Unlike Ian and Guy, I've done a fair amount of thinking on dying before. There were days of being wild, when I held death in my mouth, when I licked the dying. I've been incredibly lucky, to have survived my youth, and not to have lost anybody close. To have not yet lost anybody close, that is. I suck on the dying, and the taste of it steels my nerves for the inevitable.

I think about what people might say at my funeral. There's a certain pleasure that comes with considering that people may be hurt to see you go. All my best friends and lovers, I've thought about them dying, and what I would say, how I would memorialize them. I don't think this is conceited, or morbid. I believe it brings into stark relief just what is exceptional about that person, what separates them, and attracts you. You have to be close to a person before you can begin to imagine their eulogy.

The dead live on in the memories of those they've touched. But we strive for immortality, to live on when memories have faded, when no witnesses remain to tell stories of our exploits. We live for the glory of a fitting epitaph. We live so that graduate students on holiday will take snapshots of our headstones.

When we are young we expect we will live forever. Or rather, when we are young, we expect to die young. The young have no concept of aging, and so live as if death is imminent, as if there will be no interval between their youth and their end. If death doesn't soon come, they are left to age with the unshakable feeling that they didn't live enough. Did we not suck enough out of life to be left with death in our mouth? Is this not the tragic realization of Dmitri Karamazov? His failure was a failure of his youth, and having unexpectedly survived years of tempting death, he would now have to learn how to live.

We live for the tribute. The young die good, and they will be remembered as good. But if we've survived our youth we realize that a proper tribute can only be made on the accumulated wealth of a life's achievements. The young are good, but that is all they are: young and good. That is all they will be remembered for. Those who are lucky enough to make it through their youth, to have gotten old, know deeds mark a man for immortality. The young die full of vigor, possibility, and that is tragic. Dying young may mean you get a punk rock anthem written for you, but it almost guarantees you will soon enough be forgotten.

I've never been hunting. I've shot guns, and I've shot at and possibly killed some frogs, but I've never gone hunting the way my grandfather did. He lived in Flagstaff, Arizona, on some land up in the mountains, from where he used to set out for days hunting elk, antelope, bear. Bear hunting will make a man.

I didn't know my grandfather very well, but I knew him well enough to know he was a hard man. Once, while in the mountains cutting down trees for the winter, only two months away, grandpa got caught by a portion of tree that had split from the trunk while falling. He was pinned, unconscious, his back broken from the impact, the trunk lying across his broken legs. He was alone, and he hadn't told anybody where he would be.

By the time night fell he was hallucinating. He told us of looking up into the branches and seeing birds looking down at him, crows, talking to him, and among themselves. He could hear the coyotes. It was quite cold, so he did his best to bury himself, digging his own grave and covering himself with leaves.

I imagine his wife, Joy, began to worry by sunset. By the next morning they were looking for him, on land and by helicopter. Apparently, he had parked his truck in a way such to make it invisible from the air, and had gone where nobody thought to look. It was clear by nightfall that Grandpa Bill was in some serious fucking trouble.

He had slipped into a coma by the time rescuers found him, sometime on the third day. Everything that could be bruised was bruised; the rest was lacerated, contused, concussed, ruptured, or collapsed. He was kept in a coma for I don't know how long, but he survived, and he walked again. Not a miracle, but a helluva recovery by one tough sonofabitch.

He was 76 years old when he went up into those mountains to cut down trees. Clearly not the most brilliant man, but possessive of an impossibly hardened individuality, tempered through a youth in want, war, and work. He was a boss in the Heavy Machinery Operators union, and he wore a gold union ring and had a huge wardrobe for union duties. He was a hunter, but he also drove a Cadillac. If he was not strictly monagomous, he was, from all I've heard, a decent husband, maybe as good as a hard man can be. The cruelties I remember I dismiss as anachronisms. I knew him as kind, but I know very little, almost nothing more about him.

