revision99

I haven’t written in more than a week,

because I haven’t felt like writing. A whole bunch of life is happening to me, and it’s going by so fast that I can’t find time to blog it. This will be the gap when I’m old (OK, when I’m really old) and I’m trying to remember what I was doing just before I spent that mad year in Rio, with that crazy, crazy redhead from that goofy modern dance troupe. I will try to refer to my blog, because I know that blogs are forever, and all that I write will remain here for me and the world to read for all eternity, or until the ozone layer is completely gone and the entire human race has departed for another star system, lush green and yellow and silver planets that beckon and welcome, hiding their deadly secrets until all of the spaceships have been dismantled and beaten into plowshares…

But long before the Great Exodus, I will be a doddering old geezer yelling “URL, schmoo-R-L! Just find that blog!” And the great great grandchildren with their Intel Argos Brainchips will call up Google and frantically search the database of over 50 trillion blogs and vanity web sites for some record that I ever wrote anything at all, much less described the goings-on of June, 2006 but instead they will keep getting sidetracked by pictures of Paris Hilton going down on Jenna Bush, the future First Lady and President of the United States, before the Last Election, in 2032.

But I haven’t felt like writing, and so nothing will be found. I feel bad about this, although I know I’ll get over it before I am a doddering old coot. I feel bad because I keep thinking this would be a cool opening sentence – and then I could go on to show how this is a good example of… but right about then something else swoops into my mind and washes that idea away, and I’m not telling you what idea it was because I have no fucking idea, because I can’t concentrate on anything long enough to remember it five minutes later.

It now occurs to me that perhaps these are symptoms of already being a doddering old fool, much as the overuse of italics could be seen as a sign of a decreasing facility with language and thus a need to resort to ever more typographical tricks to make one’s writing seem vibrant and relevant, emphasis callously and frivolously superimposed over meaningless text in a pathetic effort to fool you, the reader, whom I love desperately. I know, you’re thinking “He’s saying that because he knows he’s the reader, and of course he loves himself, the narcissistic fool.”

Ah, but do I love myself? Maybe I loathe myself. How would you know, really? Notice how you only have to replace the “v” in love with “ath” to totally reverse the meaning? Merely a coincidence? I think not, and you’d think not, too, if you just thought about it.

So, what’s everybody doing for summer vacation? I’m planning to catch up on the laundry, maybe shellac a few picture frames. I could come over if you need some company. I’m a little eccentric, but I totally hide it in public, so you wouldn’t be embarrassed. I could bring some killer weed. I don’t have any, but I’d get some if you wanted it. We could pitch a tent in the back yard and stay in it all night, and tell your parents not to come and check on us no matter what.

I seem to write only about my crummy job lately.

Not to belabor such an admittedly unimportant issue, but this happened today at work and I am still scratching my head over it.

I was walking by an office, and a member of our highly paid, friendly and knowledgable sales staff – let’s call him “Albert,” shall we? – was sitting in there and staring at a blank computer screen. He wasn’t meditating. He just didn’t know how to log in. I see this as a good thing, because once they get logged in the trouble starts.

Sensing me near his door, he called my name, not taking his eyes off the screen. I thought about acting like I hadn’t heard him and just strolling on past, but it was early in the week and I was still filled with good will from taking Monday off, so I went in.

“What’s up, Albert?”

“Hey Larry. I’m trying to [use the computer to perform a function that is against state and federal law as well as company policy, and which could violate my customer’s privacy and compromise his financial information and leave him open to possible identity theft], but I can’t figure out how to get this computer working. Can you help me?” Those were not his exact words, but that’s what he was trying to do.

“Sure, Albert. I know your manager’s password. Let me just log you in. And… there you go. All set.”

“Thanks, Larry. We’d never get anything done around here without you.”

“No problem, Albert. Have a good time.”

I walked on, musing that Albert will probably remain logged on to that computer until the next power failure.

I may have mentioned my crummy job in the past.

