Calgary
For the last 10 months, I’ve kept a welcome mat in the bed of my truck. I stared at it today from the roof of a client’s house. It was purchased for my 4th place of residence in Edmonton, remained lightly used after the 5th, and has survived since then as some sort of passive-aggressive self reflection. It did not settle in British Columbia, it did not settle in the other place it was taken, and it did not settle in Calgary.
I’m not sure I drink enough to pretend some sort of Kerouac. I just like stories. I like how they start and how they end.
Someone tried having a real career in cow-poke-ville and it lasted for a summer. He worked for a sort of American tech startup, hiring out their remote sales force to Calgary, and thought that might be a good fit. A startup sounds involved, if not always fun - for some being involved is many times more important than having fun. The people who were training me were the kind of people my father would spit on if they tried to sell him shoes. He’s a very patient man, but how many times can you tell someone politely to lose your phone number? None times. Hmm.
Occasionally you call someone so genuinely braindead that they actually think you are an altruist who got lost, ended up in a phone booth with their number, and have conveniently built the exact product that will solve all of their problems. Funny I should be talking to you, Sharon. It sounds like you’re a great fit. Can we both ignore that the series-whatever-bag-of-shit I work for paid way too much money for your number? Can we pretend serendipity brought us together, and that I am not calculating how much of my vehicle payment you are taking care of should you buy my wares?
You have a dog? Tell me all about them.
While on the phone, you discover that Sharon would only do for about 45$, so you tell her to suck cake and that you ‘have another call.’ Your other call is just yelling at the eastern European man who asked in his last voicemail to deal with someone else. Nay nay, my friend. You and I. Till death or credit card failure do us ‘part.
Maybe at 1:00 I’ll slack one of my coworkers and ask if they would like to day-drink with me
If you were actually disappointed to find out that corporate life is politics, I’m not sure you moved up and down enough social ladders during your formative years. Despite vacillating on the bottom half of said ladder, enough moving and shaking happened in my own life to realize that having your finger on a couple buttons does no harm. Read more Henry Kissinger. Live in the soft power. If you can’t blow up a couple social circles, your head is not even remotely in the game.
On that note - any person who reads ‘the 48 laws of power,’ and thinks that book is in any way insightful or meaningful should be hooked up to a Matrix-style body battery so that society at large can at least make some use of your warmth. You either grew up politicking or you didn’t. Your nurse friend (who is 26 and making payments on a 2014 Subaru) is not about the start the next crusade because she read the musings of a man who looks like he would dissect a dog should it ever become legal. For Christ. Grow up. The majority of the effect any given self-help book has is to flesh out your own concept of agency in your life. Who has done anything they are genuinely proud of and thought ‘thank god I read that self-help number, or I wouldn’t have been able to pull that one off.’ If you have, you can email me about it and I’ll be sure to fit your counterpoint somewhere in my kitchen garbage.
These jobs are fine - I can, in fact, be bought - so long as all the chest thumping and humming is secondary to the fact that some amount of money ends up in the right place at the right time. When I can no longer satisfy every material whim I have and am forced to stare at the wall, pondering the morality of my job, the storm’s a-brewin. The funny that companies play, because they have no other choice, is to be ideological about their product. They talk about starting with why, selling visions, ‘painting the picture,’ etc. At their best, leadership are priests, walking quietly around an institution that is justified in large part by their silence. Asking why this thing exists is degrees more offensive than starting an orgy during the company all-hands. You could probably fuck a mattress during said meeting, so long as you were wearing company swag.
It resembles religious and institutional realities in that the behaviour is also the goal instead of an actual sense of enlightenment. Get on board or fuck off. Due in part to real economic ‘demands’ of companies, nobody has ever or will ever have the time to monologue to your sandwich-eating hole as to the point. Why does this product exist? Ineptitude. Call the next number.
The best thing about that schtick was that salespeople, for all their faults, are people who love a story, or a joke, much more than your average Joe. Occasionally I’ll run into someone in the trades worth talking to, but in order to do that you have to go through a couple people who, by all things good and holy, cannot decipher when someone else wants them to shut the fuck up. I do not need to hear about your nephew’s DUI, your blood pressure medication, or your thoughts on the lizard people within the first 7 minutes of meeting you. Of course I believe the earth is a rhomboid, and the only thing anybody should drink is 3% milk, but I wait until the second day I work with someone to get into all that jazz. Why do I know about your public indecency charge but not your last name? Sir? Sir. May I introduce you to…20 questions? I’ll even ask, at the very end, ‘would you smoke crack again?’ Take me down slow, captain.
Salespeople, on the other hand, are very into the social pony show. And ironically the easiest people to sell, mostly due to the fact that they think themselves impervious to external schmoozing. They’re too busy getting other people to get got themselves, is the thought. As long as whatever story you tell them is entertaining, they will agree to just about anything. Of course all the people I worked with were geniuses whose judgement is beyond reproach. I’m only talking about the other ones, guys. Thanks.
Anyways - Calgary.
Calgary is a place where white-collar people from across Canada come to pay less taxes and pretend that they know what a transfer case does. Calgary is a place where you are close enough to the mountains to go hiking twice a year, but far enough that you don’t feel obligated. Calgary is a place to discuss how great the trail system is, despite all of it being paved, and in that case (by some accounts) not a trail. Many things to do in cowtown:
- Swim in the elbow river, while deftly avoiding all of the brain worms in the elbow river
- Verbally harass anybody who moved here from eastern Canada
- Pay 22$ for the pay-by-weight food in Ollie’s
- Steal raisin tarts from Ollie’s in retribution for the 22$ lunch you just dusted
Bear spray is for narcs. Swim in every body of water you hike across. Swim in the glacier water and try to convince some poor Australian backpacker that it’s actually super warm and they should also jump in. Visit the gopher museum in Torrington. Order from the guy with the coke nail in the Drumheller Dairy Queen. Get lassoed and stabbed in Forest Lawn attempting to pick up a 20$ squiggly mirror off of marketplace. Meet an actual farm boy at Stampede and realize that they have the social skills of a small dog and the sensibilities of a big rock, which is okay, and all things considered a much better way to live. But you’re ‘just not looking for that right now’ and will be doing molly with your coworkers for the rest of the weekend. Fuck up those white cowboy boots you bought 3 days ago. Drive into a streetlight 5 months into our sun-deprived winter (it may have been an accident, but the EMT will still look into the abyss of your eyes and recommend vitamin D tablets). Break both your legs falling off a chairlift. Move back to Hamilton. Onwards.
Being a somewhat professionally-projecting vagrant is funny in the sense that when people are constructing their image of you, part of it is contingent on the length they are guessing they’ll know you for. The ability to, or maybe just fact of, seeming more stationary than you actually are warps the room. You’ve mistaken me - I am the man at the bus stop. Someone close ish to me is going to Sydney next year, and it would be lame to fly alone, so I may as well.
Soon, then. Cheers