Tonight Will Be Fine
Two nights ago Reed calls me and says, Let's just say fuck it and go to Mexico City for New Years. I can't, I tell him, I have a job now. He wants to do something, get out of the town he's been in for two or more years now. We can't even think of when the last time we were in France was. A year ago? Two years to the day? We've lost track. I can't go to Mexico now, I said, I have a job now. A nine to five. I never thought I'd say this, but I actually kind of like it. After almost two years of having a different schedule every week, of having to work early mornings some days, and other days having to work late nights, and still other days having to work sometimes both, and many days just having nothing to do because there was no work to speak of, not for the next couple of weeks, having a nine to five is almost--what's the word?--quaint, pleasing, comfortable, it's there for you. Well that's just it, it's comfortable. You're a quarter of a century and you're already on the path to comfortable. Comfort just leads to old age and depression and the longer path of regret. If this is comfort, then I would hate to see what poverty is: I don't even have a place to lay my head every night of the week. If anything, the nine to five, as constant as it is, is only temporary, I know this in my heart, that they could never get me to do this forever, that somehow I'll find a way around it, as I have so far; but for now what a nine to five is just another way to see life on the other side. And in many parts of my childhood I always kind of hoped I'd be working in the skyscrapers of the city looking down at the tiny people during my coffee breaks, ascension hundreds of feet into the air being the principle extent of my morning commute, and during lunch, accompanied by just the book I'm reading at the moment, munching on a sandwich and looking around me at the suited-up lunchdates, thinking, I'm glad I don't work that job, I'm glad I don't work that job, ad infinitum. From up there the sun shines at a different angle on your face, so even though I can barely see when somebody approaches me with a manila folder of papers, I nearly refuse an offer to shut the blinds because "it makes me feel like I'm outside," but the truth is I have never seen the sun from this high up, it's something of a novelty to have it shine in my face while entering donations into a database and reading return-to-sender donation requests that have written on them in an angry red pen "deceased 1997!" or "sorry I can't send no money!" What the nine to five is to me now, and why it doesn't feel as bad as I once imagined it, is a sort of penance for having said fuck it let's go to blank once already.
You see that's why I can't go to Mexico City for New Years, as much as I love to, don't get me wrong. Because at this age things still work out usually for the better, but nowadays they are slow to reveal themselves. Before, remember, it was so easy to go to France for a year, just fill out a few forms and make sure to send them in before February--that far off month that never seems to be around when you need it. The ease of those times abroad are conjured up rarely, and when they are it takes some foreign object like a bottle of Vin de Graves or a Paul Bocuse cookbook from 1982. Respectively, they'll pull back the curtain on the moments of preparation of a big night and a prechauffage in that yellow kitchen where we would sit and drink and occasionally, restless, get up and go to the window to see what window in the checkerboarded buildings was lit and alive; and secondly the night in a taxicab in the French Alps just a few hours outside of Lyon when I realized the French word for 4x4 because the cabbie kept talking to me about them inexplicably. I said fuck it, let's go to Thailand for a month once before, and I quit my job and gave up my apartment with some vague idea that everything would be there nonetheless once I returned. And when it wasn't I looked up at the sky to make sure it was still turning and knelt gently to genuflect before the stars, and so here I am, not stuck, but I'm planted here and my head is in the sky and truly it's only my fingers that do the work, and they are the smallest appendages, so that I don't mind sacrificing them for most of the day. Mexico City will still be there come the new year, and France will too, as much as I love it so, it will still be there the following weekend despite the economic downturn, and anyway whether or not I'm sad not to be there is overshadowed by the sadness that I wasn't there in the twenties or the forties when, or so I've read, shepherds still led their flocks through the streets of Montmartre. It's so less romantic now that what difference is a couple more years not to see it? And can't Mexico City or Monterrey wait as well?
Looking at and thinking about this journal, this one, I'm mostly reminded of the better times in Bordeaux. So sometimes if I'm nostalgic I'll open it and click through the calendar where I see a dearst of entries within the last two years, and then a huge flux of entries in 2004 and 2005--no, the writing isn't very good, but the point is I was writing so much more than I do now.
You see that's why I can't go to Mexico City for New Years, as much as I love to, don't get me wrong. Because at this age things still work out usually for the better, but nowadays they are slow to reveal themselves. Before, remember, it was so easy to go to France for a year, just fill out a few forms and make sure to send them in before February--that far off month that never seems to be around when you need it. The ease of those times abroad are conjured up rarely, and when they are it takes some foreign object like a bottle of Vin de Graves or a Paul Bocuse cookbook from 1982. Respectively, they'll pull back the curtain on the moments of preparation of a big night and a prechauffage in that yellow kitchen where we would sit and drink and occasionally, restless, get up and go to the window to see what window in the checkerboarded buildings was lit and alive; and secondly the night in a taxicab in the French Alps just a few hours outside of Lyon when I realized the French word for 4x4 because the cabbie kept talking to me about them inexplicably. I said fuck it, let's go to Thailand for a month once before, and I quit my job and gave up my apartment with some vague idea that everything would be there nonetheless once I returned. And when it wasn't I looked up at the sky to make sure it was still turning and knelt gently to genuflect before the stars, and so here I am, not stuck, but I'm planted here and my head is in the sky and truly it's only my fingers that do the work, and they are the smallest appendages, so that I don't mind sacrificing them for most of the day. Mexico City will still be there come the new year, and France will too, as much as I love it so, it will still be there the following weekend despite the economic downturn, and anyway whether or not I'm sad not to be there is overshadowed by the sadness that I wasn't there in the twenties or the forties when, or so I've read, shepherds still led their flocks through the streets of Montmartre. It's so less romantic now that what difference is a couple more years not to see it? And can't Mexico City or Monterrey wait as well?
Looking at and thinking about this journal, this one, I'm mostly reminded of the better times in Bordeaux. So sometimes if I'm nostalgic I'll open it and click through the calendar where I see a dearst of entries within the last two years, and then a huge flux of entries in 2004 and 2005--no, the writing isn't very good, but the point is I was writing so much more than I do now.