Kook Mountain

Arnold Harris and I had another adventure this past autumn. We met in Trinity County, he from up north in a purple Ranger and me with all my shit in my minivan driving slowly over bumps and spending last dollars on reintroduced Chicken Littles and Reeses Mini bags. One arm that had been holding the Thule in place had broken, and on the freeway the Thule flapped in the wind, catching gusts of wind and slamming back hard onto the top of the van, causing me anxiety. I pulled into Brad’s and Arnold was already there. ‘The ganja was gone’. The feds had been building a case against Brian since last year. He was cocky, he had invited his dad over to look at the trimmers one day, and while we bitterly estimated their combined net worth he bragged about taking acid at some sort of important real estate meeting. Drug fed and rich, he had apparently worshipped his own balls back then. Rural cops and feds alike don’t like balls displays, and Brian’s acid abetted notion of his own innate freedom has only resulted in a prison term for his father. Meanwhile he’s on the run, probably phoning his representation at inconvenient hours, and when his dad doesn’t mention him it’s out of pride. No, he was not a discerning boss, and his lack of acumen left me very inconvenienced. No one had told me not to come. Arnold and I hit the honey oil proffered by a former authority figure and passed dazedly into unconsciousness on the couch. In the morning Brad led us out to look at at the hacked marijuana stalks, picking up crushed buds here and there and reminiscing about the size of the plants. The crystals shimmered brightly in his memory.

The next morning Arnold and I were very confused about what to do. I tailed him to Weaverville, stalled awhile at the only store, then drove back up 3 looking for a campground. Rush Creek was the second place we stopped. We were there for a week, too timid to even light a fire the first few nights for fear of being discovered by people who didn’t actually exist in the vast wooded expanse of Trinity County. Gradually we settled in. I drained the Quest’s batteries listening to the Orioles defeat the Rangers in half-static, and after that we would just put the Droid in a bowl and listen to male voices tell tales. Frugality quickly became a matter of pride. When the illusion of choice is eliminated, pride often takes its place, and every treat from this point on was more delicious because it had to be mentally earned through a practice of abstinence in which we usually only rarely indulged. After the third night we gained enough confidence to start small fires and quickly phased out the waterlogged salami, replacing it with bunless hot dogs or potatoes in foil. People would often pull into the campground at strange hours to fill jugs of water for their gardens, but one night several ‘visitors’ came at once and, only barely accustomed to strange night time rustlings of the unmotivated kind, we were both terrified by the sudden presence of human intentions in the dark. I was naked in a sleeping bag; truck lights flooded the tent. Who knows what they were doing? I was very weak in that tent. In the early morning hours of the following morning I woke up bathed in sweat and stumbled out into the eerie moonlight. I ran to an area of the forest where the ground was littered with the tissue paper of past campers and shat diarrhea in the nude. Horribly, pitifully. On the whole it was peaceful; I washed my face in the river. After a week we still hadn’t found certain jobs, but we decided to leave Rush Creek to be nearer the rumor of jobs.

After a few days of mildly celebrating our return to civilization with midday beers and conference series matchups, we fell under the employ of some dusted Mississippian playboys, 21st century ganja hicks who no one actually knew. We wound up a series of dusty roads segmented from each other with numeric keylocks, threatening signs and roving dogs. Our destination farm had formerly been the premises of an AIDS hospice service in the 80’s; it was beautiful, with unfamiliar trees bent low against the cliffs and expansive views across the valley where campfires burned suspiciously in the distance. The usual strange cast of trimmers assembled, but these seemed stranger than that still. Perrell, a half-Jamaican nerd, got drunk on the first night and noticed that April was ignoring him. Sitting in my lap, he acted familiar, warning me away from her. “I’ve been here for three days”. He was already in love, a territorial romantic, very uncomfortable. This was the first instance of his obliviousness. More would follow; he eventually had to be called out when he followed April back to her tent strumming a jazzy line on a borrowed guitar and freestyling an awkward paean to his misunderstood lust. Later, the drunk bosses paid him a hundred dollars to swim in a filthy goat pond, very shallow- the next day he was gloating. Perrell was sensitive to growing discomfort, but it seemed as though he was unable to stop its spread. He was the sower who couldn’t discover the cycle. “Out on the street, some call it murrrrr duuuurrrrrr!” he would sing the lines in a throaty baritone during moments of relative silence in the trim room, birthing titters that grew into rebellious allegiances that gradually aligned against their father. He was aggressive, we all agreed- not physically but in his verbal presence.

The second day we were put to work, and it dragged on for seriously long weeks. Marijuana brought to light the nearly unfathomable depths of ridiculousness within each individual aspect of every situation. It was very difficult to turn off, to enter into a ‘normal’ state. Drinking was employed in this regard, encouraging dramatic outcomes. The small dramas of subtle rebuffs and slowly shifting social allegiances became my chief source of entertainment. Arnold and I would mutter sentence fragments and bits of accent and laugh hysterically, then rush out for Solo cups of chili or a plate of chicken-on-the-bone. Meat eaters were forced to eat meat for nearly every meal; access to the healthier looking cooked vegetables and grain mush was denied by reason of our hosts extremely meager food budget. All the action was in repetition. I became obsessed with the way that personalities slowly reinforced themselves through actions that became predictable in their form but always surprising in their detail. Jon became Jon, realer by the day. It was hilarious.

