prepare yo’ self, ‘cause september 7, 2015 is coming whether you like it or not. with it will come a bunch of jpegs and .gifs and other bullshittery on social media, all of which will serve to remind you of the noble contributions of the valiant pullman strikers et al. who forced tubby, soft-handed1 draft dodger grover cleveland to sign legislation creating the holiday. yay for labor and yay for just resting, knowumsayin?

i mean, i’m a lazy piece of garbage just like everybody else, so rest means a lot to me. it’s everything to me, really, because it’s the time that i, a lazy, entitled piece of garbage millenial (too lazy to pick up my pieces of garbage lol lmfao roflmao roflmaocoptersaurus rex), sit around thinking deep thoughts: JUST WHAT DO SELFIES MEAN? HOW MUCH HAS [INSERT UBERCELEBRITY DU JOUR] CHANGED OUR CONCEPTION OF THE COGITO? IS THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY DEAD?2

so yeah, i’m restful and wasteful. unlike andrew marvell, i never hear time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; instead, i’m just left thinking and thinking 'til there’s nothing i ain’t thunk, breathing in the stink 'til finally i stunk.3 and what good is that, huh? the worst thing a person can achieve, particularly in an era in which he is utterly powerless to alter his fate, is a sense of self-awareness, leading inevitably to an inflated sense of self-importance. i matter, i deserve better than this! you raise your consciousness only to lower it by squandering lonely hours gazing at a shiny, irrestible iPhone 8, the one with the texturon™ screen that bores a hole right into the heart filament of your being.

it’s too late to go back, of course: we’re all well and truly fucked, prisoners of an endless cycle of self-reconstruction4…which is why, on labor day, we should pause and think how it could’ve been different. we could’ve still been fending for ourselves in the forest or chained to the workhouse table, our bodies breaking and our lives slowly ebbing away, but without a second thought.5 without a first thought, even: we would accept death because it was the only conceivable end. now, when you’ve got a bit of leisure, “time for your self,” don’t you want to keep accumulating more of it? a few more hours, days, months, pretty pretty please? for us, death isn’t the end, because the end is leisure. death is just failure.

you’d rot away by 40-45, unhealed by antibiotics and unsaved by a social safety net, but in the end you’d be doing a public service because the best thing you or i or anybody else can do is to shuffle off this mortal coil without raising a big fuss about it. labor that culminates in death rather in leisure is not a tragedy; no, it is life itself, the unobserved life, which perhaps isn’t the best life but how would you know the difference?

according to the accounts of various 19th century baseballers who met him, that is. former white house press secretary dana perino’s description of modern washington dc manhood is also enlightening: “I remember thinking that there just weren’t that many men I was interested in around Washington. Most of the guys didn’t look like they’d ever worked outside a day in their lives — soft hands, limp handshakes, pale skin, and pudgy middles.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/04/07/dana-perino-explains-why-guys-in-washington-are-undateable/)
lawlz
i’ve fulfilled my dream, admittedly a small and unimportant dream, of mashing up “to his coy mistress” with this: http://genius.com/Violent-femmes-country-death-song-lyrics
what could be more navel-gazing, more gross (in the abstract, anyway) than the idea of therapy? the notion that YOU matter so much that some service worker has to help YOU sort out all of your shit, which is the same shit everybody else is dealing with, meaning truly awful shit but also meaning just life, because life is awful, who cares? plus, uh, your life? get real. life is ten million times worse for those truly unfortunate people who aren’t in that air-conditioned manse you call your home away from home.
instead of “pumping iron,” a vain and futile pursuit, i could be stacking hay bales or pulling a plow or some such thing.

–oman buckwild