Reading Beckett in My Car Before Work

They sent me to a different post office for what they call on the job training. Five days of supervision by some disposable clodhopper so I can one day earn my own mail carrying route, a muddy marionette job, a real simulacrum role running on the gas-huffing protraction of a surpassed era of circulating paper, handwritten letters.

This latest phase of training coming after two weeks of orientation, four hour instructional and safety videos with late-stage soviet production values, mail truck driving tests in postapocalyptic industrial parks off interstate exits known only by ogrish long haulers and vestigial pipefitters; after shadow shifts, hours long rambling and repetitive union pitches by 80-year-old financial secretaries who never retire, who die forehead-flattened on an old desktop keyboard under plasterboard acoustical tiles; after instruction at an academy of sorts, led by a man radiating abyssal normality, truly at the depthless core of something especially generic, with his stock image boyishly middle aged face and pulpous body clad in loose synthetic Southeast Asian mass assembled sportswear, casually talking of his unused accounting degree, the Indianapolis Colts, buying his son a truck, wanting a virtual home golf course(I should mention; despite his neotenous appearance, in his social and biological functioning he approximates an old testament patriarch, having fathered and provided for more than one son, while I, despite my grandfatherly irritability and interests, remain a sterile manchild of the end of history); after weeks of background checks in which I was supposed to provide the address of every place I’ve lived for the last thirty years and personality assessments where I strongly agreed that I liked creative problem solving and unchanging routine, a preparatory span of time long enough for me to have become the postmaster general of the United States or for the earth to have entered a new geological eon.

This post office on the opposite side of town, where I need to be at 8:30 am; rolling on orange cone choked roads, brake lights burning my retinas; half a mile of creeping left lane hits a parked utility vehicle with flashing hazards materialized out of nothing; shoehorning front bumper into a centimeter of space between cars in the right lane, horns blaring, curses hurled, the slumber of Ancient Greek furies disturbed. Quarter mile later I contemplate plowing through a bucket truck rather than switching into the slow flowing left.

Subsequent mornings I made the trip early, left my house when the traffic was only half as bad. Sat in my parked car with the engine running in the post office parking lot, the heat blasting, reading Molloy. Not my first choice, but the book had been in my back seat for months. A disembodied consciousness babbling about his (its?) mother, tunneling back up the fallopian tubes, bebopping on echo’s bare ribcage, a lone mad voice threaded with contradictory barks, Walt Whitman in a black turtleneck, post-genital masturbation, self-stimulation of the neither region, scraps of sensation, unmistakable existenchialism, hiccupping questions, the anguish of an actor, practiced and hollow. A little superfluous at the moment.

The theater of the absurd plays in my pineal gland, my skull is drummed by the bones of dead men. I’m well aware that the voice, my voice, is an alien implantation, that the inner is a tissue of outer accidents, a ghostly gramophone of candy bar commercials and old-time swing music, parental admonitions, presidential addresses, playground taunts, irresolvable arguments. Infinite one-man acts, the sound of one hand playing table tennis. The absurd, like all things, has been rationalized, automated, streamlined, capitalized, converted into motor oil and electricity; it courses through work and leisure, charges all spectacles, from the ceremonies of power to the hobo soliloquizing on the median of a highway.

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Wednesday, I delivered mail on a route through the strip mall subdivisions of Indianapolis’s sprawling exoskeletal hinterlands. I was overseen by a helpful woman named Trelonda who asked what you doing every few minutes, along with we got ta hurry up and come on now. On account of cultural and sex differences, the volume and tone of her voice struck me as rude, emasculating even, but I earnestly believe she didn’t intend to rattle, disrespect or unman me.

Working in the service industry, in downtown third wave coffee shops, I mostly encountered white collar professionals and mainstream counterculture art sniffers and poetasters. Mostly the same kind of people active on the same social media platforms I use and who live next to me with increasingly elaborate polychromatic flags and democratic political signs in their yards. Delivering mail I’ve stepped through a portal to a different dimension. Mostly Hispanic, some working class, scattered whites and the fixed income elderly. And a few businesses, junk yards, auto shops with indeterminately African and Arabic proprietors, beauty salons that seem shut down.

The vertigo inducing striations of class and ethnicity in a complex society. The anachronistic endurance of certain industries, services and people. On one hand, yesterday’s hottest profession or money-making scheme teeters on the edge of total annihilation, absolute subsumption and assimilation; on the other, behind the curtain of fashionable urban districts, just a few minutes and a few turns beyond the repurposed industrial spaces and HGTV flipped neighborhoods, stretches a Eurasian steppe of goat herders, sub-Saharan desert of scrap metal scavengers and herb peddlers, Myspace scam artists.

In the scalding cold winds, I stuffed bills and advertisements into overflowing boxes, creaking receptacles unchecked for months. Piled plastic coated kindling on stacks of chaff with the printed names of cryptids. Witnessed up close and briefly the dizzying churn of expendable semi-citizens, construction workers and meat packers and disability drawers moving in and out of transposable hovels with grimy siding and hard dirt yards. The unsettling blend of disrepair and tawdry decor. Rusted motorbikes and Pontiacs with trash bags in place of windows next to shining black mustangs with red leather upholstery.

My new job, my trade, the way I prove my worth, economically speaking: I hear talk of the strength of the union, the coverage of the benefits, the dependability of the role, and then I read about how the post office has lost billions of dollars every year for the last fifteen years because of the pension program and growing competition from other shipping services. My job could be remorselessly privatized, downsized, liquidated, absorbed, replaced by robot pigeons. As of now there probably wouldn't be a Post Office if they hadn’t signed a contract with Amazon to deliver their parcels. I’m trying to consider myself lucky while feeling haunted by the specter of desuetude. I hope the union can keep muscling the government into giving us money.