I cling to words as a matter of faith. It’s a word that gets abused alot: faith. But I’m increasingly unable to find another word to describe the act that is adequately connotated and contextualized. I cling to it the way a carpenter clings to their tools, the way a baby clings to their parents. I cling.
Life is an absurd business. My latest gig, working the gate at Churchill Downs as a lot dog, highlighted some of that absurdity. The Downs is a giant coughing economic engine run, literally, on horse power. That engine, like all engines, burn up resources and do nothing but create endless motion, driven by Men who care nothing about who and what they run over. Back in the September Meet I worked inside once or twice, right up next to the track. On a day when the track was sloppy from rain I watched a horse fall not far from the finishing post. The thorobred fell like a tired concertina. But it still got up, jockeyless, trying to finish the race. The animal was led into a trailer where I later heard it was put down.
If you’ve never seen a horse keep running in spite of a broken leg you don’t understand what nobility of spirit actually means.
They don’t put the horse down on the track anymore. Too many cameras. Too much bad press. No one want to know how the sausage is made. They just want the feast and their fancy fucking hats.
I worked outside the wall. The pay was better and the people were more honest… which is to say, more distilled. Inside the walls, the gentility is fake. There’s an aristocratic “Upstairs, Downstairs” feel to everything. Many people who work inside the wall think they’re better than us lot dogs. They buy into the class structure and act like if they step and fetch properly that they will be invited to sup.
They never are. We aren’t either.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t people who appreciate the work we do. There are some genuine humans there, trying to work and support families. Genuine working people with kind and open hearts. People brought us coffee. And donuts. The previous five sentences are a prayer of thanks for the angels that walk the Earth. And I am always grateful for the reminder that they exist, even in the dark machinations running off the world.
In the past my writing has suffered when I work. And truth be told, I’d rather be writing and reading and wandering around than being on the job. But as a matter of survival, I cling to words. I write from a place that disappears. Each moment evaporates into another and I write. I generally chose a language economy that’s stripped bare because when one has to no choice but to splice life down to the moment, there’s no time for reflecton. Maybe that’s what the pure existentialists have wrong. They look at the long march of time as a giant slide instead of a seemingly endless series of connected moments that grow from the previous and feed the next. And it is in the those vanishing moments, absurd and experiential, that I write. And when I can take a longer moment, I write longer.
Because there are always enough words. And always enough to write about.
