SHRUG (SLUG)

by
Joel Van Noord

I have a job which requires me to give things up and leave everything I know with the ease of shrugging my shoulders and turning my back. That�s just the way it is. I�m not saying anything of any virtues or faults of this life. It�s a job. Life is a job, sometimes. No. it�s a series of jobs. I guess. More than anything else. So it�s a lifestyle I�ve landed in, or emerged from, or whatever, that makes me leave things with the ease of shrugging my shoulders.

I�ve loved things. Even a woman here and there. I�ve loved trees and water and mountains, certain books and paintings, bars and street corners and cities. But had to leave them all to be alive. To maintain the things I need to call myself an American.

I�m in Idaho now. At the most southern jog of the Snake River as it dips the wide swath of land eroded from the mountains that allows Idaho to be populated. It�s a dismally small town, 6,000; the second smallest town I�ve ever lived in was 60,000; each much different than the series of capital cities I grew up in.

Farms. Basically that�s it. Farms and the distant peek of a mountain behind the long meander of land saved for the majestically damned Snake. The Hispanic population in town is 35%, colossally high above the Idaho average and twice the nation�s. The median income is 27,000 and the majority of people never went to college.

I did. And I make a little more than 27,000 � depending on how much overtime I work in a pay period. But it�s deceiving. It is the fall and I took the job in late August and would most likely leave before Christmas, if not Thanksgiving. So I never worked more than a year in one place. I hadn�t done that since a professor of mine took me on for a year and a half after graduation and had me staring through a microscope at plankton and larval fish, burning the seething circular image onto my retina.

It was a slow period in the biological sciences, almost non-existent in the natural sciences, and I�d been unemployed for close to a year, collecting checks, volunteering at a non-profit and then finally loading boxes for FedEx. It was somewhat depressing, volunteering my time like that, for a job that should have been paid, I was cataloguing a vast array of aquatic species: from insects to fish, for this non-profit who wanted a database of all the species on their land. So it was real work and most definitely worth a salary; and, because of the way things were set-up I had to give away my time in order to keep my resume up to date to, hopefully, one day get another low paying job �protecting the environment.�

Before that I had lived in the desert of Oregon, coastal Michigan and upstate Maine. All for approximately 8 months or so. Then a stint of winter travelling where I�d connect with old lovers and live in their beds and then travel to college friends and sleep on floors. It wasn�t all that bad. There was a beautiful freedom about it. Knowing that you�d work hard for a little over half a year, then have three or so months to simply travel on the sum of wealth you�d collected, waiting to do it all over again.

However, it could be intensely lonely. Depending on who you happened to work with. Often, the job was full of local, highly uneducated family men whom I had nothing in common with. But usually there would be at least one other person like me. A degree in biology and an appetite for travelling, partying, the outdoors, progressive issues and what not.

I remember applying for the job; it was something nearly identical to what I�d done in Michigan. It was a tech job and required little responsibility, no supervising, which I felt I was ready for and was aiming for in employment. But it was in rural Idaho and I�d reluctantly applied for it. I had to get away and would rather get away with the aid of a salaried position far away in the west than a random, naked leap into some city I�d picked from rumours and an atlas. I got the call and had the interview and knew they�d offer it. Three weeks went by and I�d forgotten about it. Then they called and did offer it and I took it. I resigned to it, more so, and had a week and a half until the job started.

The job was four hours from Yellowstone and I planned on driving out and doing some exploring. But I got a call from a friend who�d moved to San Jose and had a job with Lockheed Martin and was in DC supporting a launch they had in Florida. �I don�t really have to do anything, all I do is sit by a computer and watch it to make sure it doesn�t explode and then get really happy and jump up and down when it doesn�t.� Is what he said about it. �It�s basically a free, government subsidized vacation.�

I rode the metro into Dupont Circle and thought of the recent London attacks on the tube. The vast system of tunnels was defenceless, it was open and could not work in any other manner.

