unemployed

July 15th, 2004

i imagine she is brown, older, very, very kind. and happy now. smiling. employed.
employed.

i don't know how to experience rejection; i construct myself at the interview, childlike. terribly vague and naive. they can't wait to go. they're wanting to roll their eyes, as i speak about my experience. my young life.
i don't know enough.
the wrong people were rooting for me.
i believed too much in myself.
underinvested.
they were mean, and controlling, and immediately contradicting.

(none of this is true.)

what went wrong? the verdict is not in my favor. the variables are jumbled and distorted. i have no insights about my past.

and how do i confront my own unknowing? i pretend drastic choices. i won't sleep. i'll have no food. i'll take up smoking. throw up a lot. snap pictures of everything. write about everyone who lost something, mostly me. i'll leave the car parked, forever. i'll wear my disillusionment, and guard myself from my life. candid, unrelenting life.
i had too much faith in possibility.


i was sitting with coffee, and karen. she was sensitive, curious, cautiously concerned. she was not sure what i needed. (i resented us both, lacking direction, having distance.) a small gray bird hopped to our table for food. i felt special, and watched it closely. karen tipped an empty cup, and it flew to the next table, startled. the women there did not see that it wanted to be noticed. it did not notice that i wanted to be seen. our encounters are random, self-motivated, unimpressionable. i hate that selfish bird. gray bird. (i loved it until it took me for granted.)

we drive to go car shopping. make plans for the garden. there are fleeting sentences and fused colors in my head; i want to go home. i have no memory of myself. i don't know where i am. (they make me cry.)

and you remind me in a letter i received today of my car payments.
economics is a cultural trap. i fucking hate money.

and i understand hopelessness in one petrifying moment. (i am standing sunburned with a sign at the end of a highway exit. people pass, with varying degrees of sympathy: "can't get work. anything helps. god bless.")

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