This AM walk to the R train has me passing through what was, today in particular, a very crowded gathering of all-night revelers getting sustenance at the St. James Deli. Sometimes there is police presence but I did not detect that today. Just a lot more people than usual, with one especially beautiful woman seen getting into her car to the catcalls and comments of a group of 3 or 4 men. She had a smile on her face, and the shoutouts seemed respectful enough. WHere did they come from? Where do they go? Apart from the crowd I encountered a group of three woman, all cradling their screen-lit phones. I heard one say “I’m so fucking tired.”
I’m tired, too. Got to work over an hour early, and for no good reason except I like to type these musings for my future self to revisit and remember this period of my life, when a job I loved slowly became a philosophical version of hell: There is no challenge. There is no future. Philosophers would agree that this is a first-world version of hell, or at least hellishness.
THe bigger crowds were in my dreamspace last night. I barely could bring myself to wake from it, it was so raucous and bawdy. A certain ex-gf appeared on her revenge tour, stampeding through my house and destroying expensive paintings and artworks with scissors and sledgehammers. A large crowd of her supporters cheered her on her path of destruction, which she only broke away from to give me her famous sloppy, full-length blowjob that was the only reason we had to even know each other. In reality she is not angry at me and had no reason to be. We parted amicably when, believe it or not, I got tired of hours-long oral sex and conversation that felt like I was talking to a primitive chatbot. She also wanted anal, to which I said I did not, a decision I only somewhat regret. She got me to pee on her and that was probably the happiest I ever saw her. But those were brief moments. When she appeared at my apartment, usually around 6pm, she went straight to work and played every possible tongue and mouth game with me until 9pm,when, depending on her work schedule, she either went home or we went to my bed for a couple of hours. She was about half my age, assuming she wasn’t lying about that, and had a huge Italian family that had gatherings every Sunday and no one there ever knew anything about me. Her father was a couple of years younger than me.
But in the dream all was vengeance, suggesting to me that this woman was a composite character, because there is one ex whose anger toward me will probably never abate. White hot anger until she dies, with no forgiveness even though, as she admitted, I did nothing horribly wrong at any time in our relationship. I wasn’t perfect but who expects that? Her insecurity expressed itself in anger and nothing short of full bore rage, typically over incidents and situations that simply did not matter. I would almost sympathize with her at times when her vulnerability showed itself. She would start into screaming about something and up the volume the more she realized she had nothing on me. One of the weirder incidents was the 3am screaming fit regarding a comment I’d made about masturbation over a year earlier while we were sitting at the bar and long before we were even dating.
Ah, romance. I see no prospects for my immediate future, and I am fine with it. I’ve at least evolved as a male to a point where I no longer believe that having a woman in my life improves me as a person or makes me a better man. It just depends on the person, obviously, but being with someone does not change me, and cannot change me. It has the potential to make me happier, though. I’m not happy with my life these days. Laziness is my foil but something has got to give.
I read somewhere that the trick to finding meaning in a dead-end job is to befriend someone you work with. I tried as hard as I reasonably could to do that but it just hasn’t worked. This place is different from previous jobs, where I could pick up conversation with coworkers from 20 years ago the same today as back then. Previous jobs felt like family. Here, there is nothing to talk about, and no one knows how to laugh. There is only one guy I was able to make laugh and it was shocking to me when it happened.
Laughter is a researchable phenomenon. Most would say that it is a signal of happiness but I disagree. I think it is a signal of nervousness, or discomfort. You don’t laugh at a comedian because she mkes you happy, you laugh because she exposes some fallacy or disconnect. Laughter gets credit for representing happiness because it hijacks the gesture of the smile. A mere smile may indicate happiness but slapped on top of laughter it has a very different meaning.
People here do not laugh.