At home today. Maybe all day. Maybe all week, all year, all life. Feeling the pull, away from the job I so wanted. You could even say it was a dream job of mine. It has not morphed into a nightmare. It’s not like that. It’s just a practical perspective that says I’ve taken it for all I wanted. It is not paying my rent and it is draining my soul to the clitoris I never knew inhabited the hollows of my brain.
Wondering when I lost my ability to do what I’m doing at this moment. Sit at the desk and type. I go crazy when posting from work or anywhere else. But here at home it feels hopeless, like I’m filling a silo that continuously increases in depth and width to where every letter of these words flickers into oblivion.
I should be most comfortable here, should I not?
It could be environment. I have three monitors now, one dedicated almost exclusively to porn. That setup is, needless to say, not conducive to focus or concentration. So at this moment the porn screen and the other monitor are dark. Just this screen.
I just got up to put on pants, remembering as I crossed the room a conversation with a woman who used to live with me. She believed shoes should never be worn indoors. I do not disagree with the custom of removing shoes indoors, considering what we step in while walking about in the great wilderness of New York.
But I made the point, which she did not dispute, that I wear shoes when working at home because it makes me feel like I am somewhere, not just puttering around the living room. Shoes are amazing like that, right?
A few minutes ago I looked at my face in the mirror. Earlier, in the shower, I cut my chin shaving. A bloody mess that for whatever reason healed almost instantly. I don’t get ill at the site of my own blood but it was a small bit surprising to see bright red streaks on my right hand. Looking for the cut in the mirror turned up nothing, but some zits remain. I believe the zits are work related.
As I looked away from the mirror I thought “They’ll go away.” Somehow those words “go away” can only remind me of my mother and her conflicted messages about what she wanted me to do with my life after college. She wanted me to “go away” and her frequent question when I entered a room was “What are you doing here?” or “What do you want?” asked in a sullen, disconnected way. She wanted me out until I was out. Then the talk was toward my inevitable failure in life, failure in New York, and inevitable return home.
That failure may have happened in some respects but I never seriously considered going back. I didn’t care for the city, the climate, the culture. All but one of my friends have moved on while my family remains in the house where we grew up. I could consider moving into that house some day or other but I’d have to hit absolute rock bottom for that to occur.
I’m supposed to get a colonoscopy, this after reading a credible-seeming report that said the revered procedure said to detect and prevent spread of all kinds of cancers is, in fact, not really all that effective. It sounds like I’ll be sedated again. That happened last year when I had 2 teeth pulled. It’s not the only time I’ve been fully sedated but getting those teeth pulled is the only real surgery I’ve ever had. Other sedations were for non-invasive endoscopies, where the camera-tipped tube slithered down my throat looking for nativity scenes and feral horses.
I’m going to put on a shirt and shoes now, for full comportment, full feeling of relevance and importance.
Shirted now, albeit with a Charlie Brown garment. Not terribly businesslike but who’s watching? That webcam atop the porn monitor is covered so no spies should be able to intercept this fascinating passage of time, in which a man sitting naked and alone at his desk becomes fully clothed, article by article, becoming a respectable looking creature all in all.
Next to my chair, on the floor, is a pile of socks, mostly black, some grey, mostly thermal. I take them off each night I come home and sit at the desk. The weeks worth of socks has formed quite a comfortable looking pile, comfortable with the warmth and pillowy density. I would not want to rest my head on a weeks worth of possibly stinky socks but the image that pile creates is of comfort.
Almost all my socks have holes in them now but not the thermals. It’s the short socks that I wear out quickly. Those are the socks I wear on epic long walks of double-digit mileage. I can’t do so many of those nowadays, which is fine with me, but I do occasionally wish I could wake up and, as in years past, say to myself “Today I walk.”
Such a sadness in that kind of walking, though. A searching. The modern-day flâneur is not the cosmopolitan person of leisure who has time and means to comfortably amble about town, observing things and compiling observations into combustible conclusions.
Today’s flâneur is directionless, not quite lost, on the verge of becoming unmoored but still tethered to rituals of cultural norms.
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