chopping onions

a stanza stolen from my past self

autofiction fixations

meatballs

i'd worked at a restaurant engrossed in food prep savagery: gloves up to the elbow, massaging a vat of veal, beef & pork, squelching the fat & muscle from 3 different species into a cold, raw paste.

squelch, squelch. a feast for worms. every one of us is made of this stuff. everyone dies, then we're mixed with ingredients, stuffed into a mold, & buried.

by the time the front of house filled to-go orders for lunch, i'd be in the back chopping, several dozen onions deep.

chop, chop, chop, chop, chop.

face tear-streaked, salty snot on my upper lip, hand calloused & raw from gripping the knife, i'd reached a firm decision that life is pain.

but i was present for it. did that count for something?

dishwashing

scalding water would scorch my exposed skin raw. bright red hands.

scrape, scrape, scrape, rinse, load.

the drain in the floor by the dishwasher would clog nightly with half-eaten food scraps (remember the meatballs?) flooding the kitchen floor in rank, chunky water. i'd squeegee the slop across the floor to keep it from oozing out into the restaurant to collect around people's feet. a sisyphean sentinel.

restrooms

one of the waitresses would alert me to a clogged toilet in the women's restroom. my squeegee is still needed.

at times, it was as though the restaurant itself was slowly submerging into a swamp of its own waste. sewage & pre-chewed food burbling up from the pipes to swallow us whole.

insights from different lifepaths

working class

sisyphus pushes his boulder uphill eternally. albert camus said we have to imagine him happy, otherwise we're all fucked.

i see his point, but i can't help but wonder if camus ever had to work minimum wage scrubbing other people's plates & plunging their too-thick shits.

hell is an employee side-entrance. "abandon all hope ye who enter here."

yuppie

after i quit the restaurant, i go back to school, incur a hundred grand in debt & get a job in silicon valley. i spend eight hours a day reprimanding an ai for regurgitating the racist, sexist & homophobic slop it consumes from across the worldwide web.

the pay is fine. under capitalism, there's no way to make bank without screwing someone over.

what's my integrity worth? there's a price tag on my soul & it's a whole lot cheaper than i thought.

writer

this is my quandary: warp realities into arcs with every narrative.

beginning, middle, end. again & again.

history doesn't have an arc. life is flat circles; it does not impart moral lessons.

however!

i'm also not a nihilist (all evidence to the contrary). in the words of a punk song: "life is beautiful if you just let go"

i agree & weep, chopping motherfucking onions.