Day 103(?) Work!

I think I have the work part down.  Then it goes

Relax
Don't think

Then there's the optional step which is

Increased Work
Increased Relaxation

Talkin' bout zen. 

“Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.”
“There is no failure unless one stops.”
Ray Bradbury

                I stole that from some website but who cares?

               Minor rant here to start out.  I have a problem with these comedy actors who decide to try serious roles.  Will Ferrell in Everything Must Go, Maya Rudolph in Bridesmaids (which is a comedy, obviously, but not for her), Jason Segel in Jeff, Who Lives at Home.  You guys are allowed to be funny in dramas, it seems like your idea of playing characters is to act exactly the same as you always do except not be funny.  It's like your spirits have been broken.  You should find a balance like Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, or Whoopsy Goldberg.  

              Second minor rant!

              I am starting to empathize with the villains in Disney Movies, Musicals, and whatnot.  Where it's always the guy who has went through the proper channels, is able to provide emotional and financial support, and is admittedly a little possessive of the girl that he is sort of kidnapping.  I know how it feels to be precarious, the whole "me against the world" thing, which is usually more of the role the villain is in than the hero.  The hero usually has the support of the people, the love of the girl, the potential to be successful, let's face it, the heroes success and the villains downfall are both equally inevitable in most movies.  Take Aladdin, for example.  Or Moulin Rouge.  This is what it feels like dating any girl who has dated a guy before you, like there's no romantic love or emotions, and you are more or less forcing your square peg into the square hole.  Even if you want to kill that guy that's could appear and steal the girl at any moment, you're not going to do it Mr. Villain.  You're pathetic and all of your strength, initiative, and control of the bureaucracy is going to leave you single and alone, or worse (dead).

            That's my whole minor rant.  On to the sort of fiction!

          

Everything was the way he had wished it would be a few months earlier.  This beautiful girl, working behind the sheet of oxidized glass with the perforated hole for talking.  She had been there every day when he showed up, and she was there every time he left, yet he had never had a real conversation with her.  He didn’t know what to say, and most of the time when he tried to start a conversation he’d bury his confidence level lower and lower.

Then he was sure she was hanging out with him as a friend, and that was all he could be.  The first date fizzled instead of sizzled, truncated by the fact that she invited three groups of friends, each one couples who were either married or would be married.  There was Rachel and her husband, Erin and hers, there may have even been a baby involved. 

She’s an outsider like me, he remembered saying to himself.  He couldn’t help but talk to himself in stressful situations, something which in earlier days he referred to in himself as disassociative personality disorder.  He read books about it and the cases were always more severe, some people watched themselves go through their entire lives with complete detachment.  Then, where was this emotional longing coming from?  Was it as much a desire to be one with his own body again?

The couples shared a lot of beers.  That was fine, he could have more himself.  He ordered a different kind every time to feign that he was testing flavors and being an all around connoiseur.

“I can’t help but feel like yesterday wasn’t such a good day for us.”  Jerry said on the phone, between breaks of watching Malcolm and the Man.  She sighed wistfully, and seemed completely oblivious to the phone conversation concept.  She must have been completely removed emotionally, just as he was removed physically.  Unfortunately, those two sides couldn’t combine and form one worthwhile whole.

He always expected some kind of substantial breakthrough, some definining event that would cause a paradigm shift and reinvigorate the world around him.  Getting older was more of a realization that the only way you can change life is through a series of small things, because change needs to be a persistent series of events, not just one unprecedented one. 

“I don’t think so.”  She said, and then there was a long pause.  Jerry rolled his eyes on his end of the phone, staring at the large pause symbol in the corner of the TV screen.  “I watched this show earlier today about contimination in the Mehkong river.”

He wasn’t stuck, she was.  He was the willful sailor letting himself be sucked into the whirlpool, and in the center was this island, which even if he reached he wouldn’t be able to live on.  It lacked all of the proper outlets for communication, sometimes the seamonster would spring out of the rapids and make the whole area seem lively, but even that monster was losing its’ scales by the chunks.  He’d probably let it swallow him alive, but what choice did he have?  She was a beautiful woman.

