Speed Trap

Dear J-

Monday’s actually pretty wonderful this week, at least Monday night (I didn’t have much of a Sunday to speak of; we won’t speak of the evil known as weekend and night shifts). The simplest things — coming home, dinner, bath, and reading books — the easiest routines, the very act of getting back down to normal is a revelation. It’s only two nights, I tell myself, two nights that I got to spend alone and live in the dark, but it’s two nights way over the line after all the hours and days sunk into work, the cold embrace of work and empty promises set adrift.

We’re all ready for a change; all ready for the hours to shrink down again into the normal hub-bub. I remember a friend telling me that his son was acting up at home, trying to get attention while his dad was working long hours with the new system we’d just rolled out; shades of Worldcom rolling back into my life.ten years later, and this terrible wheel keeps spinning, cycles keep coming back up. Ding-dong, it’s the past at the door; could you get that, please? We had to leave the Zoo early yesterday because figgy wouldn’t cooperate with our plan (can we head over here, or are we going to just stay in the photo booth?) and I can’t help but think that it’s somehow my fault.

Part of me wants to believe that there’s something better for all of us, where I don’t have to work as far or as long. It’s not to the point where we can’t survive the remaining years; we could keep going on as we are, but it’s a kind of stasis, no time left over in this particular budget, this pie’s been sliced up and spoken for long ago. And not knowing the answers — it’s my job to know answers, or at least to know how to find them — is immensely, unendingly frustrating. I suppose it could be a learning experience if I chose to see it that way, but mind stays dull with fatigue, caged in the trap of hours stretching across days and months.

Mike

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Week Rap

Dear J-

I’m cutting back the Bleak House updates — still reading it — to one per week, out of consideration to those suffering through a one-chapter update every Friday (yet another week goes by and I’ve no excuse but sheer exhaustion at having to get through the scant few chapters left.  Let’s just say that the plot has thickened, and being thick-headed after long days and short nights leaves little time to digest something dense.

I’m beginning to lose track of the days and weeks; I look up every few moments and goggle at the little numbers that keep flying by my eyes.  It’s the twelfth already?  Wasn’t it just Thanksgiving last week?  We were sure that this year had just gotten started and already we’re fleeing downhill to 2009 at this point.  How does it already become the weekend again already?

The stars spin slowly overhead.  Time flows with figgy’s moods; when she’s cranky, it hangs poised and pendulous, waiting and crawling along on broken glass.  We hope for the best as we batten down the hatches and prepare for the storm as the winds pick up speed to reverse time’s stream.  And yet when she’s thrilled with the world, when she’s happy the hours fly by and days pass without notice.  Guess what kind of year it’s been?

Mike

Cold Water on Your Back

I must have really been homesick those two years in Boston. That’s all I can excuse myself for.

*****

All the same, I really enjoyed grade school. You got crayons, glue, pencils, and a notebook in September. You listened to stories after lunch. You wondered what was on top of the roof, over the fire escape, past the fences, behind the bushes, under the slides, inside the teacher’s lounge. I personally had a huge fear of being in the sunlight with the bloodstones present. As my friend described it, it would suck the blood right out of your body, much as lab reports and midterms were to do in a few years.