The exhaust of observation

Memorial day at home went better than I expected, as I now expect every event, meeting, discussion, trip, holiday and shift to drag on longer than it should, drag me through fields of bark chips and sharp straw and yellow jacket nests, pulverize me with repeated beating from baseball bats, splintered clubs, rusted pipes, humiliate me with some forced exposure, some assless chap-clad live report on a book I haven’t read to an audience of ex-girlfriends and their extended families.  

The drive was the worst part of the day, and after that, we sat around the table and ate burgers and talked about my dad’s old job at the cement company, the old men of his time who fought in World War 2 and horsed around with heavy machinery and goofed off on steel beams and high ledges and worked in the blazing dust of the quarries and stone mills like it was nothing, the younger men just a little older than him who came back from Vietnam not so much forged but forgotten and broken, quiet and cracked, ‘messed up’ as my dad put it, and then we ate slices of lemon bundt cake even though I’m trying to limit sugar and carbs, because when my dad makes a cake for the occasion, my retired dad who, in a way no one could’ve predicted, took up baking and dessert making in his winter years, found a new interest, another reason to look ahead, to keep moving, I’m not going to insist on my neurotic dietary restrictions, my dubious half-imagined morbidities, I’ll try to enjoy what my loved ones do for me. 

The drive back was worse than the drive there. I was late lunch drunk, early evening on the road after hours of grilled beef and sweet citrus and family talk, with that fatigue where all sounds draw back to the periphery, the growing silence ushering me to sleep, as if the dialed down volume of the external world anticipated and announced the soundless depths into which I was about to plunge. To lose consciousness, to let your soul slip from its everyday harness, is one of the greatest pleasures and a surefire path to restoration, except when driving 80 miles per hour on the interstate or engaged in some other delicate and deadly affair requiring a degree of wakeful attention.  

No, the worst part of the day was its closeness to the day after, the beginning of the work week, its shuttling of my reanimated carcass from recreation to labor, its threadbare buffer between time spent with family and time spent driving through town to speedway on the west side, crossing the rube-a-con into race car country, the site of the indy 500, where people gather to sit on their sandbag asses and stuff their ballooning entrails with charred pig parts and beer, sit in the hateful sun blotched and ruddy and having a blast, a kind of fun even in the midst of their rapidly deteriorating looks and vigor I can hardly fathom, an enjoyment more incredible and inaccessible to me than smoking opium with satan’s handpicked concubines, to a massive building where I now work long hours setting up the beverage program of this diner cafe market technicolor dream store, talking to sales reps and new hires and what has to be the third hundredth set of coworkers I’ve had the acrid pleasure of knowing and, someday soon, never seeing again.  

It’s often remarked upon (what isn’t) how fast life moves these days, but the primary state in which I (not saying we, no more we’s, tired of all the weewee all over the place, zip it back up and hold it) exist is that of waiting; waiting for responses, feedback, deliveries. The speed of life has multiplied the instances of waaaaiiiiiiiiiitttttttiiiiiiinnnnnggggg to hear back from yet another thumbnail, outer orbit account or liaison manager, not middlemen exactly but left and right of center nu-manoids delighted to help me slide some slop down the trough; packets and forms and certificates, ID’s and licenses, all I have to do is fill the data pails and send them off; ten people I’ve “met” in the last half an hour will get back to me soon, they’re excited to build this relationship, this intimate business exchange of symbols unlocking a flow of products and money that will bust open braided rivers of hogbodies and pastries and IPA’s, dirty rice dishes and paper cup lids.  

Endless reinvention and self-discovery and new opportunities, the unknown, new people, you never know who you’ll meet or what you’ll end up doing. I’m not so sure. Churning transactional environments deplete emotional and moral energy, rub social nerve endings raw, homogenize the experience of others and blunt self-relation as well. The infamous dunbar number, the 150 people an average person can know, remember, relate to; another sociological finding that combines obvious common-sense with irreplicable experiments and controversial claims, whatever its accuracy, whether it’s really 290 or 35, only considers the total number of active relations in a static present, an abstract potential, and ignores the reality of degradation over time, the weathering of how many people a person can know after having known and discarded, rejected, moved on from several sets of relationships in different settings. Insofar as instinct is socialized and social behavior is instinctive, the emotional resources for bonding are nonrenewable, recoverable up to a point, beyond which the ability to connect shrivels, and the person doesn’t know anyone anymore; there are no longer people to be known. 

Personality is grounded in stable relationships and continuous social timespace. Market competition in its present guise, the accelerated cycling of workers and businesses, neighborhood and commercial turnover, the concrete separation of education from work and their monstrous refusion as institutional and objectivized stages of formal training to increase earning potential; all wear away the habitat where characters form and crafts mature and bonds fasten, setting up a fundamental revolt from the social as embodied practices in organic networks, with lost participation in a shared world compensated by private chat features, proliferating channels of commentary on a public life that has become a shadow play.  

A little less vital than the will to reproduce is the will to talk about reproduction. Observation of a thickening emptiness in several styles, some reaching for poetry, grasping at shimmering stars and sounding like hamplanets slamming into each other, some clanking around with technical terms, having replaced with their own living brains with the pale blue-prints of thinking machines. But everywhere a did you notice, you know what I noticed, the whole scene resembling a brick wall comedy club; I hate to do it but I couldn’t help noticing all the noticing going on, how noticing is all I’m trying to do anymore as a stopgap for my absent active role, my capsizing future; Kierkegaard got it right enough for his day, though he foozled some of the details; the world will end not with the applause of wits who think it’s a joke, but with the latest round of professorial clowns trying to honk observations over one another.