Philosophy for Dummies
Philosophy for Dummies
I checked in,
drove through the gate,
and I was already running behind
when the door
that they had assigned
was taken
by the only other white guy
in this city.
This could not be.
“Hey,” I said.
“Who’s helping you?”
“The white guy.”
“Oh.”
We met eyes.
“Did you know Bill
that used to work for you guys?”
“He was before my time.”
At the back of his truck
he stood in front of his last pallet
with a book open at the waist.
“He was from Boston, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, white guy.”
“He got fired right?”
A forklift driver passed,
a Mexican,
then another,
a Guatemalan,
and a third,
a man from Northwest Africa.
They didn’t look like him,
they didn’t look like me,
and a realization came to me:
you can learn
a lot about yourself
and how you’re perceived
when you’re the minority.
A race
between that stop
and the next
I looked at my phone
to check the clock.
“A man smokes weed on his own time,”
he said coughing out
a careers worth of cigarette smoke
over his right shoulder
and he excused himself
before returning to his pontification.
“But if he ain’t high at work,”
he said.
“What’s it matter
what he did last night?”
“Exactly,” I responded.
“He got caught up on a piss test
after a Tijanua trip, right?”
“I was raised First Baptist,”
he said. “But I’d put it on god
that CHP got him with two joints
on a roadside inspection.”
One story
can be heard
in a thousand different ways
and who’s to say
which version
is the remake;
“Like I said, ‘I never met him.’”
“Oh, that’s right.”
Life’s a little weird
when you view things
through the illusion of the mind,
but sometimes
when the focus is just right
a fog can clear
and you can hear what it’s like
to be alive;
looking up from the book
he read:
THE END OF LABOR
IS TO GAIN LEISURE.
“Aristotle,” he laughed.
“That sounds like some shit
Bill would have said.”
“I wonder what he’s up to?”
“I don’t know,” he said
as they finished his load.
“But that’s it for me.”