The Farm gets serious for a moment.
I’m Scared, Tired, and Want to Go Home
When I lived in Seattle in 1999 I worked a shit temp job as a copy editor in a large white-shoe downtown law firm. It was a second-shift job, from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m., taking care of late-night documents that came through from midnight-oil burning young bucks, or ensuring that the lawyers had whatever they needed for meetings first thing in the morning. The work was tedious, difficult, and gawd-awful lonely. Parsing their jumbled legalese and ascertaining what their liberal rules toward grammar meant, was taxing, and the dim fluorescent-lit room they hid me in strained my eyes and sanity, and left me at the end of each shift with a headache so fierce I would have sworn I had just been beaten with a Louisville Slugger.
The 30-minute bus ride to and from the firm was an appreciated time for unwinding, and I would just read used books that I had bought from a small bookstore store close to my apartment on Capital Hill. Yes, the store had a mangy cat that would sidle between my legs and fire off my allergies.
Downtown Seattle is jarringly quiet at 8 p.m. Like many downtown areas, there is a clear demarcation between where people work and where they get drunk and try and pick each other up at hip bars and celebrity-owned pool halls. As the monolithic office buildings and the surrounding coffee shops and stores closed up, the downtown area shut down and assumed a horror movie’s eeriness. Taking quick and plentiful smoke breaks outside between inserting commas and semicolons, I’d stand on the sidewalk for a couple of minutes and sometimes not see a single freaking car and nary a flannel-clad longhair. Back inside, I worked toward quitting time like an automaton and looked forward to sinking into something more substantial and engaging than Mrs. Davis’ last will and testament.
The articulated bus home would show up around 9:20, but by 9:00 I couldn’t stand to stay in the firm’s office any longer and I had already eaten all the leftover M&Ms in the conference room the cleaning staff hadn't gotten to yet. I would go down to street level and sit on the bench at the bus stop with a dog-eared book of short stories or a reviewer’s copy of some shite bestseller from two years ago.
The streets would be dark. Too dark. In the distance I could hear the dull pulse of the congested highway. To my left, pools of color from the traffic lights would wash over the asphalt and scare the shit out of me because I watched too many B movies in my formative years. The buildings were looming giants waiting to lean over and smack me with their cellphone antennas. At times it would be downright ghostly, and any approaching footsteps would make me look up warily. I would hope that their owner would go passed the bus stop, but if they didn’t, I prayed these crazy fuckers could read.
There is something comforting to me about someone with a book. When a huge, scary dood in the shadows, just beyond my blurry peripheral vision, can be heard turning the thin pages of a dime-store detective novel, my heartbeat slows down enough to keep the looming heart attack at bay. When the hulking and pierced man wearing sunglasses at 9 p.m. with his Walkman blaring its cacophony of rap-metal sits next to me and pulls a tattered copy of Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” from his coat, my eyes return to my own book’s pages.
I remember one man in particular. He was stooped and his Timberland boots were unlaced. He wore a T-shirt that advertised a gun store with pictures of assorted handguns and semi-automatics. There was a bull's eye on the back, for fuck's sake. He carried with him a large bag with a pair of camouflage pants poking out from it. I thought about moving down some on the bench but didn’t want to give him any reason for provocation. Reaching into the bag, beyond the fatigues, he removed an attractively ornate “graphic novel” with a series of line drawings on the cover (thinking back now, I wonder if it was a Chris Ware book; he woulda been on the cutting-fucking-edge!), slouched back, and began reading. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, I thought. A wolf won’t eat a wolf.
It didn’t matter what they were reading: pulp, literature, comic books, magazines, romances, sports biographies. As long as they were reading, they would be no harm to me. Perhaps I too looked as menacing and threatening to them (though seeing my fragile figure, you would strongly doubt it). But they felt like comrades. We let down our guard in front of each other, even on a darkened and empty urban street, when it arguably should have been at its highest state. With our attention thusly diverted, and our consciousness preoccupied, the act of reading was a trust bond. So long as it wasn't porn.
