5.12.10

While you were out...

So, since I last wrote, I've turned twenty-six, somehow managed to hold onto my job called Gun Country and the Retirement States, and started writing two novels that reached 20k before becoming uninteresting...things, not novels, more just the crusty remains of ideas that weren't vibrant as they had seemed. So, started another one.

But I've come to the somewhat frightening realization that I've lost my anger and angst. This would be fine if something had replaced it. So far, nothing has. There's this weird void left, and a lot of my personal passion seems to have vanished with the other personality quirks. It used to be hard for me to get to sleep, and I'd just lay in some electronic glow - TV, Computer, Stereo - seething with fury about something. A minor slight from a stranger, how the world works and people don't, my various failings, the various failings of others, something that would allow me to have an excuse to ground my teeth and have my pulse be way to high.

God help me - it seems I've gone suburban.

And that scares me, because I dread becoming comfortable and uninterested. I'm actively afraid of caring very deeply about the state of my lawn, and less about, say, if text messaging would be useful in intergalactic travel due to the speed of light (vision - text) being faster than the speed of sound (vocal), how many genocides are going on in the world right now, child soldiers in sub-Saharan conflicts, the vast swaths of pornography on my computer, or my violent dreams where I get to be a grim sort of wise-cracking hero - like an existential Spider-Man.

But all of the stuff I used to define myself - the unending cyclone of rage inside my head, the weird "Bad Woody Allen Flick" way through the world that I had - are gone now, seeming to have fizzled out.

I blame the sitting.

I have a job that goes completely against my nature: I must sit still for eight hours (ten if you count my time in the car) total and call people asking for money. Now, as much as I love sitting, I get antsy after five minutes because somewhere out there something is happening and I missing it. Now, it has always been such - but I could at least pace around at the other jobs. Not here. I sit here. My cheeks are making a groove in the padding. And then there is the asking for money thing - I hate asking for money, even when the reason is something like "What do you want for your birthday?" I dread it, because I hate money - love the stuff it can buy like beer, cigarettes, cancer treatment and detox clinics, but I hate money - and the idea of asking it as a kind of middle man, just a weight-station en route to its final destination in someonelse's pocket just seems really very wrong to me.

But the whole job thing seems wrong to me. Hell, I still don't like this whole "life" deal. Come in through pain and suffering, mostly get kicked around, maybe kick back, spend years waking up every morning and hauling your freight somewhere (in my case an office), sell your time for a bit of cash and are expected to be grateful for the chance, then die - it's over. End of ride. Now, that's a rip off. Why isn't my pulse faster? Why am I suddenly so beaten down?

Someday.

Shanti, shanti, shanti.