iii.
As I continue down Hawthorne, I watch the woman I see each morning, hauling ass in her Kia, half-eaten Danish in her mouth, looking down at her phone, ignoring the posted twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit. Though every day it’s the same, I’m suddenly angry. My mood shifts from contemplative to enraged. I want to throw something at her car—a rock, a stick. Some days I search the ground for an object, as if I really plan to do it. I want to scream, “Slow the fuck down!” But I never do. Instead, I stand there, fuming, hoping she doesn’t hit anyone—a kid at the bus-stop, some random pedestrian. I hate this woman, though we’ve never met. I hate her, perhaps, because we’ve never met, because it’s easier to hate someone you haven’t met than walk down the street and knock on her door and say, “You drive too fast. The kids play out here. Could you slow down?” I know where she lives. I’ve seen her car parked in the driveway, yet she’s come to represent, through repetition, every driver I’ve ever seen who does this, so I’ve cast her as a scapegoat. I could talk to her and maybe she’d stop. But I can’t stop every driver, everywhere, from doing this, from hurtling on their way to nowhere.
Where do you have to be that you drive so fast?
Then again, I’ve done it. Attention wanders. Your foot gets heavy on the gas. You realize you’re speeding, but you’re lucky, and no one’s stepped in front of you. I’ve read that pedestrians have a twenty-percent chance of survival if they’re hit by a car doing forty, and I can’t help but think of Sadie, the joy in her eyes whenever we step outside to play. “Shoes on!” she says. She carries them to me. She runs around the driveway while I hover at the edge to stop her from going into the street. How happy the outdoors makes her, the way she collects sticks and piles them on the porch steps, the way she sidles up to flowers and smells them, the way she brushes her hands over the texture of their petals, how she collects leaves and imbues each with its own special meaning. This was something I did when I was young, personifying the most ordinary objects, assigning them value. Yet, the vigilance I have to maintain to ensure my daughter doesn’t get hurt while doing something as simple as sitting on the front lawn is exhausting. I’m not talking about her tripping and skinning her knee. What I mean is her falling off the six-foot embankment above the creek that runs past our house. What I mean is her tripping down the stone steps in our backyard that lead to the basement. What I mean is her eating the mushrooms that grow in the shade of our sycamore and poisoning herself. She likes to run, and when she runs, I run. When she stands and starts to move, I stand and start to move, too. I have to make sure she doesn’t wander into traffic or get snatched by someone. But I can’t control every aspect of her life, protect her every minute of the day.
When she started daycare, I was a wreck. The unknown space, unknown people. We’d toured it, met the teachers. We had friends whose children attended the same school. Yet, the first day, after we left, I was fretting. What if she chokes on her lunch? Does the staff know the Heimlich? Are they trained in CPR? Questions I should have asked but didn’t.
On my Facebook feed that morning, I’d spotted an article about a daycare worker who killed a three-year-old in the Midwest. The girl had refused to take off her coat, and the daycare worker pushed her. The girl had hit her head and died in the hospital. My wife was downstairs packing lunch, and I sat, staring at the screen. It was a small daycare, the article said. The woman was the only caregiver for a group of four children. She’d lost her temper.
My mind went to work.
A small daycare, it said. Ours was bigger. There were two adults for every room. I assumed this was a way of keeping their behavior in check, preventing this from happening. I hid the post, as though hiding it could erase what I’d read, revoke what had happened. One daycare worker in thousands across the country had lashed out. It doesn’t happen everywhere, every day. I hid the person who posted the article as well, someone I’d gone to high school with, a woman who had her own kids and liked to share articles about parents leaving children in hot cars while they went to the bar or shopped at Walmart. When we first took Sadie in, she’d cried but soon settled down, and now she’s used to it, used to people. When we take her to parties and see our friends, she warms up in a few minutes and roams about saying hello to everyone. She’s learned the alphabet, colors. She can count to twenty. And though I would have liked to teach her these things myself, I rarely have the time or energy.
I cross another street. The houses and lawns stream past in a blur. I reach Brookside Avenue and cut across the train station parking lot. Aside from saying hello to Heather and staring down the speeding woman, I’ve coasted to the station in a daze. I’d looked at some of the houses on the way, passed other people, but I’d hardly seen them. Part of this is early morning fatigue. Part of it’s the fact that I’ve walked this stretch of road so many times, I don’t see it anymore. I cross streets without a glance, trusting reflex over consciousness. I’ve walked this way so often I can feel the cars and buses on my periphery. It’s not sight alone but all my senses working together to absorb the world. The air’s turned brisk overnight, but the light jacket I wear is enough to keep the chill off. The trees are changing color, and I trudge through piles of leaves, picking them up in the cuffs of my pants as I go.
