It figures Bell should call just after I smoked a joint. This being the 20th time the collector is calling, and a Friday so I’m at home to answer it, I answered. The joint was still smoking when the call came in. About halfway to the end, a fine roach beginning to form, ring ring goes the telephone. Slide to answer wailed the oblong screen, almost a commandment, or thought as the urgent number of a collector telegraphed on screen. I don’t know my own number, but I know these 10 digits, the promise and dread of a toll free number; there is nothing free about this call. It’s always a past due amount, and outrageous pricing. I’m hovering close to $300 a month for the joys of access to the information age. Did I mention I work a minimum wage job?
Life demands you work harder, spend more hours grinding away in useless work. We seemed determined to make work insufferable for those who’s skills and interest don’t lie in a traditional work path. The means with which to provide sustenance is only every easily achieved that way, at the job you don’t like, at the career you start to question, at the actions that take you away from your family, from your friends, from your thoughts and wishes, for prolonged stretches. Only that way, with the 40 hour workweeks, and the promise of promotion, of greater riches if I try just a bit harder at this thing I hate.
Have an interest in ceramics and make objects that people like, that’s nice, now go work this remedial job for 8 hours because your crafting interests provides no income. You can work in a factory because there really is no market for you and what you make. Or maybe you like painting and making portraits, especially of darker charters, all goth like, because that’s your thing. Black is your favorite colour, the subtle shades of gray, the shock of red, a dash of light, your means of expression. But ink ain’t free, nor are the canvas, so here’s some plastic bottles, go shove them in a box. Having not finished high school, or obtained to any higher degree, you can enjoy your stupidity for a long while pushing a broom about the floor, or going about, gathering the trash. There is no prospects here, at least to our diminishing job market, where requirements grow ever higher, the work more demanding and ever more distasteful.
One must step away from the soul a little bit, accept the narrow confines of career interests, propel oneself again into the walled corridors, the avenues of success, chasing with ever narrowing focus one point of light at the expense of all others. To be driven, to be focused is to succeed.
To everyone else, enjoy trying to balance the bills.
