There’s a red plastic cup outside on the hot concrete, or at least what’s left of one. I ran over it for the fourth time just a few minutes ago pulling back into the Design Services parking area from my stint today at the Gazette. It’s just a mangled scrap of plastic now, and I’ll probably throw it in the trash before I drive home in half an hour or so.<\/p>\n
I have an ever-widening hole in my khakis. This is the only pair I own that’s long enough. I used to have a couple more pairs, but they either got lost or disintegrated through use. Every other pair of khakis in the closet is 34 length, which is just too short\u2014the pant legs don’t break at the ankle when I stand straight up. So this is my last decent pair, and now they’re done for too. The only clothes shopping I think I’ve done in the past year was for a couple of shirts from a thrift store, and for a beanie at Walmart for the upcoming winter (this is back when my hair was really<\/i> short).<\/p>\n
There are stacks of change just to right of my monitor, six to be precise, three penny stacks, one dime stack, a nickel stack and a quarter stack. The quarter stack is the shortest, since I took a good number of those home to use in the laundry machines before we left for Europe. I still haven’t washed clothes, and we’ve been back well over a week.<\/p>\n
Money comes in; money goes out. I’m not living from paycheck to paycheck any more (thank goodness), but every time I get another influx of income, the government wants more money, or the insurance company wants more money, or the apartment complex wants more money, or one (or all) of my cars stands out in the parking lot, mechanical bits in disarray, which of course you can’t see because it’s got the car cover on and the hood is closed, but I can see<\/i> what it needs to run again, and says to me, “Spend money on me. You have that extra hundred. You have to at least get me running properly, right?” and then the cycle starts again next month and I can’t get rid of anything even though I want to chuck a grenade under the left rocker panel of the white Supra and blow it six feet in the air, flipping over and over, a fireball a la<\/i> Mission:Impossible 1.<\/p>\n
I want to get rid of things. Things wear out, things consume, things exhibit entropy. Only those things which display the required degree of usefulness in relation to daily life will remain… But then, I want to get rid of my daily life too, mannerisms, attitudes, pretenses, excesses of opinion and thought. Too many people. Too much to do. Too much to think about. Too much written on the blades of the ceiling fan as it rotates slowly overhead at 2:30 in the morning before another Thursday morning when I’ll have to haul my ass out of bed after resetting the alarm five times, and working on page 291 of the Undergraduate Bulletin, playing jackhammer techno through the headphones to keep my mind engaged and saying hello and goodbye to Lauren all day as my only actual human contact. What a crock.<\/p>\n
I don’t want the white picket fences. I don’t want the American dream. I don’t want to be some nut-brown, overweight, greased-up tycoon sitting on the deck of his fishing boat, knocking back another beer and checking the reels; I don’t want to be the five-time award-winning district manager for Burger King in the southwest region of whatever state, coming home to his blue-shuttered home in Suburbia, USA. I don’t want to be like anybody I know; I want to be like myself, which works because I hardly know myself.<\/p>\n
I want to run away. I was going to add “from home” but that doesn’t work because it doesn’t feel like home here. It won’t be like in every movie where the runaway feels a certain tie, even years later, back to the place from which he ran, because “it’ll always be home”\u2014but I can imagine the future of such an event and I can tell I won’t feel some grand, mystical tie back to this area. The only things about here that I’ve missed while away were the easyness of everything, sparks of the routine that I’ve developed, but that’s something I can generate anywhere I go; familiarity and a certain stability bring those qualities into existence. But there’s nothing beyond that about here. I may feign a home-y tie to regional affectations like the food, the way of life, particularities here and there, but that’s just the familiarity coming through\u2014in large part I say those things because I can; the emotional resonance has never been there.<\/p>\n
Time to drive back to the apartment so I can attend part of the youth leaders’ retreat this weekend. Funny how the more I want to be alone, the more these events keeping popping up… But I’ll go; I’ll give it a shot. And I’ve run out of thoughts that want to be made quasi-coherent. For now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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