Middle America - Middle Ohio - Middle of Nowhere. The wrong side of the freeway. Patron of food pantries and yet disqualified from unemployment benefits or food stamps. Two previous employers who don't need my warm or cold body to fill a slot in the schedule. Budget is the polite explanation from work friends of half a decade of working together. Isolated, Inexplicably sidelined from ones own life in a strangers purgatory of purpose. Or lack thereof. Estranged by the constant evolution of technology that I once was quite adept at using. Free to write this because no one is reading. This or anything. The luxury of not mattering. It has its consequences though on the space where one should have a soul.
In the end I'm cleaning a house, keeping a yard detailed like a car, then detailing a car over a decade old. I forgo cooking alone because of not wanting to eat alone. Instead I make a Gin tonic and watch a show called the Americans. Sometimes I water the lawn because that's what old men used to do but I can't really afford the water bill. I miss cheap barber shops where women were never at place in. I keep the appearance of home but its just a house. And not a safe one at that. The windows don't shut in the winter and they don't open in the summer. Somehow I am just trying to keep up an American appearance. Trying to perpetuate the illusion. To fill in the gaps that I tell myself that I'm a sleeper agent waiting on a source code that isn't being broadcast anymore. An operatives set up in a dingy suburban get up to play out a part in. Just to be a part of something. Except there is no part and no one is watching. More importantly there is no one back at the other end of an imaginary line to report back to somewhere vague North or Middle East of the Atlantic.
My life is the life real people use to threaten other real people with for non-compliance.
I grill meat like some pagan sacrifice, Occassionally burn some wood in the backyard like a modern day suburban Zoroastrian. I stopped taking photos with my camera to prove my existence because even then I went unnoticed.
Exchanging religion for some cheap Gin to keep the proselytizers of a super market selection of religions away.
I think for three decades now I have just been looking for employment with a purpose and one or two that would at least marginally surpass the basic cost of living in a cheap burnt out neighborhood. Ragged under pants so full of holes I'm embarassed to put them on. Mismatched socks with holes. Bed clothes with holes. I stopped buying clothes a decade ago. Designer body bags haven't reached the market yet but I'm ready for them none-the-less. Its strange how Soviet all this life in the West has become unintentionally.
I can't seem to make a friend. The few I have do not make sense in their life obligations that leave them no time to just, say, have a cocktail or some caffeine and chat. The screens have invaded and absorbed everyones attention. As a kid I remember cocktail parties that had to be endured on good behavior in nice clothes for parents playing the same charade just for the free liquor - that all changed into religious affiliation activities with mothers against drunken driving. I miss the smell of cigars in the back ground. I miss smokers and neurotic drip coffee obsessive conversation over dinette tables.
There is no getting laid at this age in the gay games of a techy society. There aren't neighbors to talk to you unless they want to rope you into their religious psychosis. There is no getting called back on a job application for minimum wage. The corner cafe where one could drink coffee or alcohol in polite society has become a gas station quick mart to buy blunts, beer and diapers. No place to commiserate in being left out in the cold or to navigate a life alone.
And though all this I know comes crashing to an end when the numbers run out - and the numbers keep going down as the years go up - I keep thinking the decimal place in the numbers of my life is just one more column to the right than it really is - I work hard to manage the appearance. Things like blood, sweat and tears are the cocktail of effort to perpetuate the illusion of a parcel of an American property long past its use by date.
The lights are off. The windows closed. The curtains drawn. The night oddly warm for this time of year. The hand held phone on a pay and go no contract plan doesn't ring. The blue rotary trimline wall phone isn't hardwired anymore to line strung up out back. There are no alerts for a text or email message from someone wanting to maintain a line. The lines have all been stretched so thin for so long that they have long since snapped. Members of a so called family failed decades back.
Sometimes in the house I feel there is no air. I go out at night and sit in the backyard - there is no place to walk to - the stars don't penetrate the light pollution. I know there is the milky way and distant galaxies and planets and stars beyond my ability to comprehend. The crickets still make their music and that is about the only solace in these last weeks before the cold sets in. The bedroom window is still boarded up now for four years so its not possible to leave open for the company of the crickets outside and their sound to stave off the plaguing sense of aloneness.
You can't tell someone like me - in the rut I am to just go out and make friends - to have a friend you have to be a friend. To get a job. In a world where no one has time for a friend. The technological devices we are absorbed with actually just mask the fact that we are too self absorbed to want to connect. Notions like a spouse or children, in-laws, pets, friends from wherever - these have become material accoutrement with which we self identify with like the car we drive, the house we live in, the neighbohood we come home to. People in ones life have somehow become just another material possession on the path to hoarding. Even a job has become a material thing to possess - And yet we live lives where we can only hold on to things for a short while. And we don't think of the all encompassing vacancy we will inhabit. An isolation that is coming for us individually.
