Liberation from the lie.
Sojourning in Dreamsilver, traveling and mapping every road going east from downtown. I don’t say I was sojourning, but it was some version of myself, rougher edged, maybe better.
Out one of them was a tourist attraction. It was an animal park, some kind of open air zoo. I saw a rhinoceros clearly, but it was a jumble of charismatic megafauna.
Maybe a third of the creatures were people dressed up like animals, rather than animals per se.
A lion toward the lioness end of the gender spectrum caught my attention, crawling halfway up the cliffs that bordered the place to have an urgent shouted conversation with me. The nature of the conversation wasn’t significant. Only that s/he wanted to have it, and keep it going, and establish a connection, and not let me get away back to my life without a fight.
In time I was on the ground and she was showing me this place she worked. In time she took me back to the small apartment dorms where she worked, a company town arrangement that the employees rented from the employer.
What she wanted from me was liberation, and I started to provide it.
Let me come at this from another angle.
There’s this scene in the movie Tombstone.
There’s a bar in town when Wyatt arrives. The bar isn’t doing well. The reason it’s not doing well is that it’s been taken over by a bad guy, Billy Bob Thornton, who has coerced the owner into becoming the bar’s card dealer. He’s not qualified. His interpersonal skills suck ass. He abuses the customers. But because he’s intimidating, he keeps the job and essentially runs the place into the ground. He’s benefiting, but it sucks for everyone else, especially the nominal owner of the bar.
Wyatt puts him down quick. A meaner fish swallowing a mean fish, pure power. After he brutally convinces the bad guy to leave, he suggests to the owner that he’ll be providing security from now on, in exchange for 25% of the profits. The ‘owner’ seems to accept the new way gratefully.
In the Dreamsilver dream, I start to pull off something like that, leveraging the fact that the workplace is exploitative. But I don’t want an ongoing arrangement. I just want to free the one lion and to get paid for doing it. I’m blackmailing some bad guys into doing the right thing on a small scale. I’ll agree to overlook the bulk of their marginally criminal enterprise. For a price.
Playing within a power dynamic, being strong, overlooking things for a price–that’s my job. Or you might say its my business model, because I don’t want any more fucking jobs.
You might think too of what Kevin Spacey did to the employers who were trying to end his career with them, toward the beginning of American Beauty.
***
There is no exploitative animal park in Silver. The poor kids work fast food, and while they too are dressed up in humiliating polyester, it’s not a lion suit. It’s a drone suit. I’ve personally been there and personally done that. I am still a poor kid, but I’m an old one, and not that poor.
There are no freelance sharks taking over the card games. There is Law throughout the land now, and the modern day Owning classes have made sure it was written to protect them from the capitalist uncertainties of single strong men like Billy Bob, or even Val Kilmer for that matter.
If you want to play these games now, you have to become a lobbyist or a politician or DNC operative or at least a consultant, which just means that you’re all dressed up in a fancier grade of tiger suit, hippo suit, monkey suit.
***
But …
Liberation from the lie.
These thoughts and dreams are haunting me, razoring me. The ideas come bubbling out and I rhetorically take tentative steps in this or that direction … this weekend I did so in a bar, with family.
My sister-in-law, who runs a very complex faro game for a major corporation, responded to some of that disorganized talk by offering the opinion that I would be an ideal Life Coach.
Which is wrong, and fucking ridiculous, but has a little seed of the right kind of thinking inside it.
What I have against professoring is that over time it became about selling poor kids on a lie. The thing is–it didn’t used to be a lie, but time marches on.
When I was their age, the lie was mostly true. You really could go to college and pull yourself up out of being the poor one sometimes just by following the program.
Mostly that still meant you got a job and put on the relevant monkey suit every day of your life until you piled up enough jack to retire in style …
But even for me, a marginal case if there ever was one …
I could major in Humanities. I could write a Master’s thesis with a razor blade and a spool of audio tape. And it could all work out–the professor suit was no uniform; it didn’t pay great but it did pay more than enough.
All that accommodation is in the rearview mirror now, both for me as a marginal case, and especially as a pipe dream and a pure lie for the children coming up into post-COVID Trump America.
They need to be told so by someone who has been there.
My business model is off in that direction.