My mother really didn't have a relationship with the man, and she made sure her two youngest children never got too close their grandfather. She had her reasons, but I believe she regrets not having given me the chance to be closer to Grandpa Bill. She regrets even though she loathed the hardness, the meanness, the masculine irrationality. He was the only grandpa I had. My father's father had died when I was still and infant, and she regrets not giving me anybody but my father to really know as a man. While she loves my father, she knows he has never hunted bear.

It's been really fucking hot lately. The apartment has no air conditioner, and it's sweltering. The other night, as I lay sweating in heavy air, I had a vision of my midlife crisis.

Suddenly I could see that the personality I have developed will be the same at 40, 50, 60, and that that will entail a crisis. For the first time I could clearly perceive that the range of possibilities I have to choose is pruned with each passing year. And it seemed completely natural that as this realization developed I may be driven to seize upon one of those ever dwindling possibilities and drop off, drop out, disappear.

I think I'm well positioned to have an epic midlife crisis. I'm childless, terminally single, and diabetes-free. I'm not gonna be the sort of guy who buys a sports car, or gets a motorcycle for weekend runs. I'm gonna move to the Pacific Northwest and plant trees. Just dig little holes for saplings. Or maybe Indonesia, where I can probably find work cutting 'em down.

A kernel of messianism has begun to take root in my thinking. Not really having accomplished all that I believe I'm capable of, not having developing any binding relationships, I have to have faith that if I continue with my eyes wide open, and take pains to be ready, an opportunity will show itself. I think about redemption, about the possibility of redeeming myself through performing a penance. Guilt arises in the space between actuality and potentiality, and there are often times I long for punishment. There are times when I am envious of the prisoners. Perhaps this is what Eric sees in the men he teaches: men taking hold of the possibility for redemption.

So I prepare for my midlife as though I am preparing for prison, preparing to be a prisoner. I do pull-ups, and push-ups. I don't overly spice the foods I prepare at home. I go without sex for periods of time. And regardless of whether that's a matter of choice or not, I'm gonna be ready to take hold of my redemption with an iron grip. When the day comes that I take a left turn, when until then I've always taken a right, I'm not gonna look back. Hell, maybe that'll even mean getting laid.



The Boss, indeed. Incidentally, I ran into Little Stevie Van Zandt at the newspaper stand this morning.

She's terrifying. She looks at the camera, or perhaps the cameraman, with, what is it? Contempt? Is it curiosity? Something predatory, unnerving. Something masculine. She is a beautiful woman.

She's the novelist Christina Stead.

When I'm home alone and just want to relax, I like to instant watch old episodes of Law and Order. Netflix streams right to the TV, so even though they only offer the 'Criminal Intent' and 'Special Victims Unit' versions of the program, it's nice to just press play and instantly have something to ignore. It is precisely because these series are retarded, truly retarded iterations of the original series, yet the same, insofar as they ape the form of the original Law and Order, that they are so goddamn easy to ignore. I play a couple of episodes and pretty soon I've answered emails, done the dishes, watered the plants...It's brilliant!

The head of the Philosophy department at Stanislaus was a Deadhead like few others. While this may seem laughable to some, he is a truly original thinker of the Grateful Dead phenomenon, and one hell of an administrator, having brought together a serious group of Continental thinkers in a fucking cowtown in Central California. Well, anyways, we were talking about the Dead, and I said something about the richness of the lyrics, and the rewards of focusing on the lyrical element in the music. Jim agreed with the point, but pointed out, with a smile, that he often found himself ignoring the music altogether. It was what he put on when he needed to work, which is to say that he had reached a level of familiarity with the music to the point where he no longer needed to pay attention to it. He could just be with it, without that being a thing. Is that what love is, the blissful ignorance of the beloved's existence, objectless and indifferent? Am I in love with Law and Order, SVU?

Every year on my birthday I get a card from my Grandmother, each holding a check written for however old I'm turning, and the inscription, the same every year, "Eat light, drink light, and have a happy, healthy birthday." Good advice from a woman who displays the vigorous stamina in old age that only accompanies the temperate, a trait clearly lacking in my nature, in my generation, but intimate with the children of the Depression.

