"Oktober"

            And for a brief tumultuous moment you’d wondered if the universe had any purpose to it.  Couldn’t possibly, reflecting.  You go back to the job search, glossing over an unending array of varied terms and specialized coinage.  Land Surveyor.  Chief Executive Officer.  2 Month Intro Promotion.  Social Media Sales.  Dancers 18 And Over.  Digital Marketing Manager.  Hardworking Drivers Wanted for Compassionate Positions.  Experienced Optician Wanted. Front Desk Agent.  Seismic Bracing for MEP Systems.  Graveyard Maintenance Mechanic.  Painter – Temporary.  The list goes on, unfamiliar garble as you lose interest entirely.

            So this is it, you think as you fetch another cup of coffee.  The economy.  The dawning of the age of Malthus, dog eat dog, ‘Warriors, come out to play.’  You finally un-liked Barack Obama on Facebook today, tired of the uplifting updates that have fuck-all to do with you.  2.5 million new health beneficiaries.  Pah!  Who’s to pay for health insurance without a job?  Same as last week with his bolstered education initiative:  ‘Congratulations, son, your newfound essay-writing skills will be a boon sourcing up a job.’  As if!  Labor.  Jobs.  Careers.  The people are starving and all we have is cake, cake and iPads.

            Shit.  The coffee doles from the carafe thick as sludge, heavy and black as fetid hangover dung.  Haven’t laid out one of those in a while, liquor being damned expensive out here.  Or maybe it always was more or less the same – just now begins the slow forward crawl into antiquity, the vague specter of inflating currency and rising prices about you.  Always an afterthought, wasn’t Ramen fifteen cents once sort of thing.  It’s Orwellian.  Bradburian.  Philip K. Dickensian.  Why does it happen?  You sit on the couch and stare bleakly past the darkened old-world television ahead, right on through it into the world beyond.

            Money ever-inflating, has been for decades and decades and shows no sign of stopping.  But what do you know, you’re no economist.  It seems like an unstable sort of system at first glance.  But hell, what’s two dollars on the loaf to a corporate big shot?  What’s four or five in twenty years if business can keep on booming, keeping on- something.  Liquidity comes to mind, but you know it’s not the word you need.  The rant grinds to a halt and all you can think about is the subtle rattle of the electric heat and the dank, impenetrable muck in your mug. 

            People.  Love them, hate them, it always comes down to people.  Maybe there’re too many of us?  Sounds likely, but only in the vaguest of gut instinctive sorts of ways.  Seething people copulating, breeding in too-big piles until there’s no place left to put them, swinging from apartment balconies like monkeys and stuffed into trailers on the outskirts of society.  All of them clamoring for the necessities:  Give us food!  Give us shelter!  Jobs!  Money!  Health care!  A sense of worth and accomplishment, the moon and the very stars!  Make us gods!  People.

            And you’re a one to talk, sitting there on the hide-a-bed second-hand sofa in a tattered terry, mug of muck in hand without a care, without a purpose.  You add nothing to the world – and you wonder how many others do as likewise.  It’s a weigh-down, a real dragalong.  An anchor!  Positive spin, it’s the jobless that keep the workforce at-the-ready, tag teaming in with the lackaday and insufferable degenerates that are always getting fired.  We’re like sharks then, waiting to dig into the misfortunes of others.  That’s game theory, eh?  One man’s win is another’s loss.  Schadenfreude defined, neatly repackaged as a lifestyle and imbued with a capital piety, doing the good work for the economy.

            Rambling angry thoughts, roving toward the coffee pot for mug three before jumping back onto the computer.  C/Linux Software Engineer.  Client Services Specialist.  Massage Therapist.  Dental Hygienist.  AFH Caregiver – CAN/NAR.  Fish Biologist.  More exotic dancers.  A somebody for society’s each and every, myriad niches to be filled by the capable.  You are none of these things, at least – you can’t imagine yourself as any of these.  It’s like picturing yourself with a goatee or imagining non-consciousness; beyond any sort of conjurable imagery, too far-fetched to visualize like.  You as a massage therapist.  Fixing people’s broken teeth.  Filing taxes and filling forms and johnnying a desk until the five o’clock punch-out each and every weekday. 

But those jobs don’t seem to exist, or at least – not for you.  You sitting there on a nice but still fold-out metal chair at a prefabricated stick-together desk, feigning interest in a list of job openings in the false hopes that one will say ‘You! We Need Somebody With a Flair For Cooking, Encyclopedic Knowledge of History, And a Smattering of Zambian Dialects.  Foreign-born Preferred.’  Something epiphanal and grand and worth shoving off an application towards, tie around neck and tremendous toothy grin on the face.  Something instead of wanting to just crawl back into bed with a bucket of valium and sleep until the economy picks up or a major war breaks out.

People.  It always seems to come down to people and bad coffee.