So Much To Say
I wake up in the morning, tired. I get up, make the beds, grab the laundry basket and head downstairs. I put on a pot of coffee and make the kids breakfast, while my wife makes their lunches for school. We do the dishes together, we drink coffee together, we talk about our days and the monotony which lays ahead. Then she drives them to school with one vehicle and I drive to work with the other.
The office is quiet until it isn’t. Then it’s filled with nonsense. One of my bosses, Greg Davies, talks about Trump.
“Should be fucking killed. Should be shot in the head.”
The other boss, Andrew Tomes, doesn’t watch the news, but he likes to talk. So he doesn’t like these conversations because he’s forced to listen. When he gets his chance, he changes the subject to one he knows a lot about. People. Then everyone else is forced to listen.
Greg nods, and smiles, fake laughing at the right points, then slowly returns his gaze to the computer screen. Andrew leaves, talking to himself as he enters his office and Greg laughs.
“Christ, can he ever talk.” I smile and nod, not confident enough in the thickness of the walls, to say that my boss never shuts his mouth.
It’s semi-quiet for a little while, but then the noise starts up once again. First, with Andrew’s Zoom meetings in his office. He’s partially deaf so he speaks at volume one thousand. He tells the same tired jokes about tariffs (he doesn’t watch the news but he knows that much) and laughs before adding, “I know the meeting isn’t about tariffs because if it was, I could go on all day about it. (No he couldn’t. He couldn’t go any further than he just has.)
I share an office with Greg, and every once in a while, he tries to get the political discussion started again. “You know why he’s doing this eh?” I turn around, hoping he isn’t talking to me, but I know that he is. “I’m not really sure.” I answer. “So he can crash the market, buy a shitload of property cheap and sell it all high. He’s crazy, but he isn’t stupid. He knows who his audience is. He knows exactly what he’s doing.” “Yeah, that sounds about right.” I answer, sounding like Andrew, (We both know I could go on about this all day, if I wanted to. But unfortunately, I have work to do.)
I decide to google some news and read it quickly so that maybe I have something else to add. But I don’t, and the articles are as dry as desert air. I just don’t care, though I should. I know, I should.
Around 10am, Andrew’s wife, Julie comes in. If anyone could take the verbal diarrhea award away from Andrew, it’s Julie. It’s about her mom, always her mom. She’s pushing 90, and she is as stubborn as a mule. Greg’s her brother, Andrew’s her husband. It’s all family in the building, and so each day in the office is like a Thanksgiving reunion.
“Do you know what that woman did today?” She asks, and answers before anyone else has a chance to. “She gave seven thousand dollars to a fucking stranger.” This gets Greg’s attention, and mine too. Although it’s all being said right in front of me, I don’t look over. But I listen. Because why not? I’m bored as shit. “Some scammer called her and apparently he sounded like cousin Benny. He tells her he’s in jail in Mexico. Can you believe that? Says he needs seven grand for bail. So what does mother do? She walks down to the bank, takes out the money and a man shows up at her house and takes the cash.”
Greg and Julie talk about this for a half hour, ignore a few customers that come in, while Andrew is shouting at the top of his lungs on his Zoom call. I think about a video I saw on Facebook earlier. A man is saying that the office is where productivity lives and the home is where it dies. He’s arguing against office workers working from the comfort of their homes. “The office,” he says, “Is where the magic happens.” I look around the dimly lit office. Mother handing out her retirement savings to a man who knocked at her door has gone back to Trump. Somehow, his idiocy as a President is related to his elderly mother losing seven grand.
“Should have killed him when they had the chance.”
This is where magic goes to die.
2.
I work in a wood manufacturing plant, by the way. On the marketing side. My job is to find suitable clients across the globe who’d be interested in buying some high end hardwood. All wood that I wouldn’t be able to afford in ten lifetimes, the irony isn’t lost on me. I need to act like a big player. Big man with big money, and talk to architects, designers, and all sorts of folks with money to burn and aesthetic appeal engraved in their brain. I talk like I know, but I don’t. (Fake it till you make it, right?)
I spend a lot of time staring at a blank screen and having fake conversations with my boss. Conversations where I have balls, actual balls, to walk into his office, sit down next to him and say, “I want a raise. A nice big raise or I’m walking.”
He says, “Sure. Just tell me a number, and it’ll be on your next pay.”
And I give him a big fat six figure number. I come home and tell my wife.
