Friday, November 19, 2021

An unnamed play based on service industry lives, hard at work. Hey: Hard At Work. Title.

Prologue: I am welcome to go get my last BackCountry Traphouse and Pizza pay check, today. I don’t know if the next check will come from Tandoori Grill, or even if it will be front or back of the house, for sure. I’m waiting to see if that’s the place, because they are Indian food from homemade recipes, the owner’s in there working, too, and they’re directly across the street! But one thing I am looking for, regardless- for at least some of the hours- is the pleasure of working by my best friend, Angie, again.
I’m not bitter, but I sometimes grow to feel that way, if I’m not keeping enough of my usual good juju flowing. I don’t just work for money. I have done what I think is my finest work without asking a penny for much of that. I can’t sleep- to be fair, I did sleep rather a lot, while reading Hamlet, petting cats, and eating simple meals with Angie, yesterday. I didn’t get outside, and my body needs both exercise and the outdoors. I was just having the fundamental needs discussion about the natural desire to be outdoors- the messages that seem to wait there in the uncluttering of one’s head.
Often times, sex springs me full-awake to stay, rather than shutting the beast down. That may be the case, tonight.
What it made me think though- and now that I’m not so dead-beat, I’ve much to write, even about Work- was, how often did I lie awake, too excited to sleep, anticipating getting back to a job I was determined to master and enjoy greatly? If anything, I was troubled not to have a sense of an end time to the endeavor, because I knew I’d want to do something else. But for a time I told myself I belong.

Granted, I was lying awake before that, remembering how pissed I was with James, who would just find something to make a hard-headed and wrong argument about- a fact I didn’t report, while charismatically training him. Someone must’ve told James: that guy’s only been here six weeks what does he know? Or maybe he was jealous. But I’m both vindictive and small enough to get a bump off him flaming out in a week, and generous enough to think it might be a place he might be thankful to work. If it asks the best he can give, that’s the best he can do. A point of pride in one is mockery of another.

It’s really no affair what someone at a job I left behind thinks, except, I intended to leave him with that job and move on later rather than sooner, with a reduction in hours that fit my needs and theirs. I came in to a situation the kitchen manager described with much cursing and worry. I felt compelled to be the stability, but I really just started very reluctantly as someone on his way back from realizing he’d failed to save his flyer in a proper extension.

I told the chef, Jim, who they pay as their prep cook, how I really see Life as Stories. If I'd only done it all for the money, I'd shove my experiences there into a pile, the way students cram for an exam with little apparent long-term retention or use for the knowing. But I clearly have to come to terms with how I was moved to risk really understanding, which I didn't know would get me yelled at eventually. I knew it would be a place of characters, lives walked differently than my own, with little appreciation yet of the violence that broils beneath certain work places. I have to come to terms with the memories, and I'd rather do it now that drag it out. I may not have went home inspired with new material for any other creative endeavor. But I did listen to a head full of voices that regard themselves, largely unheard. I don't think my drama is on level with the rot of Denmark, but there's a store's story there. I was seriously staying on, foremost, to be a positive force beside, and in the life of, a guy called Bubba.

There’s too many lines remaining, even as I feel the same sense of struggle not to get involved too much, as I did after shaking Daniel’s hand on the job.
End Prologue I'm going to probably try drafting this, primarily, the next few days. I may get another chance at hearing some of the stories, so I can adopt them with rich detail. Five Act breakdown.
If there's one thing my post-pandemic work experience has given me, it's an engagement period brief enough to posit a proper arc. The nature of survival suggests deadlines along the way, which is great, as other projects were allowed to drag on to some date not yet foreseen.

Hard At Work. A working title if ever there was one. Update: I got 3000 words down, with a lot of real life-inspired quotes, and decided I had to get some energy out of my system so I could move on. But if the itch strikes, I think it's a cool play idea. Be Chill, Cease ill

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