How to write haiku while on the clock? How to navigate sublime consciousness among the proletariat? Za Zen: an internal focus among the swirling tumultuous chaos. Honing in on ones work to be as efficient as possible. The Four Agreements: Father's Way. Unpacking the ancestral histories of work, through ethic = work ethics, a fine tuning of the mental instrument, cerebral productivity.

All these workers are characters in and of themselves. They are individuals coming together to form an archetype, but of what? Not just Americans, not just lazy, not just overworked drones milking the clock. There is a silent ethic of separation and mutual support, every human for themselves, forced into collaboration, belittling the other over petty differences, dreaming always dreaming of another life outside of the job, an ideal put on hold for the grind of the work day, struggling to stay afloat within the abyss of constant motion - of capital forces - always threatening total annihilation, of the individual identity within the communal whole, of the physical body, but mostly of the spirit. The spirit suffers for different reasons, for lack of recognition, but mostly as a result of unnecessary (nonessential, ungratifying) toil in service of others with no immediate relevance. To labor for nothing, for the void, is to allow oneself to be filled with the void, to build the self into a container of nothingness. Yet there is separation possible, potential transcendence, above the hum drum drones of the machinery and schematics, a labor of transcendence which can be practiced in all things. It is this that I wish to achieve in this life.

Always it seems there are two characters, but the worker is one, and so perhaps is defined by this internal strife, or of the inner tension with the outer dimensions. Angry, hot headed, perpetually hungover, always verging on sickness, a somnambulant slave to their own materialism, or status, or hubris.