It’s the strangest feeling, tucking in your shirt and
putting on a tie when you don’t have anywhere to be, and
yet it feels natural. You’ve been so well trained by the
mechanisms of society that, since it’s Monday, you feel
like you should be up and getting dressed and putting on
this tie, your favorite burgundy tie, and leaving the
house, beginning another five days of slaving that buys you
two days in which to sleep and build up your reserves so
that you can slave another five days.

        It feels right.

        Strange, but right.

        And yet, doing it, there’s also that quiet loathing
that’s buried deep in your brain. Your brain and your guts.

        You know the one.

        The one that knows that being a slave shouldn’t feel
right, even if it does.

        The one that has always wanted to throw a monkey
wrench into that same mechanism of society that you are a
part of.

        A monkey wrench or any other fucking kind.

        Just something that would put a halt to the whole
fucking thing.

        Delusions of grandeur you’ve had while sitting behind
the desk, staring at the monitor as numbers scrolled by
with their hidden meanings.

        After getting dressed, you sit on the bed and slip
into your favorite pair of argyle socks, and then the same
black shoes you’ve worn to work every day for the last six
years (they tend not to get worn out because you tended not
to walk at your job).

        Your wife, beautiful even without any makeup on, pokes
her head into the bedroom and says,

        “Coffee’s done. You ready?”

        Your wife’s a wonderful coffee maker. She goes to
places like Pricilla’s on Riverside and picks out beans and
combines them into delicious amalgamations, and every
morning since you’ve been married she has gotten up with
you and ground the beans and prepared the coffee, and
poured you your morning cups, perfect every time, with
their twenty-five percent cream and their lack of sugar.

        “Yeah,” you say.

        And she turns around to start back out to the kitchen
so that she can pour your cup (she doesn’t ever pour your
cup till you say you’re ready, so that it doesn’t get cold
before you have a chance to drink it), but before she has a
chance to disappear, you say,

        “Wait.”

        And she faces you again.

        And you say, while getting to your feet, you say,
“I’ll get the coffee. You relax on the couch.”

        “What?” she says.

        The thing about marriage is that after a while each
person will simply fall into a role, and every day that
role is filled, and after a not very long time, if one of
the people isn’t happy in their role, well, that person
wants to rebel, only usually they don’t rebel. They’ll
simply lash out now and then while continuing on in their
unhappiness.

        The thing about your wife is that she’s done that for
the last ten years.

        The thing about you is you never even noticed she was
unhappy until very recently.

        Sometimes you’re so fucking stupid.

        In this case you were stupid for approximately nine
and a half years.

        “I’ll make the coffee,” you say, and walk past her
toward the kitchen.

        And she follows.

        And says, “I know what you’re trying to do.”

        You pull the coffee mugs from the cupboard.

        “Yeah?”

        “Yeah,” she says, “and I think it’s sweet. But you
can’t make coffee.”

        “I can,” you say.

        “Go sit down,” you say.

        And you know that she knows that you’re not gonna
budge on this one, and she sighs, and she walks away from
you.

        And you turn back around and get down to the
chemistry.

        And less than two minutes later, you and your wife are
sitting across from one another on the couch and she takes
a sip of her coffee, and she grimaces, and she swallows
hard, and she says,

        “Good.”

        “That bad, huh?”

        She nods and laughs.

        You laugh too, and you say, “Sorry.”

        “Me too,” she says, “but I have to pour a new cup.”
She says, “I don’t know how much sugar you put in, but it’s
a lot.”

        You silently sip your coffee.

        When she comes back out and sits down across from you,
she says,

        “Thank you for that.”

        “For what?”

        “Trying.”

        And in this moment, you feel that you have a chance.

        You feel there’s at least a possibility that you guys
can pull through this.

        You nod at her.

        “You’re welcome.”

        And then you say, “Well.”

        “I better get to work,” you say.

        And you get to your feet.

        You don’t know how the fuck you’re gonna kill the next
eight hours.

        Maybe with a hatchet.

        Did you really think everything might be okay just two
hours ago?