Why would she only talk to him about TV shows?  Was she that humorless?

“Well what’s going on in the Mehkong?  Old seamonster up to no good again?”  He asked.

“You do this every time.  The Mehkong is a real river, a lot of people depend on it.  If it matters so much to you that we are an item, you are missing the point.  The world out there needs each of us to do all we can do, it has no room for couples.”

Jerry figured this was the inevitable speech.  She had been through her romance phase a long time ago.  He’d have to keep kicking himself now for bringing it up.

“I’ll call you later, I have to think about what you said.”  He hung up with ostensible thoughtfulness.  Jerry crossed into the bathroom, body hair sprinkled liberally from every surface area. The blinds were tilted horizontal, and he twisted the curtain rod to correct this.  He turned on his heel and stepped on the scale, he was up another five pounds.  He looked at his profile in the mirror, the stomach was making its way out past the pecs again.  He thought he had been exercising and eating properly, but as the old adage goes results don’t lie.

He was mad that he lied about having to think about what he said.  He tangled the cord around his arm and let the phone dangle

There was a time when he would be mad at her, and then after calling he would be unable to keep that vitriol up.  It seeped out of his head and corroded all of his organs, being absorbed completely by the time it reached the abdomen.  And he felt it like a little goblin in there, rearranging the cupboards.  He eventually willed himself to stay angry,

Jerry called his friend Colin, who had a completely different frame of mind.  It wasn’t necessarily a fresh perspective, but it was a different perspective.

“You’re doing the complete wrong thing if you’re trying to draw ultimatums, get her to… um… capitulate.”  He was eating a sandwich or something, and was almost impervious to listening.

“What you really need to do is get her to let her guard down.  When she feels like everything is fine, and maybe you got it all together… um… she’ll start coming to you.  Then it’s really… uh… “careful what you wish for.”

Jerry had a lot to say while Colin was talking, and before he talked Colin, but once Colin finished talking he decided it’d be better to just be happy with the fresh perspective.

“Are you coming out later?” 

Jerry was not coming out later.

Work, he reminded himself.  That’s the only way you can rise above this.  He flashed back to Sha-Ram, they sat across from eachother on a long wooden peer overlooking a brimey lake.

“You can only work, that’s all there is to life.  If you’re ever stuck, the answer is always work.  You decide what you’re good at, what you want to do, and then you work.  Think of it as when you are gone.  The only possible legacy you have is something you worked very hard on.  For some men it’s family, some can’t avoid their fates.  Some have to do what their fathers did, others fall into the wrong crowd and tread water for their entire lives.  The only thing you have is what you make, and what you make is what you work at.”

Jerry shook his head and laughed, laying propped up against the stucco wall in his twin bed.  He remembered how overly simple it seemed at the time, although Sha-Ram always insisted the most profound facts are the ones right under your nose.

It’s never that you’re too good for someone, but it might be that you work too hard for them.

Jerry’s dad would say he was proud of him with the lack of anything better to say, just like in a failed romantic relationship when “I love you” becomes the drastic, constantly repeated platitude that you throw like a pebble into a thick darkness.

There was a woman crying upstairs, but as Jerry put his ear closer to the wall he couldn’t tell if she was actually laughing.  80s music Jerry didn’t recognize pulsated through the nearly bare trees, some black female singer going on and on about “what it would be like to love you.” 

Jerry wrestled with the heavy “pull” door in his lobby, and retrieved a stack of periodicals sticking from the crudely crafted wood compartments across from the dull silver mailboxes.  He flipped through pictures of couches on the ultra thin garbage quality paper.

“That’s not going to fit on top of your car.”  His friend Mark said, as they stood at the side of the road.  Jerry lowered down and tried to move the big leather piece of meat by himself, scraping it across the concrete with a dumbening sound. 

Cop is poking around in his garbage, around house