by J. Billings
Everything is a job. You are a job. You are so tired in your job. You’re tired of what it is. But it’s you and even as you become something else your job is you. Going to the elevator and pressing the button for the 11th floor three times is you and walking in silence around cubicles is you and typing, pounding your fingers into little plastic cubes is definitely you. Another day goes by where nothing is accomplished. That’s precisely the accomplishment. Very small items arranged and re-organized on your desk. No one walks by. This job. Drilling in you. This job making you sweat in linens. Across the street people are in their lives. That is their job. But existing here is a job. Everyone’s occupation within their occupation. Drinking coffee is the job. Leaning against the counter and waiting for the coffee cup to fill before you drink it is your job. Jiggling the Mr. Coffee so it spits out half-ground powder is your job. Waiting is your job. Waiting in lots of different instances is your job. What to do just to keep alive in your job. Your endless, chapter-less job. To eat leaflets and drink more coffee and disrupt your gut is a major part of the job. Who takes the garbage from your job—not being your job. The heat of the job. The stink of your job you wear on your clothes. Not the piss ever-present in the lone urinal you use upon bodily need at your job. But yes, also that piss. Who drains the piss—your job and not your job. Your job is partaking in the array of medications you keep in your desk drawers. Your job is checking the expiration dates of these medications which may or may not accomplish the counteractive symptoms you desire. You notice there are no blinds to dim the outdoors because your job is confronting you with what it is not. You long for your loaf of bread and a coffee. It’s only 9:37 AM. The job pays for minutes of shitting. The job pays for minutes of frying your brain via unseen forces. Headaches are part of the job too. Passing off a screen for a screen. Dim light cools the mind. The job is wasting you away and the dim light provides a stasis. What are you doing? What can you possible be doing? What is all of this? This leads to this and this and this and. Please send off this thing to this person and await a reply with which to prompt you into another action and so on etcetera. Your job etcetera. Everything etcetera. Job is job. A job is a job is a job. Sitting in a cave-like environment and tracking the coming attractions while you sip on a generic lemon-lime flavored seltzer. What is that. A forward investment in the time spent at your job. Sugar gives you diarrhea. So. Shitting at your job is your job. Spending that time in an unclean cleaned bathroom tends to be your job on some days. Put this in your end of year report: I excel at shitting. Thank you for that. Your job is appreciative of all you do. Shitting, etcetera. Your job is shitting. Your shit is maybe jobbing. Your job is definitely jobbing. Your shitty job is shitty. Nothing must be yanked out of you. Everything full flow in its freedom.. This life is your job. You’re parched for your job. You look out the window and think of the beverages you intake because of your job. What you remember and don’t because of your job. Your belt around your waist too tight because of your job but you have to wear it for your job. Sweating so much under this cotton for your job. Your job dominates you. Your job standing over you, taunting you. Oh fuck, your job is seriously fucking you. Your job is pegging you. Nothing you can do but love it. Sweating in your office with a tiny fan you bought with a few expendable job dollars. You’ve architected this existence to survive the necessities your job creates. Office amenities galore—your own personal job realm. Receptacles to destroy evidence of your job. Plastic containers to fit the shape of papers and feed your job. Your job using you as an appetizer. You are a fork to gorge your job in its appetite. For what. All the smells of the kitchen and toilet emptying into the drains in your job’s guts. The rotten remnants in the refrigerator. Who’s in charge of your job. These little things beget your job. Growing mold and colonizing motile enterobacteriacaea, Salmonella bongori, S. enterica. Your job is a breeding ground. Stale flatulence fills the hallways until you’re good with it. Oh yes, that’s the delightful smell of my job. Oh god, yes, now I can finally do my job. This adrenaline provided by your job because of the shittiness in the air. Maybe don’t think about that, maybe again what’s that in the distance of your job. How long would it take for your job to realize an emptiness in the shape of you. What you think of when paying the clerk with your job-dollars. Buying anti-sustenance with your job-dollars. Thank you, Job. This small time away to unload an intestinal blockage makes you realize how much you love Job. As you eat this ruffage and use your job-dollars to impetus your job-induced colon disaster, you admit desire for Mr. Job. Who joins you in the mid-day job-avoidance. You’ll never know. Maybe they’re freed from their job. Maybe their job does not whip them with leather. Maybe they don’t wear an equine bit for job-pleasure. Who knows. They seem to enjoy this and you wonder how as the job assaults you mentally. Because you wait for electronic mail messages. Waiting is your job. Silence is your job. You stew in the waiting in the silence in the waiting silence. And these non-job thoughts occur. Oh God. Fibromyalgia doll. Cystic fibrosis puddin’. Stop that. CCH Pounder pronounced sooch pounder. Self-driving Dodge Durango. Remember, time must be filled with your job or what your job affords you. So you wait. Your job fondling you. Your job-mistake of a click on the wrong button and sending a message to the world. How embarrassed your job was of you. Very bad job done by you. Very bad job of you. Your speakerphone groans as a virtual call comes into you at your job. Your body has been