I am reaching the breaking point.

Out from my window, the people are passing on by
I hear them complain but I know that they don’t even try
And the lights down on Main Street don’t shine like they used to

At several’s request, I went to my old sub-employer’s Thanksgiving event last night. It was like walking through a prism to one’s own workplace funeral. I mean, it was all kinds of things. It was great to see the kids and the families and everyone celebrating in a bigger venue and a larger context than last year, which was in turn larger than the year before. Great to see things pulled off and successful and happy and hopeful amidst all that 2008 has been. It had a remarkable ability to pull back former people from the same sub-workplace. The department with the kids where so many of us have worked, so many of us have left.

And it had that same rhythm of all “programs” involving a series of kids, stair-stepping in age, taking way too long to perform on a stage for bemused/proud parents and disinterested/hyper kids. Younger kids taking three times as long to set up and stand in order and arrange themselves for a three-minute presentation. Something so real and heartwarming in a society where Hollywood has set a polished standard for the smooth way things should be communicated.

At the same time, there were slick video presentations including a year’s worth of effort on stop-motion animation. The proliferation of computers and cameras and the need for televised everything has changed even the politics of the classic (after-)school program. And watching the distinction in people’s attentiveness between cheesy kindergarten songs and a well-edited video of the first and second grade classroom was chilling. I could’ve written a lifetime’s worth of Sociology on the difference in ambient crowd volume alone.

But like so many things, the largest impact of the event for me was mired in my own perspective. It was a combination of so many things, but most prevalently that life goes on without me at places where I’ve been. What a stupid, selfish reaction to a joyful holiday event, but it hit me harder than I anticipated. Maybe it comes because I’m so close to contemplating the edge of my newest position, reaching that break point of productivity and usefulness. The answers to Brandzel’s self-regulatory question are getting thinner and thinner and my faith that people are nimble enough to react to what’s really going on is diminishing. We’re back on metaphors with runaway trains and quad-smokestacked ships and other forms of transportation gone amok. You can lead people to reason, but you can’t make them think. Not if they want to plug their ears and sing about times when things were easier.

And so I’m reminded that while one’s world at work may seem so significant and all-consuming and influential at the time, it is so easily released. People won’t miss you at your work any more than you’ll miss working. It’s just too “negative” or “inefficient” or focused on that which we cannot change. Which seems like a disappointment at first, but is really the greatest relief of all. It grants a sweet solace to all the fears one has of how important one may be in the context of their own self-constructed prison. All work is fundamentally prostitution – it provides a forum and a context for us breaking ourselves into pieces so we can feed ourselves or buy something useless. Your hooking, my hooking, isn’t making the world turn.

And I see through the windows like I see through the lies
Like I see through every useless disguise that
Everyone wears but everyone swears that they don’t

How can people lose so much and pretend it doesn’t matter? Pretend that everything will bounce back and be fine again? And soon? The admissions people are willing to make almost make me blush. Their naivete despite ages that run circles around mine just makes me want to cradle my head. For all our trappings of cynicism and jaded postmodernism in this country, we’re really all just babyish dolts. We’re all expecting things to grow permanently, forever and ever Amen. We’re blind to how long the odds have been stacked in our favor, feeling somehow privileged enough to be immune to basic fundamental rules of reality that everyone everywhere else faces at all times. And clinging to our solipsistic jingoism as a reinforcement for why things will never change. As though the greatest sports stars never got older and injured and quietly retired. As though people never died or moved on. As though the one thing infinite and eternal and undousable were the myopic gasoline-fed flame of America.

But four in the morning and I just can’t sleep
The pills ain’t workin’ and I can’t get no relief
And I feel like a hound dog moaning along with the rain
Any day now, the jukebox could drive me insane
There’s an old man in the corner that nobody knows
He says: “laugh while you can cause someday you’ll be wearing my clothes”

And so I’m awake, writing and raving, feeling like I’m having less impact than I ever let myself fear. Not even here, in this context, for who knows if anyone reads this blog except my little choir of one and two halves. No, impact in the sense of why it was (theoretically, not really) worth it to hang on to such a carcinogenic routine for so long. Impact in some sort of measurable way as far as making people see the world differently. This would, ironically, all be different if I were sixty. People would listen, people would care. People would at least have an archetype for thinking I had something to say and contribute. They may still not listen enough, I guess, grass and green. I am deluding myself even now. All I would see then is the potential, the upside, the other archetypes, the hope and exuberance of youth. I am me now staring back and you there in the future and shaking my head and admitting I’m wrong. You’re right, there is no perfect time, no perfect position to be heard. People will hear and do what they want, fundamentally. How else would things have gotten the way they are?

And when I’m depressed I sleep and when I sleep I awake at all the wrong times and when I awake I despair and shuffle about, hydrating and clearing passages and feeling driven to drivel my consciousness on a board in case I die today and someone wonders how did he get there? How did he make so many mistakes and ignore so many signs? What kind of idiocy defines this useless species, anyway?

But I guess I can’t tell you what you don’t already know
And I ain’t no prophet, my landlord he told me so

As a postscript to yesterday’s post, the sign got fixed yesterday, if you can believe it. Maybe the universe wants(ed?) to make me believe there was hope or everything was going to be different. Nevertheless, the same person who came to fix the sign left a note on our car threatening us for leaving it six inches overlapping into the “driveway” that hasn’t seen a vehicle on it in about three decades. Beautifully, it was signed “The Owner” even though I know darn well Prudential hasn’t bought the building from the people we keep sending rent checks to. And the note was on a scrap of Prudential paper. It’s all the energy I can muster to not plot against the sign in ways that look like more continual decay in bitter demonstration of why it’s a bad idea for realtors trying to unload houses to be so cavalier about the feelings of the inhabitants of said house. In the end, though, it’s just another straw for the spine of a camel that long ago burrowed itself in the sand and waited, interminably, for dehydration to set in.

Ah but don’t mind me baby, I’m only dying slow