With no harassment, besides the two gentle and smooth teeth that opened as I inserted my ticket and pulled it out as it zipped through the insides of the machine and commanded the path clear, I boarded the metro and sat for the long and bumpy ride. Staring at all the orange and the wide aisles between the seats. It was the perfect metro for America�s capital. Wide aisles and hardly ever full. Like suburbs. The mall and Smithsonian district is about right too, enormous and ridiculously expensive buildings and museums only a few stories tall and stretched out wide onto the available space. Long green grass stretching between Lincoln and the current President.

So we spent a day wandering around the modern art museums, laughing at them and what they could mean, or didn�t mean; they didn�t have to mean anything and that was reassuring. In the National Gallery we posed with ancient statues and sculptures, smiled next to Romulus sucking on the tits of a She-wolf. Little has changed in the art world. We wandered aimlessly, looking at whatever happened to be there, we posed by ancient Greek statues. A woman in preparation for a run, with her hand out, cupped over her ear; my friend put his flesh next to her marble and pretend to whisper to her as I took his picture. We�d laugh and he�d say to me, �I�m an adult.� And we�d laugh harder.

The two of us had little illusion about life. And this allowed us to be borderline nihilistic, it was a sort of rational indifference we had to things. What could we do? In the face of such absurd happenings in the world, all we could do was acknowledge them and laugh and walk around art galleries and make our own stupid form of it with our expensive little digital cameras.

***

It�d been awhile since I drank heavily and it soon showed. I remember little fragments and an overall impression of the night. The first part of it was this walking around the galleries and laughing, and I remembered that fine. We laughed at everything, especially when it wasn�t funny. We liked to laugh and there was no reason not to. The fact that things were not funny only made it funnier. If there was a piece of modern art about America destroying something or worshipping consumerism, we�d look at each other and shrug, �we�re rich, huh?� and we were and that was funny enough, we were rich, even if I was unemployed I had privileges and beautiful freedoms and the access to vast cities and open infrastructure and culture. We probably weren�t �good people,� but to us, that really didn�t mean anything. Life was too simple, like I said, we were too simple. We didn�t believe in gods and didn�t have morals that weren�t gotten by a pragmatic analysis. We were simply biological arrangements moving about the world we were born into. We (as a species) made money, ate food, did various drugs, and looked for women to slip into (not necessarily in that order).

That night and we met some others we�d gone to school with. An economist who lived in a house with Pete � my Lockheed friend- who now worked at a consulting firm in Dupont. I sat and listened as they talked about 401(k)�s and their real jobs, their real salaries. This kid had a Mexican girlfriend he�d met in South Korea where he spent a summer in the US embassy. This Mexican knew a little English and I knew more Spanish than her American boyfriend. It was interesting and the more I drank the more fragments of Spanish I tossed about the night, thinking I was clever, but most likely making no sense whatsoever. We started drinking at 5 and buzzed out during happy hour and had a small let down until we met up with some girls, one of whom was my ex-girlfriend, who took us to a gay bar because of the outstanding prices they had for liquor. The night has no specific memories, only trends. The second trend was listening to these two kids talking about all the money they made and how much more money they wanted to make and how they wanted to get into property. Ownership separates the absurdly wealthy from the rest. Once you own something and enough of it you can sit back and take a cut while you hire someone else to �manage� the property, to do all the work.

