resource, when used to mean “a person.” “We need a new accounting resource.”
resourceing, or the process of acquiring resources. “We’re resourcing some new accountants.”
organization, often shortened to “org” as a means for corporations to refer to themselves and their internal fiefdoms.
technology, in the overused software sense of any program, device, technique or method its proponents believe to be sufficiently complex and radical that it deserves coronation as a “technology,” instead of just another copy or variation of some longstanding thing. For instance, “Our new map technology provides robust haptic foldability.” (In other words, it’s a paper map.)
reporting. There are two senses here, one for data processing and another for what journalism has devolved to. In the first sense, reporting is the process of delivering reports, which are by definition tedious, opaque, and offer meticulous data about a process or status that is either too small to be relevant or too large to have meaning as charts and graphs: “We’ll need more resources to finish the TPS reporting on time.” The second sense can be seen twenty-four hours a day on cable television.
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I am a writer. I know many other writers, and many others who write for a living or for pleasure who are writers in all but name. We treasure words, wrestle with them, hate them, luxuriate in their curve when fit together just so. Writing provides the most horrible sort of play: a game that is never quite good enough but you can never walk away from.
Words mean things. I’m not the nihilist Frank Zappa was when he shouted “they’re just words” to Robert Novak, but words must have some degree of fixed meaning to make comprehensible communication. Why didn’t I know what those third grade Texas kids were talking about when they asked to borrow a “payin”? Because my Ontario-trained auditory processing couldn’t figure out if they wanted a pen or a pin. Confronted with a pop test the answer was obvious, but I felt the need to make a point: these words sound different because they signify different things. (That doesn’t work with homonyms, homographs and homophones, of course, but that’s English for you.) The slop in meaning allows for poetry, but the slop flows through a solid center.
Words listed above break the rules. They have become tools of those who want their true motives hidden, or–even more bizarre and dangerous–desire to erase any sense of art or humanity.
Cubedwellers will recognize all as corporate language, and everyone will recognize some as the undying patter oozing from every mass media orifice. These words have been designed to be numbing. They deny basic humanity and elevate the rigid authority of those who buy and sell. I don’t think this is going too far. What’s the difference between a resource and a slave?
I am tired of these words, of this list, of the blank-eyed quarterly statements that generate them. I have resisted them small-scale, refusing to ping but instead contacting or reaching out to. When referred to as a resource, I correct or ignore the speaker or writer, shifting the word used to person. (It doesn’t stick, and I can feel the weird looks through email, but I’m not afraid of this modest sabotage.)
Now I’m turning my back on these words. They are empty shells, obfuscating with their Potemkin village show of fullness and plenty. There is no there there so why be cramped by empty space? The Market can stay rich with its innovative paper fluff. Value is solid, whether it’s held in the hand or on the tongue, and I cast out these derivative collateralized words.
I bought the shoes for this: to run a 5K, wearing a suit jacket and tie, carrying a kayak, which carries a memorial urn. I am paid to do this. This is not a joke.
The job notice comes through my improv theatre, which doesn’t stop me questioning its legitimacy. It is confirmed the theatre works with PR and marketing groups to supply people for odd jobs and stunts, funneling the money to us. The job is for a marketing firm with a mortuary client, some moderate-sized corporate operation moving into town. To emphasize the attention paid to each deceased with “memorials as unique as you”, a TV spot featuring older men with chiseled good looks in the dark clothes of formal mourning carrying a kayak with an urn conveyed on its final journey. I see the spot in a very marketing conference room: one lime green wall with the rest glass, the table some noveau recycled wood. To further get the word out, the marketing company has arranged for the client to sponsor several running events. This is de rigueur for local marathons and similar runs: men run around in costumes handing out flyers and free bling. Whether anyone has run with a kayak bearing an empty urn I don’t know. My opinion is such a thing is not a barrier that needs breaking.
Is nothing sacred? is my initial reaction. Hardly on a level with stealing elections or genocide, I calm down about a PR stunt that at its worst is shameless and annoying. Raising awareness is a phrase that has become as empty as tolerance, but in this case I am paid to try for it. In the end it’s just one more message for people to ignore.
