One day I’ll probably snap and run a credit card up my ass.

“Let me see if I can make this work…yeah…uhhhhh…I’m getting a couple of numbers…4…6…2…fuck that’s all I can get. Here’s your card. Maybe next time you ask someone to deliver food you might plan ahead a little? Maybe mention that you wanted to use a credit card. I’m offering this advice as a helpful and concerned human being stuck in the social mileu wondering how you don’t fucking drown in the rain.”

Right about there I’ll fall to my knees, scream out “PORQUE!” and then plead to the heavens, “Oh sweet fucking baby Jesus, why do you not smite these misbegotten morons who plague my existence! Why do you not slaughter them in their sleep with the cleansing purity of fire?! Why do you allow these demons to wander the earth? Why didn’t you leave me a sticky note on my car window to bring the butcher knife, El Sangriento, so I could teach this mindless soul sucking creature how to live in the world?”

Then I’ll jump to my feet and thank them for their patronage because I’m a model employee.

One day…one day…soon I think.

You see, I am living low right now. I work at a little catering company that also has a more traditional restuarant part. And because I work in the service industry there are customers who think their lunch should be free and that hearing the same joke, day in and day out over and over again makes for a happy time for some guy working a mindless job in the heat of Tucson.

The one good thing about being low is the wild perspective it gives you on life.

The only people think there’s a classless America are the ones that went to Harvard and Yale or work as CEOs in startups somewhere. Every social interaction in the real world (this web world is ephemeral, counts for less, and is more prone to intellectual judgement as words are all you have to judge people on and I’ve met homeless guys who write infinitely better than most college professors) is tinged with implicit notions of power and social status that show up in how you dress, how you speak, how you act, and how you smell.

This makes sense from the monkey perspective and it is fascinating to watch in action. (And it really helps to sell soap.)

As annoying as it is to be summarily judged worthless by a receptionist, it’s almost as much fun to watch that process in action, to see the wheels turning and to see the process chug along one gear tooth at a time and at the end to receive a stereotypical and perfectly dismissive “thank you” at that moment when you’re deemed to be lower on the totem pole.

I will admit that in the old days, back when I was running a computer department for an ad agency in Manhattan, back when I was proud to tell the world of my job and semi-cool status, I probably dismissed a lot of people doing shitty jobs without thinking about it. I know I dismissed the painfully attractive actress wannabe receptionist who was smarter than any three of the account excutives at the agency mashed together in a blender and poured out into a meta-advertising organism.

All this social status heirarchy stuff is tough to ignore. It’s built in and just kind of happens.

For the most part the catering job is silly and pointless. The catering customers are, for the most part, drug reps buying food for healthcare workers so they might sit for a second to hear about the wonders of some new, exciting!, overpriced drug. “Have you tried the taco bar?! Have you seen our cool pens?! Don’t your patients need to have the fat sucked out of their colons?”

[aside: Viagra gives away two classes of pens. The cheap ones are little and blue. That, I remarked to a drug rep in a fit of pique one fine spring day, was probably a bad image. Do they really want to associate Viagra with something that’s small and blue? I suggested a big meaty pen, something you had to use two hands to hold. They haven’t taken my advice as far as I know. The good pens were sleek and silver. Those went to the doctors because doctors need something shiny to mollify them during their dark and lonely days, I guess.]

The main recipients of the food are receptionists, billing specialists, and peripheral health care workers who have no power but are given food to woo doctors into meetings. A kind of convoluted payoff for prescribing a drug. The medical office people win, the drug reps win, the drug companies win, the catering company wins, and I win because I get paid because of all this silliness.

Health care workers are a fat, greedy lot. I’m going on record saying this. They disgust me in a deep and profound way. You could not help but feel this way when see a group of people, each weighing over 300 lbs, grab at trays of food like starving children grabbing at candy, as you try to make your way through the office, battling those ravening hoardes. There’s nothing more disgusting than people who can’t delay gratification for more than five seconds.

I get paid shit because I do a job a monkey could do and that’s cool. It’s freeing to not have to worry about the job when you go home, which I did in spades when I was running a computer department at a company that never stopped working. Getting a call from a frantic artist at 3 AM on a Saturday was way too common. Waking up in the middle of the night to check on server status was also way too common.

So I’m not complaining that I make about one sixth of the money I used to get paid in the glory days. It’s a restuarant job, that’s what happens.