Partners leave, numbers disassapate as the decimal places in accounts move in the wrong direction, I don't know about you but I just misplaced everything. There aren't photograhs anymore to prove what and where I once - was. Computer viruses knocked out motherboards with contents of family members and friends and places that were once home. People and family long since gone. I have no idea where the photographs from the days before the personal computer and internet went. Even books have become inmaterial. I once had a shelf of books to be read. Books in waiting. The rest of the shelves were books I had read - textual places my mind had been that I could reach for and grab and flip through and find the place I once was. Even they have gone - most of my life somehow fell between two continents and two countries and two unions of states. Some such relationship over a decade an a half - I think. I'm not sure what was real now. The only constant has been social isolation and unemployment since. A sense of everything slipping through my grip.
I wrote things of high risk once. Or so I thought at the time. Mostly I was just trying to excercise my mind to think for itself through a keyboard. Bad I suppose to somebody somewhere within some bureau with a quota to fill. I thought that's what we were supposed to do. Freedom as the notion of which if you don't use it you will loose it I thought. I wrote all the bad words strung along in all the wrong ways. Never bothered to edit it. To push all the right buttons or wrong ones depending on your point of view - I traveled to the places the Americans seldom go see or much less even try to understand behind written and published words. You know to put myself where my written words were. To see for myself the lies in the news. Back in the states I ended up in some unpleasant situation in unassuming cars with someone who didn't care and who wasn't going to form any bonds with me to account for a file set before me of my writing. You know Kafka-esque like. More like Agent Smith and a desk in matrix and an unspoken threat behind slightly amicable sneering questions. For which there are no right answers.
I said all the wrong things because at some point someone has to say to them. I mean in a free society isn't that the point - to think and say and write and self publish the things that people in other places or too in debt cannot. I thought I lived in a realm of free thinking, free press and free self publishing. I thought I would find a job. A purpose with a token income in that effort. I disregarded the Patriot Act. Dismissed it in fact. As we all should have.
And the consequences by coincidence or by an unseen hand:
Or by my own naive, lazy unmotived way
Were just that
I lost everything.
Marriage, house, city in a city of the world, on a Continent that mattered in its proximity between worlds.
To the middle - middle age, mid life crisis, middle of nowhere that never mattered anyway, amid nothing. Such pointless isolation, I can't watch TV programs of fiction because they are about people who interact with people. People who don't cook or eat alone or sleep alone - people who don't wake up in panic in the dark knowing that if they breathed their last no one would know for quite awhile. And I wouldn't be missed. There would be no holes left behind like all the holes in my life from people now missing.
Its brilliant - I can't blame a system, a person - agent or otherwise. I can only blame myself. I did this. I didn't do what was necessary. But in some conspiratorial way it seems genius that I was marginalized, everything that mattered to me was lost. A new country, a new home, an enduring relationship, even a language and not just that but a peculiar dialect of another tongue not my mothers. A language I no longer use. I had reached a point where I thought there was no going back only to find that so quickly I was ejected back into the life I didn't want.
So now I keep this house, its a god awful amount of work to resuscitate a house on the wrong the side of the freeway. It costs too much money to refortify, to insure, to upkeep the utilities on much less afford a coat of new paint. I keep the lawn detailed the way a neighbor woman who wore all black when I was growing up years ago kept up her yard - at a time in the past when the man of the house did that kind of work no a woman. Its an odd memory to have of a stranger, a woman, wearing black, meticulously detailing the exterior of house and yard. I do the same now because it staves off thinking about the illusion. In this three bedroom house there is no one. The dog has become a ghost. The owner a shell of a person he never was. And who I was has been wiped into non existence. The threat emasculated where there was no threat to begin with. That somone in some Kafka-esque bureau could file away with merit and forget.
I was only told to never repeat things. And to me - that just means to say it. Thank that liberal state University.
I sit in a living room in a chair before a TV monitor. There isn't much else in the room or the house. Down a short hallway is a bedroom with a single bed. Beside the chair in front of the TV is an old lamp that looks like it was used in a spy movie to interrogate someone. In fact this entire house seems like a cheap on location set to some annonymous KGB era American safe house movie scene. And yet it is not - its just what I have become. A shell for someone else to inhabit. I watch "television" patched through a miserable cheap Asus brand laptop that hasn't worked right for over two years. You get used to the slide show effect of the streaming. I keep over drawing my debit card having long since abandoned a credit card and a credit history even though I try to maintain a balance at the credit union. Unemployed sub-Union retail laborer with no people skills. Once expat. Once binational. Once married. Once well traveled by determination, courage and a trust in people.
This from Amazon dot com plays on the TV monintor in the background from a TV show I never knew about...
Elizabeth: (from inside a car)
He needs his handler now
Face to face
Or we're going to loose him
At least let him know that we haven't forgotten about him
Claudia: (across from Elizabeth)
I ran an agent in West Germany
He was a loner
One of these odd balls
Who never really learned to make a friend
So I became his friend
Many years later I was leaving,
And,
we didn't really need him anymore
I explained it all to him
And he thanked me for
the chance to work together
He killed himself shortly thereafter
We didn't need him anymore
But he needed us
Excerpt from The Americans
Season 1
Episode 5
Titled: Comint
Directed by Holly Dale
Written by Melissa James Gibson
Original Air Date February 27th 2013
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