That Gray Place

Truth is I don't know if it will ever be possible for you to feel great about your job. It's reallly kind of a sticky situation. I, myself, would much rather be spending my time reading and writing poetry, perhaps even pushing large boulders uphill, than doing what I do at work. The whole idea of it gives me a terrific sense of horror at times.

Other times I get caught up in some of the things I do when I'm there, helping people, solving problems, getting an idea across successfully. Granted, I'm not generally helping people in ways that are life-altering, nor are the ideas and solutions I'm offering earth-shattering. But the fact that those things can happen, somehow helps me get through the day. And besides that, it puts a roof over my family's heads and food in our bellies. Leave it at that.

But I can't leave it at that. Beneath this drab exterior is a person who is obsessed with changing the world (though rarely does he do anything to express this obsession, not outwardly, I realize). Maybe it's only really about being desperate enough. I'm not asking much, but I do at least want to ask, how might one change one's day job, so that a chain reaction goes off in one's life. And how might one set a chain reaction in other people around us so that little by little the virus is spread, and somehow we are living in another world?

It happens. We're obviously not living in the same world we were living in say 50 or 100 years ago. Everything's changed, the music, the technology, the way we transport ourselves about, even the way we treat other people, at least as far as our institutions go, or at least as far as they're supposed to work.

What I asked you to imagine last time I posted was perhaps quite a difficult task, I realize. Perhaps not even difficult, maybe absurd is a better word. Yes, quite loony and off the wall, I'd say. Mad as f@#k. I know because I've been trying it too. I'm along for the same ride your on, if, in fact, there is anyone out there at all, anyone listening in to the maniac behind the blog curtain.

On the surface it sounds like kind of an odd, but not too abnormal request, to consider what it might be like at one's day job, if you could transform it into a world that you would really want to live in. But how could such a thing be? Not for most of us. For most of us, it is the biggest compromise of our lives, possibly what makes it a lot less meaningful and pleasurable.

But from another point of view, this is what it takes. It takes a terrible leap over the chasm of unreason and into the land of the absurd. It takes something akin to dementia, schizophrenia, but not dementia or schizophrenia, but something opposite of that. This is what I believe Deleuze and Guattari are pointing at, to some extent, when they talk about deterritorialization, becoming a body without organs.

What I'm offering is not self help, not something that will especially improve one's performance, but just as easily self hurt. More likely neither, but a form of experimentation that is hopefully outside the categories of either side of the dilemna, something to do instead of.

This doesn't mean that there is no chance of a kind of satisfaction to be derived from such efforts. But these satisfactions will be different from those one ordinarily plans for and achieves by rote, or not.

These are not the satisfactions one already knows and can plan for, nor can expect in any way, shape or form. This is what you do not yet know how to experience.