Monday, April 09, 2007

A Bit Drunk. Garret.

Fernando,

I've just left the mess of the office and my mind is a muddle of unresolved issues and unfulfilled plans for the evening. I'm sitting at a bar surrounded by a jovial crowd and brooding in distinct contrast to the spirit of this "happy" hour (but taking full advantage of the half-price drink specials, nonetheless). Everyday I go to work gripped by something that I can only describe as dread. I leave my warm bed when my clamoring clock commands, grimacing and doing my best to ignore the murky light weakly peeking through my window panes and the chill that settles on my bare legs. I do my best to pretend that I'm not going to work. I putter about, make coffee, butter toast, pick out a tie and leave at the last possible second. I drive quickly, even aggressively, music blasting. It's my favorite part of the day: focusing all my attenton on surviving dangerous situations I've created with my own recklessness and impatience.

Somehow, I always make it to work and immediately find myself absorbed in the minor challenges of my daily tasks. I lose my self in the momentary, in the ordinary, in the necessary. I am asked a question, I am dragged into a dispute, I am locked in my daily battle with the quarrelsome fax machine. Eight (sometimes ten) hours pass. I'm good at my job; but it is so little of myself. I leave and the day is dimming. I wonder what is left of me after I have given so much to this company whose stones still stand so high above me as I walk wearily to my car and always into the reddening sky. And I am so exhausted by all the nothing I have so diligently done.

You'll have to excuse my self-pitying tone. You see, I've just been stood up. Well, not really. It's a long story. But it still ends with my sitting here all alone trying to piece my gloomy thoughts together and send them off to someone far away. And I'm feeling as if everything is somehow far away. As if I have nothing that I can actually touch. I'm wondering how much of my life is nothing but a distant idea half-thought in a hazy dream, how many of my passions are nothing but a faint light half-glimpsed in lazy glance. I'm missing something; I've missed something. Everything that matters is somewhere else and my life is stacking up behind me, day upon day of the same grim compromise that I have so carelessly shrugged on. And every day, the worries are getting a little harder to shrug away. I have grown quiet, solemn. I am in mourning for the self I leave further and further behind with every repetition of the day's little lies.

I'm sorry to subject you to this sulky scrawl, scattered with cigarette ash and stained with beer. I suppose I'm a bit drunk. But I'm sending this anyway. Because what's the point of talking to myself?

Garret