It’s funny how when you travel to distant places you notice every detail, yet I couldn’t describe a single house on this street. How would I see it if I hadn’t been concerned with the proprietary rights of a potato, questioning who the lawn shitter was, saying hello to Heather? The woman speeding in her Kia had set me on edge, and whenever I’m angry I can’t focus. But I have to snap out of this. There are things I need to do. I have to get a flu shot, I have call Sadie’s dentist to make an appointment. I shift my bag from one shoulder to the other. I don’t carry much—a planner, a notebook, whatever novel I’m reading. Still, it weighs on me, my shoulders, neck, and back, over the day-to-day distances I cover. Justine gave me a gift certificate for a massage at her chiropractor last Christmas, but I haven’t used it. Part of the reason is that I keep forgetting about it, but mostly, I hate calling strangers, scheduling appointments. Of course, this is an important part of life, so I deal with it. Especially when I have to do it for Sadie, but I procrastinate when it’s for me. Before Sadie was born, I hadn’t had a physical for years, but I’d scheduled one to update my vaccinations. And thinking of this reminds me about the flu shot. I’ve been putting it off. I just need to head to the walk-in clinic at my doctor’s office and get it done. It’s three blocks from my office. I pull out my phone and glance at the time: 7:06. I’m catching the 7:10 and won’t be able to stop before work. I’ll have to go during lunch, which means I’ll probably forget again. I pull out a pen and write on my hand “flu shot,” but I’ll probably end up washing it off the first time I go to the bathroom today.
As I reach the station, I approach a small stone building with dark green paint flaking from its trim. There’s a café inside, a ticket booth, restrooms. Two green dumpsters stand out back with signs that threaten a fine for public dumping. Maybe I should put one of those in my bushes. The smells of freshly-cooked eggs and bacon waft from a vent. The sky’s a grayish-blue, the sun muted, drifting behind pink clouds in the distance. It’s the type of day I’d enjoy if I didn’t have to work, but then, I enjoy any day I don’t have to work. I stand on the platform and take it in, this ephemeral beauty.
The platform’s crowded. I wedge my way across, dodging commuters to find the crack in concrete where I know the doors will open when the train stops. These are the little things you pick up in years of travel, the best way to position yourself to board a crowded car. I let pregnant women and elderly passengers board before me, but my sense of courtesy ends there. There’s no etiquette, and this creates a mob mentality when fighting for seats. At times, I try to rise above it. Step back. Let everyone board before me and take whatever’s left, only to watch as others who arrive later than the rest of us cut in, fight their way to the front. Then, I find myself drifting off to sleep on my feet while some spry eighteen-year-old gets a seat. I watch men half my age act huffy about moving their bags when someone asks to sit in the space where their bag is. Or worse, they let themselves spill past the confines of one seat, so that when someone sits in the other, they have to lean into the aisle, and I go back to fighting like everyone else, observing my elderly/pregnancy rule, boxing out as many others as I can. But I try to be conscientious of how much space I’m taking. I place my bag on my lap, keep my legs closed, my elbows parallel rather than spread, even when I’m holding a book to read. I’d like to think I’m a decent person to sit next to, though this could be another delusion, like how I want to be generous but then I’m not, even when generosity in this sense—in the sense of giving up a seat and simply standing—would be the easiest thing in the world. There’s always some justification that lets me keep my seat: I didn’t sleep well. I hurt my ankle running. The person I intend to give my seat to is too far away and calling out and offering my seat would be awkward. Not to mention, is it condescending to offer your seat to someone who looks older than you? Isn’t assuming that age makes them too feeble to stand insulting? I get lost in thoughts like these, and the ride passes and I don’t give up my seat. Then I get depressed that I’ve allowed something this petty to occupy my thoughts and wish we had an established set of rules, so I could observe them and be done with it instead of having to invent my own and not living up to them because I can’t police my own behavior.