We pay off our debts, and in the fantasy we even make love afterwards. Doing all the things that I’m too afraid to ask her to do.
But I say none of it. Courage isn’t my cross to bear, and in reality, I don’t even know if I deserve it. The world, it seems, has just made it hard to live comfortably. And so because of that, I feel I’m worth more than I receive. I feel like I’m worth a shitload of money, because it takes a shitload of money to live. But I don’t know what I’m worth. I don’t have a clue.
I can’t run around throwing ultimatums around. Because the reality of the conversation could just as easily go like this.
“I want a raise, a big raise or I’m walking.”
“Nope.”
“Uh, what?”
“Yeah, I said, no. Leave if you’re going to leave or go back to your desk.”
Then I’d have to walk back to my desk, my shoulders slumped and my junk between my legs. Feeling worse off than before. No more money, but a clear realization about my value and what I bring to the team. It all might just be too much to bear. Then my conversation at home might go something like this.
“Honey, I’m HOOOMMEEE! And guess what?”
“What?” She asks excitedly. “I lost my job. So no more money coming in. Say, can we do that thing that I fantasize about all the time. You know. The move.”
“Get fucked! I’m leaving. Come on kids. Daddy is nothing but a loser.”
“Loser daddy! Loser daddy! Loser daddy!” They chant as they walk out of the house in unison.
So I click away on my laptop. Clickity, click. Clickity click. And I turn around and look at Greg.
“Trump is a fucking madman. You know what I mean?”
“I could go on about it all day.” He says.
“Tell me about it. Tell me about it.”
3.
My brain and I used to be pals, you know? I can’t remember when the breakup occurred, but it seems it was a messy one. A real messy one. Trauma City.
“What did I ever do to you?” I ask it sometimes.
“You had the nerve to grow up.”
“Well what are my other options?”
“You know what they are.”
“But I don’t want that.”
“Well, if you don’t want it. Then deal with it. Deal with the mess. Clean up as best you can but don’t ever expect it to be squeaky clean. Because another shit storm is always over the horizon, you know?”
“I guess”
“You’re learning. You’re learning.”
4.
In the afternoon I drive home for lunch. It’s only a five minute drive, and with the wife and kids at work, I enjoy having a few moments of silence. A few moments where I don’t have to pretend. Sometimes there are leftovers and when there aren’t, I just pour myself a bowl of mini wheats and eat them in the silence as the cat paces and meows at me to give him attention.
The TV is off and I stare at myself in the dark reflection. I contemplate a couple of things. Having a nap, or unzipping my jeans and having a go at myself. Not because I really want to, but because I’m alone, and I don’t have many opportunities to be alone. But I end up doing neither.
I walk over to the spare room and grab my guitar from the stand and strum a few chords as I look at myself in the mirror. I can feel that I’m having one of those days. Just one of those days where it feels that each step I’ve taken had to have been the wrong one. No doubt about it. But that’s loneliness and selfishness creeping in.
“Deal with it.” My brain says.
“Or you know what your other option is.”
“Shut up, would ya?”
“Make me.”
“You’re being childish.”
“I know you are but what am I?”
“An idiot.”
“Then what does that make you?”
“An idiot.”
“Bingo. Nail on the head. Grand prize. Winner winner chicken dinner.”
I strum some more chords. The same tired chords, because I haven’t learned anything new in half a decade. Chords in the key of G, chords in the key of E, a couple of a lame attempts at a solo, and then I sing a partial song that I’d written a few years back that could have possibly been something, had I persevered and finished the damn thing, but of course, I didn’t. I sing the first line, “Here I am back home again, not a boy, maybe not a man, just a soul trying to do what he can, planting a seed in a dry desert land.”
Not bad. Pretty good. Never finished it, and never will, but not too bad.
I put the guitar back up on the stand that hangs next to a poster of the Rolling Stones. Exile on Main Street. Cool shit. Cool band.
I sit on the lazy boy for a few minutes, and realize that I’m pacing like the fucking cat. I get annoyed at the cat for pacing so much. In the kitchen, downstairs, upstairs, back in the kitchen, the spare room, back to the living room, the kitchen. Pick a spot and sit down for Christ sakes. But I’m doing the same thing aren’t I? Hard to find a place to go when it’s your skin you’re looking to escape, I suppose.
One more thought about checking out some porn on my phone before saying, fuck it, and heading back to work. So much on my mind. So much I want to say. But if I haven’t said it by now, well, what does that mean?