Blah blah blah, I had started rambling about capitalism again. It's all a boy can do in these times of excessive control. Once upon a time people were (they weren't) happy to get a good (it wasn't) job and have enough to fund home and hearth.
Those days are gone. Now it's not even enough to aspire to your Dre Beats, your 'sweet kicks', or a coat with a tick on the back. Now you have to become someone else. You have to live a life you couldn't possibly. This is self destruction sold to us with sugar coated profit driven nihilism. The end of the world will be the taste of ice cream, and the sound will be artificial crunch of the Magnum lolly model as she cracks the choco-crust in the advert world. Have you seen the price of those things? The joke's not on the stick, it's on the viewer. The fucking price of those things!
Ahem.
On Saturday the latest directive from the office of Meine Herren McVey, Fuhrer, for now, of the Ministry of Misery we otherwise disingenuously call the DWP. Another work focused interview has been scheduled for yours truly lunchtime on the 6th of July. How kind. Oh what it is to be remembered.
Meanwhile my email of 11 days ago to the useless advisers at Team North Somerset (I name thee!) has merited no response as yet. These are exactly the sort of people the DWP will no doubt recommend as a positive influence. Should I point out that the truth is otherwise? That won't go down well. The failings can't be theirs, they are professionals. They are here to help ergo it must be...YOU (that is, me).
That is how class works. They are the experts, I am not. I am the patient. I am impatient.
We don't have a free and equal society, we have a rigid hierarchy that asserts itself everywhere. In this case I will not be taken seriously, much as I wasn't by the mental health 'experts' I had relied on to offer a diagnosis. An outcome that, whenever I mention it to people like Team North Somerset, I'm told that it would be pointless anyway.
How helpful.
So once again the fear appears. The thought of a journey to the DWP's latest Mountain of Doom (the last one was of course shut by the government), having to be in that place, to sit and wait in some oppressive cloister, is palpable.
Keep the ring Frodo, you'll need it to pawn for food money. Sauron runs a charity shop or a Pound store these days. He doesn't have time for world domination. There's no money in jewellery these days.
It is a unique fear; to others who don't understand they will point to people in worse situations (of which there are sadly many, it's no comfort). They do this because society conditions us to dismiss the problems of others lest they remind us of our own and show us a common cause. That we might work together against them, because that is the only real and lasting solution to this wrecked society.
It is about the loss of control, the loss of self; the curtailment of the right to live through economic force. Numbers are swung like swords, against themselves. Numbers are also the only shield. Whether you would live or die sans food clothing shelter....medicine!...that is of no consequence to the master of coin and digit. Am I a productive little boy? Am I prepared to tug the forelock to the unwise and the unqualified who, by deign of birth, enact a system of oppression and invisible violence. Do I not matter? I'm only good for taking the x7 to Mordor; the ticket might be redeemable at the Black Gate.
If that sounds convoluted then you might just understand the nature of that fear. It is the screaming sound a soul makes when it sees the chains that come for it. The intrinsic ineffable quality of what makes life worthwhile being shackled by so mundane a thing as economics. We have no intrinsic value. How many times do you hear people say: you must pay your way - no such thing as a free lunch - beggars can't be choosers?
These aren't axioms but they are treated as such. They are the norms we take for granted, but they only have power because the working class are divided.
And yet the truth is the bluster of coercion is all this system can offer. Between the implied threats, buried like the dead with a smile under the foundations, is..? They can't manufacture work, never mind anything of value. Their databases open like Russian dolls; fractal job opportunities that unfold into each other to reveal only endless data fishing scams dressed as agencies. A hall of mirrors that reflect the ugliness of the corporate world that demands of you more than you can give. It wants not just your time, but your soul: you must give of yourself willingly in the worst way - you must be a team player. It's almost pornographic.
I can't do this. I can't fit into the shape of that world. If I do not attend I starve. If I do attend I struggle. This is Britain in 2018. It has no room for people with mental health issues. It has no capacity to understand why that dichotomy is true and unacceptable. Help given - forced - on those terms is not help. It is bullying.