It’s wrong for me to be so disrespectful of it. It pays my bills and keeps me out of that large group of Americans who don’t have health insurance. Without it I wouldn’t have this fine, fine computer, with which I blog. And, as noted here in the past, every Monday I am full of resolve to make the best of it, to be friendly and helpful, to keep it light, to solve problems rather than create them.

Maybe it’s the corporate ownership. My company has been absorbed by HugeCorp, a company whose only purpose is to own other companies (and extract the cash). It was created just a few years ago, so no one working at HugeCorp has been around as long as I have, or most of my immediate colleagues, for that matter. They know nothing about the actual business we’re in – that is, the part of the business that generates the revenue. So their “management” abilities are purely theoretical, and as a result the orders we get from them are arbitrary and, well, pointless. And stupid.

This has caused morale on the ground to disintegrate. Everyone’s upset because they are following orders, rather than getting the job done. You spend most of your time following orders, and then when you can fit it in, you get the job done, almost as an afterthought, and certainly not as a result of the orders from HugeCorp.

As part of the takeover, HugeCorp made it clear that it was their way or the highway. I stopped counting how many documents I have signed saying that I understand that I serve only at their pleasure and can be discarded at any time for any reason. The good news was always that I could quit if I wanted to (as if I couldn’t do that anyway). I wonder if they really think anybody swallowed that. In any case, these documents always arrived with our paychecks, as if to remind us that there was a linkage between getting paid and agreeing with everything they wanted.

The progression of my attitude has been: first, I tried to be a good employee, so I could keep my job and continue to get paid. Then, I saw how things could be improved and I moved to do so. Next I found myself having to fix problems that wouldn’t have happened if the company had brought me in to the decision-making earlier. I got a little sour about that.

After a while I made proactive suggestions to increase efficiency and streamline procedures. These were either ignored or rejected, only to be resurrected verbatim by somebody higher up the food chain and presented as their own, often to me! Around the time of the takeover I began to realize that I was not a member of the family, and would never be allowed to sit at the table. I was only greased when I squeaked really loud, and I got pretty fucking sick and tired of that. At some point I just stopped trying to help.

I have a rotten attitude. If I worked for me, I’d fire myself, except I might not be able to replace me without paying myself a lot more than I’m getting now. Also, I might sue myself for wrongful termination, if such a crime exists. The only way to get rid of me might be to kill me, which is why I have an assistant start my car each day when I leave the office.

The other day somebody’s father-in-law died. Your wife’s dad. Terrible news for your wife, no doubt, but just a bummer for you. Nonetheless, I wanted to sign the card that was circulating around the office, let the guy know I sympathized (I’ve never even met his wife). But I couldn’t catch up with the damned thing, and it ended up in the hands of someone I can’t stand to talk to, a know-nothing, do-nothing, pompous jerk who, in my opinion, only works here because he couldn’t manage the deep fryer at McDonald’s. Every time we need each other we both get angry and frustrated. My fault, as much as his.

So I didn’t sign the card, and my empathy became the victim of a toxic work environment that has got me divided from the very people I should be working most closely with – if we were trying to run a good company instead of just trying to keep our heads down and get by with the least amount of friction, so we can go home at the end of the day and start our real lives.

I wonder if this is some kind of new management-by-confusion technique that they are teaching in business school these days. So anyway, I’m a shithead. I can’t take full credit for it. In fact, I’m sure someone somewhere at headquarters is getting a promotion and a raise for it right now.

In other news, last night I ate a rotisserie-cooked chicken with my bare hands. Just tore it apart and devoured the flesh like an animal predator. Got it all over my face and shirt, and didn’t have no stinkin’ salad, neither.

My life is interfering with my blogging.

It’s bad enough I’ve moved my site off Blogger. I don’t get the drive-by’s that I used to through the “Next Blog” button. I’m not sure if I ever made any new bloggin’ buddies that way anyway. Well, maybe I found bloggin’ buddies that way, but nobody ever found me and made me one of their bloggin’ buddies. But at least it pumped up the traffic a little. When I think someone is reading it makes me feel better somehow, although God knows why it makes any difference.