Of the actual work little of meaning can be said. Take a stem of nugs from a box and place them onto a cardboard tray, snip the nugs off the stem and throw the dry twigs into an overstuffed bag or onto the floor, twist the nug in the left hand while snipping constantly with sticky bonsai scissors with the right, removing the tiny leaves from the tiny pipebowl nug and placing it into a bag when completely bald. Many discussions about technique took place, but the only real advantage came from violent mental conditioning and irrational focus. We worked in a series of small dusty barns lit by fluorescent lights. Kif flakes and farm dust filled the air and people developed wretched hacks and, occasionally, rashes. Flies would land on the back of the arm, be shaken awkwardly off with a little jiggle, and then land on the back of the neck one second later. Hours passed, during which inane fantasies of moderate and temporary wealth would proceed by rote through our famished brains. Bodies, rebelling against our general sensory deprivation and its subordination to material aspects of our present circumstance, would develop creaks at the wrists and tension spots at the base of the neck. These were ignored by the strong, but weaker members of the group would often indulge themselves by standing, milling aimlessly or sleeping late and showering. Activities that would indicate and promote health in regular circumstances here become symptoms of general confusion or weakness. Every time someone returned to their filthy chair after a cleansing stroll or drink of water I could not help but calculate the opportunity cost of their mental health in terms of real world dollars. A group of goats wandered the property. One of them was a three legged goat, it’s fourth leg a fragment of exposed bone jutting unpleasantly out of goatskin. Because it could not keep up with the other goats it had acquired a blood curdling shriek that sounded though a human child were being dipped in liquid fire. We appreciated this sympathetic shriek. Earnesta adopted a very accurate version of it for herself. When the work became too tedious and the environment too oppressive, she would give the humanistic goat’s shriek. It was a great description of the task always at hand and an example of a relief that could be permitted, as it allowed the hands to twist and clutch thoughtlessly on while it occurred.

Power. Who had it, what did it consist of? One morning three bosses came into the trim room in turn, upset by some absurd rumor of petty theft they had self-indulgently believed. “I will PISTOL-WHIP-” yelled Jay, with the squalid authority of a man disciplining a dog who has been shut in all day and unhappily resorted to the rug. The thought of corporal punishment ‘pistol whipped’ him into a frenzy, and the subordinate boss’s (as well as those workers who shamed themselves by displaying that they were in sympathy) quick adoption of this vengeance scenario demonstrated what depths their collective boredom out on the mountain reached. Shauna began sleeping in Billy Wayne’s bed- the only bed available, and presumably, only available to her. This action provoked us strangely, and our jealousy of the physical bed was identical to our disgust at its crudely imagined terms. At other farms the bosses would attempt to disguise the power structure with vague references to the medicinal qualities of the herb they produced, or by laying a thick hippy fog over the proceedings by means of heavily seasoned lentils and invitations to hit exclusive pipes. Here it was more naked. Billy Wayne would come in routinely in the afternoon after Budweisers and threaten the trimmers with termination for not turning the hose off, or wildly boast that he could buy Ipods for every worker before going outside and taking potshots at the escaped pig that I once witnessed trying to break into Arnold’s truck (and later spied tumbling down the mountain with a symbolic beer can in its mouth). Then he would return to the barn and crouch near Shauna, saying quiet sentences punctuated by loud ‘Huh?’s. Our young country king for a month, he exploited the position he held at the locus of nervous activity in our minds to the point that we could no longer sustain the illusion that we were at his mercy. He seemed ridiculous- the timbre of his voice approached a neutered whine. The pistol was bullshit, its significance buried beneath the pile of indiscriminate allusions to it.

The last night on his property we experienced his hubris. Blacked out on Zanax and Bud he pulled his gun on Jeffy for revealing him as a real world lame- Phish is not good, we’ve listened to an excessive amount of it, you’re silly, Billy Wayne. “Take your fuckin earbuds out! We’re listening to three thirty minute jams you fucking scrubs!” he yelled at everyone, most of whom had no idea what was going on, as they had been wearing earbuds. “What are you doing, south boy?” Earnesta chided him “where is you mother? I will spank your ass South boy. You are no gentleman”. Her experience with lovers in the Russian mafia back in Lithuania had left her impatient with feeble male aggression, with empty theatrical potency displays and with the abuse of trust. Billy Wayne pathetically flashed his gun at her, threatened to fight us one on one- “I’ve got a pistol who wants to go”- and stumbled off to the bed which Shauna would no longer share with him. Lesser bosses tried to apologize by rolling us each an individual joint- ostensibly because we were to finish the work on this property tonight- and it was at this moment I became most conscious of our degradation. Surrounded by marijuana, why would I want the boss’s joint? The illusion of a community of strange characters engaged in mutual enterprise was gone, and each individual left alone in sad awareness of the degree to which they had postponed actively engaging in a real world to participate in this sad puppet show on the fringes of humanity, to grub a measly dollar. The bosses made us stop working to light our joints in unison. One coerced toke to demonstrate our fake celebration, the rest of the joint discarded.

