I used to roller-skate in circles for hours. I was at another new school, the odd man out, bullied by my desk mate. My problems were too complex and modern to explain.
So I skated across parking lots, breezeways, and sidewalks, I listened to the vibration of my wheels on brick, I learned the names of flowers, I put deserted paths to use. I decided for myself each curve I took, and by the time I rolled home, I felt lighter. One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park.
I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating, beyond joy, and as Rollerbladers and cyclists overtook me, it eclipsed my own.
Soon after, I stopped skating. I worked in the backroom of a Tower Records. Every few hours, my face-pierced, gunk-haired co-workers would line up by my workstation, waiting to clock in or out.
When we typed in our staff number at 8:59 p.m., we were off time, returned to ourselves, free like smoke.
There are no words to describe the opposite sensations of being at-our-job and being not-at-our-job even if we know the feeling of crossing that threshold by heart. But the most essential quality that makes a job a job is that when we are at work, we surrender the power to decide the worth of what we do. At-job is where our labour is appraised by an external meter: the market.
At-job, our labour is never a means to itself but a means to money; its value can be.