trained by your job to tense at the notice of the speaker groan. Your job has trained you to open up these miniscule glands inside you which squirt out hormones, all of this at the budge of static that signals an incoming something. Opening up the airwaves for your job to squeeze through. Your job performing Kegels around you. You wouldn’t have it any other way. You say that to yourself because you know Job is listening. After all, your life is one long continuation of your job. The act of walking down the hallway to the printer and back to your office to print something again and then back through the hallway to the printer and then back to your office again because the damn thing didn’t print for some holy technological reason and then walking back through the hallway and worrying how stupid you look or maybe being thankful actually for this walking taking up minutes of your job time that if you step back and think you’d realize is actually life, life time, and then ending up at the printer to sign a document and tap the faulty touch screen and input your email address—and, what’s your password again?—and sitting there standing there for a few seconds trying to remember this inside part of you that only you know as well as all of the people within the company who can see those kinds of virtual things as part of their life-job, job-life, and maybe those people outside of the company trying to infiltrate and steal your identification terms in order to sully your good job no steal money that’s all the goal ever is and you remember oh that’s right it’s your kid’s birthday and their initials which you made into a password what a stupid thing to commodify your literal child you’re putting their identifiable material out there it’s probably on the Dark Web somewhere for someone to obtain and play with finger on their little device in search of long strings of digits to sell and re-sell and somehow cash in and turn into an artificial smut video of a kidnap-rape-homicide of a child somewhere else who may or may not also have had their parents use their existence their very being as a password to their dumb job, oh yes, your job, and you scan the paper and then slip it into the big bin where paper goes to be shredded and then you walk down another hallway and into the bathroom and side glance at yourself in the mirror and check a stall, move to the other stall because the first toilet had an unattractive shit streak on it and sit down to shit yourself. Stand up, spit in the toilet bowl, is that a piece of carrot or flesh. Are you deteriorating in your job? Is your job deteriorating you? Is your life deteriorating you and also sharing in this deterioration with your job? You walked into your job this morning through a wall of septic drainage. This tube thing slurping underground liquid sepsis from a small hole in the pavement and into the back of a large vocational truck painted green so as not to give it away as a shit container on wheels rampaging down streets with human waste sloshing in its interior threatening to coat anything it touches. And the smell escaped from the hole despite the slurping of the truck’s vacuum trunk and it enveloped you and you’re just supposed to be okay with this, just take it, don’t worry about what’s going on inside you or outside you in this smell, in the molecules of the stink. It’s fine. This is what is supposed to happen. This is what you’re supposed to do. Right. It’s like really making you warm in its stink. A kind of oil. No. A kind of dirt. No. A kind of days-old festering fly-puked shit. Yes. Meeting your nostrils and your skin despite the open city air. You breathed it in and huffed the crud of a thousand human asses. And you opened the door to your job like it was nothing. It’s supposed to be absolutely nothing. Then you’re hit by the scent of greasy fast food in the lobby. A backwards smell chain is what that is. First the end product and then the input. Wait for the elevators in the kind of sweating smell of the aforementioned grease. Coming from where. Under the counter from the breakfast of the security attendant. Under the pants escaped from the open zipper of a construction worker here for some reason, maybe shit-related. Ejecting through the leaky pipes in the ceiling. Just shit again, everywhere. If everyone saw their job like you then no. Very bad for the company. All of these organisms in their job-flesh eating each other and shitting each other out. Economics as Human Centipede. Job is shit. Shit is job. The circle of life except it’s the circle of shit. This is what the job-life is. And you dream about your job as it’s your life and your life is a job. Your life is Job. Job does not need you, Job puts up with you. No, no. Job loves you. Job adores you. Job lathers you with generosity you don’t get anywhere else. Here is a code to use fake widgets to buy very cheap goods on the Job-approved website. Eat your dopamine. Now get back to your job. YouTube your job, okay. Google your job. VAR your job. Ask Jeeves your job. That’s your job. Pikipedia your job. The charades of your job. Roblox your job. Say how do I do Job. What do you like Job, how can I pleasure you? What will make the shareholders climax? How much do they need. It’s never enough. Job is insatiable. Sssh. It’s all pretend. Job is pretend. Job is make-believe. It’s real but pretend. Job is Babel. Jobel. Demon name. Suddenly you’re jobless. Everything falls into place. Don’t you dare. Job time is not time to imagine such a thing. Bad. Very bad in your job. Do your job. Do Job. Ask someone how to job your job. How to distill your job into pieces the economy can ingest. You job until Job shits out little jobules. You are a machine that turns job into Job. Job inside you inside Job. Okay, get up.
J. Billings is the author of The New Utopia (CLOAK, 2023) and Dissolver (2025), as well as the forthcoming books Channel: Ambient, The Desiccation of Head, and NRH (Index Press). He is @jjb08281219 on various socials of your preference.