I Want to Show the Reader Wage Slavery Didn't Vanquish Me
I Want to Show the Reader Wage Slavery Didn't Vanquish Me
Week 145
O god it’s been so long since I’ve written, sucked away by wage slavery. The crazy shit at work I can’t get outside of and can’t choose to be inside of, have no choice there, it drowns me. Three weeks consumed with the fallout from the drama of my two bursting outs: What am I in Nazi Germany following orders? And, “I thought this meeting was supposed to be about education but there’s no time for this report.” Big fight with Solly in her office. “You humiliated me,” I say. And she says, “You undermined my authority. Someplace else you would be fired for this.”
Who would have thought Reinaldo cared enough to meet with her on my behalf to tell her: “It’s not a level playing field. You are the CEO. You have more power. And, education has become marginalized. I would have said the same thing she said if I’d dared. I’m ashamed of myself because I did not.”
I barely remember all the drama. I called Y to see what the chances were for me to get my old job back at the settlement house for half what I make now. We talked on the phone. Or, he talked and I sobbed. I told him the whole sad tale.
Lucha too met with Solly and told her she’s getting sucked into the culture of burocratic abuse.
All of us in the unit got together outside the office at lunchtime to strategize a united front against Solly and her best friend.
(It came out in Lucha’s conversation that Machi gave Solly more than an earful about my parenting failures, the ways I can be the burocratic abuser of my own home, forewoman of my shop to produce children, one child, to be sent out into the world defective, unviable in the market place, destined to be kept on a shelf warehoused away in the criminal justice or the mental health system.)
And what am I to do with these journals? I can never publish them until all these players are dead. I am not an artist who can see what’s benign about these people. Surely each of them is a whole person just like I am, as good as I imagine I am. Yet we’re thrust together in the schoolyard of wage slavery, each in our roles: ceo, senior manager, middle manager, site manager, line worker, support worker; or, mama, papa, sib, grandmama, grandpapa; or, clique leader, clique follower; or school yard bully and target; rapist, rapee; incester, incested; extrovert, introvert; paranoid, borderline; grifter, mark…Thrust in our roles formed and rehearsed in our childhood homes, performed wherever we gather ad infinitum.
Where does my life as a wage slave end? What do I predict will happen in this story? That she, our heroine, hangs on for health insurance until she can’t any more (70 or 75?) then at last retires having forgotten what she wanted to have time for, surrounded by cartons of journal entries, and her body then disintegrates like my parents’ who filled with their unshed tears and lasted less than ten years from the end of their wage slavery, his broken heart grown too big to pump, the tears filling up his lungs; her undischarged rage petrified liver too brittle to cleanse her blood, tears filling her belly and her legs.
Or will the cartons of paper fall and crush me like the guy in Howard’s End, killed by the books he longed to read and hadn’t yet read and never would because of his class; me crushed by the books I longed to write and never got to write because of my class.
I’m smack in the middle of these texts. I can’t get outside them.
What do I predict can happen here absent revolution?
What do I want to say and what would my imaginary reader want to know?
I want to show my reader how I triumphed, how wage slavery didn’t vanquish me or any of us, how we all did many things to retain, reclaim, unfold our humanity in the midst of oppression and its harshness, even when we were hired to perpetrate oppression, and it was our job to organize the hurting of the poor, the humiliating of the poor, the labeling of the poor. That we were the poor ourselves and triumphed the way they triumph, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, birthing feudalism from slavery, and capitalism from feudalism, and socialism from capitalism. But who knows what it is these labor pains are birthing now? And will we die of this labor? Look at what’s happening to my son and his generation, all the boys of Sunset, Gunset as they call it!
What do I predict for them? Absent revolution I cannot imagine their triumph.
What does my reader want to know?
More about the texture and the fabric and the flavor of my life. But for that I would have to feel it and is it that I am writing as a way not to feel?
The reader would want to know that right now I am sitting in the park with my laptop. It is Spring again. The trees, god knows why, have decided to go green and the tulips are popping out of the ground April being the cruelest month.
The reader will wonder why I seem to not remember Ori, or long for him, or desire to be in his presence, hold him, spoon in bed with his leg and his arm around me. Don't I remember Ori? There are places my mind can't bear to go. What do I predict for Ori? Will die in prison wondering why neither Machi nor I have come to see him? Ori believes families betray you. Does he realize we have no idea where he's being held. Or if he's being held? That thought makes my heart stop. Want to stop. For all Machi and I know Ori is dead. The reader wants me to find hime, go see him, will be disappointed or even enraged by how small I am; will see through my miserly heart, my emotional hoarding. Wage slavery wouldn’t have been so hard on her if she’d only been less spiritually miserly. If she’d only been able to see that her workplace was just another place for humans to come together to do their best with what they were dealt, and enjoy the fellowship. Couldn’t she have been one of those groups who gathered at lunch every day, the support staff group taking turns to bring cooked food from home; the middle managers, comparing weight watchers to jennie craig; all of them joking and bantering and laughing or sometimes talking about deep and serious things, or planning the baby showers and surprise birthday parties. Couldn’t she have been one of those eating cake at the parties and sharing testimonials of the homenajeado when, after singing the birthday song, while the partygirl cut the cake, the rest who stood in a huge circle along the kitchen wall, told anecdotes or shared appreciations. The reader will be disappointed in her misanthropy. For loving each other, the shelter of each other, is the only thing that gets us through wage slavery.
