Yesterday

When I was a kid - what, something like around my late teens - I used to think to myself that if I hit thirty-five, that would be a long enough life. Everything afterward was just gravy, you know? And I used to go around believing television and comics and not real life as to what life would bring with it.

Adventure! Heartache! Travel! EXCITEMENT!!!

Of course, growing up, everything is a process and all of these things DO come along. It'd be dismissive to not acknowledge all of it: for one day I was in New York City, for instance, and lived all of it!

The scary things that come with life aren't ever given a face when you're growing up, however, because no matter what you may imagine will come, you're an indestructible piece of flash machinery and unstoppable. Nothing is a monster when you're a kid!

Recently, as ridiculous as it sounds, as I'm reading some really smart, fun, and entertaining books (Richard Kadrey's ALOHA FROM HELL, Chuck Palahniuk's DAMNED, William Gibson's PATTERN RECOGNITION), I appreciate these little stories for what the truth they share...and still glance at them as bullshit. Paradoxically, as I'm reading, I want to scream into the pages that what they're selling isn't real life. Then I think of this quote from Grant Morrison.

I've not been very happy for a bit and what's getting me down aside from the typically mundane things like money woes, debt, work, friends, family, illness, is the lack of excitement I used to have for tomorrow. I used to be excited by the idea of tomorrow. Not in a conceptualized, futurist way (I think), but the very cliche that everything exciting is waiting tomorrow. How's that for cynical: thinking all the excitement's run out in my life.

Think I'm a terrible rut.

Recently, the best friend and I have spent hours talking boys and girls, and even that's lost some luster because it's become routine. It's become daily life. I feel weighed down by everything that's become my universe. Most folk, I think, can appreciate all of these daily trials because there are things to be learned from all of this. I know this too. But this isn't what I signed up for when I was born. Is that terrible?

I don't know.

Home life, work life, personal life, none of it is horrible and obnoxious and sad. Not really. Taking in the bigger picture as it is, I'm pretty damn fortunate. I don't think I appreciate it enough, frankly, and all of these things I think are perhaps a form of selfishness. At work this week, in talking with the boys there about marriage, one of them said that I had passed the point in life where that was something to want. And I wonder as we get older does that keep happening? Like a road trip, is life a long journey and the stops are places off the side of the road that you pass by after you consider stopping and then say to yourself, "There'll be something else up ahead," not considering that perhaps there won't be? Not that I'm regretting ever investing time with someone enough to want to make them my life partner. I don't feel that. But I wonder if all the excitement I used to feel about tomorrow's now an off-ramp that I passed years, weeks, days, hours ago.

Me, nattering like this, is what annoys me the most.

Yesterday, while looking through the company's intranet, I discovered openings at work that aren't necessarily interesting but look like might be fun. Puerto Rico, New York, California. Wishful thinking in a way. Because responsibility isn't easy to slough off, right? And I then make myself upset by conniving ways to make things happen where everyone is happy first and then myself. Which is NOT a way in which to do things in life. I've learned that much.

I think, the work thing notwithstanding, that I'm looking for the fun that I always believed would exist along with the idea of tomorrow. I'm not an old man, not yet, and I'm wondering where all the fun went. My idea of fun.

I turn thirty-five in two months.

Work

About four weeks into the new gig, I'm coming up with a few things that seem to relate pretty much to every single job I've ever had:

• I think I'm better than my bosses at what they do.
• I think I'm better than my peers at what we do.
• I think the youngsters at work are basically in the way.
• I hate nicknames.
• I am not a cheerleader.
• younger Hispanic girls are a necessary distraction.
• if my co-workers can't lift forty pounds, they're useless.
  
• I rock.

Year Four

I feel that dry itchy bit in the back of my throat that signals a bit of a cold. Have a headache that hasn't gone away. Physically, I'm not feeling my best (nevermind the sore muscles, the cut up hands, and the blistered and callused feet).

Three years ago, so I got a phone call.

I remember back in fall (I think) of 2008, I realized that all my bellyaching and crying and bullshitting about being sick wasn't getting me anywhere except ridiculous nights of non-sleep and lots of stress. I think I remember feeling, at various points, indestructible. But when I got sick last month while at Corey's, it wasn't so much that I felt it was one of those little emergencies, and right now, me sitting here typing this (can you get tennis elbow even when you don't play that awful tennis?), fearing that sickness again, I realize, of course, that I am not indestructible.

(Did that last sentence even make sense?)

Anyway, even though my fingers have little red cuts all over, I'm looking at tomorrow, the start of my fourth year with my little virus, and as before, it's something that I'm not necessarily not looking forward to, but rather, wondering what it'll bring me physically. I mean, I've been fortunate to be honest: after first talking with Corey and my doctor so long ago, a lot of the things that they said 'could' happen haven't happened. I've not been on the cusp of death nor hospitalized, nothing like that. I think my mind is different, sure, but better than then. All of which is good. But, yes, year four. Which seems weird to think about. It is. I'm not sure if I can describe why; my head is a little full of emotional bugs.

Even through this pre-illness right now, I had a flash that, yes, I will make it to my sixties. Is that weird? Me being overconfident? Who knows, but after a good portion of time now, it seems rather weird to think of my life in terms of a video game character's hit points. I don't know anything about the next thirty odd years, but that smile earlier today at work, my hands being all cut up, my throat being itchy, and my writing this now, I'll take it. Why not?

Why Not?

For my first day at my new job I wanted to wear this.

Not too shrewd on my part, just trying to be a little provocative given what I was expecting: a bunch of boys sitting around and talking in a warehouse environment. I figured I'd be in for a lot of overly firm handshaking and lots of half-nods in acknowledgment of each other, and probably terrible jock talk, you know, given the fact in Long Beach and Lakewood, there seems to be only one type of guy. So, I figured, what the fuck, you know, might as well make it a point to single myself our as different. Because, to be frank, I normally don't really care what my clothes says about me, but with dudes who work in a warehouse, they don't normally wear a light purple sweaters unless they're not straight. This time, I thought it might be useful and a little fun and, obviously, a way to throw some uneccessary source for gossip already, even still weeks out from our daily work days.

Turns out I couldn't wear it because I spilled coffee all over it first thing in the morning, so changed completely. Which is just as well: my first day at work wasn't what I was anticipating. And worst of all, across from me at the same table in the conference room, there was a particularly not straight Hispanic boy wearing the exact same sweater. Imagine the superfluous faux pas?! I laughed in my head when he sat down and introduced himself and I had to tell him I had the same sweater at home, and his eyes kind of opened a little wide, said, "Really?" and my not even wearing it, apparently, had a different unintended effect.