Daisy Hill Puppy Farm
There's been a huge freaking project at my day job for the last couple of weeks, one that has just reached the point where most of it is done - it's just all about shooting the stragglers in the head and leaving them for dead.
Jesus, did I just type that? I guess even after about eleven hours of uninterrupted sleep I'm still in that walking-dead mode of taking just one more step toward that ultimate goal. This is the sort of mindset that led me to write arbeit macht frei on an index card and tack it above my desk way back in college during finals week when I would be struggling to complete all of the work I had successfully ignored so far in the semester. (Did you ever have that dream where you're going to take a final for a class that you had forgotten to not attend for the entire semester? Yeah, me too. Even twenty years beyond the big sweat point for me. At least the one about showing up for class in my underwear seems to have gone away from my nighttime parade at last.)
The idea that "self-sacrifice in the form of
endless labour does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom" makes sense to me, given that if you don't sort of blank your mind to the horrible amount of work at hand, your mind (mine, at least) starts endlessly repeating that part from Devo's cover of "Working In The Coal Mine" speaks "I am so tired! How long can this go on?"
My officemates and I began to get a bit giddy as we reached the end of the week, laughing hysterically at jokes that - even now, a scant day later - seem incredibly dull and unfunny. At one point, for some reason, in a quiet moment, somebody launched into a monologue:
At times like this I remember how happy I was back at the puppy farm, playing in the green meadow under blue skies with my brothers and sisters. Those days were wonderful. We never even considered that they might someday end.
There was a quiet pause in the room and I looked up to see who had said that. I saw my officemates gazing at me, puzzled and bemused, and I realized it had been me.
Glad to be back, everybody!
There's been a huge freaking project at my day job for the last couple of weeks, one that has just reached the point where most of it is done - it's just all about shooting the stragglers in the head and leaving them for dead.
Jesus, did I just type that? I guess even after about eleven hours of uninterrupted sleep I'm still in that walking-dead mode of taking just one more step toward that ultimate goal. This is the sort of mindset that led me to write arbeit macht frei on an index card and tack it above my desk way back in college during finals week when I would be struggling to complete all of the work I had successfully ignored so far in the semester. (Did you ever have that dream where you're going to take a final for a class that you had forgotten to not attend for the entire semester? Yeah, me too. Even twenty years beyond the big sweat point for me. At least the one about showing up for class in my underwear seems to have gone away from my nighttime parade at last.)
The idea that "self-sacrifice in the form of endless labour does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom" makes sense to me, given that if you don't sort of blank your mind to the horrible amount of work at hand, your mind (mine, at least) starts endlessly repeating that part from Devo's cover of "Working In The Coal Mine" speaks "I am so tired! How long can this go on?"
My officemates and I began to get a bit giddy as we reached the end of the week, laughing hysterically at jokes that - even now, a scant day later - seem incredibly dull and unfunny. At one point, for some reason, in a quiet moment, somebody launched into a monologue:
At times like this I remember how happy I was back at the puppy farm, playing in the green meadow under blue skies with my brothers and sisters. Those days were wonderful. We never even considered that they might someday end.
There was a quiet pause in the room and I looked up to see who had said that. I saw my officemates gazing at me, puzzled and bemused, and I realized it had been me.
Glad to be back, everybody!
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