I'm Not Like Everybody Else
There is something dauntingly sad about Mondays. If you’ve got a touch of the blues in you, today is when they are fighting the hardest to get out. Sunday nights grow more ominous as the clock surges. On Sunday morning we may have slept in, or maybe even dozed for a bit in the stillness of its (always) rainy afternoons. So that night we go to bed not quite ready to fall asleep, but desperate for that sleep to come. Monday requires 8 hours of fuel at least. It rarely gets it. Last night I stared at the ceiling until after 1am, then woke at 4am, and every hour after that. I could not sleep but was desperate not to get out of bed anyway. Mondays cannot touch you until you throw the covers off and place your feet on the floor.
Alas, you must.
*****
There are 2 kinds of careers. One requires an alarm clock. The other doesn’t. If yours is the former then you’ve made a tactical error at some point. Like me. Don’t feel bad. We’re in the 99th percentile. This is one of many reasons that the world is so sad and there’s always a line at the pharmacy. Oh so many people are spending at least 1/3 of their lives doing something they do not wish to do. When you factor that tidbit into everything, it’s no wonder we’re scowling at each other much of the time. My father practically lunged out of bed in the mornings, so eager was he to spend one more day as a newspaper man. He was also one of the nicest human beings on planet earth. I believe these two things are somehow related.
Using one hand I can count the number of things that I’m good at, and none of these things is very practicable. My head is either in a trough or in the clouds. The in-between is what most folks take for granted, and it’s this bit that flummoxes me. This is where broken things get fixed and money is managed and curtains get hung and you can climb a ladder without your wife thinking you’re going to die and you can visit a Home Depot without hyperventilating. This is the place were you don’t turn down opportunities to go somewhere because it’s too stressful finding a place to park. The great and slightly off-kilter Ray Davies of the Kinks once wrote a song called “I'm Not Like Everybody Else” and I sometimes feel like I’m in the Ray Davies weirdo class. This makes me feel triumphant on a certain level, but can be a drag when all the warning lights in the car fire up at the same time.
You know that moment when you are texting with somebody and they suddenly ask “can I call you?”
I kinda feel like that ALL the time.
*****
Summer exacerbates all of this, with its forced jocularity and insistence that the cure for rampaging anxiety it to tan and cook on the grill. I despise summer because it’s so needy. Summer is constantly in your face, forcing your glasses to slide down the bridge of your nose from sweat, and bullying you into trips to the Jersey shore even though a week there now costs more than my first semester of college. The only thing good about summer is baseball, which is smart enough to start its World Series in the fall.
******
They call it stormy Monday
But Tuesday’s just as bad
—T-Bone Walker
T-Bone was pretty gloomy, but he knew his shit. I didn’t know how to finish this yesterday, so it’s now a day later and everything feels the same. The same anxieties. The same fears. The same imposter syndrome. The same swirl. So yea. This slaps. Don’t even get me started on what he says about Wednesdays.
I write these things in the in-betweens. Before the work day starts, or during lunch, or in the post 5pm hour. My dream is to be able to write all the time. To wake up with the words and go to bed with the words and spend my days rolling in them, like a dog catapulting himself into a pile of leaves. I think I’m better at this than I am at my “real” job, which is what you are always told you’d need if you dared to suggest that you could earn your living with your head in the clouds.
It was always annoying to hear, but they were right of course. It’s not the job thing that bothers me. It’s the “real” tacked in front of it.
In a bit…
—tf