The next day we were moved to a new location, this one deeper in an alpine forest where horizontal perspective was greatly diminished. A huge barn, some white tarps, folding chairs, a fire pit, tents in the rain. Billy Wayne was replaced by Justin, who had a little more sense of how not to appear foolish through the myopic display of his limited power. Instead of threats when he was blackout drunk, he would occasionally leap into the air and land in the splits position, or express his insincere (or at least very temporary ) love for all his ‘mountain children’. More of a gentleman, ‘Mountain daddy’ allowed ‘people’ to use the shower in the camper- though by this I sensed he meant ‘women’ and I could not be convinced to go near the camper. At this point I refused everything besides the American Goulash (chilimac, peas and corn in a solo cup) which my hunger- understood as a socially acceptable reason to stop working for a moment rather than as an admission of physical existence on earth- left me no choice but to accept. I walked the 30 feet from my tent to the barn, the 20 feet to the campfire to stare at it for an hour after the barn closed, and back to the tent, where I often had some cheezits hid. In some circumstances it is healthier to take no interest in your feelings, thoughts or the world around you- each moment you spend situating yourself according to any logic counts against you, and you will have to spend double the time finding a reason to continue to hack away at 2cent nugs. Watching others grapple with this reality left no time for earbuds with the tired tunes about human desire and invitations to move the body. People’s success in accepting their degradation was measured accurately in the size of their trimmed bud bag at the end of the day. Workers are paid per pound, and since there is only a slight variance in the physical skill required to trim a bud, the size of our paychecks directly reflected the degree to which we were able to force our bodies to make the money that our minds insisted we needed, or how well our minds could predict its own inefficiencies and compensate for them in advance by means of a complicated system of bargaining and rewards- ‘three more nugs and then I will stretch my knee’ etc. Beyond the general absurdity of the Mississippi folk, the marijuana and the psychosexual power brokerage, the most entertaining stories from Kook Mountain are in the individual ways in which each worker coped with their own unruly thoughts and struggled to make themselves money. For my own part I relied on near complete disassociation. I didn’t shit for three days. I rarely spoke in other forms than puns, jokes and impressions. Even still, I couldn’t resist taking breaks, delaying the beginning of the next box or lying in the sleeping bag awake in the morning before beginning work. I ranked in the top third in terms of productivity, a ranking which didn’t surprise me considering my greater than average ability for bodily disassociation coupled with my general mental frailty; I am accustomed to degradation but short on will. A recipe for relative success at the weed farm, though not necessarily cause for celebration.

The spectrum of mental mastery ranged from Jon on one end to Matt on the other. Jon had taken Ayahuasca 32 times. He had sold his bike taxi business in Martha’s vineyard, moved to Peru and probed the depths of his own being, experienced his own death as a result of his weaknesses, communed with the plant spirit and had committed to growth. He had been cradled by the incredibly wrinkled gray alien who had assured him that he is loved. As a result he was able to trim pounds and pounds more weed than everyone else, while simultaneously appearing interested in other people’s stories and engaged in life. He would listen to Tool on his headphones and chop away. I was pretty astounded and a little annoyed at his humbleness and self mastery. His success came from his ability to prioritize moving a scissor quickly above all other facets of his being, a skill which I envied. There was talk about the shagginess of his buds, but there are no criteria that matter for bud shagginess other than the boss’s. And the boss found him satisfactory, rendering the obsessive attention to detail which often slowed Arnold and I ridiculous. Jon took long walks to the barn, looked for work on his forced days off. It was too much, and ultimately we had to ignore him as comparisons between ourselves left us feeling bad. Sometimes, but rarely, he alluded to being horny. This I found funny.

 

On the other end was Matt, burned out from too many years involved in different aspects of the weed business. He’d sit for twenty minutes, scream “FUCK!” and retreat somewhere to take monster swigs of Ten High whiskey and chow Kit Kat. Coming back to the table, he’d work again for an hour, stopping as frequently as possible to yell another comedians jokes, berate someone with his overbearing sexuality, animate something he was saying with his hands or fiddle impatiently with an ipod. On days I would make 200 dollars, he would make about thirty. He worked on these types of farms and in affiliated sectors year round, so his ability to distinguish himself between the automatism required during trimming and the celebratory excesses of the day off was greatly diminished. His ineffectuality was a form of rebellion, and I respected it, as annoying as it was. He would come to the barn dressed in a too-small onesie, be drunk by ten AM and throw stale McDonald’s cheeseburgers across the room, then pass out and finish the day with a net income of about 10 dollars. All of this was for the sake of his own legend. It was a means to create the illusion that life existed and things happened beyond the simple truth of our dehumanization. It was valiant in its way. Of course, behaviors like this are known to get people fired, so another large portion of his time was spent ingratiating himself to the bosses by playing the fool. He and Richard, the sad Iraq war vet who worked the kitchen and lazed angrily about in a t shirt reading “You’re All Whores” in block letters would remain around the fire after most workers had returned to their seats after lunch and talk about who they wanted to fuck, or shoot stuffed animals with a glock in a brotherly fashion. I appreciated the way Matt would absorb people’s attentions, keeping it away from me. The bosses pitied him for his inability to make himself money, and occasionally they would make a show of holding up Matt’s tiny sack and admiring the perfection of his trimming. But any fool knew that quality in the trimming field had diminishing returns. We were not getting paid extra for immaculate nugs.

In the middle of these two extremes another we found Uncle Bill. A small time weed dealer in his mid forties from rural Pennsylvania, Bill was being paid in trade, and for every 1600 dollar pound he brought back east he would reap double, maybe triple that. A totally incompetent worker, he was allowed his repeated nights of being too baked/ drunk by reason would almost assuredly come off the mountain with more money due to the increased risks of his position. Uncle Bill was the camp mascot, and he was having a better time than anyone. He would put his glasses on and determinedly snip away for a couple hours, then drive into town in his minivan and pick up beer and wine, do laundry, eat burgers and return and just laugh. He hated the work, it’s true, but the ease with which he could shrug off our conditions and transform our experience into the type of vacation which he genuinely experienced it as was remarkable and appreciated. He seemed to understand only half of what was occurring at all times, but the joy with which he would seize on strange phrases and then bellow them across the room as an exuberant non sequitor was truly hilarious. “I’m willin out!” he would scream, and the meaning of his phrases were usually overwhelmed with his own human presence. This presence, his insistent Bill-ness, everyone began to understand as a precious glyph that redeemed its baffling context. Here was an individual who was able, by special circumstance, to fully enjoy what was not enjoyable, and did not allow negativity to inhibit our vicarious experience of this joy. He would take three full strength Oxycut diet pills, sweat profusely and yell that he was having a heart attack. He would fly into an impotent rage after being punched in the balls or goaded by a bored Jeffy, but his fear and anger always only made us laugh harder. He would find any excuse to stop working, because for him it didn’t matter. Whether he was here getting drunk or at the house he shared with his parents getting drunk it didn’t matter- he always had access to himself.