That’s bad enough, but then I have to go and write political stuff half the time, and I guess I know that turns a lot of people off. There may at one time have been conservative readers who were just friendly and curious about my thoughts and my soft-core pornography, but I must have pissed them off and sent them packing long ago. I have no good way to keep track of this kind of thing, of course, so all this is in my mind anyway, but in my mind I am rocking softly in a corner, alone and afraid.

I have been alienated in my real life lately. My job, usually known here as “my crummy job,” has taken so many turns for the worse that I just wouldn’t even know how to explain it in writing, not in anything less than 300 pages. As I’ve probably written here before, it’s just a job I fell into, not a career that I sought. I’ve never been proud of it, but as I keep doing it longer, I have come to resent it. I’m surly with most of my coworkers. Sure, they’re stupid and flaky, for the most part, but they’re just as exploited as I am, so why not be nice to them? Every Monday morning I make some kind of resolution to be more cheerful there, help people when I can, keep it light, but by noon I have turned evil again and I just can’t shake the badness. I need to manufacture a better attitude, but I keep thinking “I hate this place, I hate this place, I hate this place…” and that just overwhelms my good intentions.

And while I am there, making the big bucks, developing ulcers and high blood pressure (maybe), what might have been Real Life is taking place somewhere else, some place where I am not. I am not wearing Dockers in a happy pizza joint with my friends, I’m not driving my new Cadillac and playing basketball, I’m not watching the leaves change in New England in autumn, I’m not playing guitar anywhere, not in a studio, a garage, a bar, not anywhere; I’m not stalking Gwyneth Paltrow or snorkeling in Hanauma Bay, and I’m not keeping up with my blog.

I’ve had a web site since before there were blogs. As soon as such a thing was possible I did it. i sensed that somehow it would be a way to connect with the world in a bigger way than I could do in person, and at the same time in a more intimate way. When I started this blog 19 months ago, I actually began to “meet” people. It was somewhat interactive, but low-key and non-threatening. For the record, I have never felt threatened. I mean it must have been non-threatening to others, because of the anonymity, which is kind of strange because so many of us reveal so much about ourselves in these posts.

But I have become a Bad Blogger. I write once a week or less, and at least half of that is outraged political ranting, which no one wants to read. I don’t get around to comment on others’ blogs, either. So I’ve kind of dropped out.

But so have a lot of my early bloggin’ buddies. I went back through some of my archives yesterday, and let me tell you it was a nostalgic trip. Nineteen months and already nostalgic. Huh.

The nostalgic thing was reading the comments of people who are no longer around. I mean no longer blogging, or no longer in my circle of friends. Maybe they got tired of blogs, or tired of me. I didn’t believe blogging was a fad, like CB radio, but maybe it was. It was geeky enough when “everybody” was doing it. How much of a dork will I be when I’m still writing here and everybody else has moved on?

Anyway, I miss those people whom I never actually met. Adrian, Melissa, Holly, MPH, Red, Kayten, that hispanic chick in Denver, all the rest – you know who you are.

What the fuck. I have issues. Are you saying you don’t?

It has occurred to me…

that one of the big differences between working in a mom and pop setting and working for a huge corporation is that your boss in a huge corporation is really sort of a “compliance manager.” His main gig is to satisfy the requirements of the corporation, immutable edicts often handed down by faceless officers in another city whom he will never meet. They say what they want. He has to get it done for them.

Thus, he turns to his people, whoever works for him, and, if he’s good, makes them do whatever the hell the corporation thinks it wants that month. He will be held accountable if the job isn’t done. Knowing that, he can’t waste any time or pleasantries in handing out the chores. Explaining things would take too long, and failure will bring harsh consequences – for him. His fear is transmitted to the staff, who don’t know exactly what’s going on or why. They grow restive and crabby.