The first day of Summer is the longest day of the year. Tomorrow will be shorter. There will be less time for cold drinks on hot days, less chance for hours wasted prone under the sun on Saturdays at the beach, less of the early Summer moonlight perfect for finding a Summer love.

I once began trekking to a remote wilderness in the Mojave desert to celebrate the summer solstice with some friends. We made it as far as Leucadia, about 50 miles north of San Diego on the PCH, where my sister had a place within smelling distance of the beach. Having driven through the night we rolled in to town about 4:30 in the morning. and headed straight down the cliffs to the beach, where we stumbled upon a record low tide, the water breaking 50 yards from where it would normally reach. The shore was littered with shells, beautiful shells, large and intact. Shells everywhere, exotic in their wholeness. Gleaming white Conch shells. Large, elaborately colored scallops. I found a sharks tooth. We ran and ran, laughing, jubilant with our discovery. It was an hour before sunrise on the first day of Summer, the longest day of the year, and the fucking earth had given us a gift.

Hey Stoli, you were the meanest sonofabitch in town, but I loved you for it. I'm gonna miss you, buddy.

The J train was awfully crowded this morning. No matter. Got to hear this:

“…well, you know, I lost three, had three miscarriages before my son was born.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“But God is good, and I got pregnant with my son, and it stuck.”

“Mmmm-Hmmm.”

“And I was real careful during the pregnancy, got all kinds of tests, and sonograms and such, and when the doctor wanted to give me a shot of ___ I said no, I will take what the good Lord gives me, retarded, or missing something, it doesn’t matter. Because, you know, that shot leads to miscarriages in some women, and I wasn’t going to risk that, to risk what the Lord had given me. If that boy’d come out retarded or handicapped, well, we’d just have to work through that, as well.”

“Mmmm-Hmmm.”

“And then, a couple of weeks before I was due, I started feeling real bad. And the baby, he wasn’t kicking around, or moving much at all.”

“Did you drink some cold water? They say that helps.”

“I drank some orange juice, all that, trying to wake him up, but he wasn’t moving, and I was feeling real bad, so my husband and I got to the hospital, and praise the Lord, it’s a good thing we did, because the doctor said we was about to lose that child.”

“Oh, no.”

“Mmmm-Hmmm. So they cut me wide open – oooh, that pain! – and pulled my baby boy out two weeks early, and he was sickly, and this was up in Hartford, where we was staying at the time, and the doctors say that they’re goin’ to have to keep him for a while.”

“Oh.”

“So my husband and I, we stayed in a Ronald McDonald house for the time that boy was in the hospital, for about 2 months, and this was about 14 months ago, and we just got back and settled in the city, got a place right across from Highland Park, sure did, and this weekend we’re goin’ to do it up large, to celebrate a year outta the hospital and a year back in New York, and Father’s Day is comin’ up soon,”

“The 20^th, I believe.”

“Mmmm-Hmmm. So we’ll celebrate Father’s Day as well. Imma goin’ to get out there early, and get a bench, and get the barbeque out there, and we going to do it up large, have a real celebration, praise the Lord.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“Mmmm-Hmmm. But my husband, well, you know he’s got diabetes, and the other night he comes home all swollen. His legs is swollen. His arms is swollen. His face is all swollen. So before he even has a chance to say otherwise I say we goin’ to hospital, and we get there, and the doctor runs tests, and he says that there ain’t nothing wrong, that everything is negative. And I say No, nah-uh, I know my man, I can tell when something ain’t right, you know what I’m sayin.”

“Mmmm-Hmmm. I sure do. We can tell.”

“That’s right. So the doctor, he run some more tests, and it turn out that my husband got something wrong with his kidneys. They ain’t working right.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“God is good, and we’ll work our way through it, but for now we just gonna have a celebration, and celebrate what the Lord has given us, my baby boy.”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“But the Lord, well, you know, He giveth and he taketh away. Just last month, my man’s sister was hit by a car as she was crossing the street.”

