Chapter 1- Downfall
My downfall - the loss of my job at the library - coincided with my spiritual death. It seemed the universe decided to educate me, show me some real home truths. I lost my anchor to reality and could only find comfort in books and alcohol. Bye bye job. Bye bye house.
Have you any idea what it is like to be unemployed in today’s mishmashed, digitalized , mesmerized society? Do you have any concept of what unemployment means for someone like me; a lover of literature and a hungry mouth for the resultant spiritual encouragement; a person with an understanding of beauty, craft, nuance of word-play, spiritual lightness, a human with a gentle and poetical soul?
I simply cannot get a job. I cannot get even an interview. I have applied for hundreds of jobs and the only lucky break I got was a fractured wrist as a result of being drunk on melancholy, lost opportunities, alcohol. I cannot get a break financially or spiritually. It is as if a karmic key has turned and the result is I am locked out of life, out of society.
When I walk the City streets (and accidently relax my psychic shield) I am assailed by the consumer scream and buybuybuyme demand from shop windows displays, am thrust into the reflection of the river of modern society; that of consumer, a society from where I have been cast, thrown. (Let he who is without sin...) Shops display goods which I cannot buy. How do you think I feel? I become further disowned from the mainstream, made to feel constantly and consistently redundant. (I observe people who have jobs - those with money - the chosen ones who can buy food and clothing without care and I am jealous and angry and via the mirrors of society made to feel so fucking small. Dead.)
Items displayed in shop windows - why are they called goods? For me, and the growing millions like me, they are unobtainable legally. When one has no money these goods have a voice and a definition of their own; they become ungoods. By extrapolation I am not good; I am bad. I am marginalized - i.e. not even making it to the first draft; scribbled on the side of a page only to be lined-through, scratched out, dismissed; seen as unsuitable, unusable material, deleted, erased, forever lost. I become marginalized to the point that I am not even offered the chance afforded to the majority living in our times - that of having a social imprint, a digital fossil.
The world around me (it is my world too), shrinks and fades and a claustrophobic life of emptiness engulfs and consumes and quickly saps me of any will to fight, live. As a result of this unemployed non-life (one can not use the word living), hatred builds up as options lessen, lesson. Take note: there are uncountable fingers in dykes, millions holding back the pent up force of demanding embryonic waters. I am simply one of the masses with a finger that is swollen, aching to be removed, demanding to be pointed, and become less and less human until finally I am no longer a human, but instead become a descriptive force, one of the army, who, by no fault of there own, become a definition in a hellish Johnsonesque dictionary, shunned, and due to massive fear unread, ignored by the majority - the supposedly caring and intelligent society, dismissed by those with work, in work. Exhausted, no longer able to sustain, I remove my finger and evolve into a word in a dictionary. I am metamorphosed and stand up and am proud to define the word and non-existence that is marginalized.
(I can forget the comfort of a lover as no one is interested in me; they have been fed the advertisingbrainfuck and fuckingprinceandandprincess fairy tales and believe the metaphoric and actual grass is greener on the other side. Well who can blame them? For I am dry and barren and must face this actual and spiritual death alone.)
I am left with bitter memories and closed walls which echo them in a dull thud of urban decay and techno heart beat. I am locked-down, ground into the machine and am gifted - offered by default - a substandard life, one in which dreams are not so much as shattered, but quietly and diligently and without further fuss expertly suffocated. It is to this end I am working, have finally found useful employment.
I am no longer content with a silent death. In many ways I am fucking smart. I have something which money or love cannot buy. At best I have magik. At worst I have magik. I am inspired. I can and will inspire others. I have a voice.
(The lessons from this life will feed my word-flowers. I will vocalize, make you understand all I have been through. I will use this knowledge and scream it from the page and not just on my behalf, but also for those who, like me, are deemed redundant, who have no choice, voice. When this time comes - and it is coming - I will signal it via words and books and the ability to put it down on paper, scream via cyberspace, my space, and I will feel free, be free, and by the alchemy of thought and considered words and simple strength of character I hope to free others trapped in the machine too. I will rise, be vital. I have a beautiful, subtle, and guided caring power. I refuse to stay silent and die in the shadows. I will be me. I will shine.)
This scream is for all who care to understand it.
