Baby won't you take this magnet and put my picture back on the fridge
Rainy day, gray gloom, and the proverbial activity set. A friend has recently confided that he is confounded by weather talk. “People always want me to talk about the weather,” he says, “but I have no idea what to say about it.” But weather really just is the way to foment commonality and supply the amiable silence-covering conversational drizzle that has you saying to random strangers how crappy it is out. He is interpreting it a different way, however, positing the fact that if you have nothing to say, do not say anything at all, which might be largely indicative of any number of blog entries. “The next time someone says something to me about the weather,” he tells me, “I’m going to tell them, ‘fuck you.’”

But I really have just been having a glorious day, falling in and out of sleep long enough to realize how nice it is. I’m old enough now to have transcended the guilt complex my mom imbued on me as a child, always making you feel bad about sleeping in the day. There are things to be done, but fuck all that, I realize, falling back into a slumber. I have these dreams, too. And it’s kind of strange. There’s this one where I’m sitting on a toilet, and everyone is standing around me in a circle, watching. Which is kind of a werid thing to have a dream about.

The more we talk the less we understand
A woman crying in her car in a strip mall plaza. I have a coffee that will spill onto my lap, and so I have to sip at it until I can drive. As there she sits, at a slight angle to me, crying away. Strangely, human compassion seems almost nonexistent in this situation, as I think of how best to divert my eyes. Clearly, though, there’s no ignoring it, as we have made eye contact a couple of times now. I’m not sure what the prevailing etiquette is on the whole crying-in-a-car-in-a-strip-mall-plaza, but I guess I would be kind of weirded out if some random stranger tried to console me. Although, I guess that might be kind of nice, too. I don’t know. In the end, I opt for driving away and parking a few spaces down, so as to not deal with this situation. And in doing so, I spill hot coffee all over my leg, causing me to curse.

Explaining the whole thing to a friend later, I ask for reaffirmation that what I did was the right thing. “I mean, what was I supposed to do?” I say, “Get out and ask her what’s wrong?” He vacillates a moment, thinking it over. “I see what you mean,” he finally tells me. “That’s kind of a bad situation.” I remember a similar thing happening at my job at the university last summer. It was a long day, as per normal, when the floodgates of departure had finally opened. I was practically running out of there when I spotted someone who had literally fallen down the concrete stairway on a bicycle, blood everywhere. Whether it was the blood or otherwise, strangely, the first impulse that overtook me was still getting the hell out of there. There is, evidently, no end to the fucked up-ness.
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Interminable hell day. The cover of the clock must be wearing thin with the amount of time I spend contemplating it. And it makes me feel like a kid in a car ride, always waiting for the destination, except the scenery happens to be a windowless room and my traveling companions are prattling maniacs, which at least is somewhat consistent. When I’m not checking out how much time there is to go, I’m biding my time by entering Death Claims into a computer database. What this involves, essentially, is taking a folder off the never ending pile and typing a string of numbers into the computer for future referencing. I pick up a folder, look inside. It feels heavy in my hands, with the weight of a life expired. Sometimes there’s an obituary to check out, and it kind of makes me wonder what Danny Dang thought of it all. Or Carl Crapo. It’s pretty weird.

My niece Alex asks me on the phone the other day, “What do you do at your job?” This is incredibly, the first time anyone has ever actually ask me this question, and I’m blown away by it, if only because she’s five. I still don’t know if it’s the inquisitive genius of a kid who just must know everything or the fact that most people’s jobs are various euphemisms for doing the exact same types of paperwork I do all day and so they never bother ask. But whatever the case, I’m totally embarrassed by my response. “Well,” I say to her, opting for the short answer, “I work with computers, and sometimes I open and close envelopes.” She’s not impressed by this reply, pausing for a moment to think it over. “You only do three things?” she asks before inserting the crusher of a line that is just glaringly obvious: “That sounds kind of boring.” This child is obviously going to be a star, and when I ask her about her future aspirations, she tells me that Chucky Cheese sounds pretty good, which by comparison it really does.

The morning workload today was heavy. Ginny tells me that they’re thinking of making another fulltime position, and I feel bad that she has taken to me. We are shuffling through the endless mountains of paperwork this morning when she tells me about how busy it will be after the Memorial Day weekend, which represents some sort of deadline. “You should see it,” she tells me. But the whole thing is, I never will. I don’t have the heart to tell her, though. And so I leave it at that.