A Life's Work

A tale of my work in a lifetime.

May 22, 2024

Originally published in Not So Difficult magazine. It would be good to buy it here.

They don’t know I’m a genius. I mean they know I’m a genius, but little do they know I’m actually even smarter than they think I am, per se.

I’ve given up pretending to operate on the same plane as my ostensible peers. Where they see career, I see starting capital for my true calling (being a thinking person’s DJ and lifestyle satirist). Where they smell opportunity, I gag on the rancid stank of mediocrity. Where they hear the siren song of financial stability, I am moved to tears by the unmastered onslaught of some Milwaukee teenager’s blown out litefeet music made on a duct-taped Dell. My Soundcloud repost of his music is but a brick in the sprawling architecture of my legacy.

“Kafkaesque,” I mutter under my breath, scoffing wryly as my ‘colleagues’ go about the bureaucratic machinations of their so-called ‘jobs’. They walk into rooms, type on laptops, email emails and format the meagre contents of their minds into pre-fab stock phrases. “Let’s circle back”, they say jokingly. They’ve come to understand this phrase as a cliché, aided in part by the parasitic content industry of ‘relatable’ work TikToks polluting their feeds and dim consciousnesses. We’re at a point where “buzzword” is in itself a buzzword. I relish this irony, one I know could only be realised by a mind like mine — a mind much like that of one of a genius’s mind.

I play along, firing off the obligatory Slack messages that comprise the bulk of modern day labour. “Growth tracking is paramount”, I write. “Touchpoint alignment”. “Can we solutioneer this — hyperlocally”. It’s too easy. I spray ‘emojis’ like buckshot, drawing from the neutered work-friendly selection I keep on hand for ‘professional’ ‘scenarios’. I make sure to deploy a skin tone one shade darker than is strictly accurate. To whit: 🙏🏽👍🏽👆🏽. In reality I’m more caramel-cream than coffee, but they know better than to police my pigmentatorial self-assessment.

I enter a flow state. My eyes roll into the back of my head, flecks of spittle burble around my well-moisturised lips, and I can feel myself levitating. I’m on the point of selecting a savagely subversive reaction GIF to some wife-having guy’s paternity leave announcement, when my trance shatters. A harbinger of lame sullies my periphery. A HR ‘person’.

I’m summoned to an office, and a spew of jargon commences. “Gross misconduct”. “Aggravated incompetence”. “Inappropriate Kermit tea-sipping reaction GIFs to office theft PSAs”. A meaningless buzzword buffet. The barrage subsides, and I use my acute sense of social awareness to determine that it is my turn to speak. I scan the HR person’s face to gauge their mood. Horny. How predictable.

Once again I play along. The erotic vibe brings to mind Austin Powers. “D’ya think I’m sexy, baby?”, I smirk with ironic detachment. My tongue is so far in cheek it’s practically a speech impediment. In fact it literally is, because I dribble liberally as I smirk. This adds to the atmosphere of sexual irony.

More buzzwords ensue. “You’re fired”. “Legal proceedings”. “You’re to be escorted from the building immediately”. Immediately, I am escorted from the building. I check my Instagram on the way out. I start to formulate a brutal deconstructed ‘meme’ that inhabits the form while also transcending it. Some mindless drone shoves me out the exit. I smirk intensely, crackling the spit coagulate caking my mouth. The real work starts now.

You are right to buy Not So Difficult magazine here.