Your feet aren’t walking/ because you’re too screwed up
An amorphous expanse of free time, reaching my hands out before me and blindly feeling for the perimeter of which there is none. Stumbling and falling on my face. I am currently in the process of making a mixed-tape (okay, CD. whatever). I have a beginning and ending point, the space in between those two songs to be determined. I pretty much verge towards the obsessive compulsive and so it drives me insane: I like the song endings and beginnings to share a least some common thread, and like caulking on a ceiling, mine always gapes. I will sit there all night obsessing over this gap, until finally I get up, leaving the room entirely. That’s the thing with me: the choices drive me crazy. It’s pretty much just right and natural that being a consumer you think of these things. Every purchase is wrought with the same challenge. Would I prefer the International Delights’ Southern Butternut Pecan or Vanilla Toffee Carmel? The conundrums abound, and considering the amount of time spent in grocery stores daily, going over these things, my psychological state is just really precarious. The cashier I see every day asking me. “You really like to grocery shop, don’t you?” she says rhetorically. I don’t really know how to respond to this kind of inquiry, which introduces a whole other layer to my thinking process: she thinks I like her or something, am in fact going through her line every day to check in on her. I’ll have to drive across town now, to do my vacillating at a different store, my ritualistic exercise of living in the first world, which gives me the options, endlessly, driving me totally insane. “Yeah, well, uh, I like grocery stores,” I let her know. “See you tomorrow,” she says brightly. “Probably,” I say. There are still some International Delights coffee flavors I have to check in on.

Out of the store and into the night. Driving through the Tech. Park and trying not to hit some guy putting packages in the drop. The temperature is easily below zero, as he shuttles along at top walking speed, attempting not to run, as his face slowly turns to a sanguine red. I used to do this same job, I remember, at any variety of office jobs I’ve had, running around, doing mundane tasks. That sucks. I turn up the CD I’ve made. Everything has come together pretty nicely so far. Not too bad, if I do say so myself.