Doctor: What seems to be the problem

K: Well, it’s two thirty in the morning. I fell asleep early and now I’ll be up all night. I wouldn’t mind it if I weren’t actually exhausted. I want to sleep, but instead of sleeping I just keep wandering around the house. I’ve been to the basement twice to check on the laundry. The kitchen keeps requiring me to go to it for glasses of water. I’ll be online for a bit and then go surf infomercials, half watching half shows. I’m wandering around a small, three-story course.

The insomnia is clearly related to frustration over the pointlessness of my workday. Since I am still on unemployment the amount that I earned today will be deducted from my unemployment benefits such that despite eight hours of work my net will be the same as had I not bothered.

Doctor: So was your day really a waste of time?

K: I don’t think so. It was good for me to get dressed up and go out into the working world. I really liked all the people I worked with. The work itself was mind numbingly dull and totally irrelevant to anything meaningful in life, and I am happy that I won’t have to go back to it. How much human energy is wasted pushing little bits of paper/data around? Why bother?

Maybe I’m not wired right. It’s too easy for me to make connections with people such that even after a single day and a few brief conversations the people I met today are now part of my realm of concerns. I find it emotionally exhausting that I spent the day forming connections with people that I’m never going to see again. If this is the nature of temping, then I am going to have to figure something else out, because the thought of investing in new relationships at new work places every few days is a horrifying prospect for this wayward young empath.


Getting out of commercial airspace:


The shipping clerk is lonely. Her he is away somewhere. She’s really calm. The higher ups are all petty. She’s like a stapler; locus of transit – they “are” in their opinions she “does”.

The accountant is worried about her children. Worried that when she gets time with them she’ll be too exhausted to really be there. In the morning she talks like a Benzedrine freak, but by afternoon she crashes to normal. She’s doing the one-day burning man festival everyday and her central nervous system is the pyre. I like her. She’s very tall, vaguely Minnesotan. She has on a purple shirt with a wide v at the top and a little black ribbon tied around her neck. There’s a small silver ring on the ribbon that rests above her sternum. It’s a youth look in denial of her approaching fortieth birthday. “Don’t write about us,” she says. I radiate writer.

The short secretary wants to go back to school, but feels trapped, tethered to her husband and their car payments. She’s a biochemist stuck running amelioration charts because from a certain perspective it’s all the same thing isn’t it. “You own a car right? It’s just like your payment schedule. The payment stays the same, but the balance and the interest change as the principle decreases. Just check that against these invoices here.” I’ve never had a car payment. She doesn’t know I always pay cash for my cars. They always cost roughly the same thousand dollars. The last three were from 1993, but only this latest one has power anything.

“We,” her and the implied S.O., just bought Sideways. Implied: You’re like that guy in sideways aren’t you? I am, sort of– but I didn’t mean – no – that’s ok – that’s me. “I used to like to write,” she says. I radiate writer.

I am dancing Malaysian shadow puppets on a screen in a plot I don’t understand for an audience I will never meet. The data I am pushing is for fifteen failed companies. As spreadsheets pass by I begin to track their downward spirals of dwindling income until we get to 2004, the year of zeros. Some of them don’t make it out of 2003.

I catch the UPS guy’s falling package. “Nice save.” I catch the door to the elevator. “thanks.” I’m catching onto something. I envy the UPS man’s dolly, the floor guy’s joint compound for the molding, the cooler guy’s shifting of his weight to move a bin, the door guy’s power tool play toys as he makes a lock happen in the door to my improvised office.

Improvised office: the conference room table is covered in Dell PCs with Triniton monitors three generations old. Cords like ganglia exceed the needs of the two functional workstations. This could be a headquarters. We could plan things here. We could be heroes. Dreamers are heroes of a kind. We cheer for Sisyphus and say damn the descent.

The conference room has a twelve-foot glass wall looking out from the eighteenth floor. It’s a clear day. I’m facing north. I stop to stretch and stand and watch a jet fighter take off and ark to almost vertical in its ascent and I think that they must have to do that to get out of commercial airspace as fast as they can and I think that must be North and I look down to the rooftops of other buildings and watch the ventilator fans spin at different speeds. Why the variation of rotation, every fan a solitary oscillation?

The tech is surgically grafted to his coffee mug; it’s a pacifier of personal obsolescence until he can get home to his mudding. This isn’t the real world after all, is it? His wheeled briefcase has a telescoping handle that is silver and curves up and away from the bag like the assent of that jet. Both the handle and the plane share a certain male aesthetic that implies gadgetry. I wait with him to take the elevator down to the green level. I check my cell phone messages. He asks if they’ve run out of elevators again. I’m looking at his bag tilt and roll as he uses the telescoping lever to instigate motion. I’m thinking, “nice fulcrum, damn the descent.”