Hold Line

The hold sound for the state unemployment office is the klaxon noise that plays before they tell you the number is out of service. I’m closing in on the end of hour two listening to it. It really is a remarkable bit of hostile sonic architecture, telling you “get a job, you bum” over and over and over without ever having to pay somebody to record a voice message. They’re right. I feel like a bum. I haven’t left the house today except to go to the gas station and buy Diet Coke. I’ve been laid off and have two months until I’m back on. Since I’m job-attached and nobody’s really all that interested in hiring someone for two months for a job that won’t make me want to shoot myself, I’m applying for unemployment. I don’t feel great doing it. Nobody feels great when you’re unemployed in the “I’m glad I saved most of my overtime money so I can ride things out” sense rather than the “this gives me more time to drive my big-ass van to a national park” sense. I’m not a good enough climber and don’t have enough unemployed climbing partners to just go to the southwest and dirtbag it in a van. I drive a sedan, too, so any way I slice it, I’m gonna be bumming off somebody. I put “girlfriend w/ a van” on my task list. 

I salve my conscience, which isn’t active enough when it matters and is overactive when it doesn’t, by telling myself that I’ll probably never be able to retire, and, if I did, social security will have run out. These might be the only government benefits I ever see, so I better smoke em while I’ve got em. I just need them to pick up so they can actually correct my wages, and that isn’t working, so maybe I’m just bad at being a bum, too.  I’ve never really had the mind for welfare scams – one of my best friends was able to keep Arizona food stamps for seven months after he moved to Montana and got a job. I don’t have TB or a family of starving children, it’s just my 24 year-old ass sitting around at home and going to the gym, watching any TV show I can handle, so I don’t really have a burning urgency in me. I don’t feel woeful enough. I feel undeserving. In my dreams Senator Steve Daines calls me a freeloader. 

My supervisor calls me, makes plans for two months out. I go back to the hold-line’s bleating. I live in a basement by the trailer park, like some sort of varmint, hiding out until spring. I wander outside and the fire department and the medics are there wheeling a neighbor out of his single-wide. In true fire fashion, there are about 10 assorted captains and battalion chiefs watching. I give them a casual wave. I hope my neighbor isn’t dead. I go back inside, my upstairs neighbors have recently gotten a piano and one of their four kids occasionally starts banging on it, tunelessly. It’s nicer when they do that than when Jen decides to actually play it and my little cave is filled with the kind of music they play on TV shows when they want to let you know the characters are in a nice restaurant. When the kids start banging on it recently, though, it just sounds like “BUM BUM BUM”. The hold line cuts out because it’s four, and the unemployment people are done for the day. I walk into the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. “Get a fucking job.” I like my little pep talks.