I know I've said this before — and in fact have both followed through on it and failed miserably at it — but I'm going to get a job. This canning isn't getting me anywhere but struggling bitterly with finances, with a self-image that's spiraled into the drain so bad that it's caused me to become antisocial and even to take out my insecurities and frustrations on my beloved friends, and also with reluctant white-knuckle sobriety. I want a cat, a halfway decent smartphone, a better computer (no Internet service, though! I'll just game away all my free time), a driver's license (I don't even know how to drive!), and the ability to explore hobbies that require an initial outlay that chump change can't provide (like glass work).
Which means I'm going to need to draft up some kind of résumé that will successfully shine the shit of my employment history, get a haircut and lose the beard (unless I can get it trimmed somehow), probably get a new state ID card, and go out there and beat my feet — take time out from canning to drop the résumés off. I'll just have to hazard being forthright with the prospective employers and hope I luck out and find someone who isn't a corporate jackass who counts his ballpoint pens every day after his workers leave for home. Also, I'm going to have to be careful about any job offers, since my last attempt at this resulted in scraping boogers off the walls of a roach-infested shooting gallery; also, my legs aren't in great shape, so no standing at an assembly line forty hours a week.
Honestly, I hate jobs. It's always seemed to me that workers, even the skilled ones earning triple-digit salaries, are little more than those dreaming bodies in the Matrix, being imprisoned and siphoned of their energy by inhuman overlord machines (the metaphor fails at that last part, however, because our human overlords are if anything pathologically more than human). Not to mention the fact that most work seems to amount to fueling the gluttonous desires of a rapacious species hell bent on frittering away the beauty and bounty of the world one needless commodity and one indulgent service at a time. And, well, being an unskilled worker, people like me tend to get worked almost as hard as children in coal mines did a couple hundred years ago — and are just as disposable.
But, I'm probably going to get my gas shut off next month, I'm eating mostly garbage, I disgrace myself daily pushing a damn shopping cart full of what most people view as trash, I can't even afford to camp out at Hood River or Venice Beach every now and then to clear my head of the Portlandia miasma that's poisoned my mind all these years ... and I'm just not getting anywhere at all, and not even enjoying being a loser now that I somewhat give a damn about life. Yeah, even if I end up living in a camper and pumping gas, that'll be fine with me.
