You wake up to birds singing or radio alarm clock buzzings, street level background backfires or loudmouth TV talk show hostings, and it’s morning or it’s noon or it’s nighttime somewhere and you cat stretch in your elastic pajama nakedness or maybe your slovenly randy wrinkledness and wonder groggily whether you can toe curl up for another snatch of dreamland, or you contemplate a drug induced nausea pounding sinus headache while pondering the nether world inner workings of the deep running pipedreams beneath the porcelain altar before you, or sit bed straight, wide awake, and mentally scan your salt mine workaday schedule before dressing and driving, or maybe do the Excedrin and Prosac pill pop, and then it’s showertime with ivory soap and herbal shampoo and tea and ginger body lotion, followed by a pampered pedicure or manicure or both at the boutique, or maybe you do the quick two step instead into day before dirty clothes which still smell strongly of yesterday’s sweatshop, and maybe you shave or maybe you don’t, quick quaffing a warm beer breakfast of champions or maybe oatmeal or McDonalds, and your car beckons, having long ago seduced you into debt slavery with its irresistible low mileage, zero APR, ironically promising freedom and power, which then transformed into bondage and weakness, for now you are its slave and it your master as you dutifully do its bidding and merge into traffic on autopilot, chauffeuring yourself towards your working serfdom, for “This is your life!” you think as you join the septic flow of other individual compartment transports capillary converging on city central, and hospitals, banks, convenient stores, and strip malls flash pass your car’s window of consciousness, and maybe you feel sorry for those less fortunate working stiffs you pass daily, you a white collar pencil pushing sales schmuck and they but sunburned hard hat construction road workers, street sweeping their way to dusty death, but they feel the same arrogance toward you, sneering as you pass like a car driving chain gangster, sluicing toward your white collared prison of glass and steel, and the road workers and garbage collectors hold it over the homeless and are in turn down frowned upon by the blue collar factory rats, store clerks and carpenters who are held in contempt by the salesmen, bank executives, and  office managers, who are themselves under the thumb of the money managers and CEO’s and trust fund power mongering ponzi schemers who feel themselves high atop the food chain on the big kahuna scale of self esteem, but in reality are more insecure than the lowest rung daseiners, for the more commodities they collect the more they will eventually lose, for all are hardwired and plugged into the buy and sell bump and grind whether it’s bandages or bonds, diet cokes or confections, books or bombs, donuts or hog futures, all jobs being fully staffed day in and day out with slowly evolving troglodytes whose intricate survival features have been strangely exapted to fancy they are free and so look forward only to the ball game tailgate party times or the beach cottage weekend or Berkshires vacation or Martha’s Vineyard getaway where they can do as they please for a few hours or a day or a week or a month before returning to the necessity of their moneymaking survival schemes, maybe drowning their sorrows in crowd pleasing pastimes like concerts or casinos, barhopping binge drinking, strip clubs, intimate dinner gatherings, opera or beach house ballyhoos, immersed in the bog of their illusory freedom, which is stymied only by those niggling thoughts of a work day on the morrow, looming darkly, casting shadows over their happiness, for weekend holiday vacations are lifetime snapshots, their end being death, which we know is inevitable, but which we mentally push outward and away as best as possible, but are never completely successful, for the closer we get to our working death deadline the more we think about it, and in trying to focus our attention on how much fun we’re having we become sad, and eventually we do the bullet bite down and go to work, and what is this humanoid work obsession anyway? is it our apple eating curse which makes us do the brow sweating soil toil, nosing the grindstone, or is work a study in character construction, sorting the lazy from the elect? where prosperity indicates god’s blessings, and the poor and slowly starving panhandler sets a prime callous Malthusian example of what happens when god turns his back on you, so work work work to prove you’re his best boy, his favorite daughter or son, his darling, or his invisible hand might sucker punch you into a tumbledown or bitch slap you where the slum shines, or is work simply the will of god and our duty as god shaped human instruments, part of a catholic or protestant ethic formed around a deferral of our wet salvation dreams? for isn’t a day at work instead of a day at play a gratification put off, like spending our lives on this troubled vale instead of frolicking in the clouds with haloes and heavenly splendor? an ethic emphasizing diligent punctuality and box lifting, bale toting obedience to the boss god, and did this new work instinct develop from a change in the  economic structure of society resulting in a subsequent behavior revaluation or was it outsourced by the protestant reformation’s theological belief shifts? for feudalism’s plunge meant more work extracted from the human animal, more mind numbing slave labor, and how nice religion was there to preach and persuade the working masses that their plight was uncomfortable yet necessary for their salvation, to inject us with the death virus and disease and then dangle the cure like a carrot, forbidding suicide shortcut to bliss except for jihad joes, for life on earth is not meant to be easy and the reward awaits us in the wings, after death’s curtain call, and the rich capitalist’s profits are but gifts from god showing his approval for good stewardship, for he gifts those who please him and punishes those who don’t, and such a system is bound to succeed, since the workers will be like fanatic crusaders, compliant and without complaint for a gate pass into god’s kingdom, and even now, when a person’s god ordained calling is replaced by one’s public usefulness, social hierarchies are ideologically justified by correlating slothful idleness with poverty and social decay, but when the industrial revolution darkened the sky with factory soot, the mass produced usurped the merely homemade, skillful craftsmanship replaced by anonymous discipline as long lines of craftsmen forsook their bankrupt ancestral professions and moved to the city to slave before manmade iron mawed monsters, selling their souls to the company store and working their offspring in order to survive, and the psychological reward for delayed