 

Aside from these most fully inhabited caricatures, everyone was a character of some kind, and there was a danger that the outrageous affects of desperate personalities reacting violently to an environment that encouraged their extermination would in their turn become people and demand to be taken seriously. But there were grounding forces as well. I came to appreciate Mandy for her sly looks of disbelief in the midst of her performative engagement with people too ridiculous to be true, and Jenna for her upbeat repetitious phrases that indicated that, though she was willing to go along with the interactions that people might devise out of boredom, she was not willing to put thought into her responses. ‘The girls’, a group of attractive women used to making much more money off of binging tourists in the US Virgin islands that had been somehow tricked into working this season, had to put up with far more unsolicited attention than I or anyone else. Male minds would turn to sex, and soon they would be drunk on the belief that it was a possibility. This led to all sorts of outrageous behavior, from ‘Mountain Daddy’ sitting at the table and coyly asking for mixed drinks to strange acts of verbal self titillation in which people would begin describing vaginas and yell about jerking off. Occasionally it would culminate in things like Jacob – who called everyone ‘brethren’ and possessed an unironic enthusiasm for menial tasks (“I guess sorting larf will be my meditation today”) that the bosses exploited while trying to keep their distance- singing “Redemption Song” two inches from April’s face, believing that he was looking into her eyes while she was more conscious of the flecks of spittle landing on her cheek. ‘The girls’ bore it with fortitude and humor, wearing makeup even. It was by their example that I could determine that what surrounded me was not actually depressing, but funny because it would end.

 

Eventually it did end. In the face of widespread burnout on the part of the trimmers – who were on the verge of just crumpling nugs in their fist for the sake of a private fuck you – the bosses had begun to become very vague. ‘Eight to ten days’ they would quietly mutter when we began asking them for approximate end dates. The workers, discouraged by this, would trim slower, spend more time by the fire drunk and our release date would extend further into the future proportionately. ‘Eight to ten days’ became a bitter joke, a response to everything. When the end finally came I was surprised by the degree of bonding which had occurred between us. Everyone took pains to record everyone else’s phone number, though it was difficult to imagine a pretense for further contact once we had been released back into our separate lives. A real sense of solidarity had arisen on its own, and had bound us to each other, possibly even against our wishes. Some refused to acknowledge this, and I found this resistance disgusting, a stubborn individuality that was in the present context nothing other than a ‘boss mentality’. I was sad at leaving, and decided to spend one more night with the group at the Oroville Casino. Once there I showered luxuriously several times and shaved, revealing a face that had been hidden for the duration of my time at the farm. Everyone dressed in their best, or at least cleanest, clothes. I perceived this as an effort to show at least part of our ‘real lives’ to those from whom we had been forced to hide them. It was a gesture of mutual respect.

Arnold went our separate ways down 1-5 shortly after. What you earn after an experience like this is a brief one week window in which you feel entitled to party and consume whatever you wish while the memory of deprivation is still fresh. I had anticipated my release eagerly during my time on the farm. Unfortunately, the real world I returned to is not exactly the welcoming home I had imagined to remember it to be while on the mountain. The money I had earned allowed me the freedom to choose what to do with my time, but there are clocks out here and I can’t help looking at them. When I find myself exaggerating my prep cook experience on my resume or scrolling craigslist for entry level jobs, one can assume I’ll look fondly back at an experience in which the degradation was shared equally amongst many people who lacked the privacy necessary to keep it superficially away. On my own it’s a little less funny.

Permanent Vacation

The time/money equation is not very clear. Time is of less value when experienced without the buffer that money provides; experienced ‘head on’, time is crushing in its vastness and apparent lack of meaning. Money acquires much of its utility in its ability to reroute time through directed activity (let’s take an uncreative example here- buying a lambchop, and then a candle to make it look nice on the plate). The ‘pursuit of happiness’ in the contemporary sense often is nothing other than tinkering with the scales of balance between time and money- finding enough time to spend your money, or acquiring enough money to spend so that time doesn’t make it’s oppressive presence felt. Being of the mind that time (specifically experience) is more valuable than money (potential), I have structured my life so as to more often be endowed with a surplus of time than of money. This has worked out ok so far, as I have been surrounded by like-minded individuals with whom to share this overabundance of experience (and I’m being very generous here by making time a synonym for experience- it is more than likely that it is only the presence of others that have allowed this rationalization and conflation of terms). But, removing these individuals and replacing them with their avatars on the internet in the past few weeks has left me, once again, a little confused as to how and why I have structured my life like this.

Because I am able to provide for myself on a very basic level (I am able to eat (though I did balk and frown at the brown maggots in my rice this morning before grimly picking them out and consuming the rice with a resultant pride), sleep in a house (in which I walk softly in order to make it appear I am not there), bathe (using others shampoo) etc.), my experience is more akin to being on a very prolonged and cheap vacation than struggling for a meager subsistence. When threatened with absolute privation, I am able to summon elements of my various privileges to keep me from slipping in class (whether this involves sleeping on a fellow artist’s floor or being able to land a crappy service industry job that would not be available to the illiterate maimed). But with my ability to survive unthreatened a chief motivator of the urge to ascend in class has been removed. Joining the elite seems impossible due to the various safeguards that have been put in place to keep the lazy and rebellious from stumbling on in to their comfy echelons, and as a result I instead must rely on either hedonism or the ethic of ‘improvement’ as motivators for the actions I must take to lessen the mental impact of the time void yawning in front of me. Both of these motivators require a bit of narcissism, and as a result I have developed an anxiety that stems directly from my refusal to acknowledge narcissism as a sufficiently ethical motivator while still modeling my lifestyle around its unpleasant requests. The chief way in which this anxiety manifests is to complicate the manner in which I experience my ‘free’ time. And although this article isn’t funny at all, it is pretty funny how I end up trying to maneuver around this blockage in my life- this article (as well as others) being a primary manifestation of the problem as well as an attempt to solve it. So in an extremely dry, general sense, this article is as funny as any other endeavor with premises that preclude the content (the profound tweet, the master’s degree in art administration, the shrug etc.). Not laugh out loud funny, that’s for sure.

