visibleghost

Recently, I was hired for a full-time position after about a year of applying. The conditions are, as you might expect, in the current American job market, not great. The job is about an hour away and starts earlier than the average desk job. Anything to get your foot in and paid right? While the commute sucks I think the real negative externality is the environment. While I have seen the tried and true corporate office throughout my life, it has taken on a sort of fictional state. To me, it only existed in TV and movies from the previous generations. The few workplaces I had been in were less monolithic and oppressive in my memory, and most of what I hear from friends in corporate positions is that they are in open-plan offices. My employer is firmly rooted in the past, however.

My initial impression of the building didn't give me the full picture. When I went for my interview, the only aspects I really caught were the long, empty hallways and the grey palette my eyes would become intimate with over the few months I've worked. It was surreal seeing it, the exhaustion and monotony that awaited me felt like it was hovering over me as I made way to the interview room. There were a few of the iconic cubicles on the way, a lonely row of 3 next to the wall. It turns out this is where I was going to be stationed.

When I actually got hired, the place started to reveal itself to me. During training, we got a little tour, and I got to see firsthand the second home that most people resign themselves to. It occurred to me during this tour that the modern office is sort of a bastard child of the city. The cubicles are arranged in a similar block pattern, with the walkways acting as the streets. The primary purpose of this is that it crams a lot of people together in a small environment, which is great for costs. The other reason is that the familiarity of the layout makes it easier for people to acclimate. Indeed, even if no one explicitly makes the connection, they'll naturally notice the shared functions and treat it similarly to their actual residence. For example, one of the walkways with high traffic has had employees petition to name it "Main Street", due to the functional and design resemblance to residential districts. Along with the layout, it also cultivates community. You have neighbors, and employees can kind of be grouped to create districts. People tend to try to bond and socialize during work to make the time go by, and the environment tries to make this a more formal practice than other work environments. Both employees and managers try to replicate communal practices. There are chess tournaments and office gatherings advertised, and people get together during breaks for walks or sports. Much like any city, the higher-ups exist outside of the main area and get to enjoy their loftier abodes and watch over the common dwellers outside. I, however, don't actually get to participate in this environment. Those 3 cubicles I mentioned earlier are completely separated from the main cubicle areas. I have 2 neighbors, one of them left the job last week, so there's no one around. They also happen to be right next to most of the executives/managers. At first, I felt as if I were a refugee seeking asylum, being put into a shelter before I would be processed to become a proper citizen of the office. Then I found out that's just where I'll be forever, so there goes that comparison.

Despite the similarities and attempts at capitalizing on them to create a more social and homely place, the office just elaborates on the worst parts of city life with none of the actual benefits. Cities, being compact, all have slightly less privacy than rural or suburban areas. This isn't really that big a problem, but people can hear and see you way more than they can anywhere else. The office takes this and turns it up to the maximum exposure level. Anyone can see what you're doing at any time, and you probably wouldn't notice. Obviously, everything is audible, and the ambient sound isn't people so much as the mechanical action that drives work. Keystrokes and clicks replace the engine hums and foot traffic. The position of the observer isn't just for the managers on the high-rise outskirts, though. It's given to the employees as well to maintain uninterrupted foot traffic. Along every intersection is a dome mirror to make sure you don't run into someone. While primarily for safety reasons, it kind of degrades everyone into some object to observe and avoid. I barely really see the people here as people, just things I pay attention to so I don't interrupt my workday. The attempts at any sort of community or culture also feel hollow. Not really for the fault of the people (but the popularity of the descriptor "coworker" these days would suggest it's the people as well), but the environment. It's hard to take joy in tasks you could be doing at home or in a real residential area, inside a gray monolith or the manicured and stripped-down surroundings of an office. I was told that walking was a great and recommended activity on breaks. There were two options to loop: the parking lot or the office building. The lack of privacy doesn't help either. I tried to go to my car today to cry, and remembered that people loop the parking lot, so I just sat with my eyes closed. The actual recommended spot for being alone is the showers; my trainers didn't even mention the intended function of those rooms.

p.s: Outside of personal drive, I haven't been posting anything due to having too many ideas on the backburner and an inability to decide what to focus on. For anyone reading out there, I welcome an opinion on the which of following topics you'd want to read about:

• an introduction to my favorite street
• a small land mass in a coastal town
• highways
• my room

A friend of mine has been asking me to visit for some time now. As the only person from my high school friends who didn't have a car, I was the one everyone saw the least due to the difficulty of transport. Few were easily accessible through public transport and often times the length it took to reach a location made it difficult to schedule. After we all scattered due to college, I became distant and frayed with many of them. While some of that distancing was due to changing as a person and not enjoying the company as much, the physical distance certainly contributed. Despite that, I still wanted to visit now that I had the means to do so.

While I've been to my friend's new location before, this was the first time I had done so myself. It was also the first time I really personally traveled what felt like a great distance. The only other expedition by car I've took was down south to my brother's wedding. I was a passenger the entire time, my only real relation with both the environment and the act was needing to keep my dad awake and the rest stops. While this trip was minuscule in comparison, the physical feeling of movement was there. The car dulled those sensations but the body and mind had enough to intuit the rest.

The state highways are a much more "present" experience than the 2 other primary highway types (I've never seen a county highway, maybe its more common outside of the east coast). The roads turn and shift more, the environment changes more often. There's an actual sense of movement, compared to the tedium of a typical highway. I found the intersections into various downtowns to also give a greater sense of distance. Even if the speed loss bothered me, they were nice rests on my eyes.

