Bureaucrat

After several busy days where I couldn’t stop to hardly think, I was so backed up in paperwork today that it took all day to get caught back up. Every time that happens I think of Kafka’s short story “Poseidon” where the ocean lord is always so drowned in paperwork he never enjoys his kingdom (though he deems all his subordinates too incompetent to be able to delegate responsibility, thinking that he’s the only one that can get it right). Doesn’t really apply to me so much, but I do know the sort, I have the bosses that think everyone under them is an idiot and the only way to “do it right is to do it yourself.” Usually the blow hards that way overvalue work over their home lives and families, someone I’m trying to avoid to be but I’ve been guilty of far too often.

I also think of Alan Watt’s lecture where he talks about how we’re more a society that’s more interested in the records of things happening than the actual happening, I can agree to that on several levels. I’d say 90% of the forms I fill out daily will never be read, and I’m sure even a smaller percentage of the ones that have been will ever be used. So why’s it so important? It’s for the bean counters, the insurance adjusters, the estimators, the bidders, and all the other hoards of corporate bureaucrats vying and justifying their positions, neatly cataloging it away, creating spreadsheets, documents, mundane processes for us to follow. The amount of time I actually spend on site building things is a blip in the process in comparison to the miles of paper trails made by corporate entities. I’m the most critical part of building construction, yet the most expendable, and often times the least paid compared to project engineers or other office people. Somehow there’s more money in pushing papers around than the actual building of these projects (often times electricians are way more practical than engineers and we end up saving their asses).

In that lecture Watts also talks about how people seem to enjoy reading about something that happened in the newspaper the next day after an event then the event itself. The modern incarnation of this is posts on social media, where people seem less interested in what their doing than posting about what their doing, something I’ve also been guilty of several times over. This wasn’t anymore evident to me than on my recent trip at the Statue of Liberty for the first time (something I plan on writing more about) where I saw every incarnation of Instagram pose you’ve ever seen all happening all at once. I tried to reflect on the significance of the experience, sit and write and think about the millions of people that had passed through those waters entering America for the first time and really take in what it meant to me and at the same time was immensely distracted by everyone all posing for their online followers, making it more about them then the actual experience of being there. I think a lot of people live this way now, never really taking in the gravity of what their doing and cheapening such places by online flexing and not living in the moment. Somehow I still didn’t feel much different or any better than them, I was sort of doing the same thing, but I was lucky that I’m such a dunce I didn’t fully charge my camera so it forced me not to engage or participate in that and make me more observant and aware of what was happening, both there and to me personally at the time.
I’m so many ways, documenting has become more important than the actual living, but I guess it all depends on the context and reasonings to do so, which can either be the most useless or most useful part of what’s going on. Still, it should never be more important than the actual doing, not even equal to, not by a long shot. I’m of the opinion that some of the greatest writers that ever lived ever wrote a book, some of the greatest musicians never recorded a song, but what is the evidence of this if they were “so great.” Maybe it’s never to be known, but still something reassuring in believing in that, they existed, I know in my heart they did, and I have more respect for that than the people always trying to prove their greatnesses.