Otherworldly income

Rain in such a fine stream at such a speed, I couldn’t tell if it was falling or hanging in place, trembling like a translucent veil. Soft rain nearly has the same sound as whispering flames, heavier rains the rattle of machine guns. Thursday afternoon, the best time for grey skies; I went for a nap but it didn’t take. Sleep often cancels on me or calls our meetings short. Sometimes that jet black pool of unconsciousness spits me out, that midnight hot tub refuses my sinking body; sometimes my dreams don’t want me, they’d prefer to play alone. Strange enough the fact of sleeping; stranger still its failure. Another definition of man; the sleep-deprived animal.  

I should be working, and not in the sense of going to a business owned by someone else and performing repetitive tasks for money, any old place owned by any old high functioning lunatic, but working in the sense of making myself useful, holistically useful, to the people around me to whom I’m physically bonded. By a great historical process exhaustively detailed in an overflowing landfill of books and articles and recorded discussions, the abstraction of the individual from his organic roots changes the nature of work from a socially embedded and evolved practice to a private initiative. The single person must find work that satisfies his interests as he understands them; the particular role is disposable, and matters only to the extent that the person earns money doing it.  

Abstracting work from communal life, ripping it from its social texture and imposing it as a private object to mold in pursuit of personal goals, leaves a great many people adrift. On some level they sense their redundancy, the indifference of the machine that could take them or leave them, and, lacking a strong will or maybe simple bull-headedness, they can’t quite figure out how to thrive for themselves or be of service to others. I’m one of those; here in a week or two I could be wearing an apron, a hairnet, a collared shirt or paint-splattered coveralls, wing tips or shit kickers, a nametag or a laminated keycard. It won’t be a calling; more of a miscasting. I need to work because I don’t want to be a financial burden. No one needs me to do anything, they only need me to do something.  

It’s easy enough to reject work defined as abstract duty to earn an income, work mostly organized by large scale corporations and bureaucracies; natural to affect a principled distance from cubicle farms, wage slaves and empty executives; but then that doesn’t mean the typical fantasized alternative, that of chasing dreams and lounging, is a birthright of some purer humanity denied to us by cruel overlords and their systems. If every last plumber decides he’d rather be a painter, it won’t be long before we’re up to our necks in watery turds. And I’m not even talking about the literal toilet problems that would ensue. In small collectives, where each bond counts, every sound-minded and able-bodied person (the bar is low) has to employ themselves usefully or risk undermining the group. Also, each station awaits someone to work it, a person grows into a role that precedes them. At mass-scale, all that’s left is a grift, awkward tools for jimmying windows and doors. Instead of being born into an environment that needs specific forms of work, and maturing through apprenticeship and direct instruction, the person is educated in artificial and controlled conditions, subjected to psychological lab experiments, bathed in the latest vapory ideas on well-being, outfitted with impractical tastes and habits that will soon pass out of fashion. The surrounding culture extends the isolating and self-absorbed mode of educational institutions, further emphasizing patterns of passive consumption, empty performance and aggrandizement. A larger share of the population drops its tolerance of thankless toil.  

For all the difficult, arguably necessary labor that keeps the sewers out of sight and smell, there has to be the cultivation and reproduction of certain classes, a type of person with coarse sensibilities and a sturdy frame, rugged experiences. People brought up to mull over their sensations as much as possible will not and cannot work on farms or in factories or underground, they won’t handle machinery or fight in wars. They’ll waste away dreaming of precious art projects before they’ll throw their bodies into an industrial furnace.  

All desire for increasing leisure, all the scholarly and artistic reveries, all the grumbling about economic pressures and punishing systems and hectic schedules, the squeezing and pinching of passions and the air drying of faded experiences, they all assume a great deal; they assume paved roads and plentiful food and watertight roofs and electric taps, similarly socialized populations that respect property rights and individual autonomy, faithful stewardship and husbandry from some steady hands and heads, nurturing mothers, sacrificial animals of one kind or another, a thousand conveniences and expedients and palliatives manufactured, provided and maintained elsewhere by others, by races of moon dwarves maybe. We’d all better hope not everyone catches the sickness of self-expression, it tends to progress to terminal ineptitude.  

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Through cheap glass and a weak screen, rain heavy enough to shroud the football field beyond my fenced-in backyard. One afternoon cycling through ages of sun and storms; an afternoon so long it lies behind me, with me and ahead of me, and seems always to have done so, with light flaring against the grey drizzle, the clouds spinning thick and thin, blue sky breaking out, puddles flat and still like overlooked mirrors or rippling in a returning downpour, an interplay of elements stretching back to a time before which I remember nothing. 

I turn 38 on sunday. I don’t look a day over dead and buried. Missed starting a family like it was a tv show, I never grabbed the remote. Didn’t catch the career or homeowning software update. There’s still time, but not much. Time left to be useful but I went too long working without matter, unmarried to the material at hand. Now every machine runs on the unreal, including my body and brain.