The quiet anguish of obsolescence, comparing a person's discarded career experience and enduring resilience to a seasoned industrial barge abandoned by a shifting market in favor of superficial youth.
They put me together like some heavy crane. Stuffed my head with blueprints and legal jargon—telling me exactly what a useful life was supposed to look like. I was meant to be a hub. A big anchor holding the town down, shifting weight hand to hand. Then the money moved. The market slipped off to some other coast. Left me right here. Just a dead-end saltwater slot. A lifetime of training turned into dead data—like old grease drying up in an empty engine bay. Go take a look at the barge rotting by the pier. Nobody gives a damn about the tonnage it was built to haul. The tide rewrote the cargo list. Where the coal used to sit, it’s just moss now. A wet, green carpet eating the rivets. A heavy machine turned into an accidental garden. You look down and see a rusted chunk of iron in the mud. But inside? It’s a slow, choking panic. Knowing you are ready. Knowing you can do the work (and knowing you’re completely unneeded). It’s a quiet sort of violence. Hosting weeds when you were built to cross an ocean. The market has a blind obsession for unweathered steel. They’ll dump seasoned cargo space any day just to get that glossy, fresh-paint look of youth. They catch a glimpse of the silver on my frame and assume the hull is shot. They skip right past the grit inside the rust. The kind of mileage that rides out the exact same storms that flip the new guys over.
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