I took a different route to and back, the first was a much more plain affair. It was mostly straight with some notable curves and oscillations. The backdrop was often more fields, which made for decent transitions into the numerous towns I passed on the road. It was a serene ride, barring some roadwork frustration. The in and out nature of each area brings to mind a kind of dreamlike descent. The real highlight was the route back home for me. It was almost exclusively surrounded by dense forests, with the few towns I passed by often feeling like they were hiding themselves from me. There were far more turns and aberrations in the road, a route that was carved hastily and urgently.

The most appealing of that route back was that secrecy I felt. A straight stretch would have the forest suddenly open itself up, a tiny dirt road leading somewhere inwards. Taking a turn would reveal a quaint restaurant or shop, with further civilization seeming to hide behind the open establishment. All places one could hide in or run away to. I have had this juvenile fantasy for some time, one of running away. To leave all those I know behind and begin again. The reasons for this do not matter, or rather aren't worth writing about here. I bring this personal detail up because it came to mind almost pathologically as I drove by. Every corner felt like a potential escape, somewhere to shed myself and move on. While it's almost impossible to do nowadays with technology's advance into omniscience and distance continuing to lose meaning, it seemed possible to get away for a time somewhere along the long trip.

I watched the film "The Devil All The Time" and the part that stuck with me is the several moments, including the end, where a character gets in a vehicle and disappears. That in this country, because of its vastness, it was almost trivial to escape a life. I'm sure it's largely fictional, but I imagine it was quite easy to start anew on almost a whim. Back then they probably could just travel 100 miles if they felt like quitting. Things have changed, these roads have been built up over centuries to sustain a consuming network. The corners have been illuminated and the greenery has been measured and gutted. The radio towers keep everything under some national exposure. Even though everything is highlighted and located, when I drove by those forest paths and human stops, I felt as if I could go in and hide away from it all.

Over the summer, I reached one of the touchstones of being American: obtaining a driver's license. I went through the usual process when I was a teen, but by the time my driver's ed finished COVID hit. When I attempted the test a year later, my knowledge of the required maneuvers atrophied, and I failed pretty definitively. My next test was delayed until this summer, largely because I found scheduling lessons to be a bit of a pain with my college schedule. I also don't like the reliance on cars and found it a worthless investment of my time since I wouldn't even have one myself at the time. Unfortunately, here the highways stretch far and wide, a great boon for employment opportunities. My preferred public transit couldn't compete without massive burdens, so it was time to finally find a steel box to become acclimated with.

My current residence is a frankly awful place to drive, so for safety and learning reasons, I stayed a couple of nights driving around in my hometown. I had been familiar with these roads for years, especially through the lens of a windshield, so my relationship with the space of the town remained rather unchanged. One road, however, stood out once I began driving through it. The road is named after a common natural formation, and while it does run along one of its namesakes, at no point is it actually visible to the driver. It is about 7-8 miles long, making for a considerable stretch of land covered. It's about 2/5ths of the average boundary-to-boundary length of the town, according to my crude and unthorough measurement method of right-clicking google maps. The speed limit is set to a surprising 40mph, given that the road often bounds and enforces harsh bends in matters of seconds.

Driving through the road is a slightly surreal experience, one I couldn't really pick up on as a passenger. Now that I drive myself, all of the time I've spent in others' cars hasn't transferred over as much as I thought. Maybe it's the worsening memory, but I find myself having to relearn routes and paths I have been through enough to view in my mind. Perhaps it is the difference between following a guide and trying to navigate the map yourself; the relationship you have with the land is a lot more active and more "connected". It's easier to really feel the distance and route when you're treading it. Becoming more connected to the road is what pointed out its surrealness to me, along with doing it alone for the first time. Some of the realities I outlined earlier show this.

The speed and shape are odd and cumbersome, but a bad road isn't uncommon, especially in this massive country. What initially tipped me off was the length of the road. It's much more expansive than it really should be, as it feels like it goes on forever. Nothing else in the town feels quite as long as this one does. Part of it is the purpose of the road, or rather, what it is mostly used for. It acts as a gateway to the vast majority of neighborhoods and streets present in my hometown. It is such a structural force that on a map it acts neatly as one side of a triangle, bounding much of the residential area of the town. Nearly half of my friends resided in a location where this road was the only path to reach them. I hesitate to use the word "liminal" despite its potential accuracy here with regard to this road's very transitional purpose. The road is too lively for it to be talked about as such, but that activity is largely a farce.

The thing that sticks with me is the actual visual element of driving this road. It's funny how you can't even see the formation it's named after. There's nature, sure, but largely other than the connective tissue you see as you cruise along, it's all about the houses. Those upper-middle-class homes, with yards that took a couple of days for the foliage to be ripped from its rightful place. The road stretches on, house after house, blocking anything interesting from being viewed*. The real purpose of this road shines through; it's an unabashed shrine to the affluence of this town. Unlike the other major roads, it doesn't link to or have anything one might stop for, like a place to eat. There is no community here, nothing for anyone to gather for, outside of interpersonal events. The sole emotions to be felt passing by here is when am I getting to my friend's house, and why does that person's house look better than mine? For its purpose as a gateway to the enjoyable parts of your day, the vapid riches that take up all the auxiliary visual information make it a lonely, impersonal place. It's a road littered with contradictions, many of those being core to what living in a suburb was like for me.

*A term brought up in my psychogeography class once was "fractal qualities". This referred largely to anything natural or resembling nature, and how something about the colors and patterns was calming to us. I am unsure if my memory of the description is correct, but if it is, you could argue that this road is meant to put you more on edge. In a way, given its design and rules, this might be a good decision. Unfortunately, places like these still have "nature", often a gutted and manicured version of a once beautiful system.