run, run

I wish I had gotten that job, the one in Kalamazoo. It all comes rushing back. I knew then what I know now, how important it is to run, to hide, to get away, to start over, to redefine.

It all comes rushing back in. I cannot escape a feeling, a definition, a form, an outline, of a life that I've created out of the habits of mind and the habits of body. I stalk, I listen, I live by the footsteps overhead.

I tried so hard before to shake it and working day in, day out, spending the weekends with a perfect diversion helped. But it's back. I lost that job, and my diversion had lost its luster slowly but certainly as a feeling more powerful came rushing back in.

Lust.

I cannot think of a better word. There's no logic behind it, other than that which I put towards my stalking, my spying, my watching, my listening, my planning, my life lived around the patterns of another life, hers.

Stop it. Fill a life with diversion, activities, projects, anything to keep me busy. This feeling is unfair to me. It's overwhelming me. I wanted that job. I gave it a good effort. And I lost it to a PhD from the Ohio State.

Pitiful. Shameful. I opened up that folder, entitled "dissertation" and peeked inside. So much that I didn't look at, so much that I didn't write, so little of my effort expended on the right thing, and too much of it spent licking the wounds that I inflicted upon myself. I took a job. I hated that job. I ignored my work. I ignored my life. I slid into a routine of disavowal. I couldn't have done any good at the Kalamazoo job anyway. I would have been in a sea of guilt, self-doubt, self-pity, loneliness. I couldn't have replaced Helen. She wouldn't have allowed me to leave. When I told her about that job, she clung to me like a sad, sad little girl. She cried. I felt nothing, but the air of freedom and the vague expanse of a future that was completely new, new routine, new people, new environs, new municipal water, new state tax structure, and a new damn job. A job that, at the very least, didn't insult my education, but would certainly insult my ego. Why? Because I would dig my own hole. Teaching jobs are isometric exercises. The harder you push the harder you invoke one of Newton's laws. It exerts an equal force back on you. The harder you try, the more work you do, the less you are rewarded monetarily, and its educational value is utterly uncertain. Hard work doesn't come through that often. Helen sucked my dick that night, and I came in her mouth. She swallowed, and I learned that she enjoyed that little job, that job that she does, the one that pleases her man, the one that she will not let go. "We're on the same page" she said in so many ways. We danced one night to her records in an early 'date night' in her basement apartment bedroom. She pushed me on the bed, and I played the passive one. "You get me." She said. I can fool anyone.

Even myself.

There is no future. I just thought that an academic job at Kalamazoo would save me from this blue collar relic, this job fitting for a murderer, a criminal, an addict, an unprincipled and uneducated buffoon. And I'm stealing that guy's job. John Scoville told me as much. When he was laid off, he cussed and stormed out. He didn't say goodbye to me. He saw me as someone standing between him and a job. What a fool I am. I am too damn poetic, too damn ivory towered, and mostly too damn Ferdinand Bullheaded to pick a career, any career, and stick to it for a time fitting for a line on my resume. But who needs resumes anymore. Computers do searches using the logic of algorithms. I need keywords not experience.

Here I am, sitting at a coffee shop, feeling sorry for myself. Blacking out hours of my day because it's one that is done in secret. The rest of my day I prey upon visions of the object of my desire, snapping its picture, putting it on my computer, and jerking off violently to it, zoomed in, transfixed on the dissected object, which was once part of another person. Completely objectifying are my advances. I was told this, and it wasn't what I had wanted to do. She's a tough one to understand. She will tell me that she loves me, but she will build a life around the principle of ignoring me. Ignoring me to death.

