SOUL DYSMORPHIA
ABOUT A JOB
Guy with no soul tells me I have body dysmorphia. How would you know, agent of Satan. How would you know anything.
My mother was a natural body builder before I was born. She had a third place body building trophy in a hallway closet when I was growing up. I got a pair of adjustable dumbbells and a workout bench and a pullup/dip tower when I was 26 and I started lifting weights and I liked it more than I expected. I am my mother’s daughter. I lift weights and do calisthenics naked like an ancient Greek retard while blasting BAP’s podcast in my house. I carry 110% of my bodyweight in farmer’s walks across my house because I have a bungalow, a shotgun house, which is a long hallway, once a week for minimum 45 min in addition to other exercises. Most of what I do is what Ted Kaczynski would call a surrogate activity. I could buy a house because I bought a house in what is considered a bad neighborhood for around 100k with a 3% down payment because I was a first time home buyer so my mortgage includes a PMI payment of an extra $50 a month, meaning I bought a house for around $5000 down and a mortgage, including PMI, of around $700. I told my realtor, whom I wrote a poem about because he was the only person I talked to for a couple months, that I am gentrifying the neighborhood. He sends me a Christmas card every year. He is the only actual person from whom I have ever received mail. He told me that I shouldn’t buy the first house I tour. I told him I don’t care what he or anyone else says about anything, ever. My house has doubled in value since I bought it. It was just good timing but I pretend I’m some mastermind. He laughed when I told him that under no circumstances would I use a woman realtor. I could tell he liked me. People tend to like charming and funny guys.
I work at a small to mid sized company. I am the design department. I make around $60k a year. I pretty much have my own office. There’s a salesman who also has a desk in the room but he’s usually travelling around selling. When he is in the office he takes all his calls on speaker phone which is funny to me. Sometimes it’s too much and I have to get up and walk outside. I play music in my office and one time when I wasn’t, he asked me to “play that beautiful music.” I like him. He likes me. I always make sure to leave my music playing when I go for my lunch break walk (I don’t eat) in case he comes into the office. I run adblockers on everything so there’s no break in my playlists and if you hear or watch advertisements under any circumstance then I genuinely don’t think you are a human or have a soul.
I have a few walking routes I have developed around the neighborhoods where I work. Even when it isn’t fall, the neighborhoods and apartment complexes give me the impression of brown leaves on the ground. My work place is near where I live. My commute is around five minutes. I switch up my lunch break walks for some variety. One of them goes through an apartment complex. Sometimes I see black women with dump truck asses and turquoise shower caps and I will adjust my walking route to watch them walk back into their apartment building after they throw trash in the dumpster. It’s rare to see blacks outside in the winter though. A different route goes past a house, where, when it’s warm enough, there’s a group of at least six old black guys sitting on lawn chairs. One of them called me “pimp” and the others cheered and laughed. If they aren’t sitting outside then there’s often bikes all over the yard. Later on that route I pass by a group home for mentally disabled adults. If any of them are outside, they’re usually listlessly sitting on a bench. Sometimes I will walk past one and I say hello and they typically don’t say anything but sometimes they ask for change or a cigarette. I have neither.
I have another route where, last year, a car approached me and asked if I had seen a large white dog. I had not. We each continued on our way. A couple streets down, I saw the white dog. I approached the dog who seemed friendly albeit confused. Well what do I do now. I straddled the dog and managed to grab his collar and found a phone number which I called while trying to keep the dog from running away. The person who answered the phone told me they were out of town and needed to call the person who was watching the dog, presumably the man in the car who approached me earlier. The dog was starting to get restless but I didn’t want him to run off and suddenly his attention was seized by another dog. This dog was on a leash with his owner. I waved them over and they approached and the dogs started sniffing each other and I explained that I was trying to get this dog back to some guy who was driving around the neighborhood. It took a little longer than I expected for someone to call me, the guy in the car, and then I had to try to explain on which corner I was standing with this dog to this man from out of town before the dog ran off again. Eventually he found us and he thanked us and I shook the man’s hand who was walking his dog and stood with me so the white dog wouldn’t run away. Sometimes I see him on my walks and I always wave to him. I don’t know his name.
There’s another route where sometimes I see chickens in someone’s yard. I like taking pictures of them.
The salesman who I like and who likes me has been working here for over thirty years. That is what he tells every client. That is what he tells every coworker. That is what he tells God. Each client, no matter how big or small, how trivial or essential, gets a folder and he prints every email correspondence and I don’t know what else. These folders are not to be thrown away. When I first started my job, before we renovated the office a little, he had multiple work stations absolutely covered in stacks of manila folders and multiple filing cabinets bursting at the seams.
Coworkers complained about the eyesore and the occasional rat droppings. But there wasn’t much to be done—the salesman has been doing this over thirty years, after all, he brings in the vast majority of our revenue, he can find any client in any document tower because his mind palace is built of sheets of paper of printed emails. People from across multiple states will call specifically for him.
When finally we renovated because we got a new piece of manufacturing equipment, the cost of which was more than fifteen years of my salary, something had to be done about the files. We needed more room. And the salesman became distraught, nearly apoplectic. I wondered why he cared so much. What was the importance of a folder from 1992.
Part of why I don’t mind my job is because I literally don’t mind it. I don’t really think about it much or care about it. It’s trivially easy for me, I can write stuff like this if we aren’t too busy, it’s not totally fake email rape, I am grateful for what it is. It does not take up much real estate in my psyche. In my final year of college I had a horrible/freeing/pathetic/essential revelation about working when I was taking the spectrum of a nebula using one of the most advanced telescopes in the world, corresponding with another team of scientists across the world—I don’t actually care about this work at all. It was a taste of what my work could have actually entailed. That could have been my job, which sounds more exciting, I guess, but which was, in a practical sense, the same thing I am doing now: sitting on a computer like a gay retard. What I would be doing is sitting on a computer, probably making more money than I am now, but also having more expenses, and probably having less freedom to do what I want, or less freedom not to care. Less freedom to offer less of my soul. Because I would have been in a more robust institution no matter what. There would be protocols and meetings and goals and HR managers and emails. My heartbeat elevated just writing that sentence. I probably would have killed someone or myself in that environment. I am not exaggerating. I am probably going to be working on a computer no matter what, might as well get to wear whatever I want and play music as loud as I want and minimize my exposure to protocols and procedures and Satan. What do you do? The introduction between American men for decades now. And you are expected to answer with your job, and it’s not just what you do, it’s what you are. You are a salesman. I am the design department. For me, it’s just what I do, no matter what, it would just be what I do, that was the revelation. My passion was not in any job. At least not in any job I was qualified for. Who cares how much money you make when you have to answer a phone call at dinner time. It’s just not worth it to me. Others might be better equipped. Others might have better job opportunities.
And that’s why the salesman was freaking out about the folders. Because they were not folders. They were thirty years of his life. They were structural like his skeleton. Throwing them away meant throwing him away. And the boss threw out lots of folders when the salesman wasn’t looking.