There are moments when it’s so clear to me that I’m living a divided life. The professional me on one side, the “real” me on the other side.
“Real” isn’t the right word here, but I don’t know what the right word is. It’s something like embodied, or tactile, or ontologically solid, or something. It’s not so much that there is another me that is “more real” than the work me so much as it is that the professional world is strangely surreal.
In the professional world, there is no truth, no morality, no clock time, no feelings, no friends, no lovers, no parents, no children, no birth, no death… There is a strange absence of anything that makes a human being.
— § —
Maybe it’s not even that it’s “so clear to me.”
When it lands, it lands; there’s no thought; I’m not reasoning about it. It’s the feeling of suddenly opening first the blinds and then the window on a spring day when you’ve slept in until afternoon but you don’t actually know it.
Firsts you open the blinds it makes you squint; the reaction is visceral. You don’t fully understand what’s happening at first. You’re half asleep. You can taste the sleep in your mouth. You can feel it in your eyes.
But light is light and as you squint the fact of the light causes you to open the window. And when you open the window, the entire world splits open.
Air and springtime and the green of the trees rush in and the yellow of the sunlight reach into you, grab hold of your dormant, grovelling soul and pull it upright, breathe the breath of God back into it, turn it into a sailor and an architect and a carpenter and a soldier and a father and especially and most of all a child.
All at once all of humanity bursts forth from every inch of your skin and you breathe for the first time in a thousand years.
— § —
That’s what it is, some days at 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening, as I sit in my virtual “office” on my eighth, or tenth, or twelfth hour of consecutive work.
Suddenly I am alive and suddenly I am aware both of imprisonment and of sunlight everywhere around my cell. And then I am aware of death, and suddenly it is running behind me and I am running forward in a panic and for a moment or two I can’t type and I forget what I’m doing in the AI platform API call or what the the external partner is looking for tomorrow AM.
Suddenly I’m a person and it’s transgressive, like being a person is some sort of prostitution, like being a person, just being, is confronting a certain kind of authority embedded in every square inch of the present that breathes cash and eats and drinks isolation and hates human souls.
— § —
It happens and for a moment it’s obvious what I have to do. I have to return to reality. I have limited time lift. There is fresh air and sunlight. There is freedom, which has a scent and a taste and a texture. There is freedom everywhere, I just have to quit doing what I’m doing and—
and—
And then it’s gone and I’m back at work and it’s not entirely clear to me what I was just feeling and in any case, whatever it was, it’s clearly neither rational nor pragmatic, the course is already set, the autopilot is engaged, there is nothing to do but wait for the plane to land, any interference is to crash, D.B. Cooper is just a legend and nobody has ever walked on the moon or made music in their garage.
All myth. All made up by people who want to make sure that your LinkedIn profile is never better than theirs, and who plan to accomplish this by getting you to believe in babies, unicorns, and sunlight.
But LinkedIn knows better, and so do you.
— § —
The tale is told of a mammalian species whose guitars and hair and punk rock and skateboards swirled around them in an ecstasy of evolutionary ontology.
— § —
America has forgotten how to be free.
So have we all.
So have I.
I have to do something else, but I don’t know what it is. It is made of more fresh air than what I’m doing now, and it uses a different set of eyes.