Frustration in A Major
A Labouretto
The sun was here this morning but now it’s gone. Replaced by a few stars. But I don’t care about the sun or the stars. What I care about is that I am inching closer to tomorrow, to Monday, the workday. Toward uneasiness and time worship. Yes, I worship the end of the shift where the sun is gone. I worship the absence of sun because that’s when I can come home to my wife and my dreams. The sun is too bright and demanding, it doesn’t let me dream. It wants me to labour. And there are no dreams in labour and work. There are only numbers. And tiredness.
There was a time in my life when celestial bodies meant more than schedule. I lay on the slope of the roof of my Kathmandu house listening to Steve Roach’s Structures from Silence album and stared at Jupiter or the Orion constellation (especially the redness in Betelguese) wondering what all that meant. There were times when I slept on the roof on a winter afternoon listening to Olivier Messiah and got absurdly lost in the hide-and-seek of the sun and the clouds. On those occasions, I wondered if I could look at existence as a slapstick comedy.
I had no work to go to the next morning. I could always skip my college classes and nobody apart from my parents cared. It’s different with work now, I get paid. People care if I take even a day off.