The owner or manager in a small operation must take care of his workers, because they are the ones who take care of him. He sees them as coworkers, and they really are. The orders don’t come in emails or bulletins from a distant land. They usually come from down the hall, or the next cubicle. There is a chance to discuss how a program should be implemented, if it should be modified or even if it should be dumped altogether. The people who must carry out the orders are actually involved in the reasoning behind them, or at the very least they are there to observe first hand their genesis. The workers have a sense of being at least a little bit in control, so, to the extent one can feel good about trading their precious time for money, they feel good.

My office has a new manager, one sent from The Corporation to replace the one who retired. The retiree had fifty years of experience in the industry and had done every job. She was efficient but not brutally so, and she cared for her workers like a stern but loving great aunt. The new guy is in his thirties, with The Corporation for 18 months, an advanced degree in accounting. He takes literally the orders from headquarters, does not not understand passive resistance, thinks everybody who works for him has equal abilities and aptitudes and so anybody should be able to handle any task handed them. In his effort to comply with corporate mandates he has made abrupt changes, giving only cursory explanations or none at all. They are turning out balance sheets and reports as required, and morale has never been worse.

Virtually everyone is looking for a new job somewhere else.

Most of this affects me only peripherally, since for some time I have been gradually reducing the amount of actual work I do around there, and at this point I am down to about thirty-five minutes per hour. Plus, I have been there longer than all the bosses, and all of them think I work for someone else. So I can stay under the radar pretty much. although I know The Corporation will find me eventually, and fire me or give me something to do and, God forbid, someone to report to.

In the meantime, I am watching the show with some alarm. The Corporation has no clue how to manage people or what to do to correct course when things aren’t going well. This disruption in the office, caused by them, is likely to be dealt with through some ham-handed management school method, which, taken to it’s extreme, could spell the end of my job.

To paraphrase another blogger ” I don’t want to get fired, but I don’t want to be there, either.”

Kids, when you grow up and buy radio stations, as I’m sure you will,

whatever you do don’t let a computer program your Christmas music! I mean this, kids. Computers are have no clue how to do this right. They will play the same title back to back, several times a day, and they will think it’s OK because the recordings are by two different artists. They will not, as a good human program director would, warn you when you have limited the play list to too few songs. For example, thirty songs. Or thirty tracks, because really there are only twenty songs but some of them are by two different artists. And because of their diligent adherence to your wrong-headed choice of only thirty tracks, they will cause your on-air talent to become surly on the telephone, knowing that, even though it is the holiday season, they cannot fulfill your innocent holiday music requests, unless you happen to be requesting one of the songs on the stupidly abbreviated playlist, but why would anyone do that, since those songs are already playing incessantly?

I’ve been listening to a radio station in Los Angeles (KOST 103.5 FM, if you must know) that is playing nothing but Christmas music throughout the holidays. At first the orgy of sentiment was satisfying and fun – cheerful, uplifting holiday songs playing in the background while I worked, picked persimmons, did the dishes, drove around in the car. Good times, really. Gradually, the music faded from my consciousness, and my life was simply imbued with the warmth of the holiday season, as if a chipper and loving Victorian angel were riding on my shoulder, whispering words of acceptance and good will in my ear.

But, as with all stories of this type, soon I detected trouble in paradise. A nagging irritation began bubbling to the surface of my mostly empty mind. It was Burl Ives singing Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas, like twenty times a day. Are there not enough Christmas songs? Do they have to play this one more than, say, once a year? Apparently, computer says “Yes!”

Not only that, but once I became aware of the repetition I started to hear a lot of it, and I mean a lot of it, including the maudlin Christmas Shoes by Newsong. I think the computer is fucking this up, for me and everyone who likes music. KOST is owned by Clear Channel, a corporation which owns 1200 radio stations around the country. You think it’s a bit of a challenge to make a mix tape for your girlfriend/boyfriend? Try programming 1200 radio stations with 24/7 music. I’m not saying this is a good idea, I’m just saying that they couldn’t do it without computers. Probably Steve Jobs should get involved and donate some of those super-creative Apple computers with i-Tunes connections and “golden ears,” because those big Unix mainframes, the ones Clear Channel must be using, are just not hip enough.

