I may lose my way. I may lose the game. And when I do, I’ll lose your interest—and with it your love. You can do what I do, and the ease of this place enables this. We used to have a place, a difference. The machines we built, the jobs we created, the goods we produced, we made for you—to attract you, to impress you, to bring a burnt offering to the goddess. And your god damned response—and you have indeed been damned by it: the goddess has climbed down from her high place, taken our gloves, slipped her perfect virgin toes into our crusty shit covered work boots, and elbowed the worshiper aside: “I’ll take it from here.” “The future is female.” “Down with the patriarchy.” And with a confused ordinance of acquiescence —as if our curse of labor was her commanding wish— we stepped aside, as we do, and held the door to the corporate towers (cathedrals to her sacred temple) and befuddled, watched her walk in and begin her wand waving. If the queen wishes herself hard labor—out of boredom with grapes, sickness with children, or envy of the steel man, the mason and his iron and bricks, his direct reward of sweat beaded brow and pride in what his work makes of him; worthiness of her fruits, her admiration, and love, and wet wonder—“very well then,” we worker ants say to ourselves: “The queen shall labor dually for a time.” But she is quickly noticing the response of her army: it does not march for her in the way it used to. It’s generals—now women—they bark orders in tones we cannot hear. We have no avarice toward them, they simply make unpracticed gestures toward our eyes and ears, already trained toward baritone booms and guttural threats and thinly veiled violence. Our antennae wriggle in confusion. The directors wand waves odd. Something is wrong. The band crashes—and she is angry! That is sure. Her feline temptations, her former wiles, her curves peaking curiosity and capitulation turned every man a servant; irresistible power of the sleekest most refined kind, a powerless power, endeared and seductive, a command via request—oh the salacious vigor! The queen, “yes madame, yes! Whatever it is, I say yes!” This she trades for my boots? The mud must contain magnets that do not pull me as they do her. I do not love the mud, I love her—the mud I endure, even for only a glance at her, just a moment to worship.
Now I have a competitor with whom I cannot break old laws and truly compete against, with whom I must still revere, with whom I must outdo in our dueling labor, and for whom I may no longer hold a door but will suffer for it. I’m her descending from the throne, she has cursed us both twice. I resent my work—mud, now for no one’s sake, and I have no queen to worship, only an odd boss. And she has taken my burden from my shoulders to her’s—we are both stuck. She cannot respect the worker ant—she is one now. I bring no extra meat that she cannot kill. The throne is empty. And surely a tyrant will ascend to enslave our confused colony. What sadness this queen’s curious envy has brought, what confoundation, what confusion. We will surely all now march to the sea with the tyrant’s tune upon our lips, silently hoping for honor in such a mindless burial and amongst these individuated idiots for a son to be born of humility, and rise up a reader, an acolite, a god king and philosopher to set straight the path of our imprisoned people; to save our lineage. To restore the queen, and her king.