A Serf's Journal: The Story of the United States' Longest Wildcat Strike by Terry Tapp

Author:Terry Tapp [Tapp, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785351204
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2017-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Sunny Day

Sweepin’ the clouds away

On my way to where the air is sweet

Can you tell me how to get

How to get to Sesame Street

Come and play

Everything’s AOK

Friendly neighbors there

That’s where we meet

Can you tell me how to get

How to get to Sesame Street.

Fucking idiot.

The next week winter returned with pain. The rain of the previous week froze and new ice and snow fell on top of it, a lot of snow. Everywhere was white. I worked amidst the awfulness of it until my clothes and gloves were frozen solid and a flock of images erupted in my skull that had to be released. I headed to a breakroom but it was full of loud, angry men and I craved quiet. I crawled back out into the icy attack and staggered in the snow and high winds around the barge. Wherever I went the winter rage found me. Finally I crouched alongside a vertical I-beam holding up one of the long, horizontal I-beams on which the barge sat and I took my small sketchbook and a pen from my work coat. I looked around me for a foreman, but they certainly wouldn’t be found in that mess. As I looked I thought about the fact that, in most of the shipyard at that moment, we were caught up with work. We worked so hard and so fast that we had completed the current order of barges – at least the open-topped, hopper barges – ahead of time. But somehow this seemingly obvious and significant fact didn’t affect the foremen’s need to see me working, or for that matter, the whole, goddamned world’s need to have me work. The company and the union must make me work, no matter what, no matter if work is finished, completed, unnecessary, wasteful, counter-productive or even deadly. I must be made to work, not because any work needs to be done, since clearly nothing needs to be done. This thing I need to do then couldn’t be called “work” if by that term we mean something productive and necessary. What was required of me was a negative action, a doing that prevented a set of other actions from taking place. What could I have been doing? I could have been drawing, painting, writing, I could have been building something wonderful. I could have been building a house for someone without a home. I could have been repairing someone’s roof who couldn’t afford the repair work. All across Louisville, across Kentucky, across the United States and the entire globe, I had friends and acquaintances not working, but instead doing this other thing, this “unwork” that stood as an obstacle to positive, creative and necessary labor. I drew and wrote in the roar of winter and imagined what wasn’t happening. I imagined another world entirely, swirling in a technicolor womb, its birth canal blocked by unwork.

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