Breaks the Chain and Frees the Animal

Went to get out of the house today but couldn't decide where to go. 

I'm all executive dysfunction this afternoon. Do I clean the house? Do i clean the garage? Do I respond to the family emails that have been moldering in my inbox? Do I fix the to wonky fence planks in the backyard? Do I rearrange my closet? Do I apply to another ten job postings that aren't going to call me back? To I read another hundred pages in the slab-thick novel I started because I'd read everything else in the house? 

Do I start a YouTube Channel? Do I go back to school? Do I finally get around to burying my parents? Do I flee the country? Do I memorize the Bible? Do I take up professional poker? Do I get a tan, even though it's February? Do I staple bagels to my face and then remove them with a pitchfork? Do I teach my new dog old tricks? Do I eat some Trix? Do I turn some tricks? Do I solve the human condition? Do I set out for the New World? Do I binge watch the 007franchise, and if I do, do I include the original 'Casino Royale' or 'Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.'? Do I learn to pray? Do I learn to hunt? Do I worry if Ethan Hunt is a better spy than James Bond? Do I do it all again?

Do I forgive myself?

Does it matter?

This Coffee Sucks

This place is as different as it ever was the same, and I think that's the point - seventies color choices, nineties music, 'oughts architecture, and tomorrow's prices, today. So many hard edges and no friendly faces. No friendly faces anywhere, not on the passers by outside, not on the distant faces of the fellow patrons lost in bluelight portals, not in the face of the barista who can't be bothered to say hello, who just stares expecting me to talk first. 

The whole world seems unfriendly these days. Real friends seem fewer while para-social friends' curated facades turn to paste. Desolate job market. K-shaped economy. It's all trickled down, hasn't it? Hustle hassle Hansel hopes the last good thing doesn't get enshittified before he becomes a late-adopter and I'm just angry all the damn time.

 

 An entire world of silent compatriots getting fucked by assholes on the hedonic treadmill.  

I can't find a parking space.

I can't find coffee cheaper than gasoline.

I can't find real wired headphones.

I can't find what you're talking about in the ToS.

I can't find a decent book, or anyone who's read a decent book in the last year, but plenty of people who'll go on about the audiobook they listened to set in the world of their favorite video game. 

I can't find a reason to be excited about anything. 

I can't find a reason for Martin to be in the Garden of Eden.*

I can't find a passable carbonara.

I can't fiend in a world without cigarettes.

I can't find the 'on' switch for the hedonic treadmill.

I can't find a way out of the morass we've all made for ourselves because we were too nice to the assholes before we realized how far their assholism could go.

I can't find a way out of the morass I've made for myself because I was too nice to my alcoholism before I realized how alcoholic I could go. 

I can't find a place where the alarmists were wrong. 

I can't find my passport.

I can't find the reason I started writing today.

I cant't cope with the word 'enshittification' not tripping the spell-check.

Maybe I'll write more tomorrow.

* No, you're not supposed to understand that part. This is about my depression, not about you.

Forty-Two Steps from the Street

I feel silly for even dwelling on it, on an attachment to a possession or a place. The people we know and the things that we do are so much more important and sentimentality over the objects and spaces is only a distraction from the real meaning of things.

I first moved into this place in my early twenties, still in my delayed junior year at University.

The space is strangely laid out, with washer and dryer in separate rooms and a floorplan that is one part railroad loft and one part one part castle-keep. Splat plaster starbursts conceal a bow in the ceiling as pronounced as the one in the slat-wood floor.

This is the place that I would leave before dawn each day for the three hour transit ride to the last place I tended bar. This is where I was on my way back to when I had the accident that almost cost me my leg. This is the porch that my upstairs neighbors accidentally set ablaze, lives saved only because of my insomnia. This is the kitchen in which I cooked dinner for every third date I've had in my adult life. This is the room in which I slept a thousand nights with the third date that stayed around for five years but never with the third date I took the knee for. This is the porch on which I've enjoyed my nightly cigar what can only be three-thousand times now. Wise Gods, has it been that long?

Eleven and a half years. I've called this place my home longer than anywhere else, longer than the cottage in England, longer than the little house in Wisconsin, longer than the suburban colonial in north Atlanta, far longer than any of the dorms or corporate rentals that followed.

The Martians of Heinlein's future history held that spaces, homes, even entire cities must be relinquished when they become psychically saturated. As the ether of all our yesterdays fills them, they must be abandoned, left uninhabited as mausoleums for memories, museums  of our personal histories.

It's nearly time for the grown up things that I've been so successful in deferring for a decade. It's time for a house, four un-shared walls, a one-line address, and all the expectations that come with it, and I don't know how to feel.

I teared up for a moment my last night under this roof, but I cannot explain to myself why.

Collect Your Courage & Collect Your Horse

---

Either the weight will get lighter, or my legs will grow stronger; it's the only way for things to be. Setting the load down is not an option. I've carried it this far, feeling it slowly accumulate mass with each new quarter of the map, with each new stage in the journey.

I've dragged friends and family and foes alike on this trip, and I've no out but up and over and through. It is my quest, my calling, my meal ticket.

It doesn't seem all that long ago that I was still moldering in that suburban coffee shop dreaming about the days that I am now living, afraid to admit that they might never come. It seems even more immediate that I stood on a rooftop amid the singular, alien, darkness of a blacked-out Manhattan, convinced that I had chosen all the wrong things, that my ambition was folly and that any weight I might take up would be only the weight of disappointment.