I’m Scared, Tired, and Want to Go Home
When I lived in Seattle in 1999 I worked a shit temp job as a copy editor in a large white-shoe downtown law firm. It was a second-shift job, from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m., taking care of late-night documents that came through from midnight-oil burning young bucks, or ensuring that the lawyers had whatever they needed for meetings first thing in the morning. The work was tedious, difficult, and gawd-awful lonely. Parsing their jumbled legalese and ascertaining what their liberal rules toward grammar meant, was taxing, and the dim fluorescent-lit room they hid me in strained my eyes and sanity, and left me at the end of each shift with a headache so fierce I would have sworn I had just been beaten with a Louisville Slugger.
The 30-minute bus ride to and from the firm was an appreciated time for unwinding, and I would just read used books that I had bought from a small bookstore store close to my apartment on Capital Hill. Yes, the store had a mangy cat that would sidle between my legs and fire off my allergies.
Downtown Seattle is jarringly quiet at 8 p.m. Like many downtown areas, there is a clear demarcation between where people work and where they get drunk and try and pick each other up at hip bars and celebrity-owned pool halls. As the monolithic office buildings and the surrounding coffee shops and stores closed up, the downtown area shut down and assumed a horror movie’s eeriness. Taking quick and plentiful smoke breaks outside between inserting commas and semicolons, I’d stand on the sidewalk for a couple of minutes and sometimes not see a single freaking car and nary a flannel-clad longhair. Back inside, I worked toward quitting time like an automaton and looked forward to sinking into something more substantial and engaging than Mrs. Davis’ last will and testament.
The articulated bus home would show up around 9:20, but by 9:00 I couldn’t stand to stay in the firm’s office any longer and I had already eaten all the leftover M&Ms in the conference room the cleaning staff hadn't gotten to yet. I would go down to street level and sit on the bench at the bus stop with a dog-eared book of short stories or a reviewer’s copy of some shite bestseller from two years ago.
The streets would be dark. Too dark. In the distance I could hear the dull pulse of the congested highway. To my left, pools of color from the traffic lights would wash over the asphalt and scare the shit out of me because I watched too many B movies in my formative years. The buildings were looming giants waiting to lean over and smack me with their cellphone antennas. At times it would be downright ghostly, and any approaching footsteps would make me look up warily. I would hope that their owner would go passed the bus stop, but if they didn’t, I prayed these crazy fuckers could read.
There is something comforting to me about someone with a book. When a huge, scary dood in the shadows, just beyond my blurry peripheral vision, can be heard turning the thin pages of a dime-store detective novel, my heartbeat slows down enough to keep the looming heart attack at bay. When the hulking and pierced man wearing sunglasses at 9 p.m. with his Walkman blaring its cacophony of rap-metal sits next to me and pulls a tattered copy of Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” from his coat, my eyes return to my own book’s pages.
I remember one man in particular. He was stooped and his Timberland boots were unlaced. He wore a T-shirt that advertised a gun store with pictures of assorted handguns and semi-automatics. There was a bull's eye on the back, for fuck's sake. He carried with him a large bag with a pair of camouflage pants poking out from it. I thought about moving down some on the bench but didn’t want to give him any reason for provocation. Reaching into the bag, beyond the fatigues, he removed an attractively ornate “graphic novel” with a series of line drawings on the cover (thinking back now, I wonder if it was a Chris Ware book; he woulda been on the cutting-fucking-edge!), slouched back, and began reading. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, I thought. A wolf won’t eat a wolf.
It didn’t matter what they were reading: pulp, literature, comic books, magazines, romances, sports biographies. As long as they were reading, they would be no harm to me. Perhaps I too looked as menacing and threatening to them (though seeing my fragile figure, you would strongly doubt it). But they felt like comrades. We let down our guard in front of each other, even on a darkened and empty urban street, when it arguably should have been at its highest state. With our attention thusly diverted, and our consciousness preoccupied, the act of reading was a trust bond. So long as it wasn't porn.
posted by kiddigit at 2:45 PM
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