I look around and wonder how many can, what’s the caliber of people here? In the course of my commute, I see the same people every day—people I’ve spotted walking dogs near my house or jogging around the neighborhood, people I’ll never know, never introduce myself to, though I’ve seen them in this same spot every morning for years. I’m sure some recognize me as well. They’ve seen me ambling around with my daughter, stopping at the library or pizza place. And even though they recognize me and I recognize them, we’ll never introduce ourselves. Most exude a proper sheen of normalcy, standing there. They read the Metro newspaper or the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, or they watch the track for the inbound train coming around the bend. But of course, there are others who engage in strange behaviors, noticeable deviations from routine, and I stop what I’m doing to observe them whenever they’re near me.
There’s a middle-aged man who stands on the platform with his iPhone and updates the rest of us when the train’s late. He tells us how many minutes past its arrival time it’s expected. When the train comes and passengers glom up the doors, he hovers at the edge, pate covered with a Philadelphia Phillies’ baseball hat, bobbing his head back and forth like a baby bird’s. At first I thought he worked for SEPTA, the company that owns the transit system, but he doesn’t. He just likes doing this. So I’ve dubbed him, in the whimsy of boredom that overcomes me as I wait, Mr. SEPTA. A certain kind of man, I can see him in high school, running for student council treasurer, since president would be beyond his grasp. He’d organize pep rallies, canned food drives. Ask him a question in science class, he’ll explain the concept, not in a simple way to help you understand, but in a complex mode to make him sound smarter than he is. He longs to be seen as sturdy, reliable. He stores batteries and flashlights and bottled water in his basement in case of emergencies. He tests his smoke detectors once a month. Did I say I’ve nicknamed him? I’ve invented a life story for him, a narrative. Still, in spite of his peculiarities, I don’t dislike him the way I dislike other platform people. There’s another oddball, an immense heap of man-child I see at the end of the day. He knows where to wait for the doors too, and he stands real close to me, pleated khakis, winter coat in all seasons but summer, gigantic generic shoes. He has all the subtlety of a bull—flaring nostrils; spastic, huffing demeanor—and he’s made an unofficial competition out of who boards first.
When I get to the platform before him, he stands on top of me, invading my space. I should back off, but I get a perverse pleasure out of besting him. If the train comes and I’m able to box him out, I’ll let five or six passengers board before us because this bothers him. I can sense the change in his breathing, the way his body twitches behind me. There’s something wrong with him and he’s probably dangerous, but some days I can’t help myself. One time he boarded before me and made eye contact and mouthed the word “Yeah!” while pumping his fist. I’ve invented a life for him, too. He lives in his mom’s basement, spends hours on first-person shooter games and clips of Internet porn. I worry he’ll push me in front of a train someday. But he’s only there at the end of the day, so I don’t have to worry now.
I board and spot an opening next to a mousy college girl. She has her head pressed against the window, sleeping. This is one way to avoid questions of etiquette: opting out, a self-imposed oblivion. But I’ve never liked sleeping on trains. I feel too exposed, concerned I’ll miss my stop, worried someone will pick my pocket, stick a knife in me. I’m careful when I sit not to knock into her. I slide the strap of my bag off my shoulder, turn the satchel sideways, and put it on my lap. I take out the novel I’m reading but gaze about, watching passengers.
When I’m sitting, I get odd ideas, ideas that have little basis in fact, and right then, I wonder what I’d do if a rampage shooter opened fire on the train. It’s something I consider more often than I’d like to admit. Maybe it’s another reason I don’t sleep. I’d like to be conscious when I die, aware it’s happening, maybe a little drugged to take the edge off. I think about this to test myself, weigh my options. Where would I go? In the confines of a rocking train car, a crowded car, there’d be little I could do. I could jump up and run and get shot, or I could sit and get shot. These are two likely outcomes. But I’d like to think I’d rush him. The fantasy in my head involves him not seeing me, me getting up and tackling him, no casualties, me as hero. Because who doesn’t want to be a hero? It’s a satisfying scenario—however unlikely—since what are the chances of all the trains in all the cities in all the world that mine would be the one? The most likely outcome, even greater than getting shot or tackling the shooter, would be to sit on this train, day-in/day-out and fantasize about something I’d never want to have happen in the first place. I look around. Could you even tell if someone was about to break like that? I’ve seen a lot of angry men on public transportation, bearded men with crazy, furrowed brows, cursing beneath their breath, men with shaved heads, twitching, talking to themselves, shouting at the voices in their heads. Never once has one of them pulled out a gun and started shooting people, though there have been times when someone acts so disturbed I’ve moved to another car.
