An Ode To Unemployment

1. Refresh and refresh and refresh. you wait, wait some more. go to a mandatory orientation for the jobless — brother talks about his truck business, but also suspended license, also tries to employ the Puerto Rican girl with the nice hair; a dude with a suit comes in. you know when someone has just come home from jail, or their mother has taught them wear a suit to impress people? Maybe you don’t. I do. If you are from the hood from a ghetto from a pace under-served and malnourished you read things and people and situations before they become people, things, situations, or front page news.

2. Wash your hands over and over, not OCD yet, reminds you of Nicholson’s character in “As Good As It Gets” except you are not old and white and the audience can actually imagine this woman falling in love with this man. And would they ever fall in love with you if you too were this man but in a different skin jacket?

3. Help your daughter practice brushing her teeth washing her hands putting away her toys say please and thank you and you’re welcome and excuse me.

4. Retweet sex doll threads and anime porn screenshots.

5. Find more and more writing prompts to keep your neck from opening.

6. Sleep more, or less, depending. masturbate more than you thought humanly possible. Google “purchase a gun easily nyc” or something else closely related. Ask drug dealer friends rules for dealing, how to understand corner commerce and management.

7. Erase your Google history.

8. Text ex-girlfriends under the pseudonym “If You Think You’re Lonely Now”

9. Plan your funeral.

10. Make a collage of your debt collection letters.

11. Be depressed. Go out on dates and you will not follow-up. Lie to friends. Walk. Turn down more offers for drinks, potential opiates.

12. Talk to ghosts aka dead niggas. Talk to broken mirrors every 1.5 seconds. Balk at stop signs. Point out all the spots where you are bleeding. Find walls, punch them, repeatedly. Forgot to claim your weekly benefits (again.)

13. Quarrel with trees, with dirt, with god. overeat things. Bills will come. Sob in bathrooms and run the water will wet your eyes and someone will ask and it will be your eyes are itchy (they are not) or allergies (you have none.)

14. Start over.