Post Office Modernism

The night before I was going to start working as a paraprofessional at a public high school, I imagined talking to *cough* vibrant 16-year-olds and decided I’d prefer not to. Somehow, I’d spent the preceding weeks filling out applications, going to interviews, registering accounts, getting a laminated ID card, picturing the luxurious schedule, foretasting the time off, all the covert writing and reading I could fit into all those spare moments in class, and it hadn’t occurred to me, with any heft or acuity, that I’d be required to interact with all manner of bizarre alien youths, ungainly monstrous hybrid beings of childish and mature impulse, fungus muppets, odd underbrush spores and floppy toadstools with inscrutable origins and habits and aspirations, hatched in a great hot homogenizer, thrown into a cultural and ethnic blender, fenced-in digital savages bearing asocial contracts, not looking to learn, not knowing what that means, but needing to relate, to see themselves in their media, in their instructors. Even worse, I’d need to project authority and maintain order among hormonally, technologically and ideologically addled mutants without incurring the ire of administrators and parents.

The people who interviewed me never told me what I’d be doing in any concrete sense, and I didn’t ask, as I still harbor the foolish expectation that I shouldn’t have to grab people by the polyester collar and wring basic descriptions of reality out of them. Most encounters with institutions and their representatives result in a steam bath of information, after which I return to a desert of sense. I could only suspect, on the eve of my first day, that my role would for the most part consist of attending to students with *cough cough slide whistle whoopie cushion sound* special needs, learning disabilities. My tolerance of the certifiably neurocapable is already legendarily low; I want to run a chainsaw through the center of my own brain when I struggle to recall a needed word, and the average *barney theme music* smart person’s epic essay on pernicious media influences or the machinations of political enemies knocks me out more effectively than a quart of NyQuil. I’m on the verge of needing the Lord’s hand to stop me from running over my neighbor's dog; it’s probably not the most propitious moment to try my patience with the kind of work that often breaks the spirit of those far more humane than me.

(A wonderful opportunity for you sensitive creatures to engage your empathetic organs; please feel for me, try to understand what it’s like to be so easily irritated by the slow witted and reflexively contemptuous of the weak, it’s a huge handicap. I can’t help it; after all, I was raised by a physically intimidating father and an exacting mother, and when I played football in middle school I experienced multiple traumatic head injuries that likely damaged emotional centers but hypertrophied verbal reasoning areas.)

The final railroad spike in my nutsack was the pay. Close to my start date they revealed I’d be making 1000 dollars every two weeks, with the first paycheck over three weeks away. At the last second, I told them I couldn’t do it. Instead, I opted to work for an organization renowned for its comfortable working conditions and the pacifistic sanity of its workers: the post office.

A bit of an outmoded joke, as the last thirty or so years of institutional lunacy, chaotic violence and public unease have given the post office an appearance of dull constancy and generosity. The stressful work and inadequate compensation that pushed letter carriers into clock tower meltdowns have been moderately redressed by union backed negotiations, while a greater share of the general population now confronts diminished prospects for skilled employment and increasing supervision and behavior modification by faceless and fumbling security agencies and ghoulish psychiatrists. After the millennium, the school emerged not as a battlefield of educational approaches and cultural values, but as an actual warzone in which undersocialized and overmedicated biopolitical subjects vent their murderous fury, and a rapidly improvising, shuffling and rudderless educational class fights mind-frying devices and corporate culture initiatives for the control of student attention against a background fear of violent retaliation.

(The rise of school shootings, the statistical climb in youthful mass shootings and suicides, surely calls into question the general treatment of youth, the mixed and unresolved adult feelings projected onto a fabricated category or life stage, the withholding of certain responsibilities and the imposition of others, the conflicting imperatives of authorities that have lost their confidence and good standing without relinquishing control. Ageing and aimless societies worship youth not in the sense of living young people, but youth as an imagined vital substance, and thereby sacrifice young flesh and blood in pursuit of a monstrous/satanic fantasy of eternal life and omnipotence.

The vacuity of power at the highest level is exposed by global economic and media elite ties to pedophilic trafficking rings; at the top of the earthly hierarchy, there is no further ascendence, no higher path in the light of a loving creator, only the demonic perversion of innocence that is devastating to victims, witheringly banal in the exercise of its privileges and imagination, and ultimately ineffective in saving the souls of the perpetrators from death and damnation.)

Working for the post office, I’m far less likely to shoot people than if I were working for Wal-Mart or Amazon, and far less likely to be shot than if I were working in a school. A public, unionized shipping service offers more opportunity and security than many private ventures, especially for those without the resources to pursue credentials and specialized training or those without inexhaustible lability, managerial unctuousness or predatory instincts.

Enter the age of Post Office Modernism. Defined by the prevalence of quick shipping services, accelerated consumption patterns, progressive dematerialization and automation of both routine clerical work and creative, expressive activity, and a growing multi-ethnic population with interchangeable and depreciating skills but incompatible values and interests. As of now I have a pension.