The load is heavy, but precious, and like a merchant on the silk road I weary not only under the weight but under the apprehensions of miscreants and ambitious comrades who would take it from me were they to see me footing falter.

And still, I keep walking.

Every day, China is closer.

Five Years to the Day

I had almost forgotten. It's been half a decade and he's not been at the forefront of my mind for some time. It's strange to think that, for a quarter of the time since I met him, he's been in the ground. No less...

Here's to Volvos
And Coffee
And Linux
And Disco
And Cyberpunk
And Dog Collars (Sometimes Candy Neclaces)
And Metal Briefcases with their Attendant Felonies
And Bananafone
And Mozart's Army
And The Future
And Darmok at Tinagra


"You know that thing that we do?"

"Where we entertain only ourselves?"

"Yeah, I think we're doing it now."

"I am comfortable with this state of affairs."

Under My Feet, The Grass is Growing

---

What am I doing here?

The walls are red and the floor is polished and the shutters are fake, nailed to the wall with no hinges to turn on.

A homeless man is asleep, sitting upright against the church wall across the lane. A yellow, sallow, fallow fellow, I presume to be sleeping because I'm not brave enough to check if he's dead.

The sun never rises high enough because it's always daytime in outer space.

Rain in the East pulls the pollen and putrid pollution out of the air; rain in the West seeps into soil and sweetens the stinking sewage, and any comments to the contrary are crass and condescending in the contemporary context.

Seriously, what am I doing here?

Who invented drop ceilings? Probably the same taste terrorist that invented drop biscuits and drop D tuning.

Strangers are running in the rain, congratulating themselves on their fortitude, as if sweating amidst drizzle was the test of one's mettle.Run in the rain on Venus and I'll be impressed.

Pico de Gallo is one millionth of one millionth of a Gallo, so I should stick with guacamole because avocados can't do math, though there may be merit to the bulk discount.

The man on the other side of the divider speaks like a robot with a hole in it's throat. A humming buzzing, retro-future sound best left to Cold War paranoia on the silver screen and to the Cylons from before the reboot. I'd put in my headphones and silence him with bubblegum pop if not for what he was saying.

Christ on a skateboard, what am I doing here?

The music is terrible. The food is worse. The company is detestable. And, it's just too damn loud.

Mealy-mouthed miscreants masticating moldering munchies always arouse my antipathy. Ah, arrogance.

I could sneak out the back, walk the long way home, going west across continental Asia, and come back for my car in a half decade or so.

There is finally an excuse for all the things I've been wanting to do but I'm sure that everyone will know that it's just an excuse and suddenly I'll be the selfish asshole that's being so so so. So what? Other than I didn't want to do any of that in the future so I'll squander my excuse for lack of an actual reason.

Whatever, I'm out of here.

I Deserve a Break Today

---

This is a strange moment. I've not had a moment like this in some time, several years, at least. The sensation is so strange I'm half wondering if I'm imagining it, half wondering if I've missed something truly substantial and that the hard back-of-head smack of my own forgetfullness is about to assault me like a mis-played tether ball. It's odd, just plain odd.

The office is quiet.

I mean the office is really quiet. The body of tasks that I'm supposed to pursue is done for the day, still an hour before my vendors on the west coast close. The shooting company is in the field, only half way through their deep-split workday, but I've gotten no panicked calls. Accounting finished early and headed home thirty minutes ago. The flights are booked and no one has called to change. Supplies and equipment, all ordered, paid for, and distributed. I haven't gotten an irate call from an agent or manager since lunchtime. All the little fires that normally vex my day seem cold and smokeless.

Old-timers, meaning anyone who's tenure in the industry precedes mine by more than fifteen years, tell me that this is how it used to be, how it's supposed to be. My disbelieving ears keep hearing that, once-upon-the-good-ol'-days, a Production Office was a languid place, occupied by just a few souls who existed only to copy Call Sheets, make Sides and proofread Production Reports. The rest of the time was spent practically idle, cracking jokes and waiting for the benchmark calls from set.

The Production Office Life [TM], as I've known it, is a potent cocktail of  money headaches, departmental neediness, bureaucratic frustration, above-the-line yelling, quiet weeping, studio bow-scraping, pounding stress, and a potent dose of an exotic herb called 'fucking-hurry,' all milled together under high pressure for fourteen hours daily, served with a side of exhaustion and garnished with the constant reminder that we're the most anemically compensated of all union departments.

Over the last twenty years, as movie-making has gotten more complex, as productions have gotten larger in scope, as studios have closed the dual fists of oversight and due diligence, and as the analog/chemical modes of working have been subsumed by the chaos of digital/virtual production, more and more work has fallen to the Production Office. While we were once, as it's told to me, simply an in-house printing shop and and record keeping service, now we are the logistical cerebellum of the film making organism, with all the associated expectations, responsibilities, pitfalls, and most of all, hours.

Not today, though. Today the world is quiet and everything is squared away. The shooting day is underway and all the paperwork is done. The muckity-mucks are out of the building and nothing is on fire. Today we get to breathe a little. It makes me nervous.

I'm going to go prep the Sides.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.