Then, of course, there are people who look angry all the time, even when they aren’t, even when they’re just sitting and thinking, and I can’t be too critical because I’m one of them. I’m angry right now, maybe. Actually, I don’t know. I gaze out the window, and to avoid returning to the subject of my wife, I think about the lawn shitter.
What would I do if I’d caught him? Call the cops? What would they do? Haul him in? Keep him overnight? Let him go with a slap on the wrist? There isn’t much recourse when someone shits on your lawn. Even if I called the cops, he’d run. And they wouldn’t catch him, or if they did, they couldn’t prove it was him after he’d left the scene. How does one prove a lawn shitting? DNA testing? I could beat him up. But if I beat him up, I’d get arrested, which is something I can’t afford. Missing work, paying fines, having my daughter see me dragged away in handcuffs. There was no option but the one I took, washing it off, letting it go, absorbing my anger. Only I haven’t let it go. Here I’m heading to work, and I can’t stop thinking, what kind of person does that?
It’s a fecal matter.
I work in academic publishing, editing research. It sounds like a title, something a PhD-candidate might consider witty. “A Fecal Matter: Studies in Public Defecation in the Northeastern Suburbs of the United States.” Of course, there’d be a colon in the title. They always use colons. Maybe they’d spell out “colon” in the interest of being droll, then get mad if I changed it to punctuation, a PhD-candidate blowing his top over something so minor. Humanities people are touchier than hard science folk, the rage and frustration of the entitled coming to a head in nastily-worded emails, all caps and empty threats. I’ve been doing my job twelve years and get a lot of “don’t you know who I am” types, huffy with me because they once published an article that mattered to five other researchers in some esoteric field. Between the hours of eight and four, this is my life, dealing with associate professors who think their rinky-dink cross-examination of Fight Club is holy writ, and when I don’t fawn over it, they’re up in arms, demanding to speak with my boss. “Dude, I’ve got tenure,” I want to say but don’t. I’ve been promoted three times. I do my job well and probably wouldn’t get canned for copping an attitude. But arguing with them makes my life difficult, so I let them have their way.
It’s demoralizing if I dwell on it, which is why I let my mind drift, zone out. Achilles fought the Trojans, Ulysses bested the Cyclops, my maternal and paternal grandfathers fought the Germans and North Koreans, respectively, and this is what I do, argue with academics. Not that I want to rush headlong into combat. But life can seem so small sometimes. Even the idea of using art to elevate myself doesn’t change this, since artists are everywhere. It’s hard to believe in a higher purpose, a unique perspective. Throw a stone in any crowd and try to hit someone who doesn’t fancy their ideas important, their worldview unique, their work—or prospective work, work they plan to do in the future, since it’s usually the case they haven’t done anything yet—ground-breaking. Try it in any restaurant or museum, train or subway car, try finding someone who doesn’t harbor dreams of being an artist. Justine asks me why I don’t tell people I’m a writer when I meet them, and it’s simply because it sounds so fucking trite. Plus, if I say it, I’m met with, “You know, I’ve always thought I’d like to write, too.” To which I reply, “You should.” And when I say this, I’m not being glib—or maybe just a little. Writing, like waiting tables, is something everyone should try, if only to discover how hard it is. Of course, unlike waiting tables—which, if done badly, the failure is apparent—writing is an art whose mediocre practitioners convince themselves of genius by assuming the audience doesn’t understand. As a budding author, I too tried this defense, only to look at stories I’d written a year later and cringe.
With a world population of seven billion, it’s hard not to feel like a drone among countless drones, pushing buttons, dreaming, getting nowhere and refusing to recognize that maybe there might actually be nowhere to go. To think too much on this, I get that same hollow feeling I got at the block party: I’m nothing, no one. And when I pass, the world will be no better for my having been here. Though most of the time, this feeling only strikes when I’m up late, alone, and the house is quiet. It’s only then that I’m paralyzed by the recognition I’m going to die and nothing can stop it. It’s going to happen to me and my wife and parents and siblings and children, and it won’t matter to anyone but us. Silence descends. Time accelerates. I count the seconds to calm myself, to meditate, but the clock ticks faster than my counting. I try to keep its rhythm but fail. And it’s then that I say this—and I say it aloud, though no one hears—“I love you, I love you so much.” And I’m saying this to Sadie and Justine. I’m saying it to my parents and friends and siblings and my life. Because, small as it is, I love it. I love my wife and child, my friends and family, and saying this is the only thing that holds the darkness at bay, that keeps me tethered to this world. And I walk upstairs and look in my daughter’s room and watch her sleep. And I go to bed and touch Justine and whisper “I love you,” though she doesn’t know I’ve said it. And it’s then that I fall asleep and wake, and the fear’s gone, though only for a moment.