Having recently moved to a new city, I am constantly asked the question “what do you want to do?” As you can see, it’s complicated. I suppose what I ultimately want to do is rewrite this article from the vantage point of a person who is ‘experiencing the world’  rather than from the point of view of someone who is ‘experiencing themselves (in the world)’ (experiencing alienation). This is the difference between someone who is on vacation and someone who is at work. Uneasy in the workplace, in which I am unable to discern which circuitous path will lead me towards any goal other than that of earning an increased wage in an atmosphere of diminishing physical and mental discomfort (but always retaining the fundamental discomfort of ‘working for…’ i.e. of sublimation), I am unable to make the sacrifices that actual advancement requires. Equally uneasy in vacationland, in which I am unable to extract enough pleasure from time to justify its passing (without the experiential structure provided by expensive drugs or travel), I am unable to relinquish the idea that every moment not spent in hedonistic bliss is a moment of squandered productive capacity. The ‘art’ that results is nothing more than an anxious response to this unresolvable problem. Keeping this in mind, it is increasingly difficult to see anything other than this anxious response in every artifact engendered by my experience of unstructured time- they are all just little impositions of structure; direct contradictions of the premise that freedom is the absence of imposed structures (limitations) on human potential. It ends up appearing as though my freedom consists of my decisions of when and how to articulate the anxieties that arise from compromise, which is not the best for a life goal. What do I want to do? Transform my vacation into work and then take a real vacation from it.

I am tempted here to get into a ‘discussion’ about addiction and repetitive behavior in general as the most common solution to this quandary but I’m sure everyone knows my point already so I won’t belabor it (‘addiction is addictive because of its ability to structure time, congratulations Dyl you figured it out’). What’s more interesting I think is to provide an example so y’all can laugh at the manner in which I flail in the vortex. Last night, disgruntled by my own inability to fully enjoy the hedonistic way in which I spent the day (eating food, listening to baseball in the van, swimming in a swimming pool, drinking beer, reading frivolous articles on the internet and watching a nature documentary in untranslated dutch which I couldn’t understand- all activities which have been divested of some of their charm due to my own routinization of them), I resolved that the next day, this Monday, I would reorient myself towards production and achieve satisfaction from ‘work’ (which, without compensation, loses much of its clarity and is experienced more as rerouted leisure). What a gas. I got up after lying in bed ‘only’ ten minutes after I woke up, then read news websites, made coffee, rice and fish, ate it slowly, refrigerated some water for later, drank more coffee, read some financial articles that I told myself reflected the way in which the world is administered and were thus beneficial to read, put my t shirts in one pile and long sleeve shirts in another pile (plus some t shirts I didn’t like in a bag), uploaded a video that anyone who cares has already seen to youtube and sat down to write this article. Now would you call this day any more productive than yesterday? LOL.

Ultimately what’s missing here is interaction. Without a community both creative work and hedonistic activities fall back upon the weak little individual to justify, something he cannot hope to manage on his own. The online community of quips and congratulations doesn’t have enough presence when I get up and move around the room. Being unable to afford to do things that aren’t almost completely free (excluding the gas it takes to drive somewhere near), I am separated from a large swath of people (moving around in the world requires money). It’s an interesting place to be, on permanent vacation out here in fantasy land. It leads to time usurpation practices like the one I’ve hopefully just tricked you into participating in with me. Thanks sucker.

Bit Part in Bad Movie

I was finally offered the opportunity to directly inscribe my existence into the world yesterday. I was recruited by Central Casting to play a slightly drunk rocker in the background of a popular TV show featuring a horny Fox Mulder, which is a situation I feel as though I enact unintentionally day to day. A more honest depiction of my existence I could not imagine, and I made sixty five dollars to boot. The shoot itself was not particularly interesting, and an objective account of the event could only be interesting as evidence in a lawsuit contending that I had breached some sort of non disclosure agreement. But the subjective experience of “being yourself” in an expensive fake dream was too psychedelic to allow to disappear into the haze of a slightly irrelevant anecdote blurted out in the midst of a discussion on DVDs of HBO shows that people watch when they are depressed, so here we go.

As I prepared for the shoot I began to grow excited thinking about how perfect the role was. They had asked me to arrive the following morning looking ‘grungy’ and like a rocker (“don’t be afraid of the pompadour”). No problem, I thought. But when it came to assemble my ensemble, I became agitated. What if I was not ‘rocker’ enough? I suppose I had been gradually reneging on some of my rocker looks steadily for the past six years or so. What if they were not convinced that I was not any sort of rocker at all? The fear of not being able to adequately portray what I ‘really am’ wracked my mind. The stipulation that I had also to wear all or mostly all black further limited my wardrobe options. The only pants I had that were black were my ‘job interview pants’- baggy black slacks that were the opposite of of the torn and dirty jeans I imagined they desired. I put on these pants and despaired. I felt like a fraud. Not only this, but I had no black band t shirts, not a single one. How had I let this happen? Maybe I’m not a rocker after all? No, I had to reassure myself, I am still a rocker even if I could not convincingly portray one. I ended up with a very plain solid black outfit, with skinhead boots and an old punk belt I found. I couldn’t bring my self to buy grease and make a pompadour because I thought I would just look ‘classy’ if I did that, so I merely hand stoked my greasy hair into a garbled home pompadour that was admittedly awkward. It was the fact that I was going to be paid money that made me worry that I was a charlatan- I’ve felt the same anxiety before when assessing the relative visibility of various wine and mustard stains when dressing for an office job. I gave myself a tenuous grimace in the mirror for reassurance and headed out the door. 

