Marginal Notes

I am a marginal man. An office temp. Proofreader. Word processor. I make my mark between the lines and at the page's edge. I take my cues from messages scrawled outside the text. Additions. Revisions. Deletions. The better I do my job, the more I disappear, the place in which I toil becoming empty space.

I am a marginal employee. A midtown migrant. I make my living in other people's places. I do the same thing in many locations. I go to different offices on different floors of different buildings. Each one does something different. Each one has a different view. I have many views. But none of them is mine.

Every morning I call the agencies to say I am still available. Sometimes they have jobs. These days, more often they do not. They always have reasons. Usually it's "the holidays.' The Jewish holidays. Christian holidays. Ground Hog's Day. Secretaries' Day. Day of the Dead. Holidays frame time like margins. The agencies are running out of holidays. Some of them have begun to substitute the word 'recession."

Recessions happen when the profit margin shrinks. A few years ago the profit margin was expanding. Corporate entities were as fluid as the words on their computer screens. Capable of infinite reprocessing. They merged and divided, invaded, revised, and deleted each other. Each shift produced profits and documents. There were many margins to work in. And there were many shifts. Nine to five. Five to twelve. Weekend and graveyard.

In those days there were many marginal people. Some of us called ourselves artists. The margins provided us with space in which to develop. We did things to documents in order to do the things we really did. The margins also equipped us with a blank spot. What we really did is what we would do in the future. Therefore what we did now was not real.

To finance the present against a future profit is called 'buying on a margin'. We, who lived on the margins bought time on them as well, used them to invest in a future where everything would pay off. We invented the slash / to secure our speculation. "I am a proofreader/writer, /screenwriter, /actor-drector , /performance artist, /independent filmmaker," we said. The left side of the slash was definite, rooted in the world, the right side another name for marginality.

We were not the only ones who borrowed from the future. The people who created margins, profits and documents balanced their accounts against the future as well. Eventually they lost their balance. The left side of the slash crashed into the right. "I am a proofreader/unemployed attorney, word processor/former investment banker," we began to hear. Displacement displaced marginality.

The margins continue to contract. All space enclosed within the corporate stanzas. The slashes have come out of our identities. Either proofreader/proofreader or unemployed proofreader/unemployed writer. Our employers demand unity. Codependent no more, they tell us as their documents repossess the page.

I am a marginal man and can no longer depend on an economy's dependency. Marginal without utility. I must turn myself inside out to avoid disappearing.

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