The train stops at Temple University, and I watch the students get off. I was one of them once, and sometimes I get to missing it, the excitement of learning, of meeting new people every semester. First my mind has to whittle away all the anxieties and fears I’d experienced while going here. There’d been plenty of bad days, cold days, waiting for the train atop this elevated platform, days with the wind rippling through my clothes, chilling my bones, days spent shivering, in tears, standing there wondering whether anyone loved me, whether I’d find a place in the world. I’d been lonely in college, single. I didn’t have the first clue how to talk to girls, and that was what mattered. Not the education I was getting. Learning was the easy part. It came almost without effort, dean’s list every semester, Phi Beta Kappa. An award my junior year, another my senior. I’d graduated summa cum laude. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was girls, and I was inept at dating. I’d embellished the two short-lived romantic encounters I’d had—encounters that lasted a few months at most—to the level of tragedy, wishing my life were more dramatic than it was. I pined for these former girlfriends, invented a great love where none existed, imagined we were destined to be together when we had nothing in common. And the train stop calls this to mind, brings me back, makes me remember things I’d sooner forget. But most of the time, when I think of college, I think books. As a student, I lived in them, subsumed myself. I read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in one impassioned night, a fever dream of murder and repentance nineteenth-century Russia. I’d fallen into Faulkner’s divided South, following Lena Grove’s every footstep down the dirt roads of Yoknapatawpha County in Light in August. I visited the sinuous labyrinths of Borges, the familiar suburban landscapes and middle class failures of Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, traveled to Yukio Mishima’s pre-war Japan in the Sea of Fertility tetralogy. Each time I discovered an author I adored, I read all their works: Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain. And once finished, I’d discuss them with professors and friends.
Being young, my friends and I asserted our opinions with self-assurance, as though they were facts, as though our ideas were the most important things in the world. And weren’t they? Life and death and love and God? We knew how the world should work in ways that only sheltered students who haven’t assumed the responsibilities of earning a living can. We knew everything and nothing at all. Our professors listened, a smile—not of condescension but bemusement—playing at the corners of their lips as we prattled on. Once in a while, they’d ask a leading question, try to help us see our staggering naivety. But we were arrogant and uncompromising because we could be. Because we hadn’t realized how much life, in the simple act of living it, drains your spirit, how much compromise is necessary.
I haven’t lost it, my love of books. But certain books I loved at twenty—books by the Beats or Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer—strike me as resoundingly juvenile when I return to them now, the only freedom espoused by Miller or Kerouac the freedom to run, to never grow up, and I’d believed in that vision with such tenacity when I was a young man that it was hard to admit when I transitioned to adulthood that I no longer found it resonant. I returned to Tropic on my thirty-third birthday and had a tough time dealing with who Miller was. I figured if this was his vision, that this adolescent escapist posturing was the only way out of the nine-to-five life I’m living, I prefer Peter Pan. Society is shit. He says. Everything is floundering, balanced on the edge of ruin. The ship’s going down, and you can either be a slave to their rules or you can fuck and drink wine and move to Paris. And that sounds good when you’re twenty and want to fuck and drink wine and move to Paris. But at thirty-five, it’s reckless. It offers no solution. Society’s repressive. I’d never argue that. The job I have is draining the life out of me. It’s draining the life out of my coworkers, too. So, say I cut and run, move to Paris to fuck and drink wine. Where’s that leave the rest of them? Where does it leave my wife and daughter? Am I only supposed to save myself? The thing with books like these—Tropic of Cancer, On the Road—their allure is all surface. Both Kerouac and Miller are fine writers, but they’re not particularly deep thinkers, and their greatest flaw is a narcissism that doesn’t allow them to consider the effects of their actions. They ignore who gets left behind—anyone who can’t turn experience into art—and for that reason, they fail. Not as aesthetic achievements. But in message, meaning. There’s no solution. Kerouac drank himself to death. Miller moved to Big Sur and lived in peace and quiet, but only because of the money he made off his books. The only freedom they offer is the solipsistic freedom of individuals, which if followed to its logical conclusion, results in anarchy. The way of life they mapped out provides no alternative to live in harmony with those around you. It’s parasitical. If the only way your freedom can exist is by living at the fringes of a society you profess to hate at the expense of those who toil, you’ve set in motion the sequence for your own destruction.
