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up out of the desert
Friday, July 9 1999
I left work today a disgruntled employee, so disgruntled in fact that, when I finally made it home, I actually dug up the terms of my employment to see what if anything I could salvage in terms of stock options if I left, say, today. The paperwork wasn't especially clear, but it didn't look too promising. So I had to resign myself to continuing to keep my nose to the grindstone. I'm resistant to change as it is, so this nondevelopment isn't especially devastating. What is hard for me is dealing with the increasing sense of humiliation I get from working in a corporate environment where everything said and done to me is designed to manipulate me and get me to work harder for less pay.
Today's crisis in my feelings toward my employer came regarding my new message board system. It's been honed to perfection and is ready for release. If I could only release it some time before tomorrow, I'd score a big bonus. But today, today mind you, I overheard my boss, my "project coach" (in other words, my corporate slave driver) telling my "project leader" that we need to redesign the front page of the message board before we can release it. He'd never said anything about such a redesign up until now. This 11th hour demand seemed to me specifically designed to torpedo our bonus. It seemed like the stingy act of an ungrateful company.
Things like this leave me feeling a strong desire to fight back in some way. But there really aren't many options for people riding the bubble of internet employment. Stock options and "at will hiring" systematically strips away our rights via a largely unwritten, psycho-emotionally enforced set of rules based on unrealistic goals. None of us overworked salaried employees have any real systems of support we can turn to. Many of us don't even have personal relationships outside the company. Yet, since we have what amounts to the job security of fast food workers, our entire world can be destroyed in an instant. The more I see of the modern American digital sweatshop, the more I realized that the difference between my position and that of the self-castrating members of the Heaven's Gate cult was simply one of degree. I may not actually be castrated, but putting in the hours I do, I might as well cut my nuts off, since when I get home at night sex is the last thing on my mind.
There are a few websites gradually springing up to focus a spotlight on the horrendous workplace conditions we modern day digital sweatshop employees so willing endure. But in general, we're so starry-eyed with a giddy sense of rapid technologic change, so sold on the improbable dream of being 35 year old millionaires, that we're unwilling to fight back. So we accept our virtual castration, our virtual Nike and sweatpants uniforms, our virtual laced jello, hoping to meet that virtual spacecraft in the virtual tail of a virtual comet.
This evening Kim and I were to fly to Phoenix to commence the celebration of our one year anniversary. For those who don't recall, on July 11th, 1998, I met Kim (and her dog Sophie) at a benefit concert for the community radio station WCBN in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We've never known each other outside our relationship, which in retrospect appears to have begun that very day.
After the usual pre-departure squabbles and a hurried stint of unplanned packing, I called a taxicab. In record time we were headed towards the airport. Sophie was with us, not yet packed into her tight little pet-toting bag. Evidently she was nervous because somewhere between Ocean Beach and Point Loma she began puking all over us. We cupped our hands and caught what we could, and then, with the help of a napkin from the driver, mopped up that which remained. It was slimy, yellow and contained whole unchewed nuggets of her particular brand of high fibre dog food.
Waiting in the airport for our departure, I went off to pick up a copy of Wired and Newsweek. Kim wanted me to pick up some sort of fresh hand-squeezed lemonade from the overpriced juice place, but I don't know why they even bother tying up valuable retail space in airports with businesses of this kind, since the process of making juice in such places is so inherently labour intensive and slow. That's if you're in a hurry, which we sort of were. But come to think of it, there's plenty of waiting to be done in airports as well. Scratch all that shit I just typed. The point is that, upon seeing the length of the line in front of the juice place and the lethargic pace of the underpaid employees, I ended up getting Kim a cup of overpriced Pepsi instead, which she refused to drink, predictably enough.
We were flying on America West, which isn't quite the Greyhound of the Air that Southwest might be said to be. There were genuine assigned seats, but there were few if any extra seats. Packed in her little bag and smuggled aboard, Sophie was pretty much a non-factor, aside from occasional olfactory protests waged with bursts of malodourous intestinal gas.
The sky was clear and the lights of the ground, viewed from above, were spectacular as usual. But even with as little flying as I do, they've already lost their mesmerizing luster. I didn't look out the window for most of the night flight; it was mostly over barren lightless desert anyway.
