Work vs Life

by Paul Cuttler

I don't really want to write this but I don't want to do nothing. Nothing is evil, particularly in a restless city. You become part of the concrete fabric of everything, walked and stood on, spat on, extra layers and surfaces, bleach and acrid paint, then fucked up and pulled down. You wake up to the hammering next door, steady hums, mumbling and stuffy air. Everything clogs you up, in the lungs, pores, glands and head. I crawl out sideways into the drab air still warm from the day and night before, try to wash away the filth. I think today is Friday, I have to go to work. I don't really have to. I hate work, it makes me feel normal, but I need money. I don't.

I really fucking hate my job. Well, I hate working. But I need the money. I find it so hard to figure out the monetary value of things. Coffee is grown on the opposite side of the world, is processed by many people along the line until it ends up in a cup, and only costs me a couple of dollars. I don't know if that makes any sense. I get paid several dollars an hour for doing clerical kind of work. More like data entry. I say clerical work because it sounds more moral. The real clerical work gets several more dollars an hour with benefits. I like benefits, but I don't get any. It's probably why I like them. It's probably unfair I don't get them. The shower goes cold quickly in summer. I don't understand that. Summer as a whole doesn't make a lot of sense. I hate winter. I fucking hate money. As a consequence I'll never get anywhere. I don't think I hate people, just the things they say, the clothes they wear and ways they choose sexual partners. The phones are always ringing. I haven't answered for a while. The last one got smashed when I tried speaking to a friend. I turned the ringer down. I'm more cautious about friends. Either they disappoint me or I am disappointed by them. Why are these things complicated? The bricks in the wall outside my window are moving, a sort of swirling pattern. It could be I'm dizzy, but nothing else is moving.

Did she just say 'hello'? Maybe 'excuse me'. I think I said 'no worries', or 'no thanks'. It doesn't make any sense, does it? The elevator is always confusing. People get on and off in semi-random ways. Nobody says anything. That's right, nobody said anything, I was just daydreaming. I have daydreams most of the time. Nothing makes much sense. Fuck it all, I suppose. I know I'm sad, and that doesn't excuse anything. I could choose to be strong - but I'm tired. I suppose I could do something, but that requires energy.

The elevator tugs on its cables without breaking them, neatly stops at the same height as the floor on the ground level. If there wasn't a small gap in between it would be as though the elevator was part of the whole floor. Somehow this annoys me, not to mention the people who take it for granted. I think I have quite a skill for noticing these otherwise trivial things. It is the one thing my mind is alert to, but it goes completely unrecognised by the world. Even though these details are ugly and banal to me, they are also quite beautiful, and yet my real skill in the world goes unnoticed. Maybe everyone notices the poetry in small, ugly things as well as succeeding at socially and morally acceptable work, but I don't believe it. Even artists who paint and photograph them don't properly understand the nature of these things. They only do their art cynically, not an ounce of honesty. I think it is just me, a tragic visual poet. Did I say - no I didn't - I will - the tiles in the foyer are an ugly kind of ugly. Nothing redeeming at all. Lesser beings inflict their misery on me - on me most of all because I acutely recognise such things. I am not by nature a miserable person - I take the misery of the world to a sublime degree. Such is my talent.

I am so beyond hating my job, and my life I guess, but something keeps me going. I honestly don't know what. I walk along, I move across the same old concrete and bitumen. I am miserable and numb of course. I'm getting to the point where nothing is worth saying. All distinction is blurring. I don't think I want to talk to anyone but often the silence gets me. The same row of buildings glances past me as I walk along, the stifled sirocco air, the same chinks, graffiti and window signs grabbing my attention as always. I am sick of seeing them, but can't drag my eyes away to look at other things. This sort of bland déjà vu is awful. I even read the signs out in my head as much as I try to bite my mental tongue.

