The Blind Egress

I'm awash in texts this morning.  The factory is firing up and the workers are unhappy.  My position is vacant and I have people asking me to apply.  It is tempting.  I will need to buy a new car soon.  But I don't think they would want to bring me back.  Once they were rid of me, I am sure there was a collective sigh of relief from many administrators and widget makers.  But I was, if nothing else, a Man of the People.  It is documented.  There are memos and letters circulating among my old crowd that I had written in response to administrative fascism to, among others, the Board of Directors.  It was actually a shock to me to see some of them.  I said that?  In writing?  

My old pal C.C. was worse than I, though.  He often invoked The Theater of the Absurd in response to the intended oppressions.  I stuck and stick by him.  Us hillbillies have a mean streak.  We are bent on revenge  like the Hatfields and the McCoys.  

But I'm on the outs now.  The old group has been decimated by migrations to other factories or other towns.  As Yeats so famously said, the center will not hold.  

The reports I have from the ground, though, was that the first day's celebration was something awful.  I don't miss that.  

Today, I must do some manual labor.  Tennessee asked if I could help him move some furniture out of one of his rental condos down some stairs.  

"Can you lift some light furniture?" he asked me.  

WTF?  Have I become that?  Have I become that fellow?  

My mountain climbing buddy called me yesterday to chat.  I told him.  His response?  

"You said no, right?"

He was on his way to town to buy an inversion table because he had "tweaked" his back.  He was a major college athlete and always one of the fittest guys I knew, but he said he has to try to avoid hurting himself now.  

"When I built the new place, I hired people to move the heavy stuff like refrigerators and washing machines."  

I couldn't imagine it.  He once reveled in such things.  

But I will help move light furniture down the stairs and into the truck.  I will also be moving my own heavy containers from my storage unit.  I can't afford it any longer.  A 5'x10' space has gone up to $175/mo.  More burning will have to take place.  I must think of those prints as prayer flags afire, I guess, flaming into the greater cosmos.  It is sad.  Shit.  I just remembered that I had to trash my fire pit.  I'll need to get a new one.  

Packing up the studio was now a long time ago.  So were a lot of other things.  Today it feels I'm finally moving away from something.  It may not be the same as moving toward something else, but that, logically, is inherent in moving.  You can't do one thing without doing the other.  

I'll need to change my slothful habits, though.  I have much that should be done, some of it practical and some of it creative.  

And some of it is fun.  I'm having more fun recently than I have for a very long time.  Only a modicum of it.  But I read an article that said instead of trying to be happy, one should just try to have more fun.  That's not a bad idea.  

I've been a victim of "stuckism."  That is what the counselor said.  He wrote a book about it, so it must be true.  The concept, I mean.  I heard about it on NPR.  Some of the silliest shit I have ever heard a person mumble.  His argument was chockfull of unproven assumptions and unsubstantiated outcomes.  

I'm buying it hook, line, and sinker.  I'll "unstuck" myself with the contemporary version of linguistic snake oil.  If you attempt only three things, none of them will work.  But if you attempt ten things, one of them will.  That is what the counselor said.  Ten's a lot, so I'd better get cracking.  

Oh, no!  I just Googled "stuckism" so I could provide you with a link.  But the counselor has "appropriated" a term from an art movement of the '90s.  If you can't trust your counselor, who can you trust?  

In the land of the blind, they say. . . or was it "this way to the egress"?  

If you don't know the sayings or the sources, you always have The Google.