Out on a limn

The earth clears the frozen crust from its eyes, kicks off its winter blanket. Late morning, new apartment. Light streams in like a pleasant memory. On the second story with hardwood floors and a fireplace. A peasant living in the country house of a king.  

Grateful for the upgrade. Coming from a place with a broken toilet and a broken sink. Baseboard heaters that barely heated. Doorknobs that snapped off and missing fridge handles and shredded blinds and other slapstick defects; I went about the house like a silent comedy star, pulling drawers out of the dresser and slipping on unwashed socks, wrestling with the toilet to the tune of a ragtime piano.  

Each day is the same as every other; each day is utterly alone with itself. Never touching another of its kind. This exact moment, supposing it ever existed beyond my recollection of it; one of those in between times. Neither winter nor spring. Not a fresh morning but not noon or afternoon either. The kids talk about liminal spaces; I’m rather attuned to liminal times, the abandoned parking lots and vestibules of our days, the haunted staircases of our unrelated eternities.  

The years lie behind us like desolate boardwalks, with cobwebbed concession stands and ferris wheels creaking in the wind. Whole liminal lives spiral out, centers unto themselves but peripheral to everyone else. Boney toll booth attendants and flabby bus drivers with their own frayed outskirts, their thin social strands, the boring lore of their badly built worlds.  

Everyone a hallway and a bridge and an alcoholic groundskeeper, a rusted conveyor belt and a smudged pair of spectacles with an outdated prescription, a half-empty toolbox, an unattended hardware store on a wasted town square. Marginally useful in ourselves but together we build an indomitable machine. Each of us brushes up against all other things and all other people without knowing anything about it.   

Finally, liminal dreams. Not the traditional chimeras of the unconscious, but the filmy freaks on the borders of sleep. When your cat wakes you at 4 in the morning to perform an aria and you fall back into bed at 5. You walk through a door to nowhere. You’re at work in a cafe with desks and chairs from your high school with hobos camping out in the bathroom and you’re somehow responsible for them and then there’s a missing transition and your car breaks down on a gravel road and the disquiet you feel shades into your morning and tinges the rest of your day.  

(The dreams from your depths are populated by others, beings from other worlds, amalgams of ancient stories, while the dreams from just under the surface are nearly identical copies of you and your sensations, slightly disordered. Fear or hatred of the other is overrated; what chokes us is the same, not the other but another one of us. Our mirror image stabilizes us when we look for it and unnerves us when we catch it creeping up.) 

In one moment, all is passage. The next instant, nothing moves, nothing succeeds anything else.  

-- 

I worked all weekend at the coffee shop. The old one, the most recent old one I left on good terms, as they say. I didn’t commit the dreaded no-call no-show or punch a customer or take a dump on the counter so I’m still welcome to pick up shifts. I’ve needed them, what with moving expenses and trying to replace stolen shoes. I’m still waiting for my next job to start, and in the interim I’ve applied at numerous other jobs and contemplated other lives. 

Jobs with descriptions emptied of concrete detail, mystical hype chants preparing me for interdimensional labor. Ayahuasca ad copy. Sketchy listings like email scams from the dial-up days. Nigerian princes needing someone in the American Midwest to run errands for them.  

I almost took a substitute teaching job. Talked to a man on the phone. He prepared me for the onboarding process. I had to pay for a background check and a substitute license. Fill out several other forms. That was the end of that.  

If they need a substitute teacher they can pay for my certificates and update my files and make sure I’m not a child molester on their own time and money. They’re the ones with all the suspicions and qualifications, the burden should be on them.  

Modern work is often easier than almost everything people used to do, except in one crucial respect: getting the job. In the old days you could show up at a sawmill in ragged overalls and they’d hand you a shovel. You couldn’t even write your name but you’d be working your ass off in seconds. Now you need a completed saturday edition of the new yorker crossword and a personal reference from the pope to sit in a chair for 8 hours and slowly stain your underwear.  

I could work 4^th shift at a fedex warehouse, dropkicking packages of family heirlooms for 20 dollars an hour. But I’d have to take a piss test and finish a questionnaire. Attend training and orientation, fill out tax forms. Provide information on my bank account. I’d rather work right this second as a plague burier than write my social security number to get a job jacking off where I make millions. 

Sometimes I catch myself envying William Faulkner’s Joe Christmas, a resentful dullard with an ambiguous identity who wandered the rural south and worked on farms for room and board. Not only did he not have to show an ID, he wasn’t even sure who he was. In his case the shady itinerant life led to a vigilante cutting off his nuts, but that seems preferable to filling out an application for a job a lesser ape could do.  

The abstraction of work from history, surroundings and the social world has lent our time an air of heavily processed unreality. No one knows you or what you could do; therefore your background must become official. And reformulated and resubmitted. Your physical labor advances your finished forms. You work to fatten the database.  

We’re all Joe Christmas, but with updated resumes. Journeyman bureaucrats with murky origins and puffed-up profiles, one wrong move from a blade on our genitals.