[...] We worked so hard and so fast that we had completed the current order of barges – at least the open-topped, hopper barges – ahead of time. But somehow this seemingly obvious and significant fact didn’t affect the foremen’s need to see me working, or for that matter, the whole, goddamned world’s need to have me work. The company and the union must make me work, no matter what, no matter if work is finished, completed, unnecessary, wasteful, counter-productive or even deadly. I must be made to work, not because any work needs to be done, since clearly nothing needs to be done. This thing I need to do then couldn’t be called “work” if by that term we mean something productive and necessary. What was required of me was a negative action, a doing that prevented a set of other actions from taking place. What could I have been doing? I could have been drawing, painting, writing, I could have been building something wonderful. I could have been building a house for someone without a home. I could have been repairing someone’s roof who couldn’t afford the repair work. All across Louisville, across Kentucky, across the United States and the entire globe, I had friends and acquaintances not working, but instead doing this other thing, this “unwork” that stood as an obstacle to positive, creative and necessary labor. I drew and wrote in the roar of winter and imagined what wasn’t happening. I imagined another world entirely, swirling in a technicolor womb, its birth canal blocked by unwork.