Twelve

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From the reviews for Twelve:

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So many people all rushing to do their jobs. I wish I knew whether they enjoyed them, or got from them some sense of satisfaction. To my mind, work is the most monumental waste of time. I know that I could be thinking a larger thought, or having a more interesting conversation elsewhere. But I suffer from a lack of imagination. I don’t know where elsewhere is, or how to make it pay my rent, I can’t picture anything that could keep me interested nine-to-five, monday-to-friday, forty-eight-weeks-of-the-year. And I’m inclined to believe that everyone agrees with me for if they didn’t, surely there’d be no such word as ‘holiday’. Watching them, joining them struggle for space in this survival-of-the-fittest test first thing in the morning, every morning, the city seems to me a complex organism with a terminal disease. The new age has notions which oppose its ethic – fitness, health food, relaxation – and the age of communication has negated its reason to be.

After twenty minutes, Josh goes east and I go west. When I was little, I used to steal application forms and leaflets from banks, and with some other small friend whose every detail is now lost to me, played ‘work’ which consisted of, fundamentally, filling in these forms and reorganising them in piles. This is pretty much what I find myself doing for real now and it’s somewhat lost its appeal. The origami heaps on my desk are exactly how I left them minus my friday-air of elation. As far as they’re concerned, the weekend was my illusion.

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