The traffic is never quite in sync with me as I reach the intersection. I suppose I could see the infinite variations as interesting but it is just a nuisance. Some days I jaywalk, other days I lean against the filthy traffic-light pole until the little man changes colour. I don't see why the symbol can't be of a dog. Or a sheep. Has no-one ever thought of that before? Cars don't have car symbols at traffic lights, but buses and trams have bus and tram symbols. A filthy old street man is being propped up from his red wine stupor by a teenage boy who looks like he has been malnourished his whole life. The shrunken junky eyes dart around in his smallish head. Whoever said the world is an amazing place should have their tongue cut out.

There is a basic assumption about modern life that everyone will contribute to society through paid work so that we can earn the right to live, survive and thrive. Our basic needs are taken care of easily enough now, which leads to an increasingly arbitrary world where some work seems less necessary and meaningful than others. But it is all a part of our evolving consciousness and existence. Knowledge of this evolution in itself is useless though. Understanding something doesn't make it meaningful when so many of us still have to work useless jobs. But we are now supposed to force or create this meaning. For fuck's sake. It kind of sounds alright to me sometimes, but not everyone shares this understanding, and I still can't really be fucked. I may be dependent on society for a job, a place to live and something to eat, but society is also dependent on me and every other sucker like me. All this mutual dependency breeds such contempt. All this society breeds such antisocial malcontent.

These walls, windows and doorways keep skimming past me. I dread when my footsteps finally land me at the entrance to the building where I work, but I am usually preoccupied with how boring the walk there is, the concrete that keeps repeating, the same patterns of bubblegum, weeds and cigarette butts. What a stupid world. Don't you fucking tell me to move to the country though. Am I supposed to milk cows or dig for gold or potatoes? That is a stranger world to me.

Another elevator. Waiting in the foyer, uncertain carpet patterns. Mellow jazz, in my head not the foyer. I like music sometimes. A youngish, tallish woman looks across me. Something is wrong. More handsome than attractive. Her head tilts toward me ever so slightly, on the verge of speaking. I don't think I know her. A tall suited man moves into the space between and they acknowledge each other. The man then turns and frowns at me. Fuck you too. Who cares, fucking idiot. The lift arrives. I move forward but people need to get out so I stand aside. The tallish woman just shoves her way in. Pushing and shoving ensues but no-one seems bothered. Normal behaviour. I'll never learn. The tall man shoves his way in before me. Then we're travelling up to the eleventh floor, then the twentieth. Loud talking about business, then loud whispers about sex. Shut up fuckers. Even if I wasn't antisocial. I stand ready to get off, the doors slide apart and the woman shoulders past me to get off first. I think of whacking her. Stupid bitch. Don't tell me the world was constructed for and around these people.

Limited sense, imagination, intellect, feeling; unlimited self-assurance, corrupted purpose, opinion, moral indignation, belligerence. Why am I so tired? Everything is diminished, all the faculties that matter. Maybe they were never that alive. Maybe it is only modern people, and a minority at that, who have a feeling for something more. What good is this feeling against a ceaseless drive and energy for banality? It requires so much energy to make life this dull. So much talent. To wake at the same hour, to the same radio voice, theme music, the routine of showering, shaving, breakfast, newspaper, suit, tie, ill-fitting leather shoes, over-burdened briefcase, monotony, regularity, corrupted moral energies, walking like everyone, talking the jargon, thinking the same, eating and drinking for moral reasons, arguing, aiming for all the same fucking things. This doesn't lead to a heightened sense of their particular culture either, no connoisseurs with a fine nose - but to a solidified sense of sameness. Any variation is a destructive threat to this static, stinking solid unity. It is either subsumed or squashed or permanently external to this impervious mass. Once you miss out on your place in this comatose heaven, once you wake from this absurd, mollifying, nullifying nightmare, you can never take up the cause again. You can never cut out that greater part of yourself, for it pervades your whole being, it is the whole spirit throughout every part.

