Morley Musick

The following weekend, I returned to the storage lockers with my partner, Blair. Upon arriving, we removed the picnic table and wooden chairs and machinery and placed it all on the gravel road that ran through the facility. Blair climbed in first, swinging their legs through a hole in the rafters and rifling through box after box. Forty minutes passed, and I despaired at the sight of them, how intrepid they looked, the hope with which they pursued the mission. Soon this despair transformed into anger, a propulsive anger that thrust me back into the work.

I turned to my friend and said, “This is pretty good, but not that good.”

He agreed, “It’s fine. It gives me some ideas for other sandwiches.”

“I was expecting something to blow my mind.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I thought I would eat this sandwich and declare: ‘You must change your life!’”

We had a color-coded system for managing the hierarchy of suffering: green was for welfare snafus, lead paint violations, legal procedural errors, fertilizer-related illness, corporate malfeasance and minor environmental damage; yellow was for assault in jail, wrongful conviction, citywide poisoning, retaliatory solitary confinement, grievous and preventable workplace injuries, strikebreaking at the national scale, anti-labor espionage of any kind; red was for police murders, police or military torture, counter-radical operations involving violence or murder, war crimes (many of these last categories pertaining to refugees who had lost their homes or family members to American military campaigns).