August 27, 2007

jack of a trade or two

sitting again in a coffee shop serving the never-disappointing "stumptown" coffee, matches is looking up from his laptop screen every so often to find many other people around his same age doing the same. we are currently the derelicts, the loiterers, the...unemployed : ) and as he watches them, he realizes that we are all webbed together on craigslist, vying for post after post in the jobs section. our eyes aren't so feral as you might expect when we gaze glazedly at one another, considering that we are probably in direct competition for positions (coffee-shoppers generally having the same chances, matches assumes, of landing a job...considering our patchwork rag-doll resumes of skipping from industry-to-industry just to keep our heads above water and try to keep out of boredom; salting our liberal arts degrees with mediocrity and street-smarts). we are actually quite congenial people, and we flash smiles at one another. our jobs have probably already been promised to sons and daughters of executives; the job-postings just a necessary formality of business-class standards. and we know it~

matches knows he will probably just be federal-blackbooked for mentioning it. but communism is just so appealing sometimes. bryan told matches the other day about a sedition movement that is gaining speed in oregon, washington, and a fragment of western canada -- to separate ourselves from our respective unions and form a new country. charming idea. will post the website once he remembers it. he just wishes that he didn't have to bend his mind to fit into little office cubes just to stay a decent citizen...he wishes he could ramble on like he wants to and divide his time as he will, and it will be alright because everyone else is doing the same thing, and working co-operatively, instead of this cloak-and-dagger thing that we have going on now. le sigh.

but really he knows he is very far from having drawn the short straw, and everything is okay. just frustrating sometimes.

does the exorbitantly-priced artwork on coffee shop walls really sell? does it keep these colorful people afloat? or do they all have timber-pile rooms in their studio-apartments where tapestries are thrown over vast rolling hills of unsought and discarded artwork? m typed in 'unbought', and spell-check had a problem with it, but he thinks that as far as a substitution and electro-recommendation 'unsought' works quite well. don't you?

been here for too long, and something that these baristas are doing smells like french toast. improbable. time to traipse through downtown in search of the next big thing. tune in next time; maybe matches will have found it. you have to know that's coming, right?

right?

1 comment:

Panda said...

Seriously, send the blog link to a few independent publications and you WILL get a job doing what you enjoy. Nobody writes like you do, my witty little mattress :)