Sunday, August 24, 2008

Ain't Nothin' Gonna Hold Me Down!


"The worst thing you can say about someone in a society like ours is that they can't hold down a job. It conjures images of unshaven losers with weak grips watching sadly as the jobs slip free and float away. There's nothing we respect more than work, and there's nothing we denigrate more than the eunwillingness to work, and if someone wants to dedicate himself to painting or writing poetry, he'd better be holding down a job at a hamburger restaurant if he knows what's good for him." - A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Tolz


First of all, I am about 300 pages into A Fraction of the Whole and it has already made my top ten list of all-time favorite books...rather a selective list, I might add! It's one of those novels you read with a pen in hand, scribbling in the margins, because you can't help but want to have a conversation with the author whom you will never meet but seems to understand you better than legions of your friends and acquaintances combined. I have spent the majority of the weekend holed up in my apartment in Philly with this book, and I wouldn't have rather spent it any other way. It's deliciously cynical, hilarious, and most importantly, describes the human experience in a way that leaves you whispering, "yes, yes that's it! I'm glad someone finally noticed" as you quickly flip the pages.


Anyway, my apologies for that departure. What I really mean to comment on is the concept of "holding down a job." Where did this phrase come from? To me, it conjures images of a weasel-like creature trying to wriggle its slippery, greasey self out from under your fingers and scramble into a hole in the wall where it can spend the remainder of its days gnawing away on all your electrical lines.


"Someone grab that damn job and put it back in its cage where it belongs! And while you're at it, clean out all the shit it's piled in the corner--it's really starting to reek in there!"


Whereupon the squirming, squeeking job would be tossed back into its cage and dutifully return to its important task of turning the little hamster wheel around and around and around and around until it can make its next escape into the hole in the wall.



Anyway, perhaps my cynicism results from my voracious consumption of A Fraction of the Whole, in which most of the characters are perenially unemployed, but it seems to me like a job holds you down, not the other way around. I don't mean that to sound as negative as I know it does, but it seems like the truth. If you've got a job, you are unable to give into that capricious urge to watch 24 hours of consecutive trashy reality TV or lie about in the park watching elderly couples in matching berets or simply do nothing at all except eat an occasional ice cream sandwich. Of course, without a job you can't really do these things either, since you technically have no money. Bloody Catch-22!


I guess that's what weekends are for. And until the next one, I'm off to my little cage in the corner, hoping someone slips me a bit of ice cream sandwich as I run about on my wheel....


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