So I’m back to my CD’s. I have a friend with whom I have been exchanging cheap Christmas CD’s for ten years now. The rules are: one CD per year, bought at a grocery store or a pharmacy, and costing less than five bucks. I give her one, she gives me one, every year. Sometimes we break the one-disk rule when we find some really cheap CD’s, like in January (then we buy a few and hold them until the following Christmas – can’t give Christmas music in Superbowl season).

In this way I have accumulated…

• Elvis’ Christmas Album
• Nat “King Cole, The Christmas Song
• Tony Bennett, Snowfall
• Bing Crosby’s White Christmas
• the ever-popular Drug Emporium Traditional Holiday Favorites Volume 1

and a stack of generic collections of original hits and remakes by Hall and Oates, Brenda Lee, Bobby Helms, Burl Ives, Judy Garland. Pat Boone, Amy Grant, Chicago, Mary Hart(!), Lou Rawls, Don McLean, Donna Summer and more, more, more! I’m on a thirty-day binge of musical holiday cheer!

I’m still looking for The Beach Boys Christmas Album and Phil Spector’s Christmas (mono version). I have them on vinyl, and they’re all scratched from frequent rum- and egg nog-fueled playings and shufflings, plus they don’t work in the mp3 player. Not hearing these two classics is making me contemplate holiday self-mutilation, so please help. If you have one or both of these CD’s, for God’s sake burn me a copy! I’ll swap you my Drug Emporium compilation.

As always at Christmas time, my heart throbs with holiday good will for each of you.

I started right after Thanksgiving listening 24/7 to KOST 103.5 FM in Los Angeles.

They call this “KOST-ing” (pronounced “coasting”). They are playing nothing but Christmas music 24 hours a day until December 26th. I can’t believe I actually missed a couple days of this at the beginning, but I am on the Christmas train big time now, at work, in the car and during those otherwise introspective moments at home. I am Father Christmas, awash in good cheer.

But a byproduct of this total immersion is that one begins to realize how many Christmas songs have been remade by new, ever-younger performers, and each new generation seems (to me) to have gotten a little farther away from the original meaning of the song, until you end up with something like Whitney Houston’s hideous, overwrought version of A Christmas Song. Hey, Whitney: Christmas is supposed to be a time of hope and joy. You don’t have to torture every note until it cries for mercy.

Don’t get me wrong – I think Whitney is a gifted artist, and once we get a little distance on the substance abuse and the general flakiness we’ll no doubt begin to see her as a latter-day Billie Holliday, but I mean, I grew up with straight Christmas carols sung straight: Jingle Bells, Gene Autry singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, choirs doing Silent Night, 101 Strings with classics like God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. Oh, sure, over the years there have been some less-than-antique songs that have squirmed into the lexicon of classics: Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, Bobby Helms’ Jingle Bell Rock, Mel Torme’s original The Christmas Song.

Still, it always jars me when a new one comes along, and my natural inclination is to resist adding any new songs of the season. Like, I remember the first year I started hearing The Little Drummer Boy. It was by The Harry Simeone Chorale, and it arrived for Christmas, 1958. I was just a kid, but this song rubbed me the wrong way on several levels:

• The bible makes no mention of a drummer boy. So they are making up stuff that didn’t happen. And don’t throw Santa at me. This is my indignation. Go get your own.
• My own mother would have smacked me if I had beat on a drum around a newborn infant. I assumed the mother of God would do no less for her little savior.
• “The ox and lamb kept time?” Give me a break. Oxen and sheep have no rhythm.
• Who were those guys singing “Parumpa pum pum?” Couldn’t they find a real drum? Grown men making funny noises = just embarrassing, for everybody.
• Finally, it is not a gift to play a drum for a baby. A gift would involve giving something. He could have given the drum, for example. Then there would have been no song. Fine with me.

