Tonight I am training new recruit Eva on the bar. This means I have accrued some semblance of a hint of responsibility in a job that just the other day I was being told I had become lax and slipshod at. The news is surprisingly satisfying. I have become sufficiently proficient that I can impart my wisdom to someone else. I become concerned to project an industrious image, I become conscientious; keeping an eye on the bar, maintaining standards of cleanliness and walking up and down in a self important fashion.
It is seconds before Eva arrives when I realise what has been done. I have been had. The choice of yours truly to carry out staff training was a managerial tool, a technique, a way of buying me into (and having me buy into) the folds of this company and its dubious goals and pursuits. For a brief second I have turned into the kind of monstrous jobsworth that anyone with any sense despises. Briefly my entire being is directed toward the pursuit of a job which has at times brought me to tears of despair for the state of humanity. I have compromised my entire identity for the sake of some sense of worth and prestige and now I can see clearly that this is the precise point at which the rot sets in, the very moment at which I would have been turned into a hateful drone by the economic powers that detest every pore of my free being.
Eva arrives. I tone down my thoughts and turn to an honest run through of how best to get through a night without wanting to hang oneself. We discuss her degree in Eastern European Studies and I introduce her to the collective sense of despair surrounding the repetitive playing of Shakira’s ‘Hips Don’t Lie’. Being human and not harbouring any significant brain injury, she picks up the job very quickly. The night passes smoothly and I go home to try and get some sleep before the next round of soul punching.
Today I am met by a challenge. After a morning spent in the library I return to the flat to post while Mike and his friend Carl are discussing Mike’s thesis in the living room. Carl comes in to say hello and asks what I am doing. Upon being told he tells me his feelings about blogging. About how it is not true to its own ideological sense of plurality because it organises itself into nodes of opinion and influence and is only available as a resource to those with computers. About how many bloggers allow their lives to become subjugated to the act of writing. I point out that he has perhaps conflated the act of keeping a blog with the ideological commitment to what is called blogging and that by writing a blog, one does not necessarily buy into the ‘blogosphere’ and all that term conveys. I do not meet other bloggers (unless they happen to have been friends first) and I try to avoid centring my life around my blog, furthermore, I actually read very little of what else is out there. I am what you might call a casual blog user, barely a blogger at all and more of dabbler. Perhaps we should christen the ‘dabblersphere’ and those of us with a less headstrong attitude to writing a blog would be able to separate themselves from that curious strain of the liberal press that cherishes the blog proper as a new form of human interaction. Nonetheless, I feel suitably chastised and sit here to finish my post with a question mark and curious sense of emptiness hanging over me.