I need to get out. I needed that job. I need a job. Mine has dried up. I had a good job. It was dirty, but I worked around the best, at a pace that wasn't too terrible. The best job I had was fabricating, handrail around a tar decanter. Man, I felt like I had some control, some authority. I simply was allowed to do all the heavy lifting and made sure that my two co-workers didn't have to work that hard. It was warm up there. It was cold outside. This was a perfect job. We had to wear respirators the whole time, and I loved that job. Looking like a bunch of MIG fighter pilots, we walked upon the tarred lunar surface of that tar decanter. And suddenly we were laid off. Then we were laid off again, and again, and again. And finally, after we picked up our tools, and cleaned up our half-finished projects, the mill shuttered our operation--a decision made a thousand miles away and it killed our job. I missed the great monetary gain and mental diversion that the job offered me. Now I go back down to the hall and put my name on the list. To find a job, to fill in for the job that I had, that I was willing to drop for a job in Kalamazoo, that I would have hated by now, but that still haunts me like a bad night, one that cannot be forgotten because it got my name in the papers and put another in the obituary. I didn't kill anyone in a drunken driving accident, but something about my life is an orchestrated tragedy. I would have engineered it as one, but I lack that degree. You don't need a degree to orchestrate. So many damn barriers to entry. So many damn degrees that I don't have. This writing may prove that I exist. It may prove that I can and do write. It may even provide a measure to my ability to construct compelling sentences. But it ultimately damns me because it's personal, it's taboo, it's too fucking self absorbed, and it's going to get me in trouble. I am writing a diary of my inner states on a publicly accessible web page. This is an allegory for our publicly viewed privacy, our socially networked, fame-measured existence before others. The technology mediates us in a way that adds some very consequential contours to our interactions--they can be searched, they can be found, they won't be forgotten.

Perhaps this Blog sealed my doom at that Kalamazoo job. My cynicism, my pain, my inner turmoil, my self-pity and self-doubt: these aren't good for a job interview. Jobs are public. The spaces one occupies at work are formal, deliberately restrictive, emotionally oppressive, and utterly central to making a meaningful existence, a life lived out of the purely fungible dollar that we earn, sometimes by the hour, sometimes by the job, sometimes by contract.

The dollar. It's something that I seek to have at a constant rate in my life. But what I seek more than the money is that which must be done in order to obtain it--work. Work offers me one thing that I need right now--a diversion, time spent away from underneath the clop, clop of feet, my sulking behind the blinds, my paparazzi tactics, my sickening and sick desires, unrequited love, twisting into objectify, violent lust.

This world; it's a collection of base desires, selfish motives, and stitched together, barely, just barely, by boogeymen, ideologies, laws, and the one consequence that motivates most--fear of losing control over one's body through incarceration or death. It's a fitting allegory for our inner lives, ones that we try to shape and control by replicating the very institutions that shape the way our bodies move, how our eyes see, what our tongues taste, and what our ears hear. We're in it, but we're so far from it. The mind is trapped. Our senses mock it. Our institutions give it the long-throw reflex of extant culture. But the reflexes, the nerves, the motor neurons, the associational network of synapses, are all so coextensive to the reality that makes us perceive any reality, and yet they could have any content, any whatsoever, and look similar.

I needed that job damn it. I wanted a new start. I have to run. I cannot outpace the demonic habits, the objectifying and violent possessiveness of my desires. And here I am, in the midst of it, hungry, hated, empty. Back on the list to find another job, something to keep me from remembering what I am running from. The continuous demoralization of clumsy work, getting my ass kicked by a knot, a bar, a weld, a bolt, a tool. I guess it beats getting your ass kicked by a not, a not thing, the positive object of negation, the category and essent preceding non-existence. Another set of clumsy words, another stab at existentialism for which I have yet to earn any chops, another bot-crawled screed about my sad existence, a sadness conjured by myself, a continuous and painful editorial board, damning me to exist in a prison of doubt, self-hate, and articulate awareness of my pain.

This, this labor, this painful trudging through self-doubt, it is my job. It pays nothing. It produces words like this. It births opportunities to think, to practice, to preach, to poetry. It pays nothing. It does something. It pays nothing. My stomach burns from hunger. The screen displays what my checking account holds; it dwindles. My confidence dwindles. My life; it's a job. My job is my life. My pay is my sadness. The work I do the poetry of contours, the contours of my mental states, my confessions piss out, my words never stop, my sadness continues day in, day out. I will not sleep well tonight. I will not sleep. I must get up early to get my name on the list. I need a diversion. I need to put my mouth on something. I need to quiet the voice of my pain, my doubt, my shame. I need to hold something, a tool, anything, to keep me from trying to hold her too close, once again, scaring her away.

I hate my job. I hate being me. I hate. I am hate. Run. Run until you collapse, and hope you run far from the thing that defines your existence.