tales from an ordinary world

2001-07-02

The TV's shouting yet another law show at me, telling me to convict this man, but I don't care, I don't care, I don't care about those kinds of invented situations. I've got coveted new book by favourite author, and in the afterglow of finishing it in a single reading, nothing can touch me, nothing can stop me actualizing the distance, the lonely confusion and loss, the feeling that things will never be quite the same. "No, I'm fine, I really am" says balding laywer TV man, behind the CD I quickly threw on to try and give myself a sense of space. But I'm not fine. I'm digesting. I'm busy. I'm wishing I could describe myself better, like a book, like a book that somebody wants to curl up with on a night like this, when I sat on the tram and didn't know where to look, and I felt cold at the tram stop - me, cold ! - and the walk home filled me with an unusual sense of momentary dread as I ducked around the town hall's odd little Japanese garden. Are things catching up with me ? Am I not attending to my needs ? It's true, there's a certain part of my work that just doesn't excite me, that feels like going to the dentist, that I wish I could entrust to somebody else. But in the end, it's a minor concern. Work is work is work. We can't pick and choose it (not really, not like we fool ourselves into thinking). It's important to have some kind of work pride/ethic thing happening. I feel like I have that, at least. But work isn't really what bothers me in the end. It keeps me going - I feel I'd go insane without it - idle minds, devil's playground, etc. - and at the same time I feel like it drains me - after work, I don't feel like doing much, often to the disappointment of others. It was like that 6 years ago, and it's like that now. I've become a dreamer, my faculties wither, and I have to kick myself so I don't fall into thinking that it just doesn't matter anymore. I don't make any sense. I've let so many things go, because other things always seem to come along, but I feel like I'm living more and more on my memories, memories that divide my thoughts about the kind of person I thought I was versus the kind of person I now think that I was, way back, in other times. And now, the way there's always a small subset of things I can talk to any one person about, the really really close friends I once had have drifted off - probably more my own fault than theirs - and I'm feeling so incomplete, so out of phase, because I don't have that feeling of having someone on hand to ground me. There's people who want to talk at me, and people who want me to listen. Sometimes these people feel like it should be the other way, but it just doesn't feel right to be any other way, other than how it is. And people will go, and new people will arrive, and life will go on, and it'll never be the same, because each moment is different, bringing me new anxieties, new memories, and new regrets. I'll only appreciate things after they're gone, because I'm just a man, and we men are all fools.