Got some sun yesterday, more than I’ve absorbed in a long while. Today there’s a headache and some burn on my neck. How I suffer. I was working on other things but when I saw the bright, hot sun beating down I could not stay put. I revisited my flaneur tendencies, just wandering around familiar places.

I have finally been able to inject these tendencies into my workday, turning the lunch hour into a stramble against time. I made it as far as the Whitehall Terminal nad back, but I’ve also made it northeast to Greenwich Street. Being in Lower Manhattan had never really been much of an influence or factor in me working here, until recently. I like but don’t love this area. So many tourists and, in clusters, a lot of college kids. Nothing wrong with college kids so long as they stay away from the bars, which some of them do not. 

Yesterday I got caught up on some things. I chose a new PCP, after my previous one mysteriously disappeared as an option on my network. I hope he retired but I suspect he just didn’t like the commute. He ordered my first ever colonoscopy then disappeared before it was performed. He was cool in that he filled prescriptions for controlled substances without requiring in-person appointments.

…

It is the next day. Friday June 7. Had a new air conditioner installed last week. It has been mostly fine but the last couple of days I wake up with a slight headache. It goes away but could the a/c be to blame? Maybe it’s the hammers with which I sleep, or the hostile kangaroos I rescued from their feral forest and let sleep on my nocturnal pasture.

At the workplace, and hour early as usual. It happens here, almost every day but probably not today, that the people I work with rise up into a tidal wave of laughter and apparent joy. If I can even decipher what the impetus for thi slaughter is I virtually always fail to comprehend what about it merits gutteral guffaws and horking chortles, not to mention tears and sinus evacuations.

This is not happiness. Laughter and this type of behavior may resemble happiness for having hijacked the smile, a universal symbol of happiness. But really this kind of cathartic expulsion of internal energy reflects insecurity, unease, and something deeper that I am failing to articulate at this moment. It’s not that much deeper. In fact, it is not deep at all. People are insecure and herdable.

I don’t really know anybody here. I talk to some people, and it’s fine. But in terms of who’s who my understanding barely extends past my immediate bosses. Apparently there are “senior” ranking people in charge of everything but I have never understood who they are or what they do. I’m sure they do great things, and maybe I would know more about that if I knew who they were. Do they know who I am? Probably not, at least not specifically. I’m just a slug in the system, a cog on the wheels. I’m fine with that, although I remind myself of something my mother said (paraphrasing): A smart person with nothing to do is very dangerous. I have things to do here but they are meaningless to me and may as well amount to nothing.

I have very deliberately kept my life outside of work off limits to any discussions here. No one needs to know. I appear here to do the work and go home or somewhere else to either drink or have sex, depending on the day of the week. That is no one else’s business any more than they’re post-work routines having any ………………… what am I really saying here???