Gone Nothin'

A highlight of my recent fad for reading and re-reading Jack London is the short story "Apostate." It is set in my adopted home San Francisco, but the general atmosphere of the story feels more like the Old Satanic Mills from back East, the big red brick buildings you'll see driving through the wastelands of Worcester, Massachussetts which used to house textile sweat shops and now are nurseries for angry heavy metal bands. Apparently, in the days of London's youth San Francisco had some of those sweat shops, where he suffered for a while working on starchers and looms. His depiction of the toil almost makes your hands ache with tendonitis:

His lean fingers felt as big as his wrist, while in the ends of them was a remoteness of sensation vague and fuzzy like his brain. The small of his back ached intolerably. All his bones ached. He ached everywhere. And in his head began the shrieking, pounding, crashing, roaring of a million looms.

What struck me most about this story is its ending. The long-suffering, hard-working protagonist, who has toiled away his youth in order to feed his ungrateful younger siblings, suddenly just stops working. While ill, he takes the time to calculate exactly how many "moves" he makes with his hands in working the machinery, and concludes that he makes twenty-five million moves a year, and that "it seems like I've been a movin' that way 'most a million years." So he stops moving. He does so not just because he has calculated the existential absurdity of his Moves, but also because not moving feels so sweet and right:

Now this week I ain't moved at all. I ain't made one move in hours an' hours. I tell you it was swell, jes' settin' there, hours an' hours, an' doin' nothin'. . . . I'm jes' goin' to set, an' set, an' rest, an' rest, and then rest some more.

As I write this blog entry, I am sitting home on my first sick day in many, many months of work. No, I don't work on looms, but I'm still going to take a minute to contemplate how many Moves I make when typing away at the creation of software manuals. I'm sure it is millions of moves, and I'm sure that somehow those kinds of Moves are a lot tougher to make than typing about fly fishing, or casting flies, or paddling kayaks around. Not all moves are equal.

I know this because, like London, I did some manual work in my younger days. For a very short time at an Alaskan fish processing plant, I was a "Slimer." My pal O'Brian and I drove up to Seward one summer and almost immediately started work on a "slime line," where a bunch of poor souls in blood-smeared rain gear used blunt knives to clean off bits of guts and gills from an unending flow of fish coming out of a big gutting machine that we called "the chink." O'Brian was a handy slimer. Like an Apostate with a slightly more positive attitude, he calculated how many fish he slimed in a minute, and did the multiplications to come up with how many thousands of fish he was able to handle in a day -- some very impressive number that I can't remember.

Being slow and slopping and unskillful in my Moves, I sucked at sliming. A disgusted foreman soon moved me off the line and onto a boner. Seriously, I worked at a nice, dishwasher-sized machine that ate split salmon and spit out meat on one end and a pile of bones on the other. It was easy, slow, work, feeding halves of fish into the vibrating maw of the boner. And then -- I can still feel the Christmas-morning anticipation of it -- every hour or so, the bone-hopper got so full that I had to turn off the machine and empty the bones. This involved a walk of 150 feet which I sauntered, ever so slowly, glancing over at the busy slime line, carrying the hopper out to a big dumpster destined for a fish meal plant.

Oh, weren't those the days! Two weeks of it gave me tendonitis in my hands and wrists, and I vowed never to do manual work again. Mainly, I have kept that vow. But now I begin to wonder if the next evolutionary step might be to stop working at all, manually or otherwise. I certainly loved my lazy old sabbatical months, recorded sporadically in the earlier entries in this blog. I didn't quite do purely nothin', but I didn't do a whole hell of a lot, either -- no attempts to write novels, no volunteer work, no running for office. I fished an' fished, an' I tell you, it was swell . . .

The truth is, the current business climate may someday soon make me a test subject in the great experiment of not working. Layoffs started almost as soon I started work back in August, and in dribs and drabs they have continued right up into last week. My number may well be called, and my database-related Moves brought to a halt. I'm not going to encourage that turn of events, but I know all too well that there's not much I can do to stop it if it is destined to happen. People slave away and kiss the Man's ass ten hours a day and still get laid off -- I have seen this shameful act played out on a few different stages, and I want no part of it. If they need me, I'll work, at least up until the late summer coho migration in Bristol Bay, and possibly even beyond it. But if the axe falls, you know what's next: Gone Fishin'!!!