I’m washed up. Hit the wall, ceiling, door, cement floor in the basement. I mean let’s be real here.
I’ve spent the last 4-5 years worrying about where I’m going to eat next, figuring out where I’m going to sleep and how I’m going to fend off debt collectors day to day. So busy scrounging for each little piece each day that I wasn’t thinking about my life, where it should be. Too busy to notice I let myself slip away, completely. My sense of where I wanted to be disappeared and now faintly out of sight and no longer within reach.
I always point out comically in animals, or small children, the moment when the light fades from their eyes. The moment when they realize “Oh, this is it. This is all there is.” It only gets worse from here on. Not everything is possible. Perhaps my dreams won’t come true or worse, perhaps I don’t really want my dreams to come true after all. I’ve lost my passion for some of it. Now I am those who came before me, lost in space and time in this place we live in. Stuck in the mistakes we make, in the life we forgot we were making while we were making our greatest attempts at staying alive and barely afloat.
Instead of spending every waking moment fulfilling my dreams, I’m in a cube, not even a cube, a “pod” listening to 30 others type, and chat about nothing. Dinner, what they made for dinner, acquiring ingredients for dinner, whose over for dinner, how dinner tasted last night and what it might taste like tonight or tomorrow. What time dinner will occur, how dinner will be different this time and that’s just dinner. Listening to boring, monotone wastes of space “yes” someone to death in conversation. Yes, Yea, yea, yes, YES, yesss, oh yes, yea, exactly, yea. mhm, yea. An assault on my eardrums. A slow reminder I am not supposed to be here.
But I am, I made this happen. I dreamed last night I got an offer at a previous place I worked at. Apparently that’s how miserable I am here. It’s a monotonous job. But I chose it. I did because I needed stability and I still don’t have it. Why? Because I keep chasing some, half-baked, recycled, 5th generation, white washed version of what resembles what’s left of my dreams. A fucking podcast. A day late and a dollar short. Everyone’s doing it. My reasoning may be different than most though. To get down and document the history of an artist’s journey. So much lost history. In a local scene, these things are never known, lost to the generations and gentrification of the cities where venues are replaced with boutique stores and Chipotle’s and “startups.” Band’s crazy story’s buried in turmoil, college attempts, moving apart, getting jobs that take precedent over the band. Some groups don’t know that the next practice will be their last until years on when they simply don’t remember. Too busy, too broke, too fed up. Like me.
What the fuck am I doing? I’m no more stable here than I was a year ago, two, three. Same shit, different set of walls. The stakes are higher now. With every passing week I delay and delay and more and more obstacles are set up by life. Nothing slows down but time speeds up exponentially until I wake up and it’s 2020, 2025, 2040. Fuck. What have I done? Nothing but excused myself and excused myself for why I haven’t done IT yet, whatever IT may be. I sit here and write during work when i should be working. No, fuck that, when i should be chasing. But to do so needs money and money means work and work means I need to work enough to make what I want and that needs hard work but I ain’t working hard because I’m not passionate so I skate because I’m miserable and I’m miserable because I’m not doing what I want day to day so I work and go home and drink and wish I wasn’t here and this is the circle of excuses.
We buy books to distract ourselves and self help books to make us feel better for making excuses and don’t actually help us DO ANYTHING but for a brief period of time, pull the wool over our heads but make us believe the curtain has been LIFTED and I WILL do something about it, TOMORROW WHEN I GET UP I’M GOING TO DO IT, FINALLY. But nothing. ever. happens. We skate by briefly on the elation and feel-goods that we are so changed by this thing we read in a book or online about changing your life that we just forget and weeks go by and you’ve still. done. nothing. Nothing has happened so we decide the book didn’t work and try another and THAT one will be the one. THAT one will work. Rinse and repeat.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. By which case we’re all fucking insane hypocrites. I’m a hypocrite, and so are you. You fuck. I keep getting emails, buried in emails. Little letters and numbers combined in order to form words that make me miserable and I don’t care to read but will make me more miserable if I don’t so I do. Email was invented as a digital hamster wheel keeping us docile and miserable and chasing the end of the work which will never occur. Because after you’re done there’s more work and if you’ve finished all your work and there is no more that’s the end of you and go home, we have no need. You’ve been replaced, fired, let go, laid off, outsourced, canned, terminated. We’re streamlining, downsizing, downgrading, downshifting, cuts, setbacks, trimming the fucking fat, “reorganizing,” readjusting, re-calibrating, rehabilitating, redistributing, refining, rehashing, repossessing, redacting, recycling, re-PURPOSING, REALLOCATING, reassuring. Underutilized, under staffed, over staffed, over margin, overstated, We’re losing. Go home. Go fuck yourself.
What’s it all mean? What’s the point? Is there one? Now someone wheezes and everyone ignores, annoyed, quietly wondering when the appropriate time is to ask if they’re OKAY. WHEN can you fucking get up and go die quietly somewhere ELSE. There are no walls here, no doors. GO AWAY and make noise. The woman who won’t shut the fuck up walks by slowly with a shit eating grin on her face, like a predator looking for her next prey she’ll waste another 23 minutes talking about her son or daughter to, as I pray into my screens (yes, screens) that she doesn’t lock eyes and laser focus in on me, reeling me in to another useless, uninteresting conversation about her shit husband or shit kids or shit house or shit car. But i’ve slowly stopped praying about it, because I’ve become a pro at avoiding her, I have built a tactic. A surefire way to avoid her as she walks by. Like a guard and a prisoner who has a secret he needs to hide. A form of survival in a way.
Nobody fucking cares. Stop. This place swallows souls. Recycles them into weather-worrying, deadline driven, shells of people. I desperately want to wipe my desk clean of all work apparatus, replace with microphones and sit people down who’re scurrying to “meetings” and “conference rooms” and ask them what they wanted to do before the light left their eyes.
As if they’d even remember.