Two Hundred and Seventy Seven

Another dream.

I work at a company that’s a mash-up of all those small companies where I worked at the beginning and the end of my working life.  We all sit at long tables, like the ones on which I sprawled when drawing blueprints at Bendix, and later at Modern when reading them.

Everyone is casually dressed except me.  I realise, to my dismay, that I’m wearing a white shirt and tie because I’m one of those old(er) men whom employees at small companies tease and mock because they used to work in an office at one of the big corporations, but are now on a downward spiral and clinging to the past.

There’s a young apprentice at this company who takes special delight in teasing and mocking me (Surely I wasn’t like him when I was a young apprentice.  The older employees did seem to resent me, so I took special care to win them over and learn from them).  One day he comes to me and apologises for having teased and mocked me.  But I don’t know whether he’s serious, or this is the prelude to yet another of his pranks, so I ignore him.

Attempting to make conversation, he asks me how I like working at the company.  I reply “I hate it with all the fury of a thousand exploding suns”, which surprises me as much as it does him.

At lunchtime, the owner of the company walks in and tells us he has a special treat for us; something both interesting and educational.  A professor of history is going to show us his collection of antiquities.  Then a scruffy man, looking like a homeless person, walks in.  He’s carrying a battered suitcase, which he sets on one of the tables and opens.

It contains small clay figurines which, he says, were made in ancient Sumer.  Only now do I realise, as I write this, that they looked like the clay figurines I used to make when I was a child, and kept on my bedside table.

The other employees make the desultory sounds of admiration which they know will please our boss, and go back to work.  I stay behind, and when they’re out of earshot I tell the scruffy man his figurines don’t look like any Sumerian figurines I’ve ever seen in a museum.  He readily admits he made them himself, and was selling them on the street when our boss passed by.

I awoke, thinking that everyone knew Trump was a con man and elected him because of it, not in spite of it; but they didn’t know that consciously.  Most of the things most people do they do for reasons they don’t know, and take care not to know, consciously.  They move through life as through a dream, taking care not to wake.

Everyone knows we're in a downward spiral, but chose to believe Trump when he said he’d Make America Great Again because they don’t want to wake from the American Dream.