Tonight I’m on second shift, which means I’m Louie. I’m Louie so that Louie has a weekend. Thursday and Friday I’m Roger so that Roger gets his weekend. On Sundays, the only day shift I work, I get to be myself.

Although it’s true that I have a deep romantic streak in my nature, I do want to describe what I do here in terms as concrete as I can make them. It’s easy to fall into abstractions. Often, I find that the commonly held reality abstracts itself and so I must describe it as such; that’s not what I’m talking about. This isn’t about describing my job as Kandinsky might paint it, though I suspect that might be just as valid as any 1000 words I can spend on it. People claim to hate abstractions and then describe why abstractly. It’s the bane of our humanity: our ever-failing attempts to describe and articulate but falling endlessly into a monologue, alone on a stage in an abandoned theater.

Lately, I’ve taken to asking the rivermen what I should be doing. When I’m here I’m The Watch, which means I check on the boats and walk around. I make my presence known and keep an eye on things. I keep people off the boats who aren’t supposed to be on the the boats. But I picked up quickly on the fact that there were Other Tasks I should/could be doing. Everyone here has a role, a job, a series of tasks. I point this out to everyone from the captains to the chief engineer, to mates and deckhands and after a bit of pressing they generally say something like, “Well if YOU WANTED TO you could…” and then tell me some other task that The Watch used to perform. There is no clear reason why the task is no longer included on my list of duties. I get the feeling that because swing shift is difficult to fill, they don’t want to overload the poor bastard who signed up for the shift. It was suggested to me that no one wants to tell me to do something they themselves don’t want to do when they’re stuck on watch.

Thus, in my perpetual motion of writing and describing my sometimes abstracting reality in concrete terms, I fall back on essential functions.

Tonight I am Louie.