Once this ex of mine, a huge hippie, to speak in clich�, arrived I had someone in my own class. I suppose I�m in a unique situation. I have little money. Sometimes I don�t nudge above the poverty line � but I don�t care, I don�t have many expenses, all I like is travelling. It�s not that I have high ideals and want to save the environment (I used to). It�s just that I don�t have the needed energy or ambition to do what it takes to �succeed.� So I talked with this girl, Anna, the ex of mine that I hadn�t seen in years. I said to her, �they talk about owning property and they mean buying an apartment complex in a city and renting it out. We talk about property and mean land, out in Colorado near the New Mexico border, where the land is useless and costs 500 an acre.�

She agreed. She worked part time as a naturalist giving tours on kayaks down the Potomac, I imagine, with another part-time gig as a nanny. It was our way or corrupting the minds of the youth, I supposed. Thought could be a virus and that hippie, with hair on the verge of dreadlocks and hemp in her veins and all the rest, instilled her dreams and ideals into those rich babies with their rich, non-existent parents off in their office building researching intellectual property rights of whatever else. I figured this is what she did. Told the babies to be communists and to revolt against the property owners and redistribute wealth to the workers, the ones that create it. But perhaps she just liked kids and their beautiful ignorance.

I remember her saying things like, �my sister hasn�t paid rent in two years.� It�s these kinds of memories that stick out. That was the third trend in the night, the last trend, the second and third trend of the trip were sort of the same, only opposites. But after that we got separated and Pete and I ended up back at the hotel bar drinking some more.

Then there was a phone call. It was Anna and she asked for me. He threw the phone and it hit me on the chest and I didn�t wake up. Then he rolled over and pushed me from his high queen size bed while I was passed out on a small cot.

On the street I sort of became cognizant. I had on my backpack and was off to her apartment. But I didn�t know where it was. That�s what she wanted on the phone, apparently, so I must have packed up and hugged my friend as he�d be flying out the next morning, back to the bay area while I�d be in the soft sheets next to soft flesh.

But I had no idea where she lived and had no cell phone and no way to contact her. I tried to think, to remember what she�d said. A few names were in my head and I rolled them about my tongue. Was she even back at her apartment? Or was she still out, it was a birthday party at a house� I think. Near 3:30 and I was on the streets of DC. Walking along Connecticut away from Dupont Circle. There were bums laying out on benches and now the graffiti was the most obvious and dominant feature. During the day it was hidden behind the long strides of well-dressed people quickly moving along the streets.

But I got robbed. A well-dressed kid not much older than me stole my backpack. Luckily I forgot my wallet and camera at the Hilton, where Pete was staying, and I stumbled back there and called up to the room. It was almost hilarious except for my head was pounding and I almost pissed myself when the blurry eyed man pulled a short knife on me. It was absurd and I was already beginning to remember it like it had happened to someone else. He opened the door and we mumbled a few words to each other and again I fell on the cot. Anna called again at 4:30 and wanted to know where I was. This time she met me in front of the hotel. I realized I�d actually been jumped. My jaw hurt, where the man had punched me, and my backpack was gone. It wasn�t a big loss. There was another shirt, the zip-off portion of the shorts I was still wearing, my toiletries, a memory and battery card for my camera, and a Harpers with an article by a favorite writer of mine about how American�s get Jesus wrong and had more war and more injustice than the most godless Europeans. That stuff was gone but I still had my camera and wallet. Again I said good-bye and hugged Pete extra tight. Then found Anna in the lobby below. It was an incredible lobby, like those hotels often were. A intricate complex of chairs and plants and raised and lowered steps. We should have stayed there and found some five o clock intimacy behind a shrub or something. But we left and wandered up some radial street off Dupont and found her small studio. It was almost the size of the bathroom in the Hilton where all expenses: 1,500: for three nights and a plane ticket and food, paid by Lockheed who got their money from the Department of Defence which got its money from the taxpayers. Me, when I worked. And Anna, when she slugged the most marginal way of life from two part-time jobs and a endless supply of passion and idealism. Life was tough. It was those connections which I quickly added up and paraded and told to people that gave me the distant calm of a rational indifference. What else could I do, was a motto.

We went back to her place and made some sloppy love and slept till noon. Then I told her about being jumped when I first went out to look for her. She hadn�t even asked what had happened to me with her first attempt with the random call to the Hilton. She had to paddle around that day, at two; and she left, I wandered around Dupont and went into a few bookstores to see what periodicals were different, to see if this section of DC had any more independent journals of thought than Borders in the Pennsylvania suburbs. It didn�t. Once you reach a certain point there is nothing to do but create your own space where the industry lacked � so to speak.

