It's easy to sleep when you're dead
Driving on 9 and actually listening to the song “Drivin’ on 9”, by The Breeders, realizing for the fourth or fifth time that Kim Deal has the nicest voice you have ever heard in your entire life, a voice evocative of smiting your foes and washing away all of your fears. Or for two seconds anyway, before you realize that you are actually diving on Route 9, the most homogenized stretch of road in the entire world, dotted occasionally by a Walmart Super Center. From what I remember, this road will bring me from points south into Canada and further. And it is not long before I begin thinking, could I drive to the North Pole? It does not seem entirely plausible, especially because the automobile I happen to be driving periodically emits a strange smell and makes a funny noise on breaking. And it does seem like some type of geographical improbability. But there must be a way, I think. Why not drive to the North Pole? I could be the new age Shackleton of mundanity and despair. I’ll drive anywhere, beyond the infinite, Space Odyssey-style.

It really only is the fourth day of unemployment, but already I seem to have settled back in to my natural pattern of scuttling around and hanging out in coffee shoppes. I’m like some kind of gerbil that has been removed from its natural environment for a time and is now being reintroduced to that same place, settling in too comfortably. And while the general nature of this environment does seem to be lacking in basic function and OK-ness, it does seem to feature an alluring spin wheel, which is the rote existence of my unemployed life. Already, I’m having an anxiety attack. Being asked what I’ve been doing all day elicits such perplexity in me that I cannot even begin to explain. Layers upon layers of incomprehension are produced from my lips.

Talking to my mother the other day. “You really need to find employment,” she tells me, before inserting, “for the rest of your life.” We both laugh a little at the gravity inherent in this notion. I’ve been running laps and she’s suggesting a marathon. It really is a little daunting. “Well, at least something permanent,” she says. My social security statement arrives that same day in the mail. Checking over the figures. This cannot be right, I think indignantly, breaking out a pad and paper for the calculations. I have to double-check the numbers when I find out that I have made a sum total of $66,000 lifetime. 2003 was a good year, bringing in nearly $13,000, which, on the imaginary line graph of the mind, drops off significantly to $6,000 the following year, and even less thereafter. I run these figures by a friend later. “That means if I were to make a wage that would be considered pretty meager by most standards, I would be living like a king,” I tell him. I later make the completely outrageous suggestion that I will somehow be prosperous one day, but I think what I mean is that I will hopefully make $20,000 at some point.

Oh, man: is it hard to own up to the facts. I will probably be homeless and destitute in two years’ time. The early morning glare will find me staking out a spot outside the Central Avenue Hannaford and fighting the other homeless people for premium loitering positioning. I ruminate over the possibilities of my horrible future as I listen to the radio. And it’s funny how you can find yourself getting so carried away by your own thought process sometimes. You work out some extended rumination in your mind which has no limitations, have an imaginary dialogue with a friend, all the while driving your car around. A routine trip to the corner store finds you crossing state lines. I look up and realize, much to my horror, that I am actually in the suburb or Clifton Park, 20 miles outside the city limits. Not exactly the North Pole, but close enough.

There's nothing accidental in this song
Summer couture: a pair of pants I cut into shorts and a two-dollar assortment pack of different colored t-shirts. Walking down the road, brandishing an ice cream cone, and showing off your bony kneecaps to the world. It feels pretty good. The rain has decided to let up a day and you feel your urge to crumble turning into a veritable wellspring of hope and good intentions. Whereas two days ago you felt the urge to climb to the top of a very high place and plummet off, you now find yourself smiling on the world, not even minding when the neighborhood crackhead makes fun of your curly hair. Yes, you think: everything is going to be alright.

I don’t have a job anymore. Apparently, to score 11th grade science exams they want you to have some recollection of the periodic table, which is absolutely necessary to locate the right answer. How I managed to emerge from college without a solitary shred of this totally essential information on my transcripts is a complete mystery. But it is real and it is true. Talking to the kid who sat next to me for a bit, I had to deliver the essential information. “You’re an English major?” I said, “You mine as well go ahead and drop out now and learn a trade or something. Become an auto mechanic or a plumber.” He laughed it off, thinking I was joking. But I was at least one part serious. There is absolutely no point in going to college, the main premise of these institutions existing, essentially, as a way for aimless adolescents to become less poorly socialized and get away from their parents. Sadly, the particular college I went to didn’t even offer me that. Where my guidance counselor was in high school, I don’t know. But if I had access to this information, it may have saved me years of toil, student loan costs, and useless knowledge. Instead, here I am, completely broken and sketchy.