gratification disappeared as a justification for the labor armies, for factories give rise to over production which destroys the assurance of prosperity so essential for the contented worker, for over production leads to market gluts which leads to sales declines which lead to less profit which leads to lowered production which leads to layoffs which leads to suffering, and woe be to those who would gather together after work and talk in hostile tones of labor unions or luddite led machine breaking forays, for the government always sides with the wealthy, punishing those who would dare delay the creation of commodities or limit the S&P or dam the rapidly flowing profit streams of the financially and politically powerful, and here in the information age little has changed despite the worker empower and enrichment movement which is a simplistic see-through sham designed to finagle more productivity from the average working stiff, and it matters not whether your management style is authoritarian or participatory, pay scales alone are no longer sufficient for the contented worker bee, but business doesn’t care about the personal happiness of its minions, only productivity matters and if you have to burn them out in a year or two and replace them, who cares, for it’s the law of Spencerian evolution, and so you arrive at work and maybe punch the time clock and take your regular place in the line assembling cars or boats or toasters or bicycles or houses or twinkies, or selling insurance or burgers or bonds, and it’s all piece work, for you never sit down to custom make a boat from scratch or a dress or an airplane, instead making only the pieces, parts and parcels, and so you spend your working day putting heat elements into waffle irons or underwriting a loan for a person you’ll never see or know, or bolting seats in an airplane you’ll never sit in, or cream filling a donut you’ll never eat, or drywalling a home shell you’ll never live in, or selling stocks you could never afford to buy, or perfectly placing erasers within pencils or pounding out pins, or selling dresses, or pumping port-o-potties, and the sheer redundancy is enough to freeze your brain, following all the rules with big brother watching while you stock the grocery store and dry good shelves precisely according to company protocol policies, trying not to be caught stealing time from the corporation with unauthorized conversational fraternization with fellow employees, and being overly polite to asses who are angry with everyone who does not give them the service they do not deserve, and maybe for paying two cents more than the store down the street for their maxipads or their asparagus soup, and having the nerve to think maybe you give a good goddamn about their personal petty foibles, and so you politely thank them for their business with cheerful façade and a fake smile while underbreath cursing them or calling them a fat-necked cow behind their backs, and then shout, “Next!” and start again, and you have to think sometimes the employment pay scales are out of kilter, kaput and cattywampus, for shouldn’t the ditch digging grunt shoveling back breaking clods over the shoulder all day in any weather get paid more than the movie store rental clerk who stool sits behind the counter and pushes buttons in air conditioned central heated comfort? and surely more than the college professor who teaches in prestigious surroundings with summers off and sabbaticals to boot, or what about that working girl at the road construction site, the one with the hand held stop and go street sign who stands all day, wet or dry, hot or cold, listening on the radio for her far distant, unseen sign holding fellow to give her the static crackling high sign so she can twist her wrist just so and turn her octagonal form from the stop side to the slow, thus allowing the auto peristalsis to proceed, and stop and proceed and stop, hour after hour, day after day, and small wonder she wants to go home and relax in her recliner with Bud in hand and watch TV and be entertained in the coziness of her trailer home, perching her sweaty feet on the butt burned coffee table and dozing until dinner thaws and the bed beckons, and in a perfect world her minimum wage would be maximized over and above that of the cold calling market caller, who sits all day in a comfy office chair while interrupting her likes during a hard earned microwaved dinner hour couch potato feast, earning bonus points for convincing her or you or me we need spleen insurance or cheap viagra prescriptions or a new telephone service or buffalo steak or ostrich eggs or hair inserts, but the Market takes all this into account, adding imperfection and scarcity to the mix, putting precise valuations upon labor, and so we strive to better ourselves by making more money though we constantly hear that it won’t bring happiness, which no one really believes until they get gobs of it and go off and buy lots of Stuff, which means they then have that much more to be unhappy about and they turn greedy and mean and smallminded because they think the have nots want what they have, and they themselves always want more and when is enough enough? how many stock options constitute nirvana? how many billions bring you to heaven’s door? how large a trust fund to paradise? and who is happier? the beer guzzling red flanneled wool capped weekend warring deer hunter who sits in his blind in the early morning misty crispness on over hunted public land amongst rusted cans and pampers while cradling his Remington pump with something akin to love, hoping only to hear the crackling sound of a six point buck down below so he can do the deer camp bag and brag while clinking bottles with best friends he would die for? or the suave sophisticate top rung businessman, nattily dressed in the finest sport tweeds money can buy, who jets to his one thousand acre Wyoming spread for a rustic luxurious weekend bird or elk hunt, gathering with a dozen or more backstabbing business associates, hoping to both impress and intimidate and maybe close a business deal or merger while finding birds or beasts to kill with the help of professional guides and bwana bush beaters, sighting down a hand engraved gold inlaid Parker Invincible double barrel twelve gauge, drawing a bead on his hapless prey? and when do you realize that the hierarchy is an illusion, that the masters eventually become slaves to their slaves and the slaves masters of their masters? that there is a life and death struggle going on here, a dialectical death match, in which there are no winners or losers, for the one needs the other as much as the other needs the one? each defines itself in terms of the other, a mediation of mutual interdependence, like being and nothingness, and when this mediation breaks down, who do you think will prevail?