Digging the Hole You're Standing In

The head lights glint gold off the rail in the tunnel and the platform shuffles as everyone tries to guess where the doors are going to end up. And this great sardine tin rattles to a stop and you were a foot out on your estimation. So you scramble for the doors like all the other idiots; shoulder to shoulder, fighting through that door.

PLEASE MOVE DOWN THE CARRIAGE. THE PERSON BEHIND YOU IS DYING.

And you’re packed in so tight by the time the door closes that the people standing close to the concave walls are hunched over and can’t look up. There’s that awful crush, skin against glass. People smiling inanely because they don’t know what they’re doing. And you’re in among it all, book crushed to your chest.

And some dirty lowlife breaks inaudible anonymous wind. A waft of steamed vegetables flies up and bothers about your head. It’s impossible to ignore and impossible to point the finger. So you find yourself smiling inanely, battling with standard futility against the misery of a commute.

You turn your music up so loud that you can’t hear anything outside of your head, free your arms and bury your head in your book. You shut out the world as best you can and you think, if I could do this all day, I would. If I could spend my day at work, with the world completely shut out, I would. If I could sleep through the next eight hours and not get fired, I would. And you have to ask yourself, is it worth it?

Is it worth you spending the next eight hours wishing you weren’t actually aware of being awake? Of being alive? Of being at all?

Is existence worth the struggle if you spend the whole time wishing you didn’t exist?

And you reach your stop and almost everybody gets off there. And you think if you hang back and take up one of the empty seats you could have the day to yourself. You could ride the tube all day. You could wander round and see the sights. You could finish reading your book.

Nothing is better than this.

I’ll rephrase: doing nothing is better than doing this.

I sold my soul to become a legendary blues guitarist.

I sold my soul to become the most amazing lover known to man.

I sold my soul to become the greatest footballer in history.

I sold my soul…

Nobody ever sells their soul to become anything other than something incredible; a myth, a hero. But all of a sudden, you’ve pushed another pen, made some more paper, watched the second hand go round in slow motion for the millionth time that morning, and you realise you’ve been tricked into selling your soul for £8 an hour.

I had begun “a long term engagement” at an office block in Oxford Circus. I am the middle man between my boss and a million other people he doesn’t want to speak to.

Call Shirley.

Well you’re gonna need to find her number.

Ask her to send me the marketing figures.

“Hi is that Shirley?”

“Please could you send over the marketing figures?”

“Oh, David said you’d have them”.

“You know, David. David White?”

What do you mean she didn’t know me?

What do you mean she didn’t know about the marketing figures?

I’ve got them right here.

Have you done those production statistics I asked for?

Didn’t I?

Well I need them asap.

Work was draining me of all my energy. I would go home, the commute in a mildly more palatable reverse, make dinner, eat dinner, go to bed. Maybe have a shower. Sometimes I would work late. Sometimes I would work without the pathetic human right of the western world: the lunch hour. It wasn’t so much that I was demanding of my lunch hour, that I needed an hour to eat or whatever. It was the principle that I was getting by doing something I hated and I should be able to get away with doing as little of it as possible. Except that to sit at my desk and not work meant the work piled up. And besides, there was always the danger that if I didn’t impress my boss, didn’t come across as a productive little drone I could be sacked without so much as a letter. The joy of being a temp.

I wanted to a million other things but I needed to work. I was torn. I was torn between following the white rabbit and spending every day punching keys in an office where my only fulfilment was the financial by-product of spending every day punching keys in an office. I was torn between fun and no fun; good and bad; want and need.

It was about 7 o’clock at night and it was getting dark outside. I was tapping away at my keyboard.

64.

64 emailed enquiries that I should really have answered by last week sometime.

So I was tapping away at my keyboard. And I got scared.

Imagine dying in your office. That stuffy little room where you wish every second was over before it’s even begun. Imagine…

…Imagine, then, realising as the icy finger of Death taps his diamond encrusted Rolex (death sells) before your bloodshot eyes and you take in the teeth that comprise his knowing smile, imagine realising that you’ve wished your last second away, because you lived it while you were at work. Imagine in your final second, that you’ve wished them all away.

But they were never really yours.

Nothing is ever really yours. Not even you are yours. You are owned.

You are owned by the country you live in. Like an overbearing parent.

Your money is not your own. Read a ten pound note. You are constantly passing around a promise you can never fulfil. The money you work for doesn’t belong to you. Automatically, some of the money you earn belongs to the government. Like you’re paying rent. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it needs to be. I don’t care what taxes are spent on or even that I have to pay taxes at all. It’s just…weird that everyone just fits in somewhere. Everyone is part of some demographic. Everyone is a cog in a huge machine in a great big overused metaphor.

If you don’t work, you can’t get money. If you can’t get money live anywhere, because every building and even every scrap of land is owned. So let’s say, you can handle not having a roof over your head, so long as the weather’s okay. You’ve got to get somewhere nice: Spain, Mexico, Egypt, California. Somewhere you can live in the open air and not freeze to death. And let’s say, you manage to get the money to travel there. These places don’t want you. What would they want with someone who doesn’t want to work, doesn’t want to inject their economy with their hard earned cash. Without your visa and your shots and your travellers cheques and insurance you are a veruca, a wasp.

So you get thrown out: returned to your overbearing parent from a play date that went disastrously wrong.

Where do you go if you won’t contribute? Nowhere. Everywhere is owned. Everything is owned. You can sit on the floor in your housing scheme flat and soak up every benefit that the government will throw your way and not contribute and that makes you a loser. Or after an unspecified length of time, you are deemed mentally deficient. And the government can choose either to neglect you or send round the dog catcher and haul you in to some glorious state of the art institution where the residents are made to feel like real people and are allowed to watch TV and do finger paintings at Wednesday morning’s art class. And then you really can’t escape.

So you’re never free at all. You can’t switch off for a second; recharge wind down. You can take a holiday, provided you haven’t used up all your holiday days, but work will expect you back. And while you’re there you’re still paying rent on your shit suburban flat and your insurance covers the stuff you own.

You are digging the hole you’re standing in.

And you had no idea.

I am running up the escalator to work because I am late. Everyone stands on the right hand side of the escalator so all the late people can run up the left side. I am the only person on the left side. And I am running and running and I get about half way up and I trip and fall. And I’m falling down and down the up escalator and all the people on the right are looking straight ahead or have their heads buried in newspapers and don’t seem to notice me or don’t seem to care. And I am falling down as fast as the escalator is travelling up and I can’t get my balance. If someone doesn’t notice me soon, I’m going to be falling forever. And here I am caught in a very real, very modern take on the bottomless pit and I am falling and falling and falling and…

And my face is in a pool of saliva that glistens on the faux walnut hue of my desk and I look at the clock and realise it’s 9 o’clock, it’s got very dark outside and I’m still in my office. I don’t switch off my computer or turn out the lights or lock the door or even take my jacket. I just run. And I know that I’ve got to do something to stop myself falling.