Cold french fries

In keeping with my history of prudent economic decisions, I spent the greater part of my first paycheck in a month on a plane ticket to New York City. Maybe I’ll be able to pay my rent. Or maybe I’ll die on a park bench in a puddle of my own flesh. Indiana, the middle of June. The heat of early summer. Air like a mausoleum. So hot you sweat standing in the shade.  

Stagnant economy of an equatorial nation heat. Import a slave class so you can sleep all afternoon on the porch heat. My mind isn’t working. Can’t think, can’t write. Need bare breasted native women to fan me with palm fronds.  

Central Indiana, no ocean breeze, no waves in the winds. Grass beaten brown by the sun. Outside the city, the fields roll on forever like distant days. A faded landscape checkered with silos and brick farmhouses.  

I don’t want to do anything except sit naked under a tree and eat mangoes and make love to my girlfriend. But I have to go to my part-time job and find a full-time job, be a good friend and son, call my parents, read classic works of literature (reading one of Balzac’s ten thousand novels because he influenced Houellebecq, and Thomas Wolfe and Charles Dickens and Willa Cather), entertain and educate people on the internet, devote time to writing material that will be forgotten to direct attention to what I’ve written that might be remembered. 

Show up for job interviews where I know they know I don’t want to work there. Bad forced dates where we both squirm in our chairs, eyes shifting, thinking of when we can leave without offending each other. I’m a one-hundred-year-old man interviewing at places where 20-year old’s work for weed money.  

Employers need workers and workers need jobs. Workers want more money than what employers want to pay. Job markets and dating markets converge into one unholy steel cage death match, an arena of frustrated and embittered wrangling. Everyone looking for love, money, affirmation, security, good help, identity, belonging; but at a lower cost for less effort. Each person a tool for everyone else’s advancement. Insist on more for less long enough and you end up with nothing.  

Emails from indeed pouring into my inbox. Jorge Ponce thinks my fifteen years of experience at cafes would make me a good fit for his warehouse supervisor position. There is no Jorge Ponce and there is no warehouse. The warehouse is a pile of shattered cinderblocks and rusted steel drums crawling with rabid possums. Jorge Ponce is an artificial intelligence composite of two mexican men and an indian woman, a call center customer service representative cyborg. 

Right now I'm working three nights a week in a new american restaurant that serves experimental cheeseburgers and monopoly man hot dogs. 400-dollar checks, a tasting menu with wine pairings. Hosting, the easiest job in the business, except everyone hates you.  

In the service industry, you’re always pissing someone off. The guests want to sit anywhere but where you seat them. The servers want you to seat more people faster when you slow down and they want you to seat fewer people at a slower pace when you speed up. Someone’s always in the wrong section. They wait until you seat them and fill their water; they blow their nose on their napkins and pick their ears with the knives and then decide they want to sit outside.  

Whatever you’re doing someone wants you to do something else. When you’re polishing silverware you should be refilling waters. When you refill water they run out of silverware. A table needs bussing so you grab a rag and wring it and ten people walk through the door. A full party never shows up all together. You seat three of them, one more on the way, he’s running ten minutes late. Twenty minutes late, he’s stuck in traffic, he’s in a forty-car pileup, his lower half is crushed under the steering wheel, he’s going to lose his legs, he’ll be there in an hour.  

Forget shift breaks, sitting down and eating a meal. You cram a few cold french fries in your mouth by the dishwasher; thirty seconds away from the action feels like dereliction of duty, homicidal negligence. Before you can choke down the first bite of a crab cake, a server busts through the door balancing a load of dishes and gives you an ambiguously disdainful look. 

Do they loathe you or another server? Was it a boorish customer or did they just break up with their boyfriend/girlfriend/partner? The ex they want back isn’t texting them, the ex they don’t want back is texting them ten times a day. Student loan bill is due, they’re out of coke, forgot to take their meds, had a fight with their dad. You never know if your coworker wants to get a beer with you, have sex with you or set you on fire. Or all three.  

A coworker mocks another coworker, you let a scornful laugh bubble out like a bored aristocrat. Ten minutes later they’re sarcastically quipping about you to the person they ridiculed. The evening deepens, you grow tired, irritable. You drink a shift beer. Sneak a shot of tequila or two. One of those chummy dimwits who dines at a place three nights a week but who everyone mildly resents buys a round of drinks for the waitstaff. 

You get drunk but you can’t enjoy it. Have to focus; walk between narrow aisles without elbowing people in the head, knit your brow to avoid crashing into a high-top table holding glasses of red wine and pig taint with radical mustard. Can’t get caught with your eyes lingering on a low-cut blouse. When the restaurant closes you’re hungover. Too old to go out after work but you can’t fall asleep either.  

One more set of coworkers and customers, sprinting through an accelerated acquaintanceship program. Every interaction mediated by money. The market bearing down on us, forcing us into these ill-fitting roles but we have to act like friends, neighbors, members of a community. Doing what we love.  

The leftist concept of emotional labor used to describe how service jobs require a performance of happiness and comradery. Now the idea is cited in a petulant demand to be paid for listening to your friends and family. Economic thinking has seeped into every domain, corrupted all relationships. We feel pressured to treat coworkers like friends and feel entitled to treat friends and family like clients. A warm smiling face for bloodless transactions and a self-interested logic applied to the most intimate bonds.  

-- 

The day was hot and then the heat dropped off. Evening reprieve. Lounging outside my girlfriend’s apartment building, facing the chain-link fence woven with leaves. Sky flushed pink. On the other side of the fence, a high school campus. Stately trees shading the gentle hills. I don’t know if time is passing or I’m passing out of time. If I’ve left the world or the world has left me.  

Heidegger talked about being in the world and thrownness. Human existence is characterized by envelopment. We find ourselves in the middle of a situation, caught in a context that exceeds our understanding, yet which we can manipulate with some degree of competence. Mood predisposes us to interpret things in certain ways, but we can turn back on our inclinations and modify them somewhat. 

We forget our foundation, but our foundation is to forget. The world shines forth in a reflection, we appear to ourselves in the light of events, in the shadows of our acts. What is originally given lies buried, emerges at the end of a painstaking philosophical project of exhumation and deconstruction. Humanity born with starry vision, unearthly images. It took us thousands of years to arrive at the things themselves. Then we went right past them.  

Heideggerian thinking initially sounds like a reminder of our rootedness. I hear it as remembrance of our exile. Thrown into the world, cast out of ourselves, out of touch with God. Or rather, the world doesn’t exist, doesn’t gel into a whole; it is an unbounded assortment of fragments, flashes of light and stretches of darkness. To be related to anything is to be alone. 

Falling night, the end of another day. A dreamless sleep, waking up to morning light colored like a stone. Good to have someone there, a being beside me. Lying in bed doesn’t feel as lazy when someone dozes by your side. Scattered words, yawns, free association. Time hasn’t yet taken off.  

New York City in August. Brooklyn. Going to a reading with my internet literature friends. The internet has ruined my life and made the ruins inhabitable.