“Oh. Mercy.”

“Well, I’m at home with my girlfriends, and we get the call, so we rush to the hospital, Jamaica Hospital.”

“That’s a good hospital.”

“Mmmm-Hmmm, well, it wasn’t good enough to save this girl.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Every bone in that girl’s body was broken, she was crushed, all swollen, couldn’t even recognize her. But she held on, she fought, but in the end, she was just too damaged.”

“She’s gone to her Lord.”

“Yes. Yes. She was a good woman, a good child. She will be missed, but we will celebrate her memory. We gonna celebrate her, and we gonna celebrate my baby boy, and we gonna celebrate a year back with our people.”

“And Father’s Day, too.”

“Yes, that’s right. Praise the Lord, Father’s Day, too.”

Hepcat (I Can't Wait) Conan O' Brien Show sometime in the late 1990's

"Go on and treat me like a jerk, well when he comes to play, girl if I'm so bad why don't you go his way? Aw, but there's nothin' like your lovin', I can't wait to hear you say..," baby, you skank like none other.

Happy Birthday, Dad. Thank you for coming to every practice I ever had, even those times that I had to drive you home. And thank you for being such a sharp dresser.

And you know how you like to tell the story of when you and some friends got hammered one night, and you all decided to get tattoos of the Playboy bunny, so you drove to Venice Beach but you were third in line and by the time the first two got their tattoos you had sobered up to the point of knowing better? Thanks for not getting that tattoo, Dad. That would have changed everything.

I remember it being my father who did most of the cooking. I know that this isn't true, I know that it was my mother that was day to day preparing breakfasts, lunches for school (she made my little sister and I lunch every day), dinner to have waiting when my father would return with one of us from practice. But Dad had the signature dishes: Chinese Roasted Pork and Chile con Queso on Sundays with the football game; Steak Oscar on New Year's Eve; and for some reason his French Toast always had a bit of fried egg on the edge, which my sister and I found delightful. Mom was American Gourmet 101. Mom would make Pot Roast, and Chicken with Cheese and a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup. Mom would make Meat Loaf. But I don't associate any of these dishes with my Mom. This is terrible to admit, but I can't imagine sitting at another's table and thinking that Mom could make it better; not unless, that is, the menu features Fried Hamburger Tacos and "Any Pudding" Desert.

But Mom was better. She did not miss a day, did not take a day off, even when it seemed as though the pressures of holding my family together would tear her apart. She was the fucking dark matter, the only one who possessed the strength and fortitude to keep in harmonious orbit a family predisposed to wandering. And her lack of originality in the kitchen notwithstanding, Mom always seemed just a little sharper, a bit more sophisticated, more independent, more of an able woman than the other Moms. I know that she thought we took her for granted. Maybe we did...I'm certain we did. But I was always proud of her.

But Mom has changed in recent years. She is not longer the confident, assertive, force she once was. There now are times when I doubt my mother, doubt her ability, doubt that she is able. I know that she has doubts about herself. So there is just the one thing I would like her to know on this Mother's Day: her children know that she has poured her everything into them, and they know that whatever successes they achieve are reflections of her effort, her patience, her determination. And her children will be there for her, will support her with the power of their self-confidence, their strength of character. Because even if the nourishment we received in the kitchen was largely utilitarian, the lasting example of my Mom is a figure of superabundance.

There's no question that some of the today's very best writing is to be found in the pages of The New Yorker.

Just this last weekend, I paid to see a film on the power of The New Yorker review alone. The film, as the review had argued, was terrible, a supreme exercise in cynicism, "violence's answer to kiddie porn." But the review was so well written, the critic so clearly animated in his reaction to the film, his argument so cogent, that I was drawn to experience the film for myself.

