Corporate America
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| I always continue straight to the Canyon, maybe next time I decide to follow Mulholland Drive, that will be it, I’ll find the perfect spot to throw myself off the cliff, to finally die.
Charming. After six months in Los Angeles, I am so split up with the idea of going back to London or living this nightmare in that company, that my only solution worth considering is to throw myself over the cliff on Mulholland Drive. The only compromise. I’ve been living in such an imagined world anyway, such a virtual world, it makes no difference to me. This world is not real, it is no right, I’ve imagined it all. I might as well die there in my dream. Feeling a bit nostalgic, thinking about suicide and all, I decided to do a search on the Internet about my old town Québec City and Jonquière. Desperate of not being able to find anything about a past that might have existed, but for which I could find no proof, I ended up doing a search on Jonquière Black Hole. My website came out first, what a surprised. And the second entry was about the Wal-Mart in Jonquière, the first ever store which has got employees who were able to get into a union. The third entry is that the response from Wal-Mart was to close the store forever. Can’t imagine how on earth Black Hole brought a link about Wal-Mart, and a Wal-Mart in my old town preferring to shut down their first ever shop with unionized employees, who decided to demand any sort of rights or freedom, which they were not granted in the end. If I did not have a reason to shoot myself yet, now I have. 14 April 2006 I am so tired to have to prove myself every time I get a new Manager. The process is always the same. They start thinking I am moving in slow motion, not getting any result, freaking at me, hating me, find a way to get rid of me, war is declared, and then, oh surprise, results are delivered well above expectations. And then, they love me, they don’t want to lose me, but by then I’m already gone. I had the worst week, and this is quite a statement considering that my bosses are somewhere in Mexico visiting some old Maya Pyramids. The Chinese Girl and the Director had a field day this week complaining all over the office that I am not fast enough, that I am so incompetent, and now calculating all the seconds I am in the office, despite the fact that I am also working from home and leave the office well after hours. They don’t realize that, because they are already gone by then. There is also that I am not the usual employee who does not give a shit about what he is doing and how he is doing it. I cannot do 10% of what they are asking me, like everyone else. When I am asked to find all the possible sponsors for a conference, I do a damn exhaustive job of it, and that kind of stuff takes forever. In the end however they will understand that I will confirm five sponsors on this conference instead of none. Of course, it will be too late by then, they will have destroyed me to the bosses, once again. I am so tired of this pattern, of this life, of all these identical days, and all the shit I get every day from these people. It is crisis time every day, the Chinese Girl freaked out again at me yesterday, the whole office knows about it, they love it. They feed on that kind of thing, there is no hope for humanity, I can tell you that much. We are all doomed, if we do not learn to feel sympathy for our colleagues. It does not help that both the Director and the Chinese Girl are in love with the Sweet Chinese Girl and the Spanish Guy. And that love is blind. I hate this favoritism. It is clear that I have more experience and that I am better than any of them, but I have not proved myself to them yet, it will take them a while to understand that. In the meantime I also understand why these perfect employees appear to have nothing to do whilst I am sinking under so much work. They have not started the wheel yet, they are just getting there, and soon they will also be swamp under the rules of the new structure. And then, we’ll see how they cope, if they too have a time management problem. I’m not stupid, that love for them from the management, guarantees them immunity. If they can’t cope, it is because they have given them too much to do and it is understandable. If I cannot cope, it is because I am incompetent. There has never been any justice in this corporate world, I have also noticed that a long time ago. In 15 days, it’s over. I will love to tell them that I am leaving within a month. At that time I guess they will have to do some soul searching, wonder if they have done anything wrong in my case, to make me flee like that. However I may be mistaken, they might suddenly feel relieved that I will be out of there, perhaps they are more blind than I gave them credit for. I don’t think my bosses are blind, they have told me they saw a lot of potential in me, but with the reports they will get from their directors and managers, they must be in two minds. Maybe it is just not working out after all, and I long to get out of there. I am in logistic nightmare with the admin of these conferences involving over 50 people each, sponsors and supporting organizations, etc., on top of having to produce new events like a machine in a producing line. The admin alone is a full time job, and it is supposed to be done in parallel of everything else. If I am to live such a miserable existence, the pay off should be mine, not theirs. At no point will I ever be happy to see the results, no satisfaction ever for a job well done, I could not care less. It is just hell from the beginning to the end, with no way out. I need to start my own company, before I decide to shoot myself. For now I have only one goal, a very short term goal. Survive my last afternoon this week without exploding at them. Damn difficult not to, under such unfairness. I would need more than two days off to get back on my feet, and of course, this