The Worms In My Belly Are Talking Again

A tug of war piece between Wells Fargo, Marshall McLuhan and the wisdom-worms that live in my belly.

Today a dormant awareness has been triggered. I remember first attempts at reading The Medium is The Message by Marshall McLuhan in the basement break room of a Wells Fargo in central Salt Lake City. My boyfriend at the time worked there and I was visiting him. I got him the job a few months back, as I was sick and tired of seeing his lack of ambition. The circulation of shitty fast-food jobs and one-off construction gigs bored me half-way to death.  Having worked there myself for about a year, I applied on his behalf, coached him through an interview and he got it. Thinking back, I shake my metaphorical head at the shit we do for the men we’re blinded by. Love is the greatest belladonna.

At the time in late 2015, Wells Fargo was pushing unethical quotas on the sale of supplementary products; credit cards, loans, savings accounts, CDs etc. We were forced to cross-sell 8 products a day to people who did not need them for the sole benefit of stakeholders. Given that I was the only Spanish speaker in my branch, I was to do this to my own community. My stomach was a perpetual pit. The location I worked at was on the edge of town, near the airport. I saw truckers with tired eyes coming and going off the freeway exists, wanderlust folk exchanging dollars for the currency of their future, and small business owners struggling with the baren terrain and infertile customer pool. My own feelings on the ideas surrounding money, greed and the delirium it engenders caused a rift between what I spent my time doing and what I saw as purpose. I found myself in a slump, a wave of depression hit me every time I sat with someone at my desk. Fingerprints sticking to the keys, if I typed for too long, I’d feel my prints sear off from contact. I would see people from my community come with questions about missing chunks -- large fees that were taken out of their bank accounts, decimating their already low salaries. I was repeatedly told to resolve it with credit card offers. It felt like prescribing Percocet for a minor bruise. Wells Fargo aimed to turn these ‘small’ fees into a continual stream of income for their business. They could care less about charging someone thirty-six dollars on an overdraft fee for a fifty-cent overage. I felt consumed by an illness of the soul.

I found the book at the used bookstore on Main Street, the one that no longer exists, during one of my regular visits. I went to see my boyfriend for lunch. It must have been a Saturday, I was annoyed that despite not working that day, I found myself in the hellhole that was plaguing my mind and body. I remember struggling with the book, at first, unable to fully decipher sentences that were unrecognizable to me. The concept of parochialism and deception confusing my young brain, still detaching itself from the cultish rhetoric of Mormonism. Something imperceptible persisted underneath despite the confusion.

Today, reading Victor Burgin’s book Returning to Benjamin, about philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, in my apartment in London, I come across a reference to The Medium is The Message. Mentioning it under the contexts of hyper-capitalism which is so intertwined with our own use of technology. Technology that didn’t exist when McLuhan wrote the text and wasn’t as prevalent when I contended with its contents in the basement of a Wells Fargo. Three weeks later, after the above today, which is no longer my now, I finally started to re-read my copy of The Medium is The Message. My mind finally able to connect the threads between its sentences, acclimated to the concepts contained within its pages. I quit my job at Wells Fargo later that summer, the summer of the book. For some strange reason, unknowable even to myself, I took this copy with me across the US and overseas. It sat in my apartment in central Tucson, collected dust in the warehouse on Skid Row, journeyed cross-country with me to Washington Heights and now, despite nearly a decade, sits on my overfilling shelves in Mile End. I suppose some epiphanies are reserved for the future, their importance recognizable in the moment only in the form of a split-second flash of intuition.