Get a Job!

I wonder what are people saying about me, behind my back? Are they thinking "Why can't he get a job? What's wrong with him? He's got so much to offer" and a litany of similar questions, just as I ask myself? Are they saying what my wife and daughter say when they are frustrated or angry with me and the tightness of our circumstances, hoping to provoke the beast inside me, saying: "Get a job!" and "Loser!", as I also tell myself at times. I am raw on the subject, yet passive, really numb.

It is the numbness of self-protection, I assume. A state of being that cuts off feeling. I am a lobster who feels no pain ("I am a rock, I am an island. And an island never cries, an island feels no pain...") in the steampot of death. I am green; I am red. My passage from alive to food is painless according to a recent report and inconsequential, nameless. A consumer may think about a once great meal, as in "I ate a tasty lobster," indefinite article, along with a flinty white or a fume blanc, fresh corn from the fields just over the stone wall, drawn butter, a vegetable fresh and green, your choice.

It would be interesting to measure a life of luxury in terms of lobsters. Would it be quantitative or qualitative? One great crustacean, homaris Americanus per season, or an everday lobster? Indentured servants in colonial New England could not be fed lobster all of the time, when lobsters were plentiful and cheap. Often it was expressly forbidden by contract to feed sevants lobster more than a specified number of meals per week. How far things have changed! So, am I numb as a lobster and a rare or an unappreciated foodstuff? Which one am I? Perhaps just numb, or dumb, less rare than I may think.

Which brings me back to wondering: what is this job that I must get? What is my speciality? Will I provide someone their daily soup du jour, or do I wake, or sleep? Get a job, lobsterman. Feel the pain. Cry like a squeezed rock! Get out there.