My office is dominated by an ugly futon sofa. The lumpy futon itself is in a terrible flower print cover and the frame has been gnawed by an apparently insane dog or wart hog. It's not much to look at but then neither am I, and anyway it serves my purposes just fine, especially lately when a strange lassitude rules my life. I've taken to daily siestas on this futon sofa, short naps that have the quality of reluctant narcotic surrenders, and while they only last an hour or so the rest of the day is foggy and indistinct, without the crisp mental sharpness and steely alertness which distinguish my mind between 9AM and 9:20. Aren't afternoon naps supposed to leave you refreshed and reinvigorated? I usually fall asleep with a book on my chest after reading the same sentence over and over. Do I toss and turn? I get the turning part but I'm confused by the toss. I picture myself twitching from convulsions, agitated as by enormous invisible salad tongs.

Anyway, today I dreamed that I was fired from my job at In-N-Out Burger, for atheism, coarse language, chronic insubordination, and holding a customer in an unrelenting death grip. This shocking turn of events left me depressed and lethargic (not unlike my current real-life situation). I looked around in vain for another job that allowed me to wear a paper hat and call out order numbers. In my dream I really loved my In-N-Out job, it was everything I wanted. Easy camaraderie with coworkers, a fast-paced environment involving slaughtered animals, a team orientation, and work that's not too taxing on the old noggin, leaving me an hour free after work to write Denis Johnson-inspired short stories about go-nowhere lives that end in various forms of quiet and not-so-quiet catastrophe. When I woke up I wondered what this dream signified, as people always do. Not if it signified, but what. Everyone wants to believe their dreams have meaning, and everyone is bored stiff by accounts of the pointless and random dreams of others (like this one).

I never liked talk of dead-end jobs and looking down on certain supposedly unenviable occupations. Every job is a dead-end job in only a slightly larger perspective. Could I find a way to be happy handing steaming bags of gristly meat through a tiny window to endless carloads of assholes? Any definition of ambition should also include the dogged aspiration to remain sane and hopeful in conditions which are actually quite ordinary for many people. I can't even stand in a Wal-Mart without succumbing to brain fevers. Adaptability is something I've never been good at and I should probably work on that. When I was 18 I worked for a summer in a Fotomat booth in a forlorn strip mall parking lot. Do you remember Fotomat? Those silly little photo processing drive-thru booths were in every shopping center parking lot. I figured it would be great, no boss around and I would have time to get my homework done and maybe indulge in some sly paid masturbation under the warm glow of the Steak and Shake neon. I still haven't quite recovered from the experience, sitting there in my little yellow Swiss chalet in the shimmering heat of the vast asphalt as people in passing cars snickered and pointed me out to friends. I had a blue smock and looked sad, what of it? The sad and besmocked are undeserving of motorist scorn. The company made us answer every phone call with the same scripted phone greeting, which was not only idiotic but was so ridiculously long I could barely get through it without yielding to incapacitating despair. Many people would hang up in impatience before I even finished it. I could never cheat and shorten or jettison the greeting because Corporate would call several times a day to test me. They must've had a person at the office who did nothing all day but call the lonesome little kiosks to check up on the clerks, making sure they were using the proper phone greeting and not committing suicide on company time.