Blue Collar Dreams

Spending the better part of the day with a gang of six packers and movers I found myself musing how different life would have been, had I fallen on the other side of the fence and ended up part of the blue collar fraternity. I mean, advertising's fun and all, but you can't deny that there is a certain primordial satisfaction living by the sweat of one's brow.

While I was standing supervising the movers, on more than one occasion, I felt compelled to lend a hand with their efforts in loading and crating, more out of boredom than anything else. I'm telling you, standing around doing nothing is the most tiring thing I can imagine. It's ironical, but it's true. I don't know how security guards and people in similar professions do it. Give me a good day's worth of hard manual labour and I'll choose that over security guard work any day. These guys (the movers) were a happy lot. Whistling. Playing heavy metal on their small hi-fi. Stealing short breaks to smoke these crazy strong Turkish cigarettes. And there's the free workout. See, I've always felt a little stupid over paying someone money to join a gym so I can expend vast amounts of energy fruitlessly. True, I get to build my pecs. But it still is energy that is, in a sense, wasted.

Man's body is a machine. Perfected over eons, with opposable thumbs and agile limbs so he lift and strain and change the shape of the world he lives in. After a point, society evolves to divide labour into different tasks. Some require the use of his dexterity, some his strength, some his brain, to varying degrees. Mine, currently, at least during my last job, required me to utilise about 0.00001% of my brain. What about the rest then? Barring occasional bouts of frenetic activity, it just goes to seed.

Perhaps I am being a little naive over the notion of the blue-collar world. I'm sure there's more to it than heaving and smoking Turkish cigarettes. I'm sure there's a lot of hardships they have to face. But just for a day, though, or maybe a week, it'll be fun to live their lives. Ride a Honda motorcycle. Grow a mullet. Eat beef jerky and salted fish. Wear flannel. Gamble, get drunk and punch someone's lights out.

Let the good times roll.