But the song hung in there, in spite of my scorn. Soon there were 150 covers of it, and 25 million recordings sold. Twenty-five million. How could it not be a classic? I mean, Christmas is all about the bling. Twenty-five million sales brings a lot of bling. So, long story short, I hated it for about five years, but now The Little Drummer Boy is one of my beloved Christmas favorites, heavy with the emotional freight of many holiday seasons. Eventually David Bowie got on board, and I saw him singing it on television with Bing Crosby! Talk about cognitive dissonance. But we’re not talking about that, are we?

But, in general, what do you think makes a young singer or band want to do a Christmas record (CD)? Is it because they just love Christmas, and want to share their excitement with the world? Or maybe they want to show the parents of their fans that they are not bad people, even though they have shaved their heads, injected pints of ink under their skin and wear safety pins as jewelry?

There’s probably a commercial reason (ya think?). Many of these recordings sound like throwaways, and yet there is an automatic audience for them, and KOST will play them for sure. When you’re looking for hundreds of hours of holiday programming you can’t afford to leave any stone unturned. But, even this early in the season, and as full of holiday spirit as I am, there are a few I wish I didn’t have to hear again:

• Barry Manilow, For All the Children. The children thank you, Barry. Now please go sit down.
• Rod Stewart and Dolly Parton, Baby It’s Cold Outside. This may be the only version in which a conclusion to the seduction is tacked on. Of course Rod wins Dolly over. She stays, he chuckles, creepily. In my dream about this, he can’t get it up, even to fuck her tits.
• The aforementioned Christmas Song, by Whitney Houston. This is done in the style of Mariah Carey, and Whitney should know better. Every note is drawn out with dips and trills until even a marathoner would be out of breath, and still the phrases go on and on. Just stop it!
• Barry Manilow again, for his almost-exact ripoff of an arrangement of Jingle Bells released in the 1940’s by Bing Crosby with the Andrews Sisters. Did he think he wouldn’t get caught at this?
• Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Bruce applies his own tortured growl to this happy little children’s song. At least they try to have a little fun with it, but really all I get from this is “Gosh, maybe Phil Spector really is a genius after all.” (Note: Springsteen’s version is a direct rip of The Crystals’ 1963 version on Phil Spector’s “Christmas Gift” LP. Can’t these guys think up their own arrangements?)
• Burl Ives, Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas. When this hayseed holiday classic hit the streets in 1965 I thought Burl Ives had been dead for at least ten years. Now it looks as if he’ll never go away. (Composer Johnny Marks also wrote Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and, incredibly, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree. I think if you are vocally flexible, you could sing Holly Jolly and Rockin’ Around to the same accompaniment. But really, why would you want to?)

However, I am Jones, not Scrooge, and I like stuff, too:

• Judy Garland’s lush, heartbreaking Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
• Please Come Home For Christmas, by Aaron Neville, The Eagles, B.B. King, and more.
• Elvis’ Blue Christmas. The King. ‘Nuff said.
• I’ll Be Home for Christmas by The Beach Boys. Has any boy’s choir sounded more angelic?
• John Lennon, Happy Christmas (War is Over). Hopeful and useless. My kind of song.
• Eurythmics, Winter Wonderland. Take me with you, Annie.
• Oh, Holy Night, Al Green. Absolutely spine-tingling. Tell it, Reverend.

You’ve got more, of course. What are they? Come on: ‘Tis the season for making lists.

So, Merry Christmas, everybody.

We’ve started to receive anonymous telephoned death threats at my office. The first calls came in the weekend before Thanksgiving. On Monday of that week I arrived to find my usual entrance was locked, and there was a typed sign on the door that read “Please Use Front Door.” I dutifully went to the front door and was confronted by uniformed cops. Not confronted, actually, but they gave me the once-over as I entered. Later I discovered that all the doors except that one were locked, so the police could see everyone who entered, and presumably trap the crazed gunman or booby-trapped terrorist inside the building. Personally I’d rather unlock the doors and get him outside the building and way down the street, pretty much as soon as possible. Cops will be cops, I guess.