As I approached the set my fears were relieved. There’s a lot of variation in people’s interpretation of the notion of a rocker, apparently. All the men looked like either guidos or leather daddies, and leather vests, mesh shirts and sunglasses abounded. Upon arriving, we immediately had to report to wardrobe where a sunfried middle aged Japanese man in tigerprint pants quickly assessed the authenticity of the extras’ attires. Very few people escaped wardrobe with their outfits intact, and while some people were completely overhauled (a saw one man fitted with some baggy leather bondagewear and others were required to wear leather chaps over their pants) all they did to me was take away the spiky punk belt that I had thought the one accessory essential to my identification as a rocker and replace it with a cheap belt made of linked tin iron crosses. They also gave me a choker made of jingle bells that did not jingle and a tight beeny that said “bones” all over it. I wandered away from the tent looking like a complete rod. Does this mean the entertainment industry truly views rockers as complete rods? Or perhaps that in order to adequately convey what your subcultural identification (and therefore your essence) is you must relinquish your independence and let someone with greater authority than you clothe you in a goofy hat.

The women had it much worse, however. They had been instructed over the phone to “be prepared to show a lot of skin” and came to the set with their own interpretations of what that meant- a lot of cutoffs and cleavage. The wardrobe people were rather merciless though, and the young attractive women emerged from the tent in all sorts of extreme attire. The tight leather corset was a favorite, as were tall stilettos that no one could walk gracefully in. Traditional cleavage, while stimulating, is in 2012 old hat, so many of the women came out with ‘ass cleavage’- skirts so high that the round jiggling bottom curves of their ass loaves were revealed if they stood or walked. While the woman had been selected on the basis of the “lingerie model” appearance, the compromising nature of their wardrobe caused them to stumble and gasp in the sun and took quite a bit of the magic out of the playboy fantasy. Nevertheless, I became a little overstimulated and very self conscious of my been, which I eventually removed and stuffed in my pocket just in hopes of seeming slightly less creepy when I was caught furtively gawking as I could not help but do during the five plus hours of down time. This beenie-burying was a no-no, but I could rely on the fact that there seemed to be twenty different bosses with indistinguishably varying amounts of authority wandering around (or in some cases, laughing charmingly at a scantily clad underling’s polite jest in a feeble bid for pussy) to keep me from being reprimanded. As we sat around, people struck up conversations about other TV shows and smoking weed.

So this was my work, sitting there in ridiculous clothes while trying not to further burden the women by becoming part of the world eyeball that was paying them to rest it’s flabby weight upon them. After two hours of sitting in a cafeteria type room we were moved to a warehouse type room for another hour of just sitting there. The move was not explained, and as we walked across the studio lot a bunch of men wearing short sleeve plaid prints and brown cargo shorts stopped slowly pushing various carts to unashamedly gawk as we passed. Whether they had time to note that I and my fellow men looked like complete rods in the midst of this forced ass cleavage march to “alternate holding area” could not be assessed, but I resented them for their better-placed friends that helped them land well paid jobs as box pushers in a self conscious industry so drunk on its own cherry pink prestige that it sloshes it around everywhere, giving people who might not have even stained their own shirts a smugness that is discernible over vast distances. During this second period of holding I overheard one of the two older extras complaining to the other about how he had been forced to eat garbage while playing a backgrounded homeless guy during a gig the previous week. After more rustling around in chairs and euphemistic cell phone prodding we were ushered back to the set. 

My specific duty was to pretend to see a hot girl, point at her, walk drunkenly to a specific spot near a pool table, continue to ogle and gawk, pretend to whisper things about how attractive I found this imaginary woman to be to my buddy, and repeat. Each extra was provided with a prop drink- mine was a Red Stripe half full of water.  Occasionally this water would touch my lips as I pretended to swig the beer- this repulsed me because I couldn’t help think that this water masquerading as beer was of a lower quality than regular water because it had been thoroughly imbued with the aura of inauthenticity. I noted the aforementioned ‘eat garbage’ extra actually drinking his prop beer. I pretty much had no idea what was going on. My scene buddy, a very fit young man with no shirt and a leather vest, was friendly and we established a mild rapport before he noticed that there were actually topless women around here and became increasingly agitated by his own horniness. A guy whose job it was to turn on a fog machine and blow it with a fan was repeatedly reprimanded by his boss for not blowing it in the right direction, or for blowing it at the wrong time. After doing this several times we clocked out for an hour of lunch.

Lunch was some decadent affair. A mob scene of prawns, crab legs, steaks, aioli, baked potatoes, several pies and chocolate chunk cookies, pestos, ice creams and largely neglected fruit baskets- served on paper plates with compostable silverware, munched ignominiously in the second holding area with our plates on our laps. The chief source of drama for me during lunch was whether to treat it as a ‘value adding’ event- meaning should I eat way more than I want because the food was expensive and they weren’t paying me much? Or should I act as though I respected myself and my environment and eat a large but dignified portion? Being in the background all morning had made me a little paranoid- it seemed as though a second plate might draw the attention ‘head food grip’ or something and cause me to be scolded or ejected. I compromised and decided to gorge only on cookies. After the scarfing we still had another half hour of unpaid milling around, but without taking off my jingle bell choker I felt some role confusion and couldn’t really relax back into my authentic self.