is Easter weekend and we don’t even have one day off, while the bosses are on holiday, they only ones who can afford it, with the Director. As it stands, I’ll be spending Easter Saturday and Sunday, working on shrinking my to-do-list. This is just peachy, as would the Americans say. I just destroyed the back bumper of my boss’ car. If I thought I was in trouble before, considering everything that happened this week at work, and if I was worried about all that will be reported about me once my bosses are back, now I can add the crown in the huge cake: I destroyed their car! I was going backward so slowly, and yet, a stupid yellow pole in the parking lot of where I live, out of nowhere, was standing there, almost asking to be hit. If this is not proof that I cannot be trusted with anything, what proof would they need? Is it my fault if I did not drive for the last seven months, and that I’ve been used to drive small European cars instead of those big American 4X4? The truck is so huge, you can’t even park it anywhere. I guess this will have to go out of my salary, I just hope this is not going to cost $500. I don’t really care anymore after the week I had. If anything, this is one more good argument to flee, to tell them soon that this whole idea was a disaster, and I need to get back to London. I’m a disaster waiting to happen. I’m bad news. And now that I have been contacting the planet because of that conference about Nuclear Power, if my anarchist website had not attracted any attention until now, I must now be on every black list of every single intelligence agency on the planet. Seriously, what must be the first word on those spying machines from any government, if not the word nuclear? And how powerful is intelligence in America? I’ve been noticing many helicopters hovering over my flat in the last few weeks, am I getting paranoid or who I am, what I do, shines like a beacon all over America? I must be one f the most scrutinized person on the planet now, certainly all the emails I am sending or receiving are read. The word Nuclear has appeared in just about every single I have been sending and receiving in the last few weeks. Hopefully they are clever enough to understand that I am working on a conference on the subject, that I am not trying to acquire some Plutonium, and that I am about to blow up the planet. Today that made me think some more about the conferences I should be producing with my new company. I thought, why not put together the most eclectic collections of conferences on the weirdest and most taboo subjects? It got me thinking. I was imagining my first few anarchist conferences:
Though in themselves these topics are all right, and that there must be conferences in the world about these exact subjects, one company producing events on all of these, could only mean one thing, complete irony, of someone disabused with life, with a strong either sense of humor, or a great sarcastic desire to prove a point. And you know what? I thought for one second there, that these ironic and taboo subjects, the ones that people would avoid doing conferences on, are perhaps the most serious subjects there are, and ultimately could lead to great financial success. Dear me… governments have every right to be shadowing me, I’m certainly a danger to humanity with such ideas. But who cares? Today at work they ask me what I would be doing this weekend. I answered that I was going to buy myself a gun and shoot myself. Which prompted a long discussions between them (without me), where they discussed how they would kill themselves, and that they all thought about it at one time or another at some point in their life. Especially because unbearable jobs they had. Surprising enough, the Chinese Girl was up there telling us about all the wrong ways to commit suicide, as if she had reviewed them all before, I could tell she never really was that low, to actually be thinking about doing it. She went on on saying all that she would do before committing suicide, like going to Las Vegas and losing all her money, or going to the best hotels and eat in the most expensive restaurants until she runs out of money. Coming from a toothpick, I am quite amazed that she is always talking about eating expensive food, as if she was obsessed with it, when obviously she does not eat anything. Anyway, people who say that before committing suicide they would do this or that, like robbing a bank, are people who never really thought about it. Éthey would then understand that when you are at the point of deciding on ending your useless and boring life, you do not feel like doing anything, you are way passed doing crazy things to motivate you to exist. At that point you are in a place where either you continue with your miserable existence, or you end it all. There are no other solution, you cannot just abandon everything and do stupid things like going to Las Vegas. You are still very much in the realities, you continue or you find a way out, and there is usually only one way out, one thing you can actually do. Later on they asked me again what I would do tonight. I answered that I would listen to some Nine Inch Nails full blast, write, and drink myself to death. They got my point this time, I’ve through terrible times lately at work. And at the very moment, I freaked out inside, because I realized that I was more than serious. I looked at my desk, and I thought, yes, perhaps I could end it all tonight, after drinking myself to insanity, to forget it all. I’ve reached that point where I can see no future for myself, no other moment where I could ever be happy again, nothing worth continuing for. I felt like if I was already dead, and the consequences of it. How a dead end job, following an infinite amount of other dead end jobs, can lead to the illusion that life is no longer worth living. There will never be a better day, there never was one in the first place, there is nothing to hope for the future. Miserable one