When this first started one of the managers of my company went home, and he hasn’t been back to work for over a week. In the beginning I was told that the death threats were directed at him, and he was concerned for his safety and for his family. This made sense to me, as he is a miserable tyrant who attempts to demand respect without earning it. Nobody likes him – not his staff nor his customers. I’ve never met his family but I imagine they are not too pleased that he is now home with them 24/7. He has few discernible job skills and no tact or social grace. So yeah, who wouldn’t want to blow him away?

But now I hear from someone who spoke to the wannabe killer on the phone that the threats were somewhat generic, and any one of us could be in for it. (Disclaimer: I do not take this seriously in any way, despite the locked doors, police presence and now undercover security guards. You shouldn’t worry about me any more than I am worrying, which is not at all.) In the interest of not further compromising my already sketchy anonymity and losing my crummy job, I can’t utter the exact nature of our business here, but let it suffice to say that most people would like nothing better than to unleash a violent, bloody attack on our kind.

So where does this one guy get off taking the threat personally, and taking a whole bunch of time off to boot? The only positive thing I can see here is that maybe his fear has made him aware that he is a turd who needs to mend his ways a la Scrooge before it’s too late. But even that shining light is dimmed by the fact that he is getting a lot of free time while I have to stay here and work!

Well, I have a “real” office (closet-sized, but real) with a locking solid-core door and walls that go all the way up to the ceiling (eat your hearts out, cubicle workers). I have brought my pile of cheap supermarket Christmas CD’s to keep up my spirits and my adoring wife packs a lunch for me every day, so I could hold out in here for a couple of days in the event of a siege-slash-hostage-situation.

Now excuse me while I check the employee manual to see about hazardous duty pay.

I had a migraine a few days ago.

Not the kind I used to get when I was young, a blinding, debillitating pain that wracked my cortex for a day and a half and made me throw up, or want to, and took me out of commission for days afterward. I don’t get those anymore, but I still get migraines.

At least I think that’s what they are. It’s in my head, so no one can see what I see, and no one can tell me what I have. But I had a swirling, shifting, writhing, silvery blind spot in the middle of my field of vision, which over the course of forty minutes moved out to the edges and eventually went away, leaving my eyes unwilling to look at anything bright, my ears unwilling to listen to anything loud and my head full of gravelly cement.

These vestiges are still with me three days later. Everything is difficult. I walk the halls with my eyelids drooping, almost closed. My job, which is child’s play, seems impossible. Driving on the freeway I find my car rushing up to the back of other cars who aren’t going the right speed. In the mirror, my face is haggard and colorless. I wonder who I am, who is this man who can’t do anything, who can’t stay awake and can’t sleep. There’s a piece missing from the middle, an empty place where my identity should be.

I’ve been through this before, once or twice a year, and each time I am grateful that it isn’t worse, like when I was twenty-five, and I had to go to bed and hope for sleep because no amount of aspirin would help. I always wondered what brought these things on, and I never found out. I’m just glad that I no longer wake up disoriented, dirty and disheveled, in an alley behind a cantina in Juarez.

Fellow sufferers, tell me of your pain, as misery loves company.

One-Year Anniversary.

I just realized that today is exactly one year since my first post on this blog. I thought about it a couple of months ago, and decided I wouldn’t mark it with a nostalgic entry reminiscing about the things I’ve learned, the people I’ve met here and in real life, the blogs I read, the blogs that have come and gone and all the history that has taken place in the real world, blah, blah, blah. But then I forgot about it until just now.

Weirdly, it has been a rollercoaster ride for me. I wouldn’t have expected it to be, but there you go.

As always, my heart longs to fly to you.