They use this against you. Your talent becomes their weapon. So fuck them. Fuck this stupid computer, the cubicle, 'anatomically correct' chair, advanced phone system, feng shui desk, fuck this whole floor, the whole building, this grey cesspool of a city, of humanity. I'm not going to fuck off this time. It's the world's turn. I'm not going to put up with it this time. Complete intolerance. You fuck off. All of you. Fucking wake up or die. The valium, the mass sedations are coming to get you. I'm getting a big laxative and shoving it down your fucking throat. I'm going to turn this single solid constipated mass of conformity to social diarrhoea, and let it run. The world of the future is changing, is change, is going to flow and flower, your shit is fertiliser to the new world, we are going to learn to live again.

 

There is a silent queue at the kitchenette. What the fuck is a kitchenette? Supposedly the little tap dispenses filtered, fresh water. There must be lead in its pipes. I guess I'm cynical, paranoid, cranky - it turns to anger, spite, vengeance, despondency. I wait my turn. I'm three and a bit minutes late to log into the machines. The numbers stream by, semi-computer-type-randomness. The opening credits of science fiction films. Is it supposed to be exciting? Maybe the Sumerians and Indians didn't invent numbers for their practical use, they just liked the look of them. Someone just looked at me strangely. Fuck off, stupid cunt. Look what you did now. The numbers arrange themselves into the nauseous pattern I've been looking at for weeks now. Or is it just days? Funny, sitting here on this faded green carpet I now miss the red bricks of the scum-smeared streets. The patterns there are more truly random. To be honest I don't even know what it means for something to be random. It's just a word some etymologist made up to test our stupidity.

I bow my head to the god of the incessant data, I trawl through stacks of paper, I mark off someone's handwriting, I dig through my desire to live and stack it into a steaming heap in the dark corner of my mind. I type in thousands of digits an hour. Millions or dozens, I actually have no idea. My mind, its enthusiasm is mush tumbling down a sodden hill. Tears roll down my face, an embarrassing acknowledgement that I'm still human. I haven't overcome my organic imperfections. I haven't killed the beast that feels its dreams and runs away screaming, tearing the world at its tattered seams.

Hour after hour. How the fuck do I do that? And keep doing it? I want something more, but where the fuck do I look? I can't sign up for something more challenging because it is more mechanical and I haven't cut out my organic part yet. I have been trying. My cirrhotic liver is defeated, my acidic gut is none. But something keeps growing back. Where the fuck does it grow from? It would have seemed there was no will left - that was first to go. But maybe.

I log off at five o' three and a bit to round out the shift. People shove past me to get on the lift first. What does it matter? What are they going home to? They get caught in the commuter traffic on the street, in the subways, trains and freeways. Why do they keep up the pretence of caring? It's all part of the modern morality play. Method acting ad nauseum .

 

Have you ever heard such bullshit? Of course you have. Every decadent culture has its antithesis. Ours has several antitheses. They all stink. They are all fucking lies. No one understands what's going on. They are all perpetrating the same mistakes that have been handed down for so long that they've forgotten they never knew. Something like that - they confuse the hell out of me, I forget my place. I don't really have a place, that's well established. Fuck off! This is my life, my story. If I want to have inconsistencies, hypocrisies and non sequiturs then I'll jam it all full to the brim with them. Fuck you. Fuck this stupid world. It makes no sense to me. I don't need it. I'm not going to work tomorrow. I'm not going to your sea-changes, hippy utopias, nowheres, I'm not going to subvert your culture or overcome your masters. I'm not going to acknowledge it, legitimise it and get angry with it. I'm breathing new air, my own air. It is perfect to me and makes you choke. The sky opens wide and spits out your heaven, the earth splits apart and swallows whole your cities and countrysides, all your idols smash to pieces, your morals and anti-morals are but my fertiliser. I dream up a new dream, a new way of dreaming. I don't subsume you, I consume and spit you out. I'll sleep the sleep of a thousand worlds and a thousand ways and wake up in a million mornings and do it again, live all my lifetimes at once and forever. I'll be grateful and take it for granted that you turned this soil for me. I now know why you created this singular, solitary world of shit.

First I have to wake up in this morning as I did today, and do it all again, but very differently.

 

This poem is taken from Total Cardboard issue 6, and remains under copyright. For more information see www.totalcardboard.com