Urban Haiku

Sisyphus

Ah – I savour the utter humiliation – the bootlicking prostrations required of me. How I love to demean myself before inferior intellects. How I relish each and every opportunity to run down the checklist of my life. I long to prove to every indifferent stranger how worthy I am – how interesting and talented.

The playful banter required by the situation now sears my brain like a red-hot poker. I am charming and unflappable at all times, but beneath my shiny surfaces I seethe. I run completely on automatic – never pausing, or stammering. I have quick and easy answers to everything. I long to get up from the table and hurl myself at the nearest window.

The temping continues. The endless cycle of scraping up the next mind-numbing office job – until my inevitable demise I suppose. I remember being new. I remember jobs where I had responsibilities – even staff for chrissakes. A quick slump in the local market later and I’m a barely surviving temp-whore.

The universe is teaching me invaluable lessons, right?

Misanthropy

Once, while home sick, I attempted a 24-hour ‘Law and Order’ marathon. I thought I had stumbled across a diamond in the rubble-strewn wasteland of daytime television. By seven or eight that night I was ready to take my own life.

Nothing seems to make my misanthropy spike quite the way Law and Order does. Today I watched an episode about a mother who pressures her daughter into doing porn, in the hopes of furthering the girl’s acting career.

It’s that fucking “drawn from headlines” quality of Law and Order that’s so insidious. It throws a spotlight on humanity’s endlessly creative cruelty. Nietzsche said: “The lawyers defending a criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of his deed to his advantage.” This is the initial appeal of the show – the producers instinctively understand the power of presenting dissections of criminal acts in relatively non-dramatic ways. “Just the facts ma’am.”

The trouble is, hundreds of criminal acts later, I begin to despair. I think I’d be happier if the show was completely fiction - rather than fictionalized accounts of actual events. We actually do this stuff to each other all the time.

I’m going to have a cup of tea and listen to Cast Your Fate to the Wind over and over again. Maybe Vince can bring me back some shred of faith in humanity.

I have to stop watching Law and Order.