The reader will be as stifled by the climate inside my head as I am.
Strangely and unexpectedly after the two outbursts things have shifted. I am now inserted into the dyad and that could expedite my demise, because the initiatives I am inserted to carry out will fail and disgrace me, or because with the increased proximity I will morph into Solly and her best friend. Has my self-named and defended integrity been just a mask for misanthropy, for spiritual and emotional miserlyness? All these years could I have made all of this better by figuring out how to be closer to the two of them?
Solly told Lucha Machi’s gone, been gone, and she doesn’t know where he’s gone.
And she hasn’t told me. Her loyalty has been to him, not to me. I feel another volcano of rage uncoiling from my gut and rising up my core and into my hands. What if I kill somebody?
It always boils down to the things we did to survive our childhood, live through our families. I conclude that my coworkers for the most part had families with more or as much harshness as mine, but more consistent warmth. In our harsh workplace they sometimes run terrible harshness on each other, but still hold on to what’s true and good among us, those gatherings in the kitchen, those baby showers and birthday testimonials. My own childhood was harsh and the love sporadic, popped up like a carnival target rabbit. Harshness and a void when I was alone with Mami; glaring blinding love when Papi was home. And Papi was almost never home.
At work I am the same, popping up vividly now and then, popping up harshly very rarely, and mostly in an isolated void.
The reader will want to know if there is anyone I actually love. Do I actually love Ori? Do I love Machi? Am I just in a rage because they failed to give me the love my parents failed to give me? They failed to make it up to me, make life up to me?
I too will fail my reader. And fail myself. I am crushed by the weight of my texts. Can’t get my head outside them. Get their arc, their texture, their destination. Absent the revolution where does my story, her story, head, where does it end?
Why am I (She) almost 60 years old husbandless and childless? What will redeem me (her)? What will redeem all of us?
Where is the hope?
The reader will want to believe I, she, we, made it. Triumphed over oppression. We made it. We made it. Nothing can get us now. She made it. Nothing can get her now. Nothing can ever again get her.
I made it. I made it. Nothing can get me now, or ever again.
The reader wants to read the thing that will make her/him believe that she/he has made it, will make it, will make some meaning from wage slavery, will have lived for something (and not just to endure and survive wage slavery and maintain the addictions necessary to do so at levels that don’t fully overwhelm the mind and destroy the body so that in the end they come out with enough money, time and health to have their real lives).
And what if all along wage slavery has been the real life, all there is, and will be, and the triumphing is a moment to moment thing not the prize at the very end?
Life is not one long waiting for papi to come home to llevarme a pasear. It is being there, and llevarme a pasear myself.
Or, beyond that, it is coming together, joining hands, showing ourselves and each other who we are and llevarnos juntos a pasear.
O to have been that blonde girl in Mi Campamento who was in the center of the juegos a las candelitas, or a la rueda rueda, or a la pajara pinta. Not the brown little girl who walked the edges of the camp when dusk turned night counting stars, erasing the ground, the air, the stars, the void behind them, wanting to find what was permanent, what was left in the end when the planet and the universe were gone.
Later I met that little girl again, I am almost certain it was the same person, as a young adult, in the first years of the Partido de la Felicidad, and she was still the center of the rueda rueda, now fueled by beer and rum and later weed and cocaine.
So then, some part of our mind must be in the thick of the experience, watching life emerge and another must be outside learning from what has happened, wondering what comes next, deciding and taking charge. And I am choked by the weight of my life, can barely breathe, or get my head above water.
O, there is also the good we do. Last week I cotaught a class with a teacher who is calm and centered and in the story and I who am outside on the edge, on the top suffering from big picture vertigo got deliciously grounded by her, a picture of a state different than being asphyxiated by the oppression, crushed by my texts. I was shown a state of being present within it, the thing that is sentient and still open, where the oppression changes, where the revolution happens breath by breath.
And I came to the place were I thought to just sit alongside a student while she made her book, just sit and pay attention while she thought. I came down from my heady perch and breathed alongside her and was amazed at the brilliant choices she made, her concentration, as she cut up the lines from her story about an imminent visit from her mother whom she loves, and her father, and her children’s expectant joy, and distributed the lines on the page, and placed the photographs of her children and her parents just so.
It is both the destination and the journey that matter. The inside and the outside. That we, she, I have made it is not in question.