An Institutional Man

For the first few years instead of lockers you get your cubby and throw it in, a Power Ranger backpack design. Stumble over to a chair no higher than a foot. Foot and a half. There was a harmony and the folders you meticulously shuffled with colour coding assured that, indeed, you were a part of something. Whether self-portraits in a crude crayon or gathered for a book no one will remember but it certainly held attention that day all until naptime.

It adjusts as one grows, from cubbies to heavier backpacks satchel’d around the larger chairs now climbing 2, 2 feet and a half. Up and up and lockers to car backseats to an apartment nestled in some slice of rundown city.

Of course looking back it’s a clear daycare system and plainly designed lullabying and yet as one ascends onward and toward highschool, college, post grad, corporate, so insistently one could think we’re still a part of something. We’re going places!

But maybe it descends in post-grad or three years past the graduation toss. It could also fly in as a reflection on the scattered church attendance. To stare at yourself in the mirror until you take off all the flairs: to understand these are all man-made institutions.

Deeply understanding that, someone hundreds of years ago made sure to write in these fiction-made-fact realities. Is it the fate of man to always leave a trace for others to find stability in?

Whatever fate ordains, whatever it demands, when you finally place yourself in the shoes of men who made these things — whether companies or academia, family and community, religious ceremony — well, to wear the shoes, to look down, so everything’s a house of cards. Staring up so it seemed so Orderly, as a certain Reality. But with the new shoes you’re weaving words together for the next cult.

A funny bent of make-believe. What else is one to do, other than continue onward with their own institutions? So uniquely positioned today, so every Institutional Man grazes in a post-modern hellfire, scrounging together their thesis on paradisaical survival.