I Sit In a Pod

I sit in a pod. This is my essential existence, which is to say that if one were to compile a catalogue of photographs taken on the hour, every hour, of me doing whatever it is I’m doing at that juncture (au natural – or as close as one can get to it these days) and proceeded to fashion a crude flip-book from the resulting images, the effect would be that of a stationary subject/object, seated, face illuminated by the other-worldly glow of a computer screen with the odd blurred figure rushing past in the background every ten photos or so to serve as a reminder of the highly managed climate-controlled pseudolife taking place on the perimeter.

Of course, I haven’t actually tried this. Nor have I asked anyone if they would consider taking it on as a sort of personal project, a document of: a) the times, b) my generation, or c) the ever-expanding employment segment foisted on people my age as the only sweat-free and thus, respectable, post-graduate commercial undertaking - one depending on and back-feeding the crippling depression and sloth which drains the ambition to actually do anything other than ponder the vast possibility of some alternative fantasy land: office “work”.

Neither of my grandfathers sat in a pod. They hauled pulp and gravel in trucks whose oil and grease worked its way into the folds of their skin, marking their flesh like arteries on a road map. They built sawmills, houses and communities with the same hands that furrowed the soil. Providing sustenance and guidance without ever once stooping to the so-called man. Rising early, going to bed the same. A life of labour understood beyond mere commodity; drinking clean water from their own wells, and sweating it out in rivulets from under rolled-up shirtsleeves, beading on their brows and the backs of their necks, moistening calloused hands.

Ambition was more than mere ideological rhetoric before the invention of convenience, when “factory farm” seemed a contradiction of terms – long before Ray Kroc got his greasy paws on a milkshake machine. Farmers were more than a cuddly novelty for rock-stars and politicians to rub elbows with when convenient, to remind their consumers and constituents of their marketable working-class roots. The “ambitious” Maritimers of my generation have forsaken the land of their forebears.

The land and those who worked it were the backbone of a rural population, a former majority that has since thinned away to nothing but a tree-laden suburbia, its exposed ribs barely weathering the flurry of our culture’s left-right combinations of greed and complacency. Bruised and bloodied against the ropes, eyes swollen purple-skinned and gaunt, locked in a purgatorial standing eight count.

Sweat is dirty, sweat is evil and we have myriad products designed to stamp it out or cover it up. No one can make a living wage through sweat-inducing jobs anymore since they’ve mostly been replaced by machines, with the notable exceptions being that of prostitute and professional athlete.

So I sit in a pod. And maybe I should suck it up.

Sometimes You Just Have To Root For The Underdog

Now that’s a shitload of dead firemen! While I’m neither easily impressed nor callous, I just gotta give props where props are due: Go fire go! Too long have you been imprisoned by our generating stations, cigarettes and stoves; held down by the stranglehold of learned servitude — kept in check by our plentiful water. Fire rarely, if ever, gets its due. We bask in its heat while never once pondering the parentage of our artificial room-temperature. Firemen on the other hand are constantly on the receiving end of one sociopolitical handjob or another by simply getting paid to snuff out an energy that dares to bring a kineticism with its potential. But kids don’t want to grow up to be fire. It’s that suffix, man. -men! Fucking pigs. So next time some shill hands you a poster of a fireman, set fire to it. Go fire go!