After lunch I was moved to a different area of the fake bar and encouraged to to pretend to talk to a ‘sexy babe’ who had the easy role of being disinterested in me. I pulled this off with aplomb. Again I had very little idea of what was going on around me. I began having some fun with the role and hamming it up, but I was very cautious not to draw attention to myself with extreme hamming. The number one directive of the extra is to not draw attention to oneself. Any attention paid to the extra is always negative- I was supposed to be a seamless part of a drunken and lecherous background wobbling in and out of the vision of a drunken and lecherous protagonist through which the ideas of several executives regarding the relative profitability of drunken and lecherous themes are put into effect. My explicit role was to ‘fill out the world’- meaning that I had to make it appear as though these exaggerated themes were consistent with an actually existing reality which humans lived in (living in this instance being illustrated moving a few steps and appearing drunk, appearing to talk and stare). I kept my face submissively on my fellow extras’ breasts and earned the silence which indicated approval and a job well done. 

Following the shoot, I noticed that Mulder was serving birthday cake to a bunch of the people in shorts. It was clear that the extras should not line up and receive cake from the star, though no explicit prohibition was spoken. The gift of celebrity interaction was a bonus for those who had pointed things and shifted things around for weeks and we had simply not earned it. Instead we were ushered to the sidewalk to hand in our guido-wear and return home. As I left I wondered if I had actually ‘inscribed myself into the world’ as I had thought I would do. During the course of the day I found that being paid, even if you are only being paid to ‘do what you do’ creates a low level anxiety that make you feel strange and that you are ‘not who you are’ (at least, not convincingly). Of course, the expansion of the marketplace into every aspect of existence can cause this feeling to persist even while you are not getting paid. This is why receiving a wage to be a fake rocker in the background is in some ways more authentic than being an unpaid real one onstage- it’s just a little clearer what’s going on. And that’s also why I feel that the experience had a metaphorical truth-substance that outweighed the ‘reality’ of who I am in ‘in my own time’, fraught as it is with fantasy, presumption and methods of psychological resistance to an encroachment of the marketplace which has already occurred. No matter how ‘normal’ I look in my own eyes, I appear foolish to others because I am inept at accruing wealth. Yesterday I flipped the script, and looked ‘normal’ in the background of some fantasy (my presence justified by my wage) while to myself I thought ‘I look and am acting like a complete rod”. In both cases I had (and have) very little idea of what is actually going on around me. What’s the fucking difference?

Charles River Medical Theater

It was only after several fits of petty desperation that, fortified with a morbid depression, arrived in the waiting room at Charles River clinic. Considering it beneath me, at this stage in my life, to work for near minimum wage at the Westside Olympia Target or any equivalent job, I followed instead my predilection for depravity and decided to sell my body to corporate medicine. The drug being tested, for diabetes, had never before been used on humans, and preliminary to admit it required a set of unique restrictions- no cruciferous vegetables (kale, broccoli, cabbage and the like- a restriction I violated by rabidly gorging on D. Harris’ carnitas tacos the night before), no alcohol or drugs of any sort and an eight hour fast- conditions which predisposed all the incoming itinerants to a weary blandness. Punctuating this blandness, in the waiting room that afternoon and all through my stay here, would be loudly exclaimed inanities; the cackling voices of medical mendicants failing to suppress the reality of the existence we shared.

Medical testing demands routine. All experience must be controlled. In service of this effort long questionnaires about medical history must be repeatedly filled out, food intake must be closely monitored by bored nurses (“First bite is at 9:25, last bite at 9:45”), exercise forbidden and doors to the restroom kept closed. It’s strange how the nurses enforce this dictate. No forks must be raised to glistening lips until the second they are permitted to, as though the variations in metabolism in human bodies responded to clock time.  As a result of this obsessive attention to procedure everything feels a little… unscientific. It feels more that the workers here are enacting a very dull ritual than collecting valuable results. Human existence, boiled down to this type of pulpy routine, acquires a false, commercial shine.  The protocols become law once, just to say that it happened, and then the subjects squirm off to their disarrayed lives in which the reality of the pill will perhaps someday manifest, to be forgotten, swallowed hastily with a Red Bull or taken two at a time in a sudden guilty recollection. But I suppose that’s the idea of the control group- to test an experimental medicine on a “normal person” so as not to have to deal with the unpredictability of disease. That the space in which the control group comes into contact with the pill is completely artificial, a stark medical theater in which mannequin people shuffle into their recliners in strict abeyance to some poorly understood formalist theater, isn’t relevant. This is medicine, not philosophy.