day, miserable for life. At this level, success or richness can no longer change anything. You’re already screwed up for the rest of your existence, you can never come back to the surface to breath. Game Over. I don’t know what I will have to do tonight to avoid committing suicide at the end of the night. I have already started to drink myself to death, I’m drinking a whole bottle of Porto, and many beers will follow. It was even suggested to me how I should do it. I have a car. Though I am worried now that I scratched the damn thing, if I were to drive it over a cliff, fall in the ocean tonight, that will suddenly become the last of my worries. A $100,000 truck, I cannot imagine a better way to die. Los Angeles is filled with places to throw yourself from. Topanga Canyon State Park is perfect, less than two miles away. Even drunk I can reach the damn place. In London we do not have those cliffs, those canyons, this ocean beyond a precipice. What a perfect place to end one’s life. I’ve got a car this weekend, almost an invitation to act. I’m seriously thinking about it, I might see more clearly once I am completely beyond drunk. At least you will all know that I did not kill myself because my judgment was clouded by alcohol, it was quite clearly stated and considered way before I was completely drunk. Alcohol in this case would only help me to act, to accomplish my destiny, to end it all. When there is no more hope of a better day, when you did everything you could to change your life to avoid that misery you have been suffering all your life, and it failed miserably, there is no more hope. I can’t see a better day. I can’t see ever experiencing happiness. I don’t care anymore to succeed at any of my dreams. I am beyond life and its pettiness. I am beyond humanity who only proved to me that there was no great future to expect, to hope for. Every I see, everything I hear, incite me to end it all. To free me from this useless world. I’m not the only one feeling this way, there are many suicides every day all over the planet. They must be thinking about it all the time, and one day it is just too much, they finally act. I am at that point. This is where Los Angeles drove me. How ironic. And I would not even commit suicide because I did not succeed in becoming a writer in Hollywood, it is everything else that drove me there. It is not even related to Hollywood. Succeeding might have saved me, but there is no way I could prove my potential, and even if I could, I know it would quickly become the same hell I’ve been suffering in those corporate jobs everywhere on the planet. There is simply no way out, rich or not, successful or not, never changes anything. You’re either born happy or not, and unfortunately, I was born desperate, with the biggest existential crisis anyone can find. And the nightmares I’m going through just don’t help, it is “la goutte qui fait déborder le vase”, there’s just no hope in any better day. At this point I no longer care if suddenly news of my death might affect the people I know, the people who found in their hearth to love me for one reason or another. Family. They went through hell themselves, surely even my death will just be one more thing to think about, and eventually, they will just continue on their road to hell, whilst I’ll finally be liberated from it. It is all worth it. I’ve been away from anyone for so long, dead or alive, makes no difference. I know, both my grandmothers died, I was far away on the other side of the ocean, and I think they are still alive and that I will see them next time I come home, if I ever come home again. “Loin des yeux, loin du coeur”, and therefore, dead or alive, is meaningless to anyone. Should I make peace with myself before throwing myself over a cliff? Why? There’s no need. I don’t care anymore about anything. I have no more hope, no more dreams, I know they will all lead to disaster and unhappiness. And unfortunately, for me, to die, is just like turning off a computer. It has no consequence, there is no life after death, it is just like finally turning off a computer at the end of the day. It can never be turned on again, but who cares? Not me, that’s for sure. My god! Is this really the night? Will I really end it all tonight? I have never been so serious about it in my entire life. I felt it today at work, I knew it was a special day, it was different. I understood that this time, I took it very seriously, I might actually do it. Anyone looking at it, after my death, reading this, will assume it was because of this nightmare of a job I have, they will assume I did it because of these people who drove me to it. They would be wrong. They are just the end of it, what convinced me that there would never be anything better for me on this earth. They are the last station, the end of the line. There was much more before that, everything in fact, I have never encountered anything that did not drive me to suicide. In which case, I must be the problem, I’m what is wrong in this world. I could not find happiness, where many others following the same path do. I’m the only one to blame I guess, the others are only trying to survive too, I guess. My God, I would not even think twice tonight if I had a gun here. It would be over right now. Sad that I don’t have a gun. And that I am unlikely to take the four by four of my boss to go and drive over the canyon. I’m too dead for that. My father has riffles, I would have used them tonight, I know that. Am I going to again escape killing myself because of a lack of imagination and motivation to achieve it? It looks like it. I’ll fall asleep in a second. This is not acceptable. I have a car. I know the exact spot where I want to throw myself in. Somewhere beyond the mountain I’ve been seeing every day on my way to work. There is already a cross there, of a young couple who drove over the precipice without wanting it, most probably. Nicest spot, great valley, greatest view, dangerous