She left and we exchanged numbers. I liked the girl. We�d stopped dating and simply had no other contact with each other. I forget why it was. But it was over a summer and she went to Brazil and I stayed in our college town and dated one girl and then another, at the same time, a dancer and an English major. I mused at my memories, life was good when you didn�t give a fuck like that. At least that�s what I thought.

So I took the redline into Metro Center and then to the Smithsonian and wandered around again. I must have walked eight miles or so. I went into the Hirshhorn and saw a floor I hadn�t the previous day and then walked down past the Washington erection to Lincoln�s solemn seat and dark room. I suppose this was the fourth trend. But I was now sober, sort of, I had a dizzying hangover and it was unbearably humid; the sky grainy and oppressive. But the fourth trend was America itself with her citizenry at the nation�s capital and monuments. Fat. There was so much fat and ugliness. It�s probably a horrible thing to say. But everyone, to me, was fat and ugly and had on stupid outfits and looked pathetic and embarrassing. I didn�t feel good being there. I felt like a foreigner.

I kept these thoughts distant to me. They were feelings and emotions rather than thoughts. I didn�t analyze them, is what I�m saying, and I let them slide into my mind and ferment and then slip out when another feeling sunk into my wet consciousness.

***

But that was DC and its four trends. A week later I was in Idaho and drove quickly through Yellowstone. It was funny that DC and Anna were only a week or so away. It seemed so much farther.

Three days after I arrived I started working long days driving about the tributaries of the Snake and pushing electric currents through the water and collecting the fish with nets and taking their data. What a situation for the fish to go through. It was similar to what I went through the first attempt to see Anna. I left a comfortable bed in a passed out state, wandered around a little bit, got punched, a knife pulled on me, and robbed; but ultimately nothing happened.

That�s not what I wanted to talk about. I know that was a long tangent about DC and I only mentioned because I now feel like I did that night, helpless and aimlessly wandering dark DC streets, looking at dense building facades and thinking to myself, �wow, man, DC is cool, I like it.� Since that was the first time I�d been anywhere else besides the mall.

It�s a strange feeling I have here in Idaho now. A place I hadn�t wanted to visit and never envisioned myself until I had no other solid options on the menu. I live in an abandoned hotel that�s been bought and turned into an apartment complex. I live in a hotel room and rent by the month. Soon the winter will be here and the sage will be adorned with white. Hemmingway killed himself about one hour north at what is now a rich ski resort. Things are funny. Basically that�s it. I have a small kitchenette that�s three feet wide, two feet deep, then a bed which looks at a dresser which wears the marks where a tv used to be bolted to the wood. It�s funny. I have a window and I�m on a hill and I can see the yellow hills around and the tops of the roofs in my town where the people below make a little more and a little less than me.

Basically, what keeps me from going crazy and resigning myself to where I am in life is that when the winter comes I can drive away. The closest large city is Salt Lake City and I could go there. I could. I could also head to Ann Arbor where a good friend is. I could. I also think about Anna and what it would have been like if I simply didn�t leave. �What�d you say baby, no� no, actually, I wasn�t planning on leaving. I figured I�d live with you and we could pretend at the game of love.� What if I�d said that. Wouldn�t that have been hilarious. But I�m in Idaho and my resume is strong. It�s ready for graduate school. But I probably won�t do that, since I�d basically make no more additional money and I�m still bitter and cynical about the 150 dollar a month in debt I have to pay. I won�t even say anything about America�s insatiable appetite for war, 87 billion without a thought, to kill maim and destroy. Image and life. The real with a lowercase and the Real with an uppercase. Things are ridiculous. But, what are you going to do?

� Joel Van Noord
Reproduced with permission

---