The private sector is a pantheon of gods that feed on humiliation and your spilled blood. They summon you into white rooms where the exuviae of men examine you, and you must prove yourself willing to be immolated. You must be enthusiastic about it. You must call the yoke you will be tied to an "opportunity for growth." I endured interviews where I crawled without touching the floor. I traded pecks to the face with other desperate souls, like pigeons fighting over breadcrumbs in a public square. I wrote motivational letters. All this for peanuts, the mere promise of peanuts.Then I stopped nodding and smiling while I bled, and I began to listen.Beneath Italy, there is something. You can hear a slow, heavy breath, almost a death rattle. It is an ancient, decadent entity, made of paperwork, stamped documents, public exams announced decades ago, and resolutions that cite one another like an Ouroboros. It is a half-dead god that pulses beneath the travertine and the facades of rationalist and neoclassical public buildings, like a karstic current of fossilized bureaucratic power.My act of faith was precise and devoid of ornaments: a public competition, administrative-accounting profile. I passed it with the same calling with which one enters a monastic order: not hope, not ambition, but a surrender to the material world. A quest for inverted verticality, entrusting one's soul to a chthonic deity
b-bootstraps