Hardly a crowd
The race is thinly attended. Friends who run haven’t heard of it, which does not bode well for PR potential but gives me no trouble parking. The day is overcast and a little clammy-to-steamy, an unusual combo for July Seattle but one that no doubt saves us over five kilometers.
Kevin, or “Slim” Jim, before the journey
The kayak is from the TV spot, a beautiful piece of work custom made in Port Townsend hardly marred by the corporate logos, their small size working against the client but leaving the kayak unsullied. The marketing firm has made a fabric sling to carry it, but the seat belt material isn’t long enough in either lateral or handstrap length, and we eventually abandon it for the kayak’s tiedown bungee cording. We practice lifting it, now dressed in suit coats and ties. It is uncomfortable and unwieldy, but not impossible.
Milling around the open space by the water, race preparations are light: one man running the sound system plays standard amp-up music but not too loudly, and runners pin their bibs under pavilions by the lake. We realize we should have a story about the kayak and who is supposed to be in the empty urn: why not make it an improv exercise? “Slim” Jim was kayaking in the Antarctic wild, testing his ability to slide through the narrowest of ice caves–he wasn’t named Slim for nothing. A self-assured man of the world, he laughed at nature’s fury. In the end, irony got him. There was a crevasse too slim even for Slim Jim. It’s what he would have wanted. What better way to honor such a brazen hero. It’s not much of a character. My mind is waterlogged.
We pin our bibs to our backs. I stab one of my comrades trying to get it on, apologize profusely. The timekeeper, as unsure as us, comes to ask us if we want our times. Someone from the mortuary gets on the PA and announces how proud they are to sponsor the race and to be sure to come to the booth and get your picture taken with the kayak runners. I am unable to believe anyone would want that.
I begin to realize as a physical inevitability that we will be running in suit coats with a kayak. Dedicated runner types come asking what the booth is for and advises that thirty minutes would be a good time for first-timers. We both assume we won’t come close. A three-mile-an-hour brisk walk would put us back at an hour. He advises that as a reasonable goal.
The absurdity registers
For a light race, quite a few runners jam the start. Could they have walked here? A pair of heavy women with thick shoes and two wiener dogs fill out the powerwalk class. Five, ten and fifteen Ks run simultaneously, a sandwichboard pointing ahead for another lap or out to the finish. No one looks at us curiously as we block out space, getting into their internal spaces. They face the distance. I haven’t thought to do this. I assume swimming an hour a couple times a week has me in shape to run like this, in brand new shoes.
There is a noise but more than that is the movement, the marching burst forward as if the road has tilted ahead. People stream past us but we are not still. We are wearing coats and ties and carrying a kayak, a shiny brass urn resting on a sky-blue velvet cushion, and to the runners we are invisible.
Start
We talk and joke. I know this is a mistake and someone calls out the adrenaline will fade sooner than we think. It isn’t that heavy and the jacket doesn’t bind that much. The temperature is odd, the air neither warm nor cool, wet nor dry. It is a little after 9:30 and I can’t tell what season it is.
A few meters in
Sound drives as much as anything, rhythm susurrating air with its strange untied mass of huffing, squeezing sound and the mushy tack of plastic on pavement. Bodies pass and I can sense their mass without looking at them. We all make a very modest wake as we pass, a real one along with our fake one.
We are passing the anaerobic burst and needing to breathe.
Still running
Running has a surreal quality. There is no lightness as you lift and push yourself stepwise ahead, sucking in air that is never enough, focusing on what is to come and then the end but always too much where you are. The path isn’t smooth, at times narrow; we block runners and move aside as soon as we can, and they say nothing, staring straight ahead. We are not runners, and hardly runners to carry a load. But we are running, not walking. We don’t walk at all.
Toward the end it is the torment I remember from middle school, but I am far stronger now than then. Shoulders ache from carrying this stupid thing, no longer funny, no longer meriting calling out to the few onlookers who turn to us. We trade off faster. I run alongside, unable to carry and run. One of the guys does standup and was out late last night at a gig. He can do this, somehow.
The last stretch is a wretched deception: the finish line is ahead, but the path runs away from it, then doubles back. A woman passes us and makes a funny comment. My filtering is at an ebb and I promise this isn’t over in a puffy Snidley Whiplash voice. It’s a strain–the kayak, the shoulder, the legs, the lungs–but it’s not firey impossibility, the last gasps before catabolic collapse. The three mile marker is a weak taunt. Finish dances ahead, pounding into view. You can stop then, rest then, put it down then, then.