Walking down the street, swinging my arms lackadaisically, hanging limply like telephone wires. Some guy in a suit is yelling indignantly into his mobile phone on a lunch break. “You tell him I said so,” he says into the receiver. “No, you tell him I said so, though.” The person on the other end is not getting the idea, however, as he keeps emphasizing this one point. I try to imagine what it is that needs saying and the individual that needs to be reminded of the saying so. The linkage has been broken in the chain of command, and someone needs reminding of something or other. There is some executive order that needs carrying out, and someone not quite willing to do the carrying. Who could say what the problem is? The guy hangs up his phone and glares back at me as I lick my ice cream cone. Strawberry, my favorite flavor.

Sometimes I think I’ve never thought about anything
There is nobody left in the dimly lit bar. Everyone has wandered off, to some other destination. But we have made it. And in the drunken fog of another morning, it makes you feel vaguely triumphant to have reveled to the end, out-reveling the revelers. And as such, we are going to drink another drink. M. is working at the bar tonight and pouring us whatever. She has suggested a toast, and A. does the honors, producing forth the most soul crushing toast I could ever imagine. “Hopefully things don’t turn out too horribly,” he says, as we all hold up our glasses. The record has skittered from its grooves, as we look back at him. “What kind of a toast is that?” we want to know. Who says that? “OK, OK,” M. rejoins, holding up her glass, “To happiness,” she says sweetly. And then we drink to happiness, and things not turning out too horribly.

I am awake this morning to the sound of an alarm clock going off. It beeps repetitively, the most grating sound in the world. And then, after a few minutes, having listened long enough, the insidious beeping turns into what sounds like a mechanical bird coarsely squawking in the air. I listen to this for a while before the beeping begins to sound like an air raid siren. And then I can begin to make out the specific syllables, sending out the message in its encoded beeping, getupgetupgetup, for a full ten minutes. I guess there’s nothing else to do, I realize, as I’ve been staring at the ceiling for long enough to wake the neighbors. Putting two feet down on the ground, testing for footing, that your legs are going to carry you the distance again. I tentatively stride across the room and shut down the alarm clock, which causes a silence to hang heavy in the air. It is another day. Old man time has wound up another 24 hours of possibilities and failures and I don’t know what. That’s something, at least.

An article I’ve read recently points out the nature of nothingness. Even if you’re doing nothing, it relates, that’s still doing something. And all of that lack of something will impact both you and everyone else in the world at some point in time. I think this over as I go through the day. The girl I converse with outside of work today has just had her day altered in some short term way by the conversation I have had with her. Were it not for this back and forth banter, it might have caused another moment to occur, inside. She may have met the person she was going to marry coming out of the bathroom, but I have just altered her destiny by holding her up for two seconds, while I tell her nothing in particular. In that moment, her potential life partner has disappeared through the doorway of an entirely different outcome. It was my fault, totally and completely, for talking long enough for this moment not to occur. Although, I may have just saved her life as well, sparing her the sordid fate of a roof beam collapsing on her inside and crushing her totally. My completely spontaneous act of free will, which is the lame conversating back and forth, has in fact changed everything, but we do not realize. And just doing nothing alters things, too. There are no end to the possibilities of something-ness and nothing. “See you around,” I tell my coworker, as I watch her open the door and disappear inside, sending her on her way to a now altered future.

I try to decide whether I’m OK with all of the fortuitous life moments I’ve had lined up thus far. If I’ve utilized them to the maximum degree, and what exactly that means. There is no way to determine, really. It’s not like buying some consumer item, where you can compare and choose. And that leaves you in kind of a precarious predicament, lifetime future-wise. Because how do you really know? It’s probably the not knowing that ruins it for most people. The complete inability to compare, which makes you feel like jumping off a bridge, unawares. If I were really taken by the aforementioned girl, how would I know I would not be just as taken by someone else? And in turn, how would she know, not being able to compare an infinite amount of choices and possibilities, that she would not be more taken with somebody else. And one million other possibilities. I guess, though, too, you could assert the fact that you should be happy with what you have, and to stop being such a douche. Although, that would imply the ability to shut down any and all thought process, a concept which I find myself with the staggering inability to get behind.

Spying myself in the bar mirror, hair standing on end as I sit slouched down on the stool, and cackling at some absurd late night infomercial, it’s hard to make an argument for OK-ness. No, the only case I can really make is the de facto. And it does not look good. But it’s too late to work out the logistics, and so I just watch the infomercial, instead. Extremely fit-looking women on oversized exercise balls are doing insane acrobatic movements, as they smile enthusiastically for the camera. A room full of women thrusting their midsections upwards, in perfect synchronicity, off of the ball and then back down again. Who knew rigorous exercise could be such fun? I shake my head in amazement of the spectacle.

Finishing up at the bar, we have to call a cab to get home. M. has produced the theory, with her bartender's wisdom, that if you’re going to pay for a cab you should make it worth your while by being inebriated to the point that you cannot walk. And since I’m really just along for the ride, I listen up. I’m not even sure if we’re drinking to happiness anymore or just in lieu of the possibility of it. In the bathroom, I can hear A. throwing up.