corner. Willingly continuing straight, falling to a certain death. What am I waiting for? I’m trying to remember where it was. Was it following Mulholland Drive to the ocean? Or simply Topanga Canyon Drive? Should I call Leonardo and ask him where it is that we were, and tell him this is the place I will go and die tonight? Oh God, how I wish… maybe I can find the place myself. It is not everyday that you take the car in order to find the perfect place to throw yourself, a place you saw before and identified as the perfect place where you will put an end to your desperate life. I think that if I knew exactly where it was, right this minute, I would be driving there right now. I’m not even going to say that, in a way, I’m pleased that this was a de-motivation to act. That I might wake up tomorrow thinking: I am alive! I am so pleased to still be alive! This is ridiculous thoughts. I know now that tomorrow I will be at the exact same point. It is no longer the alcohol talking, I assess the situation today, I was not drunk, I’ve been thinking about it all day, I stated it many times. What are you going to do this weekend? I’m going to by myself a gun and shoot myself. That’s what I was thinking, that’s what I wanted, and I still want it. Nothing or no one will save me now. I could not care less. It is the end of it. I have to act, I have to do it, I have to end my life. There are no consequences. I am forgotten, and forgotten I will die. I have to find that courage, that ultimate motivation, to stop talking about it, and just do it. Just do it. Sounds like a commercial, but it means something to me. Just do it! And be done with it, with this existence, this nightmare of a life. There’s no hope here, there’s never been. Just end it!!! Just end it… it’s not worth it, it is just not worth it. There’s only one thing now that could save me. It is a computer game called Atlantis. A virtual world where I have lost myself every year, for the last few years. A place worth living, a wonderful place, the only place I feel I might say: wait a minute, this is worth living for, if you could actually live there forever. The company who produced that game has gone bankrupt, god only knows what happened to the people who created that perfect world for me. The world I live to survive in, that every single minute of my existence, I wish I could just grow and find happiness in. A virtual world. Where I felt more at home than any reality I’ve been living in. 15 April 2006 I woke up this morning at exactly 7 am, like if it was a normal day and had to go to work. For once it seems that I have a day off, well, in theory, that bitch at work has got me so wired, I’ll probably work on my conference this weekend. I woke up surprised, surprised that I was still alive. I came so close yesterday to somehow commit suicide. And my first thought was to her, to the Chinese Girl, she drove me to suicide, she almost got me. I’ve been through hell in my life, many times I thought I had reached the pinnacle of my misery and thought of ending it all, but last night was the most intensive I have ever lived, I cried for a while as well, I had never reached such a low point. Usually when I wake up from nights like this, my first thought in the morning is that I am glad I survived, that I did not kill myself, and I thought that for a second this morning, but five minutes later now, I’m not so sure, I’m still very much in the same mind frame, and that is also new for me. I’m never suicidal for days in a row. What can I do now? Just wake up and get on with my life, whatever is left of it? Which reminds something the Admin Director said to me this week, when it was 5 pm, the normal time I should have left the office. I was 30 minutes late that day, the Chinese Girl must have told everyone, to make sure I was going to leave 30 minutes later to compensate. I was going to the kitchen and the Admin woman said: Where do you think you’re going? I answered that I was going to the kitchen, I knew she thought I was leaving, I was planning to leave at 6 pm that day, even if at the back of my mind I wanted to be out of there much earlier. How powerful I thought, this little sentence can be: Where do you think you’re going? As if I was in some sort of prison, where even when I’m working so much overtime, I still cannot get out of it and walk to my freedom once in a while. And this morning, that line, Where do you think you’re going, is taking a new meaning. Where the fuck am I actually going in this life? What am I doing here? I have to put an end to it. Leaving this job has now become a necessity, a duty, an obligation, before something horrible happens. I don’t know how bad life can be in prison, but somehow I don’t think it can be worse than what I am going through, or else, they would all commit suicide every day. But of course, I don’t want to end up in prison after killing everyone in that office, or end up dead because of that Chinese Girl. I came closer than ever last night, I could still reach that point. And the most amazing thing is I have a way out, there is light at the end of the tunnel, I am going to London, the decision has been made already, and yet, I was still able to reach that total state of despair where I had no more motivation to see another day. That is how powerful what I’m going through right now is. Is it the culmination of everything I’ve gone through in my life? Was this last experience the one who finally convinced me that there will never be happiness for me in this world, especially in this corporate world? If I was ten years younger, fresh out of university, without my experience of Europe, without having survived that other job from hell last year in Westminster, would I still be at this moment on the brink of wanting to end my life? Am I just going through another bad patch, or is it deeper than that? Yüklə 1,6 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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