Originally Posted by
YetiMan
There's a huge chasm below me. Once, 10 years ago I dropped a bowling ball off this bridge and counted 16 seconds before I heard it hit the bottom. When trucks pass the whole thing shakes. I've come out here every few days for the last few weeks because, really, I need to be here and think really hard about whether or not I can actually do. this. any. more. I guess I can, I have some reserve of ridiculous leftover ego that tells me I'm ok, even when rational thought says no. I have some useful purpose here. But I think that purpose was to close the loop on my little neighbor kid, who's now a big neighbor man, and now sits at the bar and points out all the important people in town who are his friends, and introduces me to the beautiful young women who hover around him and are clearly annoyed to be around me. I'm here to show him how bad it gets if you leave this sanctuary, if you leave Taos, if you leave this little corrupt place where you're handed the keys to the city if you're the chosen son, and when you leave the real world will crush you. See me, dude, see it and learn. So that's my role, to come back here so my one and only project that didn't turn to shit knows that he needs to stay here and be the fire chief someday.
But really, what else? What am I going to do? Watch TV, go to work? Ski ice bumps at TSV with my fat ass and my bad knee...The wind blows around and it occurs to me that I've never written an adequate explanation for jumping, which is what all these people who've been my friends and family through all of my selfishness and my ups and downs, what they deserve. I spent years trying to figure out why my dad cut it short, like it was me. If I know anything tonight it's that it wasn't me, it's jobs, it's knowing that you'll never have money and time at once, it's aging and weakening, and lonliness, and failure, and manifest inadequacy. It's that moment where you take stock and realize, accurately and rationally, that you're actually fucked and that fighting it is just like fighting any other wreck you know is inevitable. You might stay on your feet a little longer but you'll blow your acl trying. That's what it feels like right now. Like when I'm in a cardboard box I'll look back on this and think "yup, should have just hopped off the bridge that one time".
I have 5 and a half hours until I have to sit in a chair for 12 or 14 hours doing a job I hate. The only thing I have to look forward to is the Red Wings and really, who gives a shit about them anyway. I'm 32, right at the age of all their best players and I'm watching them, I'm not playing, I'm watching. I'm all but unemployable, all but homeless, and every night for months I've reconfirmed there's no god by praying that I die in my sleep tonight.
So, tomorrow, if I'm there at my shitty nightmare of a job, making my rent money for my shitty apartment in the shitty desert full of asshole indians who own everything and supervise me with their fucking 5th grade education and quasi-retarded english skills, I might remember to start on the long, long letter of explanation so everyone can understand that it's not their fault. It might be a few people's fault, because when a step son needs a job, or long time employee asks for some slack b/c it was a bad year with a lot of death, or whatever, a smart person has the cognizance to recognize that it might be the last straw. It feels like the last straw. Like in 5 hours when I go and start typing phone numbers into some excel document like a fucking bitch, there's really no reason to even do that. Because when a firefighter is reduced to sitting in a dispatch center like a god damned crippled woman it's the worst kind of insult. Every minute is like getting kicked in the nuts.
So fuck it. Tonight I don't have enough time. The last time I wrote an explanation of this complexity it was like 35 pages and it took 10 or so hours. I can't do it tonight, but one of these shitty days, unless somehow I die in my sleep or something finds a way to get better and I'm not some solitary bitch man beating a path between a sucky job and a sucky apartment, I'm going to find the time to write it all out and get this done with. I'm past my expiration date, just a matter of time.