We finish. We are not last, to our amazement. We ran the whole time. I can’t see for the sweat burning my eyes.
The kayak is lowered to earth, somehow out of the way. I heave with clear lungs but can somehow breathe, move my legs, get my numb hands to work. I splash water in my face to stop the eyes stinging, not caring about the rented clothes. Sweat clings to the jacket interior, impregnating the shirt with a clammy dampness like the mist coating a cool glass. Steam rises from our jackets. Someone passes out energy bars.
A table holds a bowl of jewel oranges and a bowl of fresh wheat rolls and a block of butter. I eat a roll and comprehend that we finished in just over 37 minutes. People still trickle in to a smattering of claps and encouragement. I can see better, move and breathe less like being pulled by strings.
Jazzy hands digging it
The kayak is a minor hit, or an interesting distraction, for runners. More than I would have ever guessed come to hold it, with one of the marketers snapping their photo and printing off a race badge with the client’s prominent logo. They seem to pass out brochures, but the message doesn’t seem to register. It seems unlikely this can generate many leads, but then, I assumed nobody would care to have their picture taken with a kayak, an empty urn, and some improv students in rented coats.
I don’t have anything brilliant or pithy to say. I did it. I feel good about it. Spending money will be nice. The two women above are interested in improv, and instead of talking up individualized arrangements I answer questions about where we take classes, what it’s like, books to read, theory and practice. There’s a free drop-in practice every Monday. The woman in blue–the same woman who taunted me and who I taunted a little too strongly back–asks the most questions, seems the most interested. Maybe she’ll go.
The practiced runner expresses his impression with our time: not bad at all. With a kayak.
The marketing people thank us. Pins removed, I can wriggle out of the sodden jacket. I hope the shop cleans everything. I wander off with my steel water bottle into the steel-cast morning. The guy that does standup knows a friend of mine, is performing at Seattle’s Comedy Underground, the premiere club. Maybe you’ll drink and smoke less now. He laughs.
Microsoft spends a fortune on landscaping. At least once a week a small army of men in green coveralls and ear protection show up in their yellow pickup trucks, display their rakes and leafblowers, and cultivate green. Nature is selected, tamed, controlled, given a haircut. Everything is trimmed; nothing is allowed out of place.
Weeds do not exist. Chemicals burn and warp them, and the men spend hours pulling stragglers. Appearance has an immune system that is tireless and thorough. Nothing escapes that does not fit the image.
So it is that this lone buttercup is startling. It has survived the onslaught and emerged defiant to the sun. It will be detected and eliminated within a week, but now it is a yellow beacon to the desensitized green. It has a moment and it is taking it.
Microsoft is an order machine. It counters entropy by providing tools that collect, number, label, put in the right box. Nothing they make really does this, of course: their tools create a model of what order should be. We in the world of things and time are left to make the machine’s vision real. All will fit the model of what our machines can do.
Nothing is more critical in today’s world of market-researched appearances than the mirroring of external reality to internal image, and Microsoft knows this. It projects stability, process, control–all things its mid-to-largeish-sized business customers lust for. Never mind that inside the right-angle stone and glass buildings all is disorder, argument, mixed messages, doublespeak, and an overdubbed language laden with definition but devoid of meaning. Everyone has faith that the lists and processes lead in sequence to the final order where all is answerable and solved. That these processes and lists never change, that the tasks never end and that the end long-sought product is only immediately replaced is curious evidence, but never questioned. We have faith, straight lines, green grass, and a line of people with money in their fists. They want green grass and nothing else.
Wild flowers persist, rising unbidden in the most unlikely places. Wild flowers don’t need tending, right angles, or mission statements. All the machines and all the people in thrall to them will spend the last drop of petroleum to deny this simple fact, but the wild flowers will outlast it all.
Wild flowers will outlast this monoculture lawn, the parking lot, the buildings, the streets, the city, civilization, and me. The sun shone on it, as it has for a few billion years and will a few billion yet, and I knew all this, and felt just fine.
Pau hana, new hana 