Feb 2015
The Blue Collar Lament
by Ryan Kinney
I spend most of my week in a semi-conscience trance watching multi-million dollar machines work. They are more alive than I am. Monday at 3 PM I click off my brain, switch on automatic, and begin the countdown-T-minus 40 hours. Each minute that ticks by in the dull monotony slowly steals my sanity, bit by bit. The vampire conglomerate that signs my check robs me of my youth, intelligence, and vitality until I am just another mindless automaton.
These walls are masters of time. Each minute closer to Friday gets slower and slower, until on Friday they seem to tick backwards. Then on Monday, the entirety of the previous week repeats. Each day blurs into the other making them indistinguishable.
The dictator they put in charge of the asylum barks out commands on cue, just to remind everyone that they own you. All the while he never realizes that he's just another puppet dancing for them, only his strings are shorter. When they inevitably cut them he has further to fall.
I often welcome sleepwalking through most of the week. In the few instances the machines malfunction I curse being awakened. At least as a zombie I don't feel my mind rotting.
I live on the weekends. I shed the identity the uniform has forced upon me and my true self emerges. On the weekends I love life, I achieve the goals I value, not the hazy path set before me by the corporation that owns my soul. For two days the dungeon master gives me reprieve from my incarceration. Upon clocking out each Friday I suddenly feel rejuvenated, while Sunday night I begin dreading the impending coma.
The desperation for dollars are the shackles that keep me here. I am only truly living two days a week and dying the other five. I've made a pact with the devil, 5/7th of my life for a weekly pittance. Until the decay of my body matches that of my brain I return weekly to mind numbing tedium, the memory of my weekend existence fading into the background.
Written 1/28/08 while on the "job"
Edited and organized into sensibility on a weekend.
by Ryan Kinney
I spend most of my week in a semi-conscience trance watching multi-million dollar machines work. They are more alive than I am. Monday at 3 PM I click off my brain, switch on automatic, and begin the countdown-T-minus 40 hours. Each minute that ticks by in the dull monotony slowly steals my sanity, bit by bit. The vampire conglomerate that signs my check robs me of my youth, intelligence, and vitality until I am just another mindless automaton.
These walls are masters of time. Each minute closer to Friday gets slower and slower, until on Friday they seem to tick backwards. Then on Monday, the entirety of the previous week repeats. Each day blurs into the other making them indistinguishable.
The dictator they put in charge of the asylum barks out commands on cue, just to remind everyone that they own you. All the while he never realizes that he's just another puppet dancing for them, only his strings are shorter. When they inevitably cut them he has further to fall.
I often welcome sleepwalking through most of the week. In the few instances the machines malfunction I curse being awakened. At least as a zombie I don't feel my mind rotting.
I live on the weekends. I shed the identity the uniform has forced upon me and my true self emerges. On the weekends I love life, I achieve the goals I value, not the hazy path set before me by the corporation that owns my soul. For two days the dungeon master gives me reprieve from my incarceration. Upon clocking out each Friday I suddenly feel rejuvenated, while Sunday night I begin dreading the impending coma.
The desperation for dollars are the shackles that keep me here. I am only truly living two days a week and dying the other five. I've made a pact with the devil, 5/7th of my life for a weekly pittance. Until the decay of my body matches that of my brain I return weekly to mind numbing tedium, the memory of my weekend existence fading into the background.
Written 1/28/08 while on the "job"
Edited and organized into sensibility on a weekend.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UNYAYN17pI&index;=187&list;=PLPvb07CD2LbgXN0YvnrZ79D9vrgGEUYUY
