American Fanatics

WHEN I AM SICK OF WORKING

W H E N I A M S I C K O F W O R K I N G, and feel that misshapen panic rise in me like a weather balloon filled with strychnine, I think of my sociologist father at fifty asleep on the couch, an exam over his eyes and thirty term papers sliding from the rattling perpetual stack on his chest as he snored— so much for Durkheim, so much for goddamned Thorstein Veblen and the acquisition of substance by seizure— my father who taught me everything in the Western world gets screwed in the same direction, then unscrewed in the other (if a pipe burst, he fixed it, if my mother cried, he caused it), who learned responsibility’s cold calculation from his father delivering mail to the same ten miles of neighbors every day for forty-five years but taking his lunch leak in the cornfields because he was a dago and knew not to presume, and though I mostly consume without producing and the semesters pass like leaves without remembrance in a down-tumble of dusty assertions, my crumbling enterprise  Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:43 PM Page 63 here amongst the well-worn orders, I swear it calms me: the pension of pinecones I scurry to collect, the chaff I shovel I’ll be buried in. Work & bitterness, bitterness & work, it is not too soon to turn palms up and throw myself this plangent kiss. I am not special. I never was. That’s the secret to my success.  Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:43 PM Page 64 ...