Try to remember always to have a good time
Another day, the smooth whirring of car tires pulling into the same parking spot at work. The wind lashes me, walking across the parking lot, like Mother Nature herself manifesting and slapping you across the face. Inside it is quiet, blocking out a whipping wind. I look up to see Eliot Spitzer himself leering back at me from his picture on the wall. It seems weird to me that I come to work five days a week and rarely notice this picture. His face is stony-looking and carved, the chiseled smile never quite transcending the austerity of that stony jaw. It makes you jump a little. Eliot Spitzer: watching your every move.

Brooke F. made me outline my workaday schedule for her last weekend. It was mortifying. I tried to avoid the subject, but she pushed and pushed. “But so you have a snack right after work?” she needed to know. I want to cut to the fun parts, but all I keep getting caught up in are the second-rate moments, like crunching intently on a candy bar after work, it makes you a little crazy. I find myself foraging for interactions with people, the insane spotlight of my mind searching desperately for some fucked-upness in the environ, just to validate the fact that we’re all residing on the same lunar continent, and that it’s not all carefully conscripted Giacometti figures and discontent. I decide to test this theory at the gym, where I stride over to some girl on the Lady Trainer (sic). “Hey,” I say to her, “how’s it hanging?” I don’t know if it’s the sheer insanity of the social gesture, the asking how’s-it-hanging to a girl I’ve never talked to before or my own sprightly form on the accompanying Lady Trainer, but she seems somewhat unnerved by my inquiry. We get talking a little. I’ve seen this girl around before. She wears all-black sweat suits, and I don’t know if it’s the monochromatic outfit choices, but I had hoped that she chain-smoked cigarettes and read existential literature. It turns out, though, that she works for the public sector and thinks the Oprah book club is really cool. Beggars can’t choose, though, and so I push and push, hoping for the full on itinerary. “But so you watch a lot of TV?” I have to know. “What about after you leave here?” I ask her. “What do you do then??” She becomes unnerved by my questions, gets uncomfortable. It suddenly dawns on me that she thinks I’m going to ask her out on a date or something, erroneously interpreting my research for a romantic gesture. “Don’t you ever just wonder about people, though?” I continue. “I mean, what about that girl over there, with the pinched face,” I motion. “Like don’t you just imagine she has a really horrible job or something? –Or is it that the mounting abyss has risen up before her and is crushing her totally??” She has no idea what I’m talking about. I try a change of tact: “So do you have a boyfriend or whatever?” I ask. “YES,” she says. “I do.” “Really??” I almost cannot believe. I imagine a couple situated in a restaurant, carrying on some insipid conversation in a booth somewhere, a real Olive Garden of the relational exchange. I want to ask about the boyfriend but don’t actually want to know any of the answers. A conversational stumper: In her eyes I see no tangible trace of evidence that we’re inhabiting the same platitude, nothing remotely what I was looking for anyway. Whatever that means. “Well, I’m going to beat it,” I finally tell her. The Lady Trainer comes to an abrupt halt, as she looks at my time elapsed. “That’s all you’re going to do?” she asks me. “Yeah,” I say. "Twenty minutes, that seems like more than enough to me.” She seems unimpressed. “Take it slow,” I tell her obnoxiously; I can’t imagine we’ll be talking again.

Before you die, the bad parts will crush you with an inherent sense of injustice, rolling over you like some kind of tsunami of the mundane, leaving your shoes filled with a coarse brine of boredom and slow death and ennui. There will be prescription medications and talk therapy and interminable yawns that leave your eyes watery around the edges. There will be insanity and suicide and a grim hopeless despair. That’s what will fill the spaces in between.