What’s important though is that I contend with the trivialities of annoyance because I am living low. I do the job of a high school kid. I make almost no money and really have to scrimp and save to be able to pay for a car repair. I hadn’t bought music in 4 years until last month when I snapped and picked up two DJ Format CDs.

Until a few years ago I hadn’t realized how hard life could be. Wow, can it be hard and I have it easy. The owner of the restuarant decided that we needed health insurance and has gone well out of her way to make that happen. She gives bonuses and offers help with little thought. She is one of the better people I’ve ever met.

It’s the same way with my co-workers. They’re all good decent people who are too smart to be doing the job that they’re doing.

We’re just an unmotivated lot. Too willing to accept fate and not willing to battle to make the world conform to our notions.

That’s the key success and happiness. Convincing people, bullshitting people, into believing that they need you.

And that’s the thing about being low. No one needs you. You are prefectly and absolutely replaceable at all times. If I go on a bicycle ride tomorrow and a maniac driver slaughters me like the rabid animal that I am, I will be replaced and that new guy trained and everything will move along smoothe and silky. That momentary glitch in the fabric will be repaired and my now non-existence will be forgotten all too quickly.

Being high the world works exactly the same way too. That’s the comedy thing about it. Everyone trapped in the social pyramid needs to pretend that they’re better than everyone lower than them to make it through the day. I’ve got a shitty job and declared bankruptcy a few years ago but at least I’ve got a place to live and I’ve got some interesting hobbies which is way better than that loser hippie kid who camps out in the park on 4th Avenue trying to beg enough money to score some pot to get through the night.

The healthcare receptionist knows she’s better than me. The doctors are better than the receptionists and the drug reps. The CEOs of the drug companies are way better than all of us losers since they make enough money to buy small African countries.

It’s all a grand game of constantly shifting power connections. That’s all it is…a simple game…and it is a story we tell ourselves to make being high and low make some sort of sense. It’s a tale of justice and moral worthiness. It’s a tale of complete made up bullshit.

Why do I know this? Because I used to support the decision makers, the movers and the shakers, and I know that most of them can’t even figure out how to turn on their computers or put toner in the printer. They are idiots and morons just like everyone else.

There is no justice in the world. A guy whose parents went to Yale has infinitely more opportunity by the simple fact of example than the guy who grew up poor in rural Kentucky whose parents held four menial jobs to pay the rent of the small house. Either one can become the other but you won’t try for the high if you only can see the low.

This is one thing I understand completely. My family was provincial in that way that lower middle class families in big cities have a tendency to be. They are close to greatness. They are the camp followers of the modern age. And because of that they rarely question their world and their silly lot in life. All that art/music/experimentation 10 miles away from where I grew up in Queens (the Ridgewood area) never touched my life. No one I knew had traveled further than Massachusetts. The tiny intimations of a grander larger world than I could hope to experience came only from books.

It wasn’t until I stumbled into the job working at the ad agency with people from all over the world, people who had traveled and done all sorts of crazy things a kid from Queens would never have imagined while he was stuck in his provincial world, that it occured to me that I could do something, anything at all.

[Oh fuck it is so damn hot in Tucson right now and I don’t have air conditioning and this cafe I love to frequent doesn’t either. I am so freaking sweaty it is amazing that I haven’t washed away the tables and the chairs. There’s nothing better than drinking hot coffee for the buzz, sweating profusely and typing like a madman, smashing, punching, the keyboard to make the cool typing noise that is the epitome of action, with a laptop on your lap, your balls hanging on the floor they’re so well cooked, and your crotch wet right here.

Okay, I can dream up a billion better things but for some reason that scene tickles me in a way I can’t easily describe. I guess it suites my particular internal story of the crazy loner spewing forth wisdom and wit on the web.]

The point of this is that I was once reasonably high in the food chain, slowly sliding upward on the pyramid, wallowing in the social mileu, and now I’m really really low in the muck. It wasn’t until I got down here that I was able to see what was happening, what was really going on.

Don’t get me wrong. It sucks not having money and having to accept attitude from spoiled bastards because that is my job. Sitll, it’s kind of nice to be able to see this stuff, to have that tiny veil of ignorance stripped away from my eyes for a brief tantalizing moment.

Whatever happens in my future, no matter how it turns out, I will always be exceedingly polite, understanding, and considerate to people bringing me food.