Last Place Prizes

For a month I’ve been unemployed. My whole life I’ve been a temporarily embarrassed dead man. The last of my money was blown on a New York City trip and this months' rent, and next month my girlfriend will pay my rent and keep me from falling into the ranks of the unhoused, joining the only club eager to have me as a member; those who for the time being find themselves in a state of experiencing a period of not legally dwelling in a rented or owned enclosure due to faults possibly issuing from social and historical factors not extending to events or acts traceable to individual agency or unaccountable fate.  

I’ll visit my grandmother and sense the ineffable years between us, that fracture in the heart of time; see the love for me glimmering in her eyes alongside incomprehension of my trials and failings. Her soul stuck in a time when a man got out of bed and drank a cup of bacon grease and put on some trousers and went to work for the phone company or shipped out to fight a war on an island jungle against Dr. Seuss drawn samurai wielding monkeys. I’ll ask her for money or I’ll move back in with my parents and self-publish increasingly crackpot adventure/spy novels. Alcoholic vigilante private investigator Tommy Hoghound beats minorities with hammers in noir toned dockyards and jazz clubs. Scribble tracts, screeds, pamphlets on the long fall of the west and how fat women have stifled my potential even as I ask women who love me for money. Dig a basement beneath the basement of my parent’s house and eat canned corn and compose schizoid free verse chapbooks while high on synthetic spray lubricant, read my scrofulous mind melting ramblings at women’s group open mic nights held in queer owned bookstores.  

The day after I came back from New York City I was supposed to work; I’d been scheduled one day that week. The week before I’d been scheduled two days. I started with five. That’s how they like to fire someone in this business; shaving the shifts down and changing the locks and phone numbers, speaking in a foreign language when you show up, wearing Groucho glasses and tasking the Mexican cleaning crew with telling you it would be best if you sought work elsewhere. A minimum of discomfort and dignity for all involved.  

It was the same old downturn; I took a position with some authority granted by my experience and I told the owners I wanted to simplify the service model and menu, limit hours and tasks, reduce movements and responsibilities for the sake of not hungering after a gun barrel in my mouth after a month. For the other employees I’d prefer not to manage like they’re in a latte sweatshop, an offshored simulated social factory, a laptop laboratory for test tube remote workers, overfed fetuses, product managers and brand ambassadors, small-time corporate Henry Asskissingers and clammy gladhanders. But no one who needs money running a business in the middle of the country can afford to offer less, say no, close up a hole now and then. In a few days they’re talking about new drinks, they’re spinning pastry trays on their fingers like a Harlem globetrotters act, expanding the food program, breakfast and lunch, extending the hours, stretching the staff as thin as possible. I’m working weekends that leave me feeling as if I’ve received a hundred thousand dirty swirlies, humiliating unheroic exertion unworthy of being called toil or labor, and the owner is sending emails telling the team of four employees hey guys we’re going to need to make at least another 500 dollars a day for this to be economically viable.  

11 dollars an hour, not enough to eat well but it’s still swallowing the profit margins, a wage paid with gritted teeth through pinched pocket, banking on the living portion of the money coming from the carbo-loaded athleisure class tipping on drinks they already find offensively expensive. No one satisfied with this arrangement but it must go on; the fact that it doesn’t work or make people happy guarantees its grim longevity.  

My last scheduled day I didn’t show, saved us all the trouble. A day or two later a bot erased me from the work messaging app. No messy personal interaction required. Technology no longer eases physical burdens of average working people; it only assists the managerial removal of human redundancies.  

Now I’m waiting to hear from the post office about a carrier position and I can’t remember how many other jobs, though I’ve been denied a lineman apprenticeship, which I applied to not so much because of the high earning potential but the high average annual fatality rate, in the top 3. Each application printed out and stuffed into a trashcan by a robot lizard, never seen by flesh and blood eyeballs. Human hiring managers play Pokémon Go and nurse a vape nipple as I upload my resume straight into a digital cremator.  

What I need to know, what I need a response from; that can wait. My rent and bills, the degeneration of my body and mind; on a strict timeline, at the pace of the inexorable.  

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The popular image of chaos looks like a riot and sounds like noise. The smell? A thousand geysers of cheap cologne erupting at once, a compost of wet socks and used band aids, overwashed and underwashed skin. Chaos suggests the absence of order as a frenzied clash of elements, each one in isolation vying for power and so at odds with all others, a condition of war. But now I’m seeing it differently; no isolated element is against anything; they’re all at war with themselves and indifferent to each other. Calling it war, even a civil one, might not capture it either, as it’s not conflicting internal forces but a dissipation, a slow hissing steam leak.  

The business owner with the delusion of a workable enterprise, the consumerist public with the delusion of inexpensive and refined pleasures, and the service worker with the delusion of usefulness and good pay. The first glance shows cooperation among the parts, the second competition. Underneath it all there’s no contact, no exchange, but windowless monads painting their own shadowy shapes, mechanical dolls with busted springs and rusting gears.  

Chaos as emptiness, nothingness. Not silence as peace or perfection, but cold rebuke, obstruction. Freedom ties us to the arbitrary. You could do anything; therefore there’s nothing that must be done. I have to work because I need money, not because there’s any greater need for me to do anything that can’t be done by someone else. Passion, self-interest, curiosity, egoistic striving, ambition; these are distractions, motives of desperation. At one time the selfish impulses built a complex economy, they acted as causes. Now they’re effects, last place prizes awarded by an automated carnival that doesn’t need them or us anymore.