Raw Blog: The Zine

Advice from a Capitalist

Somewhere along the way, I taught myself incompetence. I convinced myself of my social inadequacies. I recorded my history as a series of conflicts and tragedies, one catalyzing the next. I regarded luck as a mirror, held up to reflect my scarcities. I thought love was a sort of punishment. I thought everything was a sort of punishment. You see, it was the Puritan way we’d learned in Hopewell. Rise early, shower, lace up your boots, track dirt all through the house, so that later, you’ll have a mess to clean up. Start smoking today, so tomorrow, you’ll have something to quit. Package your self worth into tiny little boxes of productivity and stamp labels on them like “expedite”. Stain the walls yellow to match your teeth. Slant the floor to match your spine. Have the plumbers place the drain just above the lowest point on the floor, so only you can decide when enough is enough. Don’t ever let them break you. Crumple your tears up into bloody paper towels, wash your blistered burns in tomato sauce, scrub your apron in the dish pit and dry it in the oven. Tell your girlfriend, “I’m doing this for us,”  while she quietly falls in love with your absence. Quit your job and go find yourself. Find yourself passed out drunk in someone else’s kitchen. Get a fucking job already. Anything to distract you from the gnawing silence of sobriety. Somewhere along the way, I taught myself incompetence and weaponized it against myself. Does someone like me really deserve any better than this?

—submitted anonymously