, ball up and dunk, toss onto the shoulder of a highway. The initiative is on the other side, we begin with tight hamstrings, a club foot at the starting line. Others have our number before we’ve learned to count. Forces array against an organism; hungry mouths hope to soften flesh with a torrent of saliva. More than resistance and reaction are necessary; creation, imposition, appropriation are conditions of survival. And survival isn’t enough either; that’s only the setup for damnation.  

If we wrap our minds around the whole cosmos, our skin is liable to split. The inclination will be to view the fundamental nature of reality as self-consuming chaos, a great boiling bathtub that occasionally opens its drains and then recirculates its fluids. Or if you prefer, a frozen emptiness, a forgotten unstocked refrigerator with floating bits of crust here and there. The way out is by renouncing the effort to understand all from within, and instead grasping a thread, a braided light stretching from the whirlpool of time to the ocean of eternity, a connection between each lost soul and its transcendent source.  

Otherwise: we’re stuck in a dolorous scene. A sham festival, one long last meal. If only it were a vital pagan festival, a celebration of earthly cycles thrown by rowdy goat boys playing pan flutes. But such programs tend to last a generation or two on a larger timescale, or about a decade within one life, and then melancholy sets in and instruments go out of tune, zest is denatured into industrial strength acid, bursting enjoyment degrades into gassy burlesque, and heartless libertines stifle a yawn as they flog yet another leathery buttock, at last animated primarily by the fantasy of righteous wrath visited upon them; what was formerly worn as a costume in the spirit of pomp is soon grafted onto the skin, a drag performance starts to drag, and then there’s no other act, no more action, but a repeat of the same scripted subversion, a hypertensive recitation from a permanent headstand.  

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The advancements of certain historical periods wear out and require adjustments, shots of vigor from other times and traditions. Today’s vanguard philosophical acrobat is tomorrow’s flailing retard. The early modern materialist characterization of man as a selfish, fearful being, a sensitive and vulnerable body concerned primarily with calculating his economic advantage and avoiding a violent death, arose from a practical desire to end religious persecution and curb civil war. Gifted propagandists of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire promoted commerce as a corrective to the absurd practices of religion and the butchery of clashing dogmatists.  

Nearly 300 years later, among a large portion of the public, the spirit of enterprise and sociability is shackled by a fear that, in its irrationality and fervor, borders on an Enlightenment caricature of a religious bigot. Many secular progressives spurn material prosperity and a work ethic and yet also repudiate the demands of religion, the ennobling burdens and trials of faith and the responsibilities of basic familial and communal relationships. They’re left with reactive hostility toward perceived threats and a self-reinforcing loop of personal dysfunction and infantilizing palliation.  

(One of the dangers and annoyances on the other end: a rapidly waning force breeds a beef-headed complacency in opposing circles, overrates mediocre accomplishments and abilities by comparison with an evident increase in extreme bungling. Thus a growing portion of a casually identifying right will inflate its self-regard by witlessly mocking people who put their clothes on backward and sleep with trans teddy bears and poke their eyes out with plastic spoons, and will thereby fail to steel themselves for real material and spiritual struggles.) 

Autocatabolic processes spread throughout larger portions of the social body, releasing fast burning energy that depletes ailing hosts. After enough rounds of vitriolic estrangement and learned incompetence, the reactive, aggressive and punitive urges lose power and give way to regressive, isolating, therapeutic patterns, kept alive, artificially maintained by technologically reproduced operations offered by the corporate state complex that has usurped and turned inside out the functions of smaller scale social organizations. Thumb sucking withdrawal, hot chocolate disassociation, young adult novel escapism. The end state is assisted suicide under a utilitarian rationale. 

(State administered suicide, a rationalized, transactional and consensual procedure, the final cure or solution to life viewed as irremediably ill, brings to garish light the morbid undercurrent of secular progressivism, utilitarianism, postmodern hedonism, the reduction of tension to its lowest level as a roundabout death trip.)  

The progressive technical deskilling and moral enfeeblement of populations, increasing homogenized churn of urban spaces, intensifying ethnic and sexual conflict and rising prices on valuable and generationally anchoring assets are all developments consequent not solely on bottom-up contagion of character defects, but are rather in large part the downward flowing effects of decisions, policies and class interests of corporate and governing elites, whose malfeasance, mismanagement and vain hubris approach mythic dimensions.  

Consumption as an economic program, initially a spur or compliment to expanding production, evolves into an ethos and then dissolves into the pathetic. With the backing of strong social bonds and esteemed institutions, extended lines of credit motivate labor and encourage investment. In a deteriorating social environment, credit is deployed as a denial of the future, and unreal value is expended on hopeless ventures that provide momentary relief from despair, loneliness and ineptitude, while over the longer-term exacerbating dysfunction and diminishing self-respect.  

The purest subject of consumerist capitalism isn’t the austere protestant working overtime and foregoing the enjoyment of his mounting riches, but the shiftless atomized person who spends what he doesn’t have on ameliorative commodities, makes desperate use of crowd funding applications and nonprofit organizational services, and traces all the woes of life, from mass scale structural pathologies to personal moral weaknesses, to an omnipresent capitalism, the very notion of which he has skimmed from the watered down digitally circulated theorizing of subsidized/indebted academics. 

Transnational corporations tend more and more to adopt marketing strategies that target not unrealistic aspirations but rather lowered expectations and worsening health conditions, catering to likely declines in quality of life, know-how and social capital. Where the traditional model of early to middle stage consumerist capitalism might have stimulated consumption of an established product by pairing it with a dubious fantasy, (drink this beer, buy this car, get laid) the cutting edge of mainstream development and advertising aims directly at providing surrogate satisfactions that short-circuit the loop between fantasy, production and consumption, bypassing the fantasy stage altogether, crudely materializing it as a commodity and thus reducing the potential of the imaginative faculty as an individually managed impetus of labor and investment. (You’re not getting laid, don’t bother, here’s porn, a fleshtube, a dildo, a sexbot; you have no physically active role in the world, you’re beautiful as you are and downwardly will be, eat another tub of gender-neutral ice cream or bowl of frankenstein flakes, or take Ozempic.) 

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Service industry, never again. On the two or three occasions I’ve stepped into a coffee shop since the last job, I’ve had to suppress the desire to smash heads into laptops, flip tables, fart loudly, goosestep, ostentatiously tip nothing, finger the screen to get around the 2-dollar default tip for a 4-dollar espresso, make sure the pouting nonentity behind the counter knows I’m not paying him an extra penny, rubbing his face in his low wage and low station, cement the reciprocal grudge between worker and consumer. He doesn’t want to be there; well, neither do I; little more than a bad habit for both of us at this point. A decade or more of solidarity between me and baristas, waiters, bartenders now a smoldering pit. Sorry, we can’t depend on each other anymore, not like this.  

The exit was always there; never had to enter the industry in the first place. No cause for regret, though, not beyond the lessons drawn. History is nonlinear, the potential of the past lies open still, but return occurs through a bracing future, not weepy reminiscence.