After being “retired” for a little over a year, I find myself employed once again. I also find myself sitting here demoralized over the great act of compromise and failure that going back to an office job is. O, the things I do for food, shelter and health insurance.
The despair that I'm feeling over the fact that I'm returning to the nine to five world has me reeling. I tried like hell to find something that wasn't the equivalent to pushing papers. I never heard back from anyone and started to run out of money. I guess all these places saw was a two year degree and twenty years of an office job so they didn't even bother to take the time to call me back to tell me to fuck off. But it's not like there's a large market for rapidly aging curmudgeons that take pictures at Punk shows and have a problem with society at large.
I ended up with a government job where I work in a building that I'm usually protesting outside of. An irony that is not lost on me in the least. The people I work with seem to be pretty far from unbearably stupid, unlike my last job, and they do seem genuinely glad to have someone in the office that knows how to tie their shoes and get things done.
The Henry David Thoreau quote, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” has been stuck in my head for the past several weeks. After accepting the job offer, I found myself at local department stores buying clothes that would meet the dress code requirements. I ended up with a handful of black dress shirts and gray pants that don't have cargo pockets to be my new uniform. I wanted to tape an M80 to my “Business Casual” action figure variant and strike a match for succumbing to the conformity of wearing the clothing of the tech-bro/finance-douche. Buying clothes felt like such a waste of money when I could have put those funds toward records. Yet another compromise in a long line of them.
Working in the downtown area has me commuting on Pittsburgh's woeful excuse for public transit but the upside of that means my car is parked in the garage and protected from Pittsburgh's woeful excuse for drivers. I thought the downside of using our light rail system was going to be the uphill mile walk to get to my stop in which I have to perform the brilliant dance of avoiding dog shit, garbage and speeding monster trucks decked out with T*ump stickers but that was quickly replaced with the fact that the trains constantly break down or there is always some other calamity causing massive delays. I could care less if I'm late to work but I will seek John Wick-like vengeance if I'm delayed for even a moment on my return to the fortress of solitude.
After a few days of dragging my carcass up and down the mountainous region of Beechview to get to and from my trolley stop, I decided to actually look at the health tracker on my phone and, from the looks of it, the invasive little piece of surveillance must have thought I was dead over the past year and someone robbed my corpse. Going from zero steps a day while the phone sat in my living room to well over two miles a day must have sent some sort of signal to our technocrat overlords since I'm now getting targeted ads for fitness clothing and shoes.
After the first week of the cruel reminder that there was such a thing called “5am” I was so tired I could barely stand. I worked a club show out of town on the Friday and shot a basement show on the Saturday not because I had to or wanted to but because I needed to. I am still having a difficult time accepting the thing I do for money and I'm trying really hard not to let it win. The mundane life is something that I will always fight against. Due to the fact that I have grown accustomed to living indoors and eating food, I have to step into this character that I hate for eight hours a day.
All of this has led me to having a very “shit or get off the pot” moment with my art. I resurrected my podcast, started selling merch on TeePublic and opened a web store to sell photo prints. If I'm forced to have a day job, then I'll use it to fund these artistic ventures. The only problem is finding a coffee shop in Pittsburgh that's open past 6pm that isn't a Starbucks or Panera so I can sit and write. I've got notes and ideas piling up and every time I walk into a different coffee place I'm always told they're closing in fifteen minutes. This is why I need to put a hole in my television or learn how to ignore everything else in my house so I can write while I'm there.
Seeing that this is how my days are going to play out, I have decided to take an adversarial approach towards the rest of my life. There is nothing else. There will be no other thing to get in the way. There is no more “I'm too tired to do ____” or sitting at home watching television. If I skip a show for whatever reason, I'll be using that time for writing, editing pictures or working on podcast episodes. This work is my version of drugs, alcohol and religion.
This is me saying “Fuck it.” I am tired of needing to be a cog in society's machine in order to survive and as minor as all of this seems this is how I'm deciding to fight back. If no one reads the words, looks at the pictures or listens to a minute I've recorded, I don't care. This is me trying not to die. My last job had me spinning out in an existential crisis and depression that almost killed me.
The new nine to five will not have a chance to put its boot on my neck. I'll be hiding in the shadows waiting to slit its throat.
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