Even among the uncredited capsules in "Going on About Town" there are jewels to be unearthed. Consider this endorsement of a exhibition of Old Masters at the Frick:

"Savor eight of the nine visiting Old Masters, then pour yourself into Rembrandt's 'Girl at a Window', which will use you up. The unremarkably pretty subject, in an open blouse, leans forward on a stone sill and gazes slightly past us. Rosy-cheeked, against a black ground, she steams with vitality. Is she chld or woman, serene or anxious, innocent or cunning? She is all those things, but not at once. Her aspects flicker in the mind. One hand oddly raised to her throat becomes as tormentingly enigmatic as Mona Lisa's smile. Your response to her induces a responsibility. She has become a person in your life. Your life is different."

Whoa!

I am lucky enough to find myself surrounded by people whose intelligence and facility with words I admire. This is a situation that I do not take for granted; a situation, in fact, which I actively sought to put myself. I have friends who have written for The Times, and friends who have been invited to read at philosophical symposium. I have friends who nosh with famous authors, and others whose work has been lauded and published by prestigious journals. I find their success tremendously satisfying, and share in their glory as a wanderer takes share in the bounty of a desert oasis. Graduate school was my reason for moving to New York, but my motivation was to meet a girl and maybe someday get a piece into The New Yorker. Maybe someday I'll accomplish one or both of those goals, but until then I'll continue to take joy in the intelligence and wit of my friends.

Six months ago I would have told you that I dreaded going to the Dentist, and hated getting my hair cut. Hell, six weeks ago I would have said that.

Well, I had to go in for a root canal about a month ago, and I approached the procedure with a healthy amount of trepidation. To my lasting surprise the procedure was quick and completely painless. It was so fast, in fact, that I can't even justify complaining about the discomfort. And to make matters worse, or better, I suppose, the dentist and his assistant enjoyed an easy and remarkably high-brow banter, intelligently bullshitting about the political and cultural history of Kyrgyzstan and the fraught relationship between the Persians and the Afghans while they drilled my tooth with a drill that didn't even make any fucking noise!

I walked out of that Dentist's office smarter and better looking than when I walked in.

So maybe I was primed for a revolutionary trip to the Barber Shop. I got wise, this time, and when the young Russian woman who greeted me at the door asked if I'd like to have my hair washed, I said yes, please. Never say no to a girl asking to wash your hair, that's what I say. And as I lay my head back and let her fingers do their thing, I allowed myself to wash into the conversations flowing around me.

I say that I find people fascinating, but really rarely am I able to really take the pleasure of being an anonymous witness. Sitting in the Dentist's chair, I am an anonymous witness because to the Dentist and his assistant I am no longer a person but something to be worked on. To the Barbers and their customers I disappear the moment my head dips and Olga begins to soak my hair. So I listen and find that most people are smarter, funnier, more human than I generally judge them to be. They have something to say.

I don't know why it took me so long to discover that these places have their subtle pleasures, but everybody can expect a better coif and brighter smile going forward.

Jeff is the baddest dude I know, and one of the best friends I've ever had. His whole existence has been preeminately at odds. We were introduced by a mutual friend after Jeff had returned from a bit at a labor camp in the Cascades. From birth, this guy had total disregard for everything decent. And it wasn't a put on, and it wasn't a show. It was the sincere expression of his being, and making it work in this world, being appropriate to this world, seemed to require more than he was capable of giving. He was born in the desert.

Jeff was a living, breathing archetype. The great outsiders of film only mimic Jeff, and great works of literature have been written about him. He menaced the highways of California in an XL Ford Bronco, mad, Dean Moriarty mad:

"Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparkling flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again."

He was, is, the perfect expression of the Western spirit, the kind of man that can only be nourished in the vast landscape of North America. He is not cowed, will not be infringed upon. The man follows a code. Merle knows the man I'm talking about:

Well, I missed wishing everybody a happy 4/20 by a couple of days. Huh. Can't say I have any memorable 4/20s in my past, but being a pretty typical Northern Californian(er), I'm certain I've enjoyed a few.

