Enjoy Every Sandwich

Since the age of 16 I have been working. And for the most part, since then I’ve been described as a good worker. 80% of being a good worker in this country—just as 80% of being a good tenant is simply paying rent on time—is showing up on time. Another 10% is just showing up regularly. Yet, from the very moment I began working, I have despised and grown tired of it. The many co-workers I have had the—well, not pleasure nor opportunity so, how about?—situation to talk to in that time have rarely disagreed. Worse, it has been an consistent increase in seeing its purposelessness that has followed me since that day I first joined the work force. Work has always been a good time interrupted; a curtain covering my personal relationship with the world around me; a putridly pointless obtrusion to an lifelong weekend; a suitor to hangovers and an end to an otherwise endless night; an abrupt interruption to a good night’s sleep; a demeaning panderer; an unnecessary overbearing intrusion upon what would otherwise be, and still is, my own personal time: my life.

As it has been for so long, the thinking still goes that one puts in a good forty or fifty years of labor and then they can fairly enjoy the fruits of their labor; they are then free to see the world, to pursue the hobbies they never had time to pursue; to reconnect with friends and family; to read, write, and enjoy the days in and of themselves. The Golden Years.

After forty years.

Or more accurately play Bridge and Golf and go shopping for the rest of their days.

Assuming of course one makes it that far. And, if they do, that their bodies will hopefully be in good enough shape to be able to perform those delayed daydreams. But with an increasing number of people without health insurance, and thus proper medical attention (because, after all, basic medical attention is a luxury, not a basic necessity to be shared by all), it would stand to reason that there will continue to be a number of people too work-wearied to enjoy that retirement. Life expectancy may be increasing in years, but what good is quantity without the slightest hint of quality? Why should I now gamble that I will be amongst the lucky ones?

Maybe even fifty years.

Assuming too that there will be a social security that will support them, or that they were lucky enough to have had money invested for them that was not ultimately corrupted by the greed of a company’s executive.

Fifty years. And keeping in mind that the male’s average lifespan is only 72 years.

Additionally, it is a popularly accepted belief, held onto especially strongly by the educated class, that what one does for pay is the defining quality of what a person is.

I’m no university accredited mathematician, but near as I can figure it, if one goes to college, graduates at twenty-two and works until he is 65, that right there is 59.72% of our 72 years spent working.

“What are you?” is equal to “What do you do?” And so, even though one was required to receive training (be it via college degree or a simple day’s instruction from a manager) in order to be, or in actuality, to become (as we all remember being asked “what are you going to become when you grow up?” and never thinking “what’s wrong with being what I am?”) whatever we are being paid to be, a lawyer is nevertheless inherently a lawyer, a salesman a salesman, and by definition, a janitor a janitor and a garbage man a garbage man. Never mind their hobbies or what they do in their free time, only the paid time matters. There is no middle ground.

Not to mention the 17 years (from five until twenty-two) we were being educated only in order to get that job. Combined, that’s 83.33% of our years spent obsessed with working.

But whatever jobs we now hold, we will only hold so long as they are profitable to the companies that we are working for (and if we are amongst the so-called lucky working for ourselves, until we can no longer pay our bills, at which point we would then be forced to go in search of employment). An employer may help us pay our bills by employing us, but we help them pay theirs in being employed by them. Nothing more. As soon as the job is no longer profitable to them to employ us, our positions will be terminated under the guise of a thankfulness for the service, an apologetic remorse for not being able to continue the job and the universally impersonal justification that, “it’s nothing personal, it’s just business.”

83.33% of our lives with the only goal being to make more money. Not necessarily do good unto others or to the world. Simply, make more money.

We are told to our face that work is nothing personal and yet are required to accept the idea that what we do for money is somehow an extension of what we each individually and inherently are? The wonderful humor of such an absurd contradiction that we base our lives upon!

Having now only a few hundred dollars left in the bank and very few other valuables I might be able to raise some money from their sale; possessing no rich relative that long ago had the foresight to put money into a bank account that I can fall back upon; having no prospects of an unknown inheritance; and having no interest in donating to the lottery, I foresee myself amongst the idle rich at no point in my future. So if were to accept these terms as the only model of good living, of success and being part of society, I would be all but fucked.

If you do make it to retirement, the said company may make it all worth it by splurging and buying you a plaque. Or maybe even a watch.

Or “shit out of luck,” as I've heard many a good worker say before.

Even though, now retired, you would no longer be in need of knowing the time.

Well, only 83.33% of my life would be fucked or shit out of luck, technically. But, with 6.944% of that 16.66% having already passed—from birth to the age of five—however, I would only be left with an abundant 9.722% that I should certainly be grateful to be able to claim for myself. Nearly 40 years from now.


I remember—I am pretty sure it was on Dave Letterman, but even if it wasn’t, who cares, all that counts is that it was said—Warren Zevon, when asked in his dying days what advice he would have for somebody, said to “enjoy every sandwich.” Such simple brilliance from the dying is all too frequently discarded by the living.

Look, I am not adverse to working hard. I have a track record to prove otherwise. Whenever my basic survival depends upon it I have performed as necessary. But I do not wish to wait another thirty years to do what I can already do today; to do what I could do today without the burden of age and with the still thickly flickering flame of youth. I defiantly, idealistically, perhaps foolishly, believe that I am not fucked and these are not the only terms of successfully enjoying one’s life and that, as I have long suspected in the secret, all too long denied innermost chambers of myself—and it is here that I will spend two cents on a nickel’s worth of free advice—that free time is better than pay time.