When I think of God, I imagine him as a working man; a thick line of dirt under his fingernails and a chicken salad sandwich in a cooler. I imagine him sprawled back on a LA-Z boy saying, \u201ccome here son and tell me about your day.\u201d I guess I can\u2019t imagine what a God of fine and pretty things would look like without thinking that\u2019d be a God who\u2019d damn sure forsake someone like me. The only things I\u2019ve ever learned about loyalty, compassion, or real life love I\u2019ve learned from folks with gnarled up hands and backs that don\u2019t lay down right.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve never been anything but working class. Every job I\u2019ve ever held has come with dirty hands and tired bones. There\u2019s pride in that. There\u2019s got to be pride in it or nobody would survive it. There\u2019s also resignation. Plumbers don\u2019t get to talk about their achievements like salespeople do.<\/p>\n
The whole world\u2019s turned upside down about two or three times in the past two weeks. Sickness is stretching its nasty fingers all over this earth and people are hurting and tired and scared, but there\u2019s trucks that have to stay on the highway and trash that needs hauling to the dump. At the same time, there\u2019s a whole demographic of people acting like staying home from your job is normal for everybody or working from home is normal for everybody. This is the duality of the working class experience; shit needs doing but once it\u2019s done you\u2019ll be forgotten. There\u2019s pride in that too; an aspiration to stay behind-the-scenes.<\/p>\n
The behind-the-scenes reality of the working class experience extends beyond this pandemic. The whole way our society talks about work is like a body forgetting about the existence of its backbone. The only angle we know how to come at vocation from is privilege. \u201cEntrepreneurial spirit\u201d ain\u2019t ever built shit. A person with tools in their hands built it, but our history books only have room to talk about the profit of a great achievement not the sacrifice it required.<\/p>\n
The men I work with pretend they aren\u2019t afraid of this whole thing. There\u2019s jokes every time somebody coughs and jokes about dirty semi-truck cabs; but every lunch break they are tuned into the news trying to figure out just how bad this thing is going to be. Of course, this isn\u2019t heroism, it’s a job; but it\u2019s a job nobody has the luxury to stay home from.<\/p>\n
I hear a lot of folks talking about how this whole thing has upended their lives and changed their routines. I can\u2019t resonate with that. Every day is the same taillights and brake jobs that it\u2019s always been. I clock in and work through the night, laid out on a cement shop floor or perched up on a tire. I take my lunch in the breakroom in the back. I head home in the early hours of the morning to drink beer and go to sleep. I guess that\u2019s kind of a privilege at a time like this. Even when the world is turned upside down and inside out I\u2019ve got a shift that I can clock on to.<\/p>\n
This is not a romanticization of blue collar work. There\u2019s nothing romantic about it. It\u2019s white collar folks talking about blue collar work like some kind of ideal mindfulness exercise. It\u2019s white collar offices full of motivational quotes on pictures of construction sites or mechanic shops. The truth is: it\u2019s hard, it hurts, it wears you down.<\/p>\n
The men I work with would probably be typecast as arrogant by some people right now. I live and work in the culture of memes that boast about being essential, that poke fun at other jobs for staying home. What else does anyone expect? The society that ties the idea of success to the stock market and \u201cdoing what you love\u201d and sales just saw all those things break down and all that\u2019s left is dirty, cut-up hands and starched grocery store polos to do their labor.<\/p>\n
If you ask the men I work with why they do it they\u2019d say, it\u2019s a job. This is another part of the working class experience; a job is a luxury, about the only thing of value you could ever own. We\u2019re told through implication that our bodies were made to be broken on the wheel of capitalism. We\u2019re told that the trucks have got to stay on the road. We know that the trucks have got to stay on the road; but we try not to think about the CEOs raking in billions from their comfortably quarantined quarters.<\/p>\n
None of this is meant to downplay the seriousness of what\u2019s going on. It\u2019s against the backdrop of that seriousness that we ought to be asking questions about who we value and who we don\u2019t. There\u2019s jobs you can stay home from and there\u2019s jobs you can\u2019t and there\u2019s a big disparity between which category gets normalized and which category gets forgotten.<\/p>\n
Times are all twisted up right now. The future is uncertain, but that\u2019s nothing new. It seems like the same systems of power that have kept the privileged privileged and the working folks down ain\u2019t ever going to be upended, but that\u2019s nothing new either. I\u2019m not gonna get cynical though, me and my kind always have a place in this world. I got to believe that if the presence of God can be found in this dirty, greedy world, it\u2019s in the hands, heart and spirit of working people under trucks and behind registers and steering eighteen-wheeler trucks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The only things I\u2019ve ever learned about loyalty, compassion, or real life love I\u2019ve learned from folks with gnarled up hands and backs that don\u2019t lay down right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":15854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[123,2304,2306,158,13],"class_list":["post-16010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-blue-collar","tag-corona-virus","tag-covid","tag-god","tag-work","writer-steve-comstock"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16010"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16014,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16010\/revisions\/16014"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}