Coming down over Phoenix, though, the most interesting thing was the reactions of the children around me to the spectacular light show of the urban groundscape. "Why are there blue lights, Mommy?" "What are those green squares Mommy?" "Look, Mommy, the cars look like ants!" If I'd been a little kid riding on this plane, I would have been just as exuberant. This stuff deserves more than the blasé indifference of weary travelers.
There was an aggravating bureaucratic hassle in the airport as we tried to secure a rent-a-car from Avis. Given my not having a credit card but a check card instead, the Avis representative, a lovely black lady with dozens of braids and long artificial fingernails seemingly made of pearls, informed me that she couldn't rent a car to me. The issue had something to do with the fact that in order for me to use my check card, she'd have to place a hold on my card and that it would cause too much confusion. I wasn't in the least bit confused, and would have gladly accepted a hold on my card. But it turned out that she really couldn't rent to me, because the company had made it a policy not to rent cars to people with check cards, precisely because of the potential for confusion. My assurance that I was most certainly not confused did me no good whatever. But at least the Avis lady with the pearly fingernails was nice enough to call up a guy at Alamo Rent-a-Car (where checks are accepted) to negotiate a similar price for a similar car.
Outside the airport, the blistering heat of night in the low desert merely hinted at the asphalt-melting furnace of the preceding day. I don't think I'd ever before experienced such night time heat. Temperatures were probably in the upper nineties still, and it was 10:30 pm.
It came at a premium, but we'd rented a convertible, a small sporty white Chevrolet. We had the top down and the air conditioning at full blast as we sped northward on I-17. The radio stations were actually fairly good, though in the conservative state of Arizona those in charge of such things bleep out a lot more words than they do in Southern California. I've found that the specific words bleeped out in "What It's Like" by Everlast is a good test of the moral climate of a community. In Arizona they don't just bleep out "balls", they bleep out "whore" as well. God forbid that a child should hear such words on the radio!
Climbing up out of the subtropical desert, the heat gradually dwindled away to the point where the air conditioning was uncomfortably cold. Later still, we had to put to the top up for comfort.
As we entered Sedona, Kim and I gradually started fighting. I was feeling alienated from her, as though we were doomed by inherent incompatibility. I was thinking of this trip, which she'd planned for us. I was thinking of all the money it was costing us. There as the $350 for the hotel, the $330 for the car, lots and lots for plane tickets, a certain amount to put Sophie in a kennel, and God knows what for a guided tour of the mystical "Vortex" of Sedona we'd be going on tomorrow. It seemed like a lot of fuss and dinero to be blowing on a single weekend. If we'd spent that same amount of money on, I don't know, Ecstasy, LSD or beer, it would surely be a hell of a lot more bang for the buck.
On all the travels I've undertaken alone, I've been able to make a five dollar bill last for days, and I've had incredible experiences all along the way. It was going through my mind that my ideal girlfriend would find joy in the cheap experiences, the legitimate dirt of the road. There'd be none of this pansy-ass trust fund hippie shit of sleeping at the most expensive bed and breakfast in Sedona. We'd be making a nest out in the pines somewhere, living out of some hapless rotting shell of a vehicle, and loving the challenge of it all. I was realizing that, at least while I'm with Kim, I'm cut off from that experience. And thinking that, I found myself growing hostile. Since she was sensing my hostility, she was fighting back. So we were caught in a positive feedback loop of negative emotions that was making for a stressful final approach to our ultimate destination: The Briar Patch Inn.
The Briar Patch Inn is a cluster of humble log cabins down on the floodplain of Oak Creek, three miles north of the town of Sedona. Our cabin, The Vine House, had a high ceiling and big evergreen support beams but no television, no clock and no telephone. There was something emotionally nostalgic about the fragrance of the place that made me want to like it despite all the negative feelings I brought to it. Sedona is a town of Native American spirituality, woo-woo Earth mysticism, meditation, contact with aliens, liberal artistry, spirtualized vegetarianism and other vaguely kooky things, so it's no surprise that the Briar Patch Inn seeks to be a place of calm, quiet vegetarian rest and reflection. Just the smell of the place had me feeling that way. But I couldn't just lay my weary bones down and fall asleep. Kim, you see, wasn't done with activities for the night. We had to take Sophie for a walk and we had to unpack our belongings.
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