My eyes are shut and I can see the glowing outlines of the veins inside my head. If I keep them shut for long enough they’ll fade away. And I’ll look like an insane person sleeping in a Starbucks on a Thursday afternoon.
I’ve done stranger things I suppose.
Everything is now red and white and redolent of cinnamon sugar coffee syrups. Thankfully we’ve yet to be bombarded by the caterwauling Christmas music that seems to begin immediately after the the first pumpkin is smashed on November 1st.
What am I doing sitting here on a Thursday afternoon? Well, I’ve switched jobs. I no longer work at that restaurant on the upper west side. In fact it lasted all of a month. I don’t have time for mean queens and catty wannabe actresses who will never know the feeling of real joy as they try to get by in the ‘big city’ by out-cunting one another. I’ll just never understand why being mean is considered to be so cool. I’m not a particularly joyful individual but at least I take my misery out on MYSELF. Get with it, folks.
I’m now working at a bar in Astoria that touts epicurean cocktails not served since the prohibition era made by beautiful, bearded, vest-clad “mixologists” behind a dimly lit up cycled wooden counter.
Essentially a hipster’s wet dream.
So… how do I fit in? Well our glorified sports bar also offers table service where we’ll bring you well plated cheese fries and quesadillas at prices likely three times what they’re worth.
But I’m grateful for it. I no longer have to commute into Manhattan. I no longer have to deal with a cesspool of alcoholic misanthropic twenty-somethings. Okay… the alcoholic part still remains. But I’m beginning to accept that every person I encounter who is of an age within 10 years of mine is a high functioning alcoholic. I think it comes with the territory of living in a society that inundates its young a steady feed of fantasy for which to strive but could never actually attain. The alcohol suppresses the gnawing reality of the broken dreams that now define our lives.
Survival of the fittest in a capitalist system that cannot properly thrive without the firm, inextricable bedrock of the poor and underclass. A strange and cruel juxtaposition – force-feeding a lifestyle unto those who can least afford to sustain any semblance of it. I’ll admit when I see someone who has achieved even a reasonable amount of comfort or success, I’m wary of who that person has stepped on in order to have arrived there.
So how do I see any hope? What motivates me?
Nothing really. Maybe pervasive loneliness. Boredom. Swimming through a perpetual state of just being “over it,” tapping my veins to see if anything will give me a sense of life again. As of late it’s been nothing. I’m numb just like everybody else. Hyper-connected and still wholly unaware of what’s really going on. In ten minutes I’ll leave this place to go to the gym, not to stay in shape but to give myself something to do. Something that feels productive. Positive. After all, how could going to the gym ever be a bad thing?
Well, I could clean my shit storm of a room. Or better yet offer to clean my shit storm of a house in which I’m living rent free. I could apply for a job that actually requires a resume. Maybe sign up for some volunteer work.
Nah. I don’t see a point.
But somehow I see the point of running aimlessly on a treadmill until I stop hating myself… even if it’s just for a moment.
Yay, cardio!