If I had been around a computer last night, I would have wished everybody a happy 4/21. There's no significance to 4/21 that I'm aware of, but last night I was thinking about how when I was a kid, probably bout 8, I rode with my friends through the early morning of July 5th and collected the previous night's used fireworks. We weren't looking for the accidentally discarded live bomb. We were collecting the material evidence of the previous nights revelry, each of us emptying our backpacks onto the grass and separating the common fireworks from the exploded firecrackers that somebody had smuggled out of the Indian Reservation or across the border from Tijuana. It was awesome, and that memory of 7/5 is more palpable than any of the many 7/4s.

Is there anything worse for a man than to be called sweet?

A man doesn't want to be known as sweet. A man takes sweetness as a reproach. The word is bitter on a man's tongue. Sweetness doesn't win pennants. Sweetness doesn't discover new worlds, break the sound barrier, or close the deal. Sweetness gets men killed in war.

John Wayne was not sweet. Ernest Hemingway was not sweet. Don Draper is certainly not sweet. Aren't these the kinds of men women want? Isn't the strong and silent type desirable once again? My father is not sweet, but in him I've always considered this a defect, an accident of excess aloofness rather than a positive characteristic, the consequence of a strong willed masculinity.

Sweet is the ideal of bourgeois domesticity. Sweet mows the lawn but does not chop wood. Sweet makes love, but never, ever fucks.

Sweet is, above all, appropriate. I want to be appropriate, I want to fit in, but I also want to stand out. I want affairs, fucking free of sentimentality, but I want a lover even more. This is the conflict that I can't seem to resolve.

My roommate has beaten me three times in a row, in chess.

Victories in the previous 434 matches had caused me to become accustomed. I considered the outcome certain, predestined in fact, and attributable to the possession of what I gladly reasoned was an ineliminable mental advantage. The matches themselves could be delicate and ornate explorations of the possibilities for dismantling your opponent. They were almost ritualistic. I tremendously enjoyed this state of affairs.

The losses of this weekend, well, they've got me a bit concerned. Early onset Alzheimer's? Mercury poisoning? Sex addiction? There must be some fucking explanation. This shit does not just happen!

...

There is trouble at home.

"The Situation", which is what I've taken to calling the collection of events that have led to my parent's current predicament, has become a crisis. My family's ability to deal with this crisis depends on its ability to communicate, and determine the contours of a new reality. For a family such as mine, it is a perfectly tragic condition. It's the fucking American pastoral.

So I deal by contemplating la dolce vita. This is a list of my current top-5 to-try Manhattan restaurants, in no particular order:

1. Eleven Madison Park
2. Locanda Verde
3. Degustation
4. Ko
5. Daniel

I must have a very recognizable face. People who have never seen me know me from somewhere. Like a fine wine, I pair it with a familiar manner...(ewww, sorry for that)

A Fruit Guy gave me a very good, really, a phenomenal deal the other day because I am a 'very good customer.' I had been there only once before, so either I was the only repeat customer he's ever had, or he thought I was somebody else. Maybe several somebodies, who knows? Now that I think of it, I get a lot of people looking at me strangely as I walk down the street. I've always just figured that it was because I must be kinda silly looking, which is why I'm always checking my fly. But maybe it's because they think that maybe they know me, maybe I remind them of somebody...maybe a movie star? Yep, probably a movie star.

But wait, I just thought of a third option. It could be, and indeed very likely is the case, that this otherwise honest Fruit Guy tells every customer, hell, passersby even, that they are 'very good customers.' My fly is down, isn't it? Sigh.

In my OK Cupid profile I claim that my smile is the first thing people notice about me. It seemed both attractive and reasonable. The pretty Colombian girl who serves my coffee in the morning likes it.

It's nice being greeted by a smile and my name, 'Good Morning, Christopher,' in a heavy equatorial accent. It's nice being told that somebody likes your smile. One of my clients says she does too. Also a Colombian, but with a heavy Queens accent. She's old school, very smart but also very sexy, sexy in a coming up in the seventies and eighties, when women were expected to be sex objects in the office so the successful ones owned it kind of way, owned it and never just gave it away. She's a 'difficult' woman, one of my favorite people.

