...my summers of ghost (vol. 1)...
There are so many ways to become a ghost, though the easiest in this modern day and age is to just stop connecting. One day you are an employed co-partner in daily, weekly and quarterly achievements, and the next you are only an algorithmic linkedin notification reminding me of what we didn’t accomplish together. In my career I have been a part of 9 different layoffs spanning over two decades and tied together by global economic recessions. I float role to role seeking meaning and purpose in the relationships I may or may not have. I haunt and am haunted.
It was with great delight that I made my move to the Bay some 20 odd summers ago. I first heard of Oakland squeaking my all black Dennis Rodman’s across a greasy junior high school gymnasium. The sound of hip hop from a radio intermittently poked through the din of two middle aged dads yelling at a group of maybe stoned 14 year olds, and would every so often mention the town (or officially “THE TOWN”).
When I made it to the Bay I landed in a two story haunted house numbered 667 in the aptly named GhostTown neighborhood. It was numerically right across the street from hell, which disappointingly was just five different freeways and on/off ramps and a pile of quiet families living clandestinely in dirty RVs. I tried my best to ignore the haunting of the house but there were a handful of dead giveaways…
The landlord upon introduction to the home let me know that “the house is haunted…if you believe in those sort of things…”
The two lazy house cats who joined me in roommating did not sleep anymore after moving in…instead they ran around the living room and hissed at the air…
My roommate had his bed levitate and I awoke to a spook rubbing my feet and staring me in the eyes…upon screaming my bedmate awoke and saw the exact same apparition…a classic four eyed double spooking…
The list goes on and we made up for the haunting with excessive live living room jams, sticky vhs horror movies, and endless bags of $2.99 potstickers. In this way we made our spooky amends. Sure, the ghosts could incessantly haunt us and keep us from sleeping, but so we too could take inspiration from their unwanted distractions and make some pretty ok arts.
My turn from spooked artist to corporate specter was not purely accidental. Seeking work I started at my home and walked concentric circles throughout my neighborhood writing down the company name of every business I passed until I was twelve blocks deep in every direction (a fine commute length being the inspiration for this process). A day or two of visiting said business’s job boards and alas it appeared that a toy company two blocks away needed a teaching oriented oddjobber like myself. I sent a resume, lucked into an interview, and the working crew over there read through my stink and laziness with an offer for me to help them coordinate. I turned down my competing offer to join a well functioning ponzi scheme, and was in pants and a polo the very next Monday at ToyLizard, Inc.
My first week of work was largely hunting and gathering papers and assets. I was on a team of 48 directors, artists and animators, and here, unlike the studio I previously pushed pencils at, there was an openness to sharing what it was that people were doing and when and where I might be able to assist and learn. In a week’s time I felt needed, paid, and interested in how I spent my day's labor.
And then they were fired.
I had never been to a company all hands. If you haven’t either, this is where at a job with a large number of people, the executives beckon all who work for them into one room and take turns passing a conch shell to bellow loud chimp screams while they point at the patterns on their success smocks. There are several synchronized dances, each one more violent than the next, and a screen showing the various ways in which numbers can make multi maroon colored sheet shapes.
At this all hands the chimp kings and queens feigned seriousness and silence while morbidly revealing details to a plot they had to thin our kingdom by end of the following week. It was a lay off. Slowly the two-story paper walled conference arena filled with increasing amounts of dread, anxiety and sadness. The monkey lords tucked tail and slurped martinis away to their convertibles while the rest of my ToyLizard coworkers grabbed what they could from their cubes in anticipation of no longer inhabiting this shared space.
The oldest sense of the term layoff is to “remove and lay aside, rid oneself of” though in 1908 it also meant “stop disturbing”. The daily connections I had with a roomful of no-longer strangers had vanished into a mist of goodbye beers and cabinets of half-read papers and half-eaten candybars. Where there was once skin and blood, now sat empty dusty ergonomic seats and keyboards filled with unremovable personal filths. As quickly as I had suited up in a new flesh of careering, I now would spirit emptily these dotted acquaintances erasing to memory.
The act of laying brings one into the spectral world. You can become a ghost when you are laid to final rest. You can also become a ghost when you are laid off. You exist in both worlds, the phantasmal expanse of diminished fading resonances and the sinewy plasmatic departments of concrete timeshared cubicle. As you practice your poltergeist and vitality consider those whom inhabit the haunting and help alongside your journey. Whether you hold them as being or wraith, ensure the conduit from which you first connected with them stay vibrating and conscious. They may have been just a coworker, but they were also once human.