Daybreak was well underway, but the lamp post sensors on the main street hadn’t got the memo yet. It was pretty. It’s out of focus because I took it before I made coffee and my eyes were still bleary.

That’s a belletrism joke. I woke up early because the stove-fixing guys were coming to this rental house on the hill.

I go to the stove-fixing store pretty often to get pellets for the stove. Each time, I notice that they have a permanent hiring sign up like all the other places. “Installers and laborers”, it says. So I was not only hoping to get the stove fixed. I was observing what their job really was, to see if I might like it.

They left. The stove wasn’t fixed and neither was my employment situation.

The last time I had a job anything like that one was right about 25 years ago. It was mostly driving and delivery, of doors and cabinets and stuff like that, in Albuquerque. It looked sort of like a regular 40-hour job, but they had hired me in through a driver’s temp agency. I think they did it that way a lot, in order to check out the talent before committing to an employee.

One day I was in the warehouse with my job partner for the day, a lifer type with the company, pulling out the orders to load up prior to delivering, and he asked me how come I wasn’t interested in doing this job permanently. Which surprised me, because I’d never said a mumbling word about anything of the sort to anyone ever. I was doubly surprised because his sense of my sense was pretty much right on.

I don’t remember what I told him exactly, but it was along the lines of there being nothing to learn from the job, tomorrow or next week or next month. This confused him, and he started in on telling me what a great gig it really was, and how much he enjoyed it … basically recruiter-pitching me, probably on behalf of his, our, bosses. I said less and less. I shrugged. I let the conversation wither and die, because it was pointless. I had no intention of humping cabinets for nine bucks an hour for the next decade, and there was no way to say it politely or inoffensively. The job was enough for him, but that would never be true for me.

A few months later I won out over 42 other candidates and was crowned Reference Specialist of the Montoya Library, and I was happy.

It think it paid 18K a year or something horrible like that. But god damn there was a lot to learn, because the World Wide Web was brand-new, and I had never seriously been online before–think of it–and most of the students hadn’t either. I learned with fast joy and within a couple of days I was specializing in bibliographic instruction, which meant talking to whole classes at once about how to do research via this fancy Web Net thing.

I was still years away from owning my own computer or renting my own connection. Further still from being employed as a “Webmaster”.

Today I am writing this at “home” on an extremely capable laptop running Linux, which is the only operating system left that’s worth a damn (sorry Cupertinians), and publishing it via something called The StarLink (yo Elon).

Pretty fuckin’ amazing when I stop and think about it.

Which is exactly what I’m doing, and it is tangential to my point.

After careful consideration …

I don’t think signing up to be a stove installer is the right thing for either me or the universe right now.

There would be something to learn, which is why I was even considering it. But the useful learning would burn itself up in a matter of weeks. Then all that would be left would be drudgery for bad wages, and a rekindled hatred for anything resembling a boss. Not to mention, based on the morning’s experience, a bad taste in my mouth for my co-workers.

Stove Fixing Dude’s initial comedic bit (the first of an apparently endless set) was about the many failings of “Indian drivers”, and things went sharply downhill from there.

I drove a lot on the Rez.

I’m well aware of the specific ways in which they generally speaking suck.

But Jesus H. Christ, man. You’re here to fix the fucking stove. You’ve known me five minutes. For all you know my mother is an “Indian”, and I’m going to beat you to death with a tire iron for insulting her in your shitty jokey paleface way.

Again, habitually, I digress.

Mostly, I wanted to talk about why I’m going to keep looking, for a Job Opportunity, without applying for this one.

There is a broader point here though.

The point is, I fucking hate the majority of rich people. Jealousy? Maybe a little. But mostly I hate what they had to turn themselves into, to get rich, by the rules of this rigged game, and what else they had to sacrifice to winning too, whether they see it or not.

It was in her role as U.N. ambassador in 1996 that Albright uttered the most infamous words of her career, in an appearance on “60 Minutes.”

The show’s correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Albright about the effect that sanctions were having on Iraqi society, saying, “We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright responded with chilling equanimity: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

This creature was literally fine with child sacrifice to the demons of capitalism and hegemony.

Although she will always be known as evil, it will always partly be because she was arrogant enough to say the quiet part out loud to Lesley Stahl.

But all the good blonde little Lesley Stahls of the world just let it ride, because their bread wouldn’t get so well-buttered without exactly these kinds of sacrifices. The Machine couldn’t go on grinding away to their benefit, without the Madeline Priestesses stuffing Iraqi Hansel and Yemeni Gretel into the fireplace by the hundreds every day.

So mostly I hate the rich.

And then I have to look over at my fellow poors. They’re drunk and stumbling around in the street cursing at midnight. They’re snoring through their blackout comas at three in the morning while their malnourished dogs go loudly insane. They’re showing up to work the next morning and yapping idiotically about the “Indians” or the blacks or the Jews. They’re voting more and more dependably for the Orangeman–or for Hillary, what’s the difference? Or even more dependably just tuning out with another twelve-pack from the Walgreen’s, self-medication at its finest.

They’re not easy to love either and it’s high time I admitted it to myself.

An ugly system makes mostly ugly people and they in turn produce a mostly ugly society.

The whole thing keeps me from calling myself a humanist, or an optimist either.

People rich or poor are the horse and the System is the cart and putting one in front of the other makes no difference either way.

Lead this shitshow? No thanks.

Follow it? Oh hell no.

I need to just keep coming back to the quest for the mythical place called the Hell Out Of The Way.

I need to find it and then maybe I can become a decent prophet or at least give decent directions to the place.

I need to trust myself to find a way to fund the quest that doesn’t kill my spirit dead.

***

A cryptic update from some hours later on the same ‘day’. This is not the stove you’ve seen before.

There is video, of the transmogrification.

So ends the long unfocused 22.