What is Jesus Christ doing up there?
Jim Cooper (pictured) wonders what Jesus Christ is doing up there. We’re told He’s sitting at the right hand of the Father. We’re told a lot of good things, from the very highest authority, these days. Then we get laid off. Last night I had a dream that I lost my job. The news came suddenly, flying in the face of all the assurances that came before. America fell.
Who has lived through an apocalypse? What is going on today and what does it really amount to?
I remember a co-worker, head shaved, needy, drove a big truck. Overcompensated for loneliness. He was in the gang a number of times when we all went out together, and he was there once when I was unceremoniously uninvited, but happened to crash the party by chance. I stumbled into a bar, with a new girlfriend no less, and there they all were. There was a cabal going behind my back. At that time I had a crush on a coworker named Lilith. My crush came months and months too late, and she was having nothing to do with me. So she decided to be cruel to me. She decided to uninvite me out of her life. I confronted her on the dance floor. I asked her why she was doing that. She turned away and yelled “Stop!” I am friends with Lilith now, and that is all in the past. But fates can change on a fleeting change in the wind. Lilith is engaged to be married now. She still has a cool name, like the demon that preceded her. She was the first woman, before Eve, and she stands for the mythological menace that women hold over me to this day. I need to get over that, probably.
The bald coworker has been laid off. These people all broke my heart. Lilith was the least of them. Men and women look into my soul each day, and they see nothing of my soul. Men and women bumble around every day, and I see them at their worst. I see the divorcé, clinging to the hair he has left. And the young ingenue, blindsided by the bitter old men. One man is over 300 pounds. Another is wasting away in sickness, bone-thin. Others are good-natured and sweet, but they’re just trying to keep up right now. They’re all scared.
I am an artist. No one at work sees me as an artist. No one knows me.
We could, any one of us, fall tomorrow. One co-worker had a ruptured aorta, and yet breathes. Who knows, it may have saved him his job.
Expenses are mounting. I can not afford any of our products. I labor.
My friend Jim (pictured above), an Evangelical by-product who works at a piano store, wrote this song “Piano.” The snaky, sulky bassline brings a secret menace with it, like a closed-door conversation involving headcounts and operating income. SOMEONE is in the know. Someone is fighting their better angels right now, fighting to keep humanity OUT of the picture. It’s business, just business.
Business is bad.
Who’s next? I don’t care anymore, they’re all fucking jerks. No, I don’t mean that… I love them all.
No, I don’t. God help me. God help me survive.
“I am an artist. No one at work sees me as an artist. No one knows me.”
perfect.