My Love for the Labor Day Sale has Never Slackened

Labor Day comes upon us always in the waning days of summer, hot and muggy, and has been hot and muggy so long that even the similes for the effect of the summer are tired and wilted so you just consider it sadly, sweating, glad you don't work outside unless you do, in fact, work outside. If you do, then you've probably already given up describing the weather in something as complicated as logos, preferring instead visceral glares, spitting, and projecting the emotion of 'fuck' - already primal and almost prelingual - at whatever your task at hand is.

The Labor Day Sale. Immediate and palpable proof of Big Capital's victory over the proletariat, if capitalism was a cancer and America was the disease-riddled body. We are sick, so sick, but everything is 20% off.

I am writing to you because I am in that strange, liminal space between having completed one task* and leaving for work. A literal, exact half-hour where sitting quietly feels Suspicious and Listless but feels dangerous to get, like, actually wrapped up in something. But I haven't been here in a while, and I can subject you to a steady barrage of train-of-thought instead of booting Civ 5 up for what feels like the millionth time, hour number 127**.

It's not like I'm as busy as I'm about to be, but I want to put a fun spin on it. Fun for you, anyhow.

I have Monday off classes, because Labor Day is a Federal. I have the day off, so I'm going in to work. Does that feel a little sick to you? It feels a little sick to me. People shop on the Monday and say, with no irony, "They make you work today?" Yeah, wow. Ha ha. Like, geeze, man. What can you say to that except give them the Officially Approved Rictus of Pleasure and say, in no uncertain terms, "Ha Ha Yes They Do But It Pays The Bills." Everyone has a little laugh, except we're internally restraining ourselves from showing them the business end of a boxcutter. How's that for service with a smile?***

Patrick Bates thinks he's got it bad? I don't even have it the worst. What I've always loved about the idea of American Psycho is how truly American it is. Even our aphorisms about the divorce between reality and daily life, the banality of the self being divorced from our labor are aspirational. If only to be an axe-wielding psycho in that suit! Those wonderful business cards! Of course that was the point. A more powerful point of my own perhaps I do not possess.

So, I am a little busy, but not yet so busy that I do not have time to write to all of you.

* Which is reading, since it's not house or yard work, and that's pretty much all I do.
** According to Steam, on 8/31, in the year of our Lord two thousand and fourteen.
*** Upper Management does not like the staff holding boxcutters with reference to Glasgow.