What IS postmodernity, anyway?

I started a new job last Tuesday, which is the exact cause of my lack of of posting. Job, you ask? Yarp. I'm working in a furniture warehouse, assembling, loading, unloading. moving. I'd classify it as manual labor, something I haven't done since I was 17. The job has left on the floor, me utterly sapped. I can point to my absolute lack of activity for the past several months as the main culprit for my physical state, but I can also say with qualification that the work is actually pretty fucking hard. It's hot, the shit is heavy, and there's a lot of it. Does this make me more of a man? Me eat meat now.

It was a strange realization on Saturday morning when I decided I wasn't dreading work. I'm finding myself actually enjoying it, to be perfectly honest. Perhaps it's the fact at the end of the day I can look at the loading dock and see the actual product of my labor? There's a tangible result. I'm realizing this is a major element of my sense of job satisfaction - working toward the actual creation and completion of someTHING. I think that's what I feel the need to play in bands, to engage in that writing and recording process. The live performance is always cathartic, but the creative process, even the labor process of arranging, rehearsing, recording, is gratifying in that there's a tangible end result. With most office jobs there's usually a project or task to be completed, but it seems so much of the work is only work in a post-modern sense. Email, phone calls, shuffling papers. It's a mobius loop of bullshit. Even when the job is completed, there rarely seems to be any real sense of accomplishment or even the possibility of saying to someone, "Look what I did."

I think I've pretty much quit drinking. What do you have to say about that?