I work with the kind of folks who get a lot of degrees and ponder what they might be at some future distant locus. The convergence point of education and that which is worthwhile. Those folks have so much focus, they miss a bit of what the rest call life.
In my harsh moments, it’s easy to mock the striving earnestness, the place where the best and brightest might wring their hands about the future. It’s tough to sit next to someone fresh out of school and fresh into 20 maybe 30 or so talking about how there aren’t any great jobs if you don’t have experience. You know, well, yah. That’s fucking right.
But, then there are the fellow travelers. The folks without the linear path of middle-class success. They are the ones I consider allies.
So, dig. Dig in a 1950s hazy with smoke, deep into Northern Californian wine, chatting over the naan on an expense accounted Wednesday night. Dig the sound of my mentioning my plugged in, internet living, wired, burnt, ripped, copied, podcast, downloaded and electronic existence. The fellow traveler, she in a kind of acceptance/denial steam punk place, talks about the Underwood she’ll soon be getting from an uncle, another generation. Pre-electricity.
So, she says, she says as a fellow traveler, one who cares about words, one who didn’t get to her job through a linear path, she who reads off the grid. She says, “Yeah, an Underwood, to be like Burroughs.” Or maybe something clearer or deeper or smarter. “I read Naked Lunch, and I saw clearly.” But, of course, that’s not a direct quote.
I get it. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, crazy writing, thriving genius. A dark hope. A real typewriter. Beat and words and the beat goes on.
Only the young and the bright and the should be more restless, she has no fucking idea what we are talking about. She doesn’t know what an Underwood is. She doesn’t know who William S. Burroughs is. But, best and brightest and educated, she needs to clarify the convo. She needs to bring it to her comfort place.
Only, I like the Burroughs reference too much. It’s not easy enough to give up on talking about something else that isn’t linear work, earnest, school-book learning. I wanna talk William Tell and heroin. Writing to keep from screaming.
So, I tell the steam punk, manual typewriter woman about my friends. About the drinking at “Bukowski’s” and reading Charles’ poetry or considering him on the Thursday nights that were my cathedral of thought. My salvation. My intellectual oasis. The non-book-learning, 100 beers on tap truth. Performance and bullshit and thought and beer.
The earnest one. The educated one. The one with whom I work, but I would never choose to drink and speak truth, she asks, “Bukowski’s, was that a Polish bar?”
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