I Am a Robot

Donovan J. Douglas

September 16 2009

            If I had known life would be like this I wouldn’t have grown up.  And not in the mystical, Neverland kind of way.  Literally.  I would still be eating Cookie Crisp for breakfast, playing with Hot Wheels, and inviting girls I like to play in my tree house.  Well, except for that last part.

            I guess the term ‘life’ is too broad a term to explain what I’m thinking.  It’s really more along the lines of ‘professional life’ or ‘monotonous labor’ or ‘prolonged, soul-consuming activity.’  Hell, the word robot comes from the Czech word for ‘labor’.  I just don’t understand how society expects a vibrant young artist to accept his fate as a factory robot.  How could this have happened?  What has society done for me that I am indebted to it?  Let’s examine.  I’m twenty two years old, engaged, childless, I live with my brother in law, don’t own a car, lack a college degree, have no money in the bank, owe eight hundred dollars to Visa, and am currently paying off six thousand dollars worth of student loans.  How exactly have I benefited?  Where does the robotic monotony fit in?  Well, out of financial necessity I suppose.  To pay off Visa, Chemeketa Community College, and the University of Oregon.  To pay for rent, gasoline, Netflix, cell phones, high speed wireless internet, groceries, beer, and the occasional Muchas Gracias fish burrito.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned from these past five years of financial independence, it’s that your personal character makes very little difference when it comes to whether you have any money.

            It mostly has to do with your place in society.  I’m lower middle class, which means my parents made just enough money to house me, feed me, and raise me to pursue whatever career I wanted.  The thing about lower middle class is that your parents don’t usually have careers.  Careers pay the bills, yes, but they also invoke creativity, develop your personal character, refine your talent, and provide enough money to support your children in whatever they wish to do.  Instead, my parents have jobs.  This isn’t to say they don’t have talent or creativity, they do by far, but jobs pay only the bills, not college education.  This forces me to work to pay for my education.  Yet after five years of working and going to school I realize I want to neither work nor go to school.  Of course, quitting both is irrational and impossible.  School is unnecessary, but I need a job to pay the bills.  But if I don’t want a job, meaning that I want a career, I have to go to school, meaning that I need a job to go to school in order to do neither by having a career.  Wow.  And I still need an education after explaining that.

            Obviously I decided to “take time off” and continue to work out of necessity.  Five years since high school graduation and here I am still stuck in an awful blank-walled job that in no way benefits my talent, being managed by someone who earns three times what I do and is only half as smart.  I should be pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing through the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon right now.  Chuck Palahniuk went there.  You know, Fight Club?  But instead I toil day after day like Charles Bukowski performing mindless labor half-asleep, having the same conversations, counting the floor tiles, day dreaming and cloud watching, talking to myself in voices I’ve never heard before, and drinking when I get home to forget everything from the day.  I’ll be a god damned fool if I can’t turn this ship around before it sinks.