As a teen falling in love with these authors, with literature, this is difficult to spot because their posturing is so attractive. Because you’re told that the artist’s job is presenting problems and not solutions. Because they piss your parents off. Because you see your parents come home exhausted, leading lives so unfulfilling that you don’t want it to happen to you, and someone hands you a copy of this book that will change your life, and you read it, and it offers an alternative that’s beautiful and exciting. To set out and see the world. To avoid the drudgery of work, the monotony of rigid systems set in place long before you were born by corporations and government. You’re going to be different, like the person who wrote this book, special. Because you see the world in ways others don’t. Obviously your parents never recognized that life could be lived another way. If they had, they would have chosen another path. And you wonder why they couldn’t see it, why they opted for the path they’re on. And maybe the teen who thinks this—the teen I once was—is right. Maybe this is my bourgeois indoctrination coming through now that I’m an adult, now that I’ve been drilled down, now that I’ve given in. Maybe compromise isn’t inevitable, and I could have chosen another path, but instead the world beat me. Yet, I’d lived in West Philly for a time, and I went to the bars and looked around and found middle-aged men, sad men, sorry men, who professed a love of Kerouac or Miller or Bukowski, men who played bluegrass music in local dives on Sunday nights and styled themselves progenitors of outdated artistic movements, who lived in roach-infested apartments, subsisting on beer and tofu-hoagies from the corner store. These were types of people Ginsberg romanticized in “Howl,” only the reality wasn’t so romantic. If you don’t have the talent, if you can’t convince others of your genius, this is what happens: star of your local bar, celebrated by winos, lord of the flies, creating your own myths, telling yourself you could have been great if only, telling anyone who’ll listen about glory days that weren’t all that glorious. I found most of these guys full of shit, more style than substance, and their style wasn’t alluring. The scene was fun for a while. I drank, got laid, and when I was done, I moved on. After a while drinking and getting laid become traps, monotonous, empty acts. Not escape. Not freedom. But who am I to say? I only know that if you adhere too strongly to the idea they are, that this is truth, you become grotesque. And this frightens me, the idea of buying into a single seductive truth, and adhering to it without question. What scares me more is the possibility this may have happened and I don’t know it. Though maybe the quickest way to gratification is to stop asking questions, choose a path and accept it, to cease struggling with purpose and meaning and fall in line with the slow march to the end. Like everyone who’s not dying a quick death, I’m dying a slow one: a little man in a vast confusing world, and none of what I think or do matters in any way outside the meaning I imbue it with. There’s no freedom for anyone, is there? Or rather, there are gradations of freedom. Not being incarcerated or forced into labor against your will means you’re better off than a lot of people in history, and this is something to be thankful for. But there’s another kind of freedom, one that’s taken away when those in charge, those who make the rules, figure out how to keep you satisfied enough not to demand a greater share of the world they control because you’re frightened the small material comforts you’ve acquired will be taken away. And this results in the vast accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few. But then, being middle class in America comes with its own set of privileges you can’t complain about, though those privileges are being eroded, and you’re always butting up against the class above you, the class that takes your time and resources, the class you weren’t supposed to recognize because class isn’t supposed to exist here, and if you dare mention this aloud, there’s someone around to point out that others have it worse, and talking about inequalities when you’re getting by and not really suffering makes you a complainer, and maybe I am. Maybe I should shut up about the fact our office president got an eleven-thousand-dollar bonus last year while the rest of us got nothing. Maybe I shouldn’t mention that while my salary remains the same, the costs of insurance premiums and transportation and property taxes are going up, so we’re actually working for less this year than we did last. But that’s okay, right? In part, it’s true: I’d rather be in an office than a coal mine or the factory where my father works. I just worry about maintaining the general quality of life for my family.
But it’s too early in the morning for this. Why do I always do it? This type of thinking only makes me upset. It’s abstract, cyclical, ungrounded. It never leads anywhere good. And most days, when I get to thinking this way, it feels like the naivety of my college years never deserted me, like for every valid point, there are five valid counterpoints I’m not taking into consideration. My thoughts are scrambled, more like rants than valid arguments. But there’s nothing else to do. The train chugs along, my mind keeps moving.