I’m riding and reading – sitting silently in the back of the bus on the way to work, engrossed in a miserable Mark Fisher book about the inescapable institution of capitalism, my nose inches away from my first-edition Kindle Fire, which I bought from Amazon in 2012 for two hundred dollars. You can buy one with better battery life for fifty bucks now, and they’ll deliver it to you in two days for free, as long as you’re a Prime member – but I don’t like to replace anything until it breaks.

The content is bleak: the book posits persuasive points that even our attempted rebellion against capitalism is controlled by corporations. WALL-E can criticize capitalist excess, but the film is still distributed by Disney. We’re caught in a never-ending cycle, cognitive dissonance helping us separate a movie’s thesis statement from its producers or ignore the irony of reading anticapitalist content on an Amazon device, our micro-acts of rebellion ultimately satiating our desire to fight back, keeping us complacent in our corporate comfort zones.

My bus pulls up at Third and Seneca and I cross the street to enter the office. The Mueller Report is out today, and every website – outside of those controlled by the conspiratorial conservative cabal – buzzes with obvious examples of the president’s obstruction of justice. Nothing will come of it – just as nothing has come of all his other misdeeds – because the president and his party are backed by billionaires, their avaricious pursuits always pushing them toward profit pulled from the pockets of the proletariat, no matter the moral cost.

We have an all-hands meeting at work today: everyone in my department congregates in a conference room and listens to executives talk vaguely about financials, filling our heads with the latest buzzwords and pointing at busy, meaningless charts that we feign interest in. The phrases “billion-dollar company” and “million-dollar deal” are tossed forth frequently. I exchange glances with my colleagues and comrades, who are clearly feeling similarly underpaid.

I didn’t bring lunch today, because I thought they’d feed us during the melancholy multi-hour meeting, a service they’ve provided at meetings past. They don’t this time. I usually eat my first meal around eleven o’clock, because breakfast is bourgeois bullshit and I don’t like waiting in long lunch lines. The meeting, of course, ends after noon, and my stomach rumbles recursively in reaction to its interrupted routine.

There’s a Qdoba on Third and Pike, kitty-corner from an objectively inferior Chipotle, and I’ve racked up enough points on my rewards card for a free burrito, so I start walking there. I already spent most of my paycheck this month on my mortgage and plane tickets, so anywhere I can cut corners counts. I will entirely ignore the concept of cutting back one week later when I realize there’s no weed left in my apartment. I arrive, eat, and read more of my book.

Though the bulletproof McDonald’s by the bus stop at Third and Pine gets the most prominent publicity as a hub for Seattle’s wayward and forgotten, the nearby corner of Third and Pike

offers similar sights. I’ve seen people shoot up openly, watched obvious, audacious drug deals, witnessed a woman vomiting bright-red fruit-punch puke onto the sidewalk before noon. In the Emerald City, we’ve all grown accustomed to this; none of it interrupts the enjoyment of my whole-wheat ground-beef burrito with queso. Who among us hasn’t seen a man in a business suit with a Bluetooth headset riding an electric Roomba unicycle past a passed-out addict on the same sidewalk at nine in the morning?

A week before, on this very corner, a man quite adequately played saxophone alongside a backing track, his instrument case open for tips. Next week, I will exit this same Qdoba, and a long-haired, baggy-clothed caricature of criminal youth will catch my glance and say, “Five dollars, bro,” gesturing to a giant duffle bag full of Tide laundry detergent on the ground. I will politely decline.

But this week, as I exit my Tex-Mex haven, I find myself face-to-face with a dark-skinned man whose empty eyes – both glazed and bulging – are gazing through me as if I were invisible. His demeanor makes it obvious he’s on drugs, mentally ill, or both. But the element of him instantly burned into my brain is the gaping, circular wound that engulfs the lower half of his face, the viscous human hole he’s currently digging his fingers into, nonchalantly tearing at – without quite allowing it to gush and burst open with blood.

It looks as though he pushed his face into a belt sander and did his best to keep the resulting gash ripped open and unable to heal, never allowing it to fully scab over. He treats his horrific sore nonchalantly, like he’s simply scratching at a mosquito bite, despite how deeply his fingers are entrenched within his own face. His listless, slack-jawed presence is merely a guttural moan away from entering full-fledged zombie territory.

He’s the living end-result of late-stage capitalism, Reagan-era politics pushing people like him onto the streets without recourse or resource, all so a boardroom full of oil magnates somewhere can buy slightly bigger yachts.

I walk briskly past him, trying but not succeeding to push the image out of my mind. I continue down Third Avenue, painfully aware of my own place as a cog within a corrosive corporate culture that cares little for people not actively generating profits, discarding the disenfranchised like the imperfect children that comic book Spartans tossed off of cliffs, when deemed too weak to be warriors. “Survival of the fittest” is laid bare as capitalist eugenics.

On my left, I see three police officers ahead of me, smiling and shooting the shit with one another. The man remains around the corner, outside of their line of sight. I consider saying something to them as I approach, but I stop myself. I’ve paid enough attention to our country’s race- and class-based cold war to know I can’t in good faith send these three white cops to check on a disturbed black man and then move on with my day assuming everything worked out fine.

I pause at the crosswalk and weigh the costs and the benefits; will the harm he’s doing to himself outweigh the harm I could cause if I ask the police to get involved? Will the help he might get from those officers outweigh the chance that an altercation ensues? Is it crueler to leave him as he is, or to send people from another consistently corrupt institution after him, not knowing how he’ll be treated or how he’ll react?

Without pride, I take the road of least resistance. I leave work early and ride the bus north, keeping my Kindle tucked away in my backpack. Upon arriving home, I snatch liquor bottles down from the top of my fridge, unveiling a cupboard I’d intentionally covered up with them eighteen days ago. I pull a shoe box out from the cupboard, and I light up every pre-rolled joint inside. I was trying my hardest to quit for a while, but America today has tested my ability to abstain, and I fail that test, sucking down smoke until I can’t think thoughts anymore.

– Andrew Stevens

Author’s Note: I must give a huge shout-out to the Assembly Literary Open Mic, an independently run event that inspired me to start writing in this format and that keeps me in touch with one of the remaining pockets of Seattle arts culture. This piece is deeply influenced by Seattle and its complicated relationship with capitalism, as well as my own internal and external conflicts with my behaviors, this city, the economy, and the world at large.