It’s taken a while but I think I’ll settle on new routes to and from work. They take a little longer but I think it will be worth not having to make 1 or even 2 transfers. Today’s AM trek felt like I was in another time and place. The W train was almost empty, with the train conductor absolutely screaming each station stop, with extra flourishes like “iF THIS IS YOUR DESTINATION HAVE A WONDERFUL SAFE DAY AND THANK YOU FOR RIDING NEW YORK CITY TRANSIT!” The volume and the timbre of the man’s hoarse, thunderous voice was grating on my nerves and altogether out of character for the emptiness of the train. I think today is some kind of holiday, as was yesterday.
I’m here early. I’ve been waking up early this week, with bothersome boners and restless nightmares that barely let me sleep. Sleep. It’s not really my happy place but lately I discovered how sweetly I sleep after taking the morning meds. I breathe steady and my body feels serene. Normally I take the pills and then shower, which is probably not wise. BP pills to calm you and a shower to ril you up.
Not much makes me angry but today it happened. I dropped one of my anxiety pills onto the floor and it scampered off underneath the stove, where I don’t even want to know what life forms and plant fauna have taken root. It is basically an unreachable spot, and my pills are valuable to me. I stay ahead, though, so I can absorb a loss like this. At this point I think I am 4 or 5 months ahead on the usual daily dosages of 1mg. But losing one pill like that is extremely angrifying because it’s just so stupid. It’s like the pill takes on human qualities and gets the fuck away from being EATEN.
If I stick to the new morning commute my arrival will be a little less sodden. Rising up from Fulton Station onto Broadway usually means navigating a small group of homeless people sleeping outside the elevator. I could conceivably make it all the way to John Street underground. I didn’t try that route today. I went through the Oculus, a space I find irritating and repellent even in small doses. Today, exiting the W station through the Oculus and turning back toward Dey Street, upon reaching Broadway there was a tall black man with his pants down handcuffed and under arrest by NYPD. I heard him yelling “I didn’t push you over.” He is obviously in some kind of trouble. His day will go very differently than mine, not that our lives have any reason to intersect even mentally. Of course I could have been the person he allegely pushed over. It was probaby a random act. He looked bugged out on some kind of substance. I did not recognize him. But his day will be long and tedious, possibly spent in a jail cell. I could use this crossing of paths to give myself fresh appreciation for the relative comfort of this prison in which I find myself.
Yesterday was a bad day. The soreness is almost completely gone but next time I get a brilliant idea to get vaccinated for three things at once I’ll do it with a couple of days clearance afterward. Yesterday should have been a recovery day but here I was at the workplace, bulging sore on both shoulders and even feeling a little pain in my neck. I have pretty high threshold for pain so it’s not like I was moaning or complaining. But it does make things uncomfortable, and it was not just physical pain. I was having bad thoughts. Harmful thoughts. A certain feeling of air blowing through the holes in my body makes bad, rotten thoughts feel like common sense.
What am I talking about? I don’t know. I looked for peer group apps, if such things exist, and of course they do. Are there peer groups for depression, anxiety, and thoughts of self harm? Probably so but they likely come with the caveat that if you express yourself in a coaxed, litmus test kind of way they will haul you into a cell, handcuffed and hog tied, for at least three days of observation, interrogation and humiliation. So I have to find one which allows anonymity, and that has to be anonymity that I can trust.
Hey, now, a cute girl I said hello to a couple of times last week has taken her usual seat in the opposite corner of this room. I don’t know if she is intrigued or creeped out but last week, before taking 4 days off, I think I detected in her a sudden awareness that I was appearing in her parts of the office with sudden frequency. That’s not really true. As has been noted, I walk and walk and walk during my downtime here, getting the 10,000 steps in even as this is not a job one would connect to activeness or walking. It’s true, I step through her corner of the floor but I’d been doing that for months before she caught my eye.
I just let loose a monster, messy, embarrasingly-three-flush buttblast. Hardly anyone is here today so I don’t detect any of the cult of people who sit outside bathrooms studying and assessing the habits and hygienes of those who shit and piss there. Do they take mental notes of those who flush and immediatly exit the bathroom without washing their hands? I know people do this but I cannot be certain if I work with members of that cult. Whatever the case, I think I got away with this episode. Nobody would be seeing me around the office today thinking “That dude had to flush 3 times today. Wonder how many wipes he performed?”
Yes, I feel fine today. I resumed the act of making my own sammiches for lunch. I don’t know how long that will last. I was always skeptical that it was worth the time, or that it saved me more than a buck or two over buying a deli sammie. But the quality of the food is improved, no doubt. Whatever that’s worth.