Which brings me to the incessant, inane declamations of the patients. I happen to be assigned to the “funny guy” corner. Directly to my left sits RLS (we are all called by our initials here- another formalist gesture towards medical privacy, but one that is quickly foregone when people- and this is common- fail to recognize their new names and must be shrilly summoned to snack by their first names instead), a heavyset forty something year old black man who shaves in the piddly, motion activated stream in the faux marbled plastic wash basin every morning. To my right is ARJ, a grizzled middle aged white man with whom I consistently avoid eye contact. Each has their preferred type of weird antisocial outburst. RLS, who “is used to a higher calorie diet, don’t ask me to move no furniture”, loves to reminisce about chain restaurant bargains- the Applebee’s Tuesday All You Can Eat Ribs for $10.00, the Changs Mongolian Grill in Kent near the Big 5 and Target; he could “get down with some Carl Junior” and “loves me some Family Size Pizza”. These affirmations, spoken to no one in particular, come when he’s in a good mood. At meal time, when the unappetizing repast brings these lofty dreams to earth, the vibe changes. Suddenly it’s all restrictions: “I don’t eat eggs, except boiled”. He also doesn’t eat peppers, cheese (except on pizza) or greens. ARJ’s themes run more to the morbid side- he’s repeated his lame joke about losing a kidney as a way to weight loss three times over the course of 12 hours. “They’re going to take your body and hang it on a meat hook” etc. Macabre themes such as these I’ve been known to enjoy if delivered in an understated way, but ARJ punctuates every statement with a high pitched, self affirming cackle that reminds me of a neurotic thirteen year old on nitrous oxide. These aphoristic statements, if people are feeling sociable, collect into grotesque swirling conversations that morph from belief in God to necrophilia to nurses on Harleys to clit piercings- a nauseating cocktail garnished with manic cackles where periods should be. Sometimes, when excitedly discussing which of the nurses are the hottest, both RLS and ARJ get up from their recliners and stand for one purposeless moment before sitting down again. I’m convinced that none of these statements serve any purpose than to simulate the feeling that they allude to. RLS talks about food because he wants to summon the appetite that made him feel alive. Sex talk about horse faced nurses alludes to a virility that can only be completely dead. Popping up from the chair? Human boner marionettes dancing to the beat of a struggling will.

The facility itself is a sterile taupe monstrosity, windowless to avoid the fluctuations of natural light. A giant commons area, called ambiguously “Conduct”, is divided into four distinct quarters. Towards the back a 52″ TV towers darkly over rows of leather chairs populated by zoned out “participants” covered in thin beige blankets. Old issues of People, Woman’s Day and Popular Mechanics (“I hope GM doesn’t go out of business” a chubby older participant says sadly to himself) litter the chairs and floor.  The TV churns on and on, shifting seamlessly from “2012” to “24” to the 10:00 news- no one seems to take control of the remote. The sound of TV makes it impossible to think; especially maddening is a Burger King commercial featuring an adult baby in a sandbox failing to comprehend the world- a commercial that seems way too cynical to sell anything besides self hatred, which everyone seems to have plenty of already. Behind the theater are a few tables with incomplete puzzles, board games missing pieces, and the eternally occupied internet kiosks. Glancing furtively over the shoulders of the surfers while waiting for a turn, I find that they are a)indiscriminately downloading pictures of volcanoes and pyramids onto their shared desktops b)browsing Safeway’s website for coupons c) reading the online sports page. At the darkened card tables in the back I’ve seen two different people idly reading the yellow pages.  The procedure area extends outward from the leisure quarter, carpet turns into off white linoleum set off by mottled olive squares. Three rows of ten recliners each face forward toward a blank wall. These chairs are where all the research gets done. Phlebotomists scoot rolling blood extraction, vitals and ECG stations along in office chairs, taking blood in staggered five minute intervals from restless patients. Some lie fully reclined, laptops on their chests, punching the keys of some Flash game. Others phlegmatically discuss God or women with the underpaid nurses, who cast anxious glances at one of the 10 synchronized digital clocks that scatter the upper part of Conduct’s ceilings. A row of airplane like bathrooms line the right wall. Along the left wall is a mess hall, set apart by a clear acetate screen, affording a slight respite from TV chatter. Meal times are so anticipated by the participants that this dinner area has an exclusive vibe. Only a chosen few sit in here at any given time, and conversations around the table seem somewhat more animated.

Participants quarters are accessed through a horseshoe shaped hall running all around Conduct. My quarters consist of four single beds arranged economically in a cross stitch pattern. The room offers no relief from the incessant TV info flow. My roommate, who’s initials I haven’t bothered to learn, loves to have comedy central on while he pecks infrequently at his inexpensive laptop.  Thought is cancelled out. Periodically, a voice on the intercom reminds study 076 to come drink their water. A single window looks out into the morgue next door (ARJ wildly asserts that he witnessed an autopsy through the window last study to couple of skeptical phlebotomists). Most bizarre, however, is the slow, futuristic flange sound that constantly hums through the walls 24 hours a day. No one comments on this dystopian sci fi sound effect, and the restless brain, lying untired in the stiff bed at 11 pm, imagines a large machine swirling urine and blood into a complex spiral, sifting Fajita waste from valuable data. For all the attempts at control, for all the studied blandness, the environment leaves an imprint. Beyond the slimy residue and the strange, lithops- like pattern left by ECG leads on forearm skins and the wrinkled imprint that tight gauze strips leave around the elbow are the mental imprints left by repetitious actions in a confined space. The funky keyboard outro that every daytime show uses to segue into commercials. The ungrammatical instructional sign for clean catch urine collection in the bathroom that I stare at every time I urinate reading “Hold Labia Apart With One Hand Until Finished Urinating Container”. The inarticulate anxiety, manifesting as lower back pain, that comes as a result of not being able to move the body in any manner besides slowly shuffling from one chair to another. My unnamed roommate tilts his head upwards at a visibly uncomfortable angle, to pore over a commercial for 5 hour energy featuring a man riding a mountain bike. We conform slowly to the environment, emphasizing again the absurdity of representing a “normal human”, that which they are constantly testing to see if we are, in this setting. The skin receives the needle, over and over again.

There’s a lesson to be learned somewhere here. Although the evidence of economic hardship is everywhere, it seems more like people come to medical studies like these because the idea of being able to veg out and watch movies is more appealing than work. Charles River clinic simulates a prison in the sense that it forbids people to leave and exercise, but the manner in which people spend their time, beyond that, is up to them. The fact that so many people choose to float in a TV haze, room to room, is weird. Either it’s a haven for leisure addicts or it’s Stockholm syndrome on a huge, culture wide, scale. You tell me?