I have come once again to the painful realization that any person I work for will inevitably make me feel like I am obviously a bastardization of nature that should have been exterminated when first I raised my knotty head. I have grown accustomed to being despised. This comes again and again into my life because I often try to do the right thing instead of the proper thing,
or maybe just my thing instead of their thing,
or maybe my take on their thing wasn’t what their thing actually was,
and because my idea of the highest ideal (with which I do all things) involves a thought process foreign to most of those granted power over others, called “creativity.”
You’d think I would have gathered our social structure’s subtle whispers and headshakes, stared hard at the result and made some adjustments, tried a different tack.
But in fact, since I have a lot of trouble liking any of the components of the giant machinery of society (particularly the machinations of the workplace), my first impulse is to puzzle and balk. With robot cornea of The Terminator, I inspect, dissect, and find I myself to be a different sort of species compared with what I’m viewing.
I generally have a lot of righteous indignation at this stage (which turns rapidly into an Agent Smith-like detest)
which frequently leads me to the unfounded conclusion that I have sovereign power over my own experience.
This mirage doesn’t last long, not to worry; I have my come-uppances on an hourly basis, and sometimes much more often.
The second impulse I get is to dismiss and disregard, since I am a benevolent human being at heart, and much squishier than a Supervillain. I have always been further aided by early indoctrination in The Thumper Creed: “If you can’t say thumpthin nice, don’t say nothin at all.” I believe that I might have misinterpreted my mother’s intentions on the actual scope of application of that statement. Here you’re supposed to have a giant stag of a father who would compliment that with some sort of Take ACTION! statement that would have counterbalanced the constant admonishing.
Maybe nothing aggressive, but something … Proactive, let’s say.
“Follow ME.” he might have said.
“Go back and shake their hand and introDUCE yourself.”
A father might have said that;
but because my father was one of THEM –
(he wore a HAT for heaven’s sakes) –
I had already disregarded anything proactive he might have said. I was as puzzled by him as I was with the rest of them. And most of the time, he just went back to watching his program. He needed a lot of space back then.
The third impulse is to flow
glow
grow
go rocket off into my happier previous paths of thought prior to being so imposed upon by the fetters of regard and acknowledgment. Here I swoon into the visions of the film I was just cinematically choreographing in my mind, which settings I was considering, what kinds of faces and words I was using, and what kind of buckram would hold a shape so dramatic as that, it would have to be grommeted and suspended, perhaps even thermoplastic boning, and ….WAH WAH?
WHAT? What did you say? and I’ve suddenly lost the entire groundwork of my present surroundings and my innermost dark secrets as well and I see it all crumble into a confusing spew of verbage from this OTHER person (WHO’S THAT?) standing there all Charlie Brown’s teacher of a wah wah
WAH Wah Wah-Wah WAH???
expecting me to have offered something cognitive in their general direction and I have no answer because they weren’t IN my movie,
or my science project,
or my vivid memory of a Hershey’s Kiss decorated chocolate birthday cake,
or my rehashing of yesterday’s argument,
or my poem,
or my philosophical psychodiscourse on my education of self and its flaws.
WAH wah-wah wah wah.
(They’re still here. What the fuck?)
WAH WAH?
Sorry?
This leaves me suddenly mired in a chocolatey pit of impossible shame, having somehow lost complete participatory validity,
(raise your sheepish hand)
and of course now risking the inevitable evaluation of that separate thing-like being, who by this time has sniffed around the tree of my mental inaction and pronounced it void of purpose,
HOLLOWWWWWWW!!!!! (knock knock!),
apparently lacking in IQ points (ah how they love their own scales!).
BAD ARTIST! No Mensa for YOU!
One gets accustomed to being regarded as mentally retarded or just disobedient,
(SPACE CADET!!!)
unwilling, unwelcome and unwanted. They really think you’re doing it to spite them, too. Particularly when you’re young.
All in a sentence or two, this can happen: You can be a nice person, a worthy charge of an instructor, or a valuable employee, or a perfect significant other, and just one of these AHA!!! moments can turn your status to permanent shit.
So you get used to living with being despised. You know it’s going to happen. It might happen several times today. Get ready to be beat up again. >WINCE<.
This is how you ruin your credentials as a friend, a colleague, a member of a planet you had no intention of staying on in the first place. You were born HERE, they insist, and because you keep trying to float away,
you red balloon you,
you will be punished.
I used to know a lawyer who had a calligraphed statement on his wall behind him:
“If you can’t dazzle them with Brilliance…
….Baffle them with BULLSHIT!”
And that, my creative ones, is all the salvation you’ve got left. Spew out something unrecognizable that they can wrongly attribute to something
faaaaaaaaar
outreaching their capabilities. Dropping names helps too. I think the entire 1950s asbtractionist color field painting movement did well with that. (And I like them well enough, too.) Performance artists of the 90s, for SURE. They built Babylonious towers of it.
You will become a great liar. Your childhood will be sullied with the sins of deception. Skills of the socially challenged. Sharpen your lies well or they’ll come and take your stapler.
I’ll be thinking up some great one when the next wage-earning interruption comes.
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