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THOUGHTS ON THE MINES

Luke Lawson

By Luke LawsonPublished 2 years ago 5 min read
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I SAT DOWN and started reading The Brother’s Karamazov again and after reading one hundred pages somewhere in the middle wondered ‘why does this motherfucker take so long to make a point?’. I guess my mind was elsewhere.

I was thinking about working in the mines. 36 years of being an idiot with twenty of those under my belt of also being a confused, and occasionally employed, idiot, were circling around my mind. What the fuck do you do now huh buddy? I thought about big trucks and red dirt and what I’d heard about working in the mines. Basically I thought of everything I’d try and do out there other than the work, which I expect is all there really is that you can do out there.

It was raining outside. I’d run out of cigarette filters. At the shops an ice freak was going through a garbage bin and yelling at some other person how there was good pickings today or some such. Then I thought about the ice problems in the mines. The ice problems everywhere.

Anywho. I guess then I thought about some kind of hope and how the feeling of thinking about something in the future tends to take us out of the present and allow us to function there, for a while. All the great philosophers of old are always telling us to live in the present, in the moment; the only place you exist – did those motherfuckers have to pay rent? Just like old Dostoyevsky, does anyone ever read his books anymore or is it rather, the more obvious choice, a ploy from book advertisers to sell more books by building a conspiracy around these figures that existed at some time or another and went fucking mad thinking about LIVING, and not necessarily MAKING one.

I walked out of the shops and some bastard wearing glasses looked at me and I thought to myself “WHAT? WHAT DO YOU WANT? I DON’T LIKE YOU” and then he drove off playing Brahms in his moderately priced vehicle to go be somewhere else. When I got home I realised the fly of my trousers was undone. I opened up my packet of filters and then took a paper out of the box. FIVE TO GO it read. Oh this is not going to do at all.

I wondered more about the mines while I was at home. I thought of it as hard work during the day and then maybe a campfire out in the desert around some demountable rooms at night. Then I figured it was probably more petty grievances between angry men in the heat, and some cunt asking questions all the time.

I opened up Google, found a mining company, an ad read SUMBIT RESUME and I closed my typer thinking “It can’t be done, it’s impossible to get a job in the mines”.

MONEY, where to get it, where to find it? Does it exist? Of course it doesn’t. All the rich people say money never made them happier. The poor people are always in search of it though. It’s the idea people like, but in all my experiences money is the most impossible thing to gather and even more impossible to hold onto. I am especially bad with money you see.

Maybe I could get a ticket to drive some sort of heavy machinery, but you know, then it’s a career we’re talking about getting into and that’s beyond me. A career in anything sounds like something everyone is trying to forever escape from. THE ETERNAL TRAP. Further, you have to pay for these kinds of training before you can even make a buck - indentured servitude everywhere you look. The sixties writer's were all down and glum about having a house and a wife but man, it seems to me that today the deal is much worse and a house and wife, and maybe some children, is a dream life that expired not so long ago for most people.

A common theme I hear from people these days is simply "I'm not having children, and I'm not going to buy a house - I'm going to go to work and see my psychologist and that's it, I've accepted it".

Why don’t I ever write any good stories? I wonder how someone does. Do you have to keep pushing the insanity of life so far that it suddenly pops into your head or are people just naturally talented. Is good writing something you can relate to? Is good writing fancy words. I guess you have to choose your audience, or let them choose you. Then it’s all about marketing; loathsome. Marketing is the disease of the modern world – a whole workforce of people trying to force upon others ideas about things based in hope of how it may change the future, but there’s always a hidden hand behind the back of the seller with an invoice for their services that outweighs any benefit of the marketing.

Are we that done for? Is this the life we’ve all created for ourselves? One never ending cycle of hoping for the next thing and failing at the current task because you absolutely lost interest in it anyway, and were probably never interested in it to begin with but you thought the idea of it might bring you some little spark of happiness to justify years of confusion, doubt, and a miserable conception of your own self worth.

The rain continued. Cars drove up and down the streets. People were stressed and agitated, hungover, medicated, exhausted, trying to keep up with life.

Then I thought maybe I could go to the mines and do some exposé on what life was really like there and how we’re all complicit in fucking up the environment for a buck. That’s a noble task. While it wouldn’t make you any friends it must be noble – basically everything noble is qualified as throwing sand in someone else’s game. We’ve been doing for centuries. We remember the great rebels who ruined something big for someone else. The bigger the fall the more noble the action. We love destruction because we hate our lives, more or less. And it’s been this way forever. Some get good at covering it up, and others complain – I’ve chosen the latter so to speak.

Short Story
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About the Creator

Luke Lawson

I am Luke Lawson

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