The thunderstorms from last night left this morning with a faint smell of summer in the city. It's a smell I will always associate with my first day in New York. I remember it raining for the first weeks I lived here.

There is a different quality to the smell of warm rain in the city. The concrete landscape prevents the rainwater from seeping into the ground. Without topsoil to absorb the rain, it pools on the sidewalk, and the ledges of buildings, beads on glass faces; the city marinates in its rain, and all the smokes, the soots, the smogs that flavor the air of the city concentrate, brew in the rainwater. In the city you smell the rain, and the rain smells like the city itself.

Scent drives to the essence of the the thing. The smell of a girls body, the trace it leaves on your pillow, your sheets, after she had laid with you. It is the smell of the girl, it is the smell of all girls. It is the smell of girl.

Fresh cut grass is what Home smells like. Tobacco is what Dad smells like. My father is the slightly stale but masculine smell of Tareyton cigarettes and Mitchum deodorant.

I remember after high school football games, everybody putting on cologne before seeing the girls. CK1 is the smell of adolescence.

Far be it from me to doubt the B.I.G., but my money is currently solving a whole lot of problems. It could be that me and Biggie have different ideas on mo and money, but when you've got nothing a little sure as shit helps.

In the last couple of months I've gotten my teeth fixed, gone to the doctor (twice), got my eyes checked. I've painted my kitchen, and made my student loan payments. I've enjoyed several nice dinners, after-work cocktails, working lunches. I've been eating, plenty, and drinking just the right amount.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night to use the bathroom. Usually when this happens I have a helluva time getting back to sleep. There are no distractions at 3:00am, there's very little of anything at all. It's when I'm most anxious, and my mind races over all that might be the cause of my anxiety, but of course there is no cause for my anxiety, so my mind just races over and over again over every shortcoming, over every mistake, over every deception, and I just lie awake. But last night I just went right back to sleep. I even thought to myself, 'nothing to keep me awake, tonight.'

Hey, I've still got my issues, shit just doesn't go away because you've got a couple dimes in your pocket. But I'm dealing with them, and I'm able to deal with them because I'm working hard, and earning a few dollars. It's a taste of responsibility, of the kind of independence that comes after failing to take care of yourself, but never failing to keep open the possibility that someday, you might just figure it out.

So, mo money? In this case, I'll take it. It ain't Biggie money anyways.

Much of my time at work is spent updating this fucking lame database that Big Brother Sales Manager uses to make sure that the money they give me is in return for some kind of productive activity. Well, the joke is on them, because while I'm sitting at my desk tap-tapping away at the keyboard, I'm not out schmoozing with clients, which is what they really pay me for. Nor am I spending all that much time updating this database with anything but imaginary tasks. What I'm really doing is surfing Blogger, incessantly clicking Next Blog, Next Blog, Next Blog. That's how I discovered this: White Collared Redneck. And boy, is this shit funny!

PS - It's 1:47 right now, and my work day is proceeding according to plan.

I was never the kind of person who knew what they wanted to do for a career.

When I was in third grade I thought I might like to be a brain surgeon. In high school, a barkeep. Once I discovered philosophy, well, I thought academia might be the thing for me.

But I never had any love for surgery or the brain. Bartending was misguided, youthful exuberance. And although philosophy does indeed occupy a special place in my heart, I don't mourn not having ascended the ivory tower.

Besides, we're talking about a job. Work, for fucks sake. And work is work, right? Now, I know what I like to do: I like to bullshit with people. It's what I'm good at. Sure, I can uphold my end of a serious conversation. Sure, I can get deep. But what I really enjoy is aimless, meandering chit-chat. Gossip. Idle talk about the weather or the ballgame. And so last Friday, when, after lingering over lunch I found myself strolling on the sunny side of the street with a pretty girl at my side, chit-chatting, I realized: I fucking love my job. Because I can do that, and that's pretty much my idea of perfect.

And as long as I can get paid doing that, it makes no difference to me what exactly my job is.