What if I can never think again?

What If I Can Never Think Again

The first time I remember feeling this way as a young adult I'd just come back from my first trip to California over the holidays when the war ended. I'd met little Lolita and gone to the New Year's eve party after the peace was signed when everyone was so happy and we had won. It had been over a New Year's that the revolution in Ventura was won. Different than my first remembered New Year when I was five and my mother sent me alone to the bodega to buy grapes because the world was going to end later that night. All anybody talked about was the end of the world and I was terrified and couldn't understand why everyone was excited but the fears of adults and how to tell them apart from their excitement were an ongoing mystery for me. I couldn't understand why there was yet another morning after the end with a grape for each of the last ten seconds.
That's what it was like to return to the City after the war ended and to have to go back to my weekly routine of making the paper and putting the paper to bed. Terminal burnout. I would never get enough rest, I would never get my mind back, I would never be able to think well again.
That's my state right now. I am terminally burnt out. I've used up my mindpower, squandered it by selling it, used it for the wrong thing for too long and now I have no mind left. Or so it feels. And I believe it.

Last Friday Little DMO was stealing a car, chased by a cop, crashed into another car, turned it over, killed a 4 year old and now he's on life support handcuffed to the bed. I know this because Sniper was also in the car and he escaped. Jose said car stealing is an addiction, an incredible high to do it and get away. One place these two get to know how smart they are in a society that gives them few opportunities for that. Big DMO was the one got stabbed to death on our corner. Little DMO if he lives will be spending two decades in prison.

I'm too tired. What if I can never think again? What if I have no mind left to sell and I make my living by selling my mind? I saw Harlan County this weekend. My heart started to break with the first scene when the young men dive onto their bellies onto the conveyor belt and are swallowed by the ground, that image of seeing them diving head first into the ground is an emblem of wage slavery, it buries workers alive...Other people work so fucking hard. What do I do? How do I get so tired doing what seems like nothing? Or is that another way to die at work? Killed by endless meaningless tasks that should not be done in the first place. Some are killed by work that is too real, digging coal out of the very ground; others by work that is too unreal, unnecessary.