        What the fuck is wrong with you?

        You can’t even tell your wife that you lost your job,
and you actually thought for a moment that everything could
turn out all right? You actually thought that. And not too
long ago, either. Not too long ago at all.

        Idiot.

        Dumb fuck.

        Moron.

        You sit at the lake in the middle of Echo Park in your
suit and tie, holding a bunch of pebbles in your left hand.

        Every once in awhile, when your thinking slows enough
for you to breathe, you grab one of the pebbles out of your
left hand with your right hand, and you toss it into the
pond. You watch the water ripple outward.

        You do this again and again.

        You do this for one hour.

        You do this for four hours.

        You do this for eight fucking hours.

        You useless piece of shit.

        The thing about traffic in Los Angeles during the
three to seven o’clock rush hours is that if you already
had a bad day, it makes you want to explode, and if you had
a good day, it sours the goodness and makes your brains
curdle.

        You know this isn’t exactly revelatory.

        But there it is all the same.

        Los Angeles traffic can make even a peaceful man,
which you are not -- can make even a peaceful man dream of
murder.

        Of Bricks through windshields.

        Crowbars across skulls, shattering bones like Ritz
crackers, leaving little crumbs on the backs of seats.

        Knives through throats, blood gushing out in spurts
with the beat of the heart till the heart finally stops.

        Blood flowing across the Hollywood Freeway like a
river, a river to wash away all those animals, all those
stinking sweating fucking driving animals.

        Especially the animals who pretend they're not
animals.

        The ones who don’t stink or sweat.

        The ones who’ve never had to.

        The pigs at their fucking troughs, getting fat at your
expense.

        The pigs in their Beamers.

        In their Hummers.

        In their Armani suits.

        With their plastic surgeried wives with their bleach
blonde hair and their credit cards for fingers.

        They should all choke on their own shit.

        By the time you take the Ventura exit, you’re so wound
up that you can hear the grinding of your own teeth, you
can almost taste the powdery tooth granules you imagine are
laying themselves upon your tongue.

        You roll down your Celica’s window to get some fresh
air, and you let the breeze across your face, and you
breathe in and you breathe out.

        Fuck and fuck and fuck.

        And now this.

        The street, which usually flows at a decent rate, is
at a complete standstill.

        You put your head on the steering wheel and you just
want to cry. You don’t want to, but you feel it wanting to
happen, you feel all those emotions bubbling to the surface
in a way unlike you’ve ever felt before -- at least not as
an adult. It feels so adolescent, this volcanic combination
of emotions, bubbling to the surface of you.

        Fuck and fuck and fuck.

        You get off Ventura as soon as it’s possible, and you
cruise, at a leisurely pace, through side streets that are
cracked and bumpy, residential areas, trying to get this
energy out of you, trying to calm down before you go home
to face your wife.

        You just drive in silence, sort of weaving through
streets in the general direction of your rented house.

        On your way home from your first Monday of non-work.

        You called Gary at home about a severance check on
Saturday when your wife was at the grocery store. He
laughed at you. Told you you were lucky he didn’t have you
arrested the day before. Told you you lost all chances of
severance pay the moment you jumped over his desk and
attacked him.

        Now goodbye.

        You have one last check on the way. You’ll be getting
it tomorrow. A check for your last week of work. And then
that’s it.

        That’s all. The money flow stops.

        And you still haven’t told your wife.

