Monday, July 28, 2003

There are days

There are days, my friend. Let me tell you, there are days.

There are days when you become so frustrated with drivers on the interstate and you finally understand "road rage", when you come face to face with the terrible wrath inside you and contemplate, however briefly, what it would be like to push the speedometer all the way to the right and swerve into a guardrail, causing a great conflagration and pain and suffering.

There are days when government bureaucracy so infuriates you that you swear by all that's holy that you have taken your last number, stood in your last line, written your last check, completed your last triplicate carbonless, fathomless, meaningless form and that the next drone who sends you somewhere else is going to pay with their own blood.

There are days when the debts outnumber the notes in your pocket and the distance from your hand to your mouth seems like a marathon, when you've lost a tiny rectangle of petrochemicals and magnetized oxide and it feels less like a missing chunk of plastic and more like a pound of flesh.

There are days when the paper is stacked high on your desk and the phone won't stop ringing and the e-mail keeps coming and the server keeps crashing and the lights go out and the soda machine's busted and you question your sanity while others question your talent and the answers to neither will present themselves.

And there are nights when you lock the door and you turn down the light and you draw a bath and you listen to a torchy ballad and you hear the voice on the phone that both comforts and kills you, and you think how interesting it might be, someday, if just once, somebody -- even just one somebody -- thought of you not as one thing to many people, but as everything to one person.

Yes, you have days and you have nights.

Yes, you.

Not me.

Nope. I've got it all together.

But there are days...