Friday, September 03, 2004
Cubic Karma
I’m a little tired of all the karma I’ve been spouting off about this week, and there’s a bunch of entertaining little notions floating around in my brain that would be fun to write about. This is when my karma shows its mettle: do I have the inner clarity to stick with the game plan, or shall I just let it crumble like so many stale teacakes in a vibrating soccerball? (Creative analogizing is very karmic. Yes it is. Shut up.) So I’m thinking, next week this site will likely be marginally more entertaining (which is to say, marginally entertaining), with transit tales and vignettes, ironic discourses on curious locutions and yummy desserts and chuckletude in general and in particular. In the meanwhiles, nonces and interims, here’s an essay of friday karma that I think I am resistant to post because it is a lesson I’m having trouble learning, which I guess is the best reason to post of all.
For 14 months I didn’t so much slave in obscurity as I languished on the fringes of civilization. I was the sole employee of my organization anywhere within a 30 mile radius, located out in a radioactive cowtown that typified all the stultification for which the suburbs are so rightly renowned. I drove an hour to work each day, and 90 minutes back home again. The area was dry, flat - an actual imagination vacuum where creative ideas withered on the vine like so many bunches of late harvest riesling, forgotten until dessicated beyond recovery, moldy and sour.
The terms of my employment were simple: I was to follow my consultant’s instructions. I was not to pester people. I was to keep my mouth shut and my plans quiet. I ws to call people on Tuesday mornings once every week until I got through. I was to clear everything I did, said, and wrote with the main office. I was to do nothing on my own.
My office was an 8x12 room with no exterior windows. I brought my own lunch and ate it at my desk, as I had learned to do at the many other nearly equally isolated jobs I’d held in my years since graduation. Were I to leave the office I might miss something exciting, but equally compelling to me was that there was nothing else going on worth visiting. I could walk the three gaptoothed blocks of what passed for downtown; I could visit an ‘antique’ store, a western-wear store, or an army surplus store. After a few months all those options got pretty tired. I just surfed the web and kept my chair warm, and I dreamed of a day when a two-block walk from my office might lead me somewhere worth going.
So now that dream’s come true. Not only am I often, if not usually, pretty well fully occupied at work these days - but if I walk out my officeblock’s front door and forward about a hundred yards, I’m at the greyfaced glistening waterfront. Two blocks north: Market Street, lined with people and shops worth careful perusal. A few blocks west: Yerba Buena gardens with the museums and fountains and such. And to the south, the ballpark and the south park district (yeah, real name) and more ocular entertainment than I’ve even begun to catalogue.
That’s mainly because my sorry old habits, forged in job after job in the hinterlands - Walnut Creek to San Mateo to Novato to East Oakland to Livermore - have become so much a part of my psyche that I’m finding it hard to break the pattern. I have so many places I could go now - too many, really - and that seems to be enough for me most days. I have to force myself to leave my desk even for ten minutes most days, as a glittering and fascinating world pulses just out a nearby window and five floors straight down. It sort of feels like I’ve cubed my karma and now my cube’s the only place it wants to hang out.
Wow, putting it down in print like that really makes me think I need to change my habits. Maybe this “being out” is something I can integrate into my life, just as “being creative” was something I had to learn to graft onto days I thought were full already. I’ll start on the right foot by getting out for my bus and enjoying a sunny ride downtown while I finish writing an essay about my car breaking down. But that one’s for later. For now, have a great weekend, and for all you expectant moms, happy labor day.