        You pull your Celica to the curb and take it out of
gear, and yank up the emergency brake, and simply let it
idle, idle while you cry, while you cry out loud for the
first time since you were in high school and the first girl
you had sex with (in the back of your Nova) told you it was
over, that she never really liked you anyway, but just
wanted to get sex out of the way and you were as good as
anyone. It all just flows out of you, bubbles out of you
and runs down your face and drips onto your shirt and your
pants, and it just comes and comes, and somewhere off in
the distance you can hear someone making a jerky gasping
sound, and it takes you almost a minute of hearing it to
realize that that someone is you, and that snot is running
from your nose, and dripping down your face, and you think
of what you must look like to an outsider, to someone
peeking into your car through one of the windows, and there
you are, a thirty-six year old man in a shirt and tie,
gripping the steering wheel with white-knuckled fists and
gasping for air and with emotional turmoil bubbling down
your cheeks and dripping off your face like lava, and
you’re sure you must look crazy, and the thought of what
you must look like makes you look even crazier, because the
thought makes you laugh, but you don’t stop crying just
because you start laughing, you just do both of them
simultaneously, and you can’t stop and won’t stop because
you need this, you need this release, any kind of release,
and it all just comes flowing out of you and flowing out of
you and flowing out you, until it won’t come anymore, and
then you wipe at your nose and your mouth with your shirt
sleeve and you sit up and you look around, and it’s
starting to get dark, half an hour must have passed, and
you sigh, and you turn the key in the ignition.

        The rest of the trip home you feel almost nothing.

        You just drive, listening to the sound of the car’s
tires roll on asphalt.

        Emotionally, you know how you feel?

        Sometimes you’ll fall asleep with your wife, your fat
fuck’s belly pressed against the small of her back, an arm
thrown over her torso and cupping her breast, the other arm
sort of just tucked out of the way. And sometimes out of
the way doesn’t work so well, and you wake in the dead dark
asshole of night to this strange sensation, the sensation
of pain you can’t quite feel. All the circulation to that
arm has been cut off, and it’s had pressure on it for
hours, and when it starts to get its feeling back, you know
sure as shit that what you’ll be feeling will be pain of
the most uncomfortable variety, but for now what you feel
just waking is the numb precursor to a pain lurking just
below the surface. Yes.

        That’s what you feel right now.

        Emotionally.

        The numbness of cut off circulation.

        You just wish you could be somewhere else when the
flow returns.

        Anywhere else.

        And you’re stepping from your car, which is now in the
driveway, pulling the last cigarette out of your pack, and
thinking of the five dollars you can’t justify spending on
another twenty coffin nails.

        You slam the car’s door.

        You strike a match.

        You light your cigarette and lean against your car and
simply smoke, afraid to face your wife. Afraid that she
will see all of what’s inside you. Afraid she will see the
lies you’ve been telling with your silence.

        All of the silent money lies.

        Lying in silence about a concept that we give value
simply by valuing it.

        It seems to you that the structure of capitalism was
built right on top of a thin and misty cloud of a
foundation, one that a large wind could blow away.

        You know you’re missing something somewhere.

        That can’t be right.

        But what if it is?

        What if the basis for capitalism is a complete
societal brainwashing, and there are thousands of men
willing to kill for this money, to build fortunes on top of
rotting corpses?

        And what fortune hasn’t grown from the rotting corpses
of those who planted it?

        Sure, these capitalists got their money legally. Some
of them did, anyway. But there’s nothing ethically that
separates them from a bank robber. In fact, a bank robber
only steals from corporations which are insured by other
corporations. Most capitalists build their fortunes on top
of the misery of the poor. In that sense, the bank robber
is morally superior. He’s a mechanism in the redistribution
of wealth in a more reasonable fashion.

        Sure.

        Isn’t that why so many criminals are revered by
people?

        John Dillinger.

        Bonnie and Clyde.

        Butch and Sundance.

        Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer.

        It’s because they take away from the entities that
have been taking away from the people for years. In a way
they’re the ultimate capitalists; they get rich taking
money from people who have lots of it. Instead of
collecting small amounts from thousands of people who will
be buried by losing it, they take large amounts from huge
companies that will barely feel it.

        You take one last drag off your cigarette and flick it
to the street, where it rolls into the gutter and dies in a
stream of water from a neighbor washing his car.

        Kantian, you’re not.

        But who really gives a fuck?

        None of this armchair philosophy does jack shit to
help you out of your situation. There’s no amount of
thinking that can get you out of this situation.

        You can think of no way out, right now. Every day you
lie to your wife is another day you know you’re going to
have to explain away eventually.

        When the lack of money catches up with you.

        When the lack of work catches up with you.

        And then how are you going to get out of this mess?

        You fucking idiot.