Flash Fiction


WORK AND HELL by Murray Morrison

What a fucking trip man.

I don’t think I realised till now how many hooman beans Hate their work, how many folk just all but shut down and shoot a great wedge of their lives in the head.

BANG.

I might add that my job is not all sweetness and light… but I inhabit myself while there, it is a continuing part of my story.

The sickness is rife though, thousands of us.

I guess this is why I have always been unable to continue in a shit job, though I have often wished I had the ability. I have watched my mates and the folk who have had the dubious pleasure of being my colleagues for the short spells that have been endured.

Ballet and baths and falling snow can’t hide it.

It is a sensible and philosophical approach, if, for example you are an artist, an author, a musician - an anything that engages your passion and joy. Then the chances are that you have to make some compromise to the need of your belly and your thirst.

So you get the awful job and it is hell and slowly or quickly you learn in self-defence to blot it out, to not think about it even while engaged in it, to ram the old fingers in the ears yodel at the top of the lungs and put it on a pile with Death and the size of infinity and the terrible sadness.

God help us that ever we came here.

Ideas and ways of life, culture and civilisation, all evolve in fairly close accordance with Darwinian theory. I am having trouble though, thinking of an animal analogous with our society.

A hyena perhaps, very successful but rather difficult to love.

Make no mistake, this brutal and ugly Way has been engineered. All that is great and good, all the mighty acts of shining creation inside and outside the soul of a creature have become inconsequential.

The Hyena shits- great golden slamming gobbets of shit, the pure wonderful excreta of a dangerously foetid and disease-ridden host.

It has been engineered though, engineered by the fat cats, the greedy fearful rich; and we are no more than cattle to be milked or slaughtered on a whim of profit, all of us, even dickheads like me with pretensions of liking their jobs.

But to shoot 40 hours a week right between the eyes, at the behest of these revolting fuckers, is a hard pill to swallow.

By Murray Morrison, copyright 2008. All rights reserved.





Flash Fiction