The sorrows of work

I tried to relax after one day of work, came home and sat on the front porch and smoked a cigarette. Someone fired a nail gun two houses down. Not once or twice but steadily in a tight rhythm for a while. The whole time I sat out there under the evening sun and its waning glow I couldn’t not hear the thwap thwap thwap thwap of the nail piercing the shingle or wood or whatever material the man (I assume it was a man, though of course in this age of gender equality it very well could’ve been an especially stout and rough-hewn woman with peculiar instincts) stood over, kneeled before, strained his back and joints in handling. Probably a roofing job. Hard to say for sure but it sent bolts through my brain. Robbing me of the tranquility of the moment, the otherwise quiet scene on the streets. Columns of maple trees like an ancient grove. The tired satisfaction of having worked, of being done with work for a second.  

The mechanical pulsing of the gun reminded me of the inescapable torment of noise and the slime mold substance of unrest sliding all over me, put me in the mood to accept with an embittered weariness that though I can avoid some of the day’s irritants, outlast some of the world’s challenges to my sanity, still the vexations will assail me from all angles at all times, even on the inside, that I sit on a tack ingrown from my own ass, and that the nuisances of industrial humanity will continue to hound me regardless of my intention to relax, enjoy myself and the fruit of my labors, regardless of the bald simple health benefits of relaxation and enjoyment, the doctor prescribed recreation treatment, the take two taking it easies and don’t call me or anyone else in the morning, stay submerged in a hot bath of jasmine and olive oil, the slick bubbles will soften the blows of falling bombs, dampen their screams, not real bombs off in you know where, but exploding scraps of an interior sky, the scaffolding of my soul giving out like a rotting roof, raining down with jagged chunks of bug eaten wood.  

I went back to work at the old spot today. It was better than where I was a few days ago. But still not better than nothing. That’ll have to wait. I got an hour or two of peace, relative to the clanging hell of the recent past. Opening alone, or closer to alone than with two or three bakers and three to four cooks, already swallowed by the giant alien snake that is the scaled up company, the ambitious enterprise and its staffs and teams already pumping away in my space, soiling the sanctity of the morning, the light through the glass, asking questions and buzzing around like swollen flies that have feasted themselves into a fatal stupor— with no one else to scrape for conversation before setting to work on the dead tooth public; in this much smaller cafe I knew I was capable of completing all tasks, and this knowledge had a borderline relaxing effect, if relaxation also carried a positive charge, provided some light momentum or uplift as well. Alone in the basement shop about the size of my bedroom, beneath the downtown streets and the rows of pink and purple flowers, in the cool shadows and morning light that felt like home, a place of familiar exchanges, exchanges of pleasantries, instead of an abduction or kidnapping and forced performance in a circus from outer space.  

It couldn’t last, it can’t. A couple hours in and the old boredom and annoyance were back, delivered in person by a public everywhere bloated and dim, that at the same time reflected back to me my own torpor, my cold stiff spirit and choked up appetites, my reactionary piety, and had me wishing for a solitude that would be less exacting, where I could for a moment escape the revolting presence of others, escape myself (the true joy of solitude isn’t that we’re free of the public, it’s that we’re free of the self the public holds us to).  

From the inside of the service industry, the experience of other people is reduced to hearing their belly rumbles and seeing their jowls rippling; images of man not at his bestial worst in carnage and rapine but in his slovenly gluttonous element, indolently gorging through his banal everyday. 

Now I’m numb to the unending alimentary pleasures often referenced as one of the highlights of life in the present. Disgusted by pastries and frosting and wandering into a new place, a place I’ve never been where some guy or gal who barely makes the rent will tell me again like they told the clodhopper who just left the register what is the seasonal drink, explain the herb whose pronunciation every third or fourth person will mangle and leave for dead, and they’ll ask me like they ask every other club-footed butthead in this Fordist model fat factory if I’d like it hot or iced, for here or to go, and I’ll pretend that this is some fresh experience for either of us, a threaded blanket of ingenuity and benevolence and talent I should swaddle myself in, and that the people working at this particular new place are more than the chewed up tenders of meal machines and junk food juggernauts soon to be replaced by latex gimp suit wearing japanese sexbot servers, more than under-awning jugglers and banjo players picking and fiddling and fingering for my dirty tips, for just one old chimney hit of scraped resin from the oversmoked bowl of my meager earnings.  

Unmoved by the quirky decor, the intentionality of the tableware. I’d eat a hunk of raw cow heart and sawdust in a stagnant warehouse every day if I never had to go to a restaurant or work in a cafe again, if I could relieve myself of the duty to enjoy and speak at length on an incrementally novel hog sauce.  

Food and drink not as ritual, as communal rite, but as entertainment, as subartistic ingredient flogging. Switching out globe theater tragedies for titillating people of global shape and heft with shakeshackspear soliloquies. I can’t pipe syrup into the failing kidneys of snack addicts anymore; the drug pushing isn’t any less sleazy and devastating, any more dignified than dropping a bag of heroin on a junky passing out in a trashcan, but then I think about leaving the industry for good, for the last last time and facing the wider wasteland of the post-atomic job market, with its commercial fallout shelters, its populations of sewage treated money handlers and middle managers and motley construction crews and all the rush jobs and hackwork, and I lose all interest in new ventures in a new field, as I’d then be working directly alongside instead of serving the very people I’d prefer to avoid forever, the general public as it now stands, or slumps, rather, the public not as civic body or a people but as a science experiment gone horribly wrong, a real bad batch of regressive apes with necrotic protuberances and bait and tackle adornments, paintball spattered and greasy and psoriatic and three steps behind the slowest train of thought about the difference between up and down.  

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They slipped my last check under the door of my digital bank account. Only they forgot about four hundred dollars. I’ve never been much for accounting, and my exact number could be off, but some money has to be missing. The icy wind of working for nothing. I did my time and didn’t even get the correct number of tokens in return, the dulled copper casts of dead labor I use to buy back my lost life, valorize my days spent building and repairing the pasteboard dreams of others, owners, almost all of them barely repressed megalomaniacs, their humility a show, a ratty front; grandiose yokels I’d sooner run through an industrial dish washer than support with any more muscular and mental effort.  

What I should do is insist on proper compensation. First, politely request the amount owed. If they disagree, dispute them. If that doesn’t work, look into hiring a lawyer, bring in the state. If I were to do any of that, my already wrenched nuts would receive another twist. Better to be out of there and poor than suffer one more interaction with owners, managers, officials. I could be wrong about the money, too, I didn’t keep strict records. And I need to focus on joining my next chain gang.