A couple months ago I got a reservation to sell my plasma for the first time in years. It was in a strip mall where every single door led to people whose job it is to take things away from you and give you back something you need that's worth just a fraction of what you gave... phone cards to a place closer than St. Louis, clean clothes, a check cashed, someone you care about out of jail, a rifle and set of fatigues, a paid up union card, or money for your ring and stereo and the chance you might never see it again. But the bus that was supposed to come and take me to sell my heart's broth came ten minutes late and that took me straight off the list.
This blood market was the only one in town that still paid the same wages it had a year ago, all of the other ones had slashed their paper compensation in half, down to 15 bucks, enough to ride the bus to and from and keep you fed through the day. An hour of lying down with a tube in your arm feeding into a machine that plays both boss and Nosferatu at the same time isn't worth what it used to be. This place is full of people willing to open their veins and thin on real life customers. Blood is cheap, the world is full of it and most miss it less when it is taken from us than money so more and more I learn what substance is more important for our survival. One comes equally to all the living, free of cost and labor, and every beat of your heart brings in more. The other is now just as vital to your continuing pulse but living is a process of losing it day by day, ride by ride, meal by meal, month by month of a roof on your head and most spend their lives trying to outearn our needs by following the orders of those generous enough to pick us to order around, hoping to be drained of enough work to get transfused with the donations of other involuntary donors with the same threat at their back and the same empty dream dangling on the horizon. This whole world like another extraction center, sucking in your time on Earth and then stripping financial worth from what you give, like a plasma center supplying this society with its lifeblood only the plasma folks give you your blood back once they've taken the gold out of you, but I’ve never known a job that gives you back time.
And a year ago you could walk into a shop on 16th and get hired on the spot, waving a sign through the day. This was back when it was legal to stay warm here after sundown, when the mall built to ward off sleeping bags at night with shopping bags by day was failing beautifully, when a walk down this street meant hearing a dozen different different stories that all started in different places and led to here and now, when the drifting class owned this place. They passed through on the way to somewhere else, or went on vacation and stayed on probation or were waiting for a train to take them away, or waiting for revenge on some other towns blue uniformed enemies provided by the ones here in the same uniform, or to sing songs in the street or some industrial building, or from the Springs to get away from all the bumperstickers that carried memories of war, to escape or have mountains to look at, or to become somebody they could be proud of, or cause there was no other place, no other choice, as many options as there were people to have them and it was nobody's utopia but I never loved Denver more. Now I walk 16th and rock rebellion's on the restaurant playlists but everyone's here for one reason and that reason is shopping and if you can't spin sign like you're in Cirque du Soleil forget it cause they've taken to hiring dummies to spin their signs instead.
It's the appearance of humanity combined with a worker whose only wages are the cost of batteries and the industrial strength materials they're built from. They stand impossibly straight and wave the signs without a hitch from dawn to dawn with no need for meals and bathroom breaks and the words on the sign are less important than the message they have for us all. There's no use for you, nothing you can't do that a mannequin can't do better, nothing in your veins worth as much as what's loaded in and out of vending machines every day. You have been living on someone else's generosity all this time but if you're not doing something useful, like writing blogs or interior design or betting on the stocks then you might not be worth the price of a bullet but that don't make you worth the price of a meal and it's on you to live or die in between those two, just do it anywhere but here, and where ever you end up going, anywhere but there.
It's true that it's safer to be wanted and used than to be neither. This is why there are more dogs out there than wolves. But when you are no longer needed in the high score competition this life has forcibly become, then you no longer need the game to survive either, this is why I'd rather be a wolf. Survival was a shitty bargaining chip in the first place, so what happens when you're no longer worth the cost of a the bribe? The mannequins are built to be safely stored and hidden away at night with GPS tracking to hunt down anyone who'd do them harm, and insured in case that fails. Even the messengers are scared to go without protection.