Remedy posting three of five.

On the Sunday nothing happened. We went to her office again. I helped sort of; we talked, grabbed food. I watched as she struggled with the line between the worker we’ve both always been and the vague demands of the managerial and professional class.

It spoke to me.

I remember a conversation I had once with a sort of friend, about doing professoring as a working class job. He wasn’t a teacher anymore, just a manager who taught once in a while. Chairly Deanly. As with many things I said to him, I got the distinct impression of disapproval. On the one hand he wanted academics to be elevated beyond mere humanity. On the other, he wanted the teachers who worked for him to be perfect worker drones, giving without stint or complaint, drawing their low pay with monkish acceptance.

He was a smart guy and he always made his political votes count, but the contradictions in his stance, extended out into the larger world, are what made me sick these last few years.

I will always be a working class hero, and a working class hero is nothing to be.

Being an unemployed one has plenty of stress to it, but it’s eleven times more congenial than trying to navigate the hopeless roles that any bossman would try to lay out for me.

Every job I had in my twenties was easy to be good at, and paid nothing. As a result, I was totally free to treat it, and the bosses that came with it, with condescension and even contempt where it was deserved. I was a productive cog, a little harder than usual to replace for the value, but the job was a completely replaceable cog for me, looked at the other way. When driving for Dominos became too rigid a situation to endure, I took myself across the street to Pizza Hut, where the manager was younger than me and willing to put up with the fact that I refused to wear my nametag, or clap an ad to the roof of my car.

But the fellow working class people who knew me best called me ambitious, and by their standards I was. I wanted a place to make more for doing things that required thinking, and that culminated in being the professor.

One day it all fell apart, and I had a long moment in the driveway of my house where I realized I wasn’t a professor anymore.

What I did with that, out of desperation to cling to the edge of the middle class, was to try to deny it with my actions. My job title still said professor, even though I wasn’t one any more in my heart.

The tension of that contradiction bit deep into my shoulder and stayed clamped on there for almost three years, twisted years that kept moving but went nowhere, until it all fell apart again.

Now what I am is on the dole, and the old ambition returns slowly, transormed, in a wave of calm.

I sit here and write, surrounded by middle class trappings, but no longer desperate to hold onto them. I’m the same boy I used to be.