I saw like ten deer on my run today.
I went later than I prefer, it was darker than I like when I still had a fair bit left to go but the deer were the silver lining. In the proper dark they’re nearly invisible but their tails at the back are bright white, which is cool.I read some work in progress again for another colleague, been a lot of that lately. It’s tiring but rewarding, relationship-wise and just as a reader and thinker - cool ideas! - and I like reading editorially when it’s warranted. Also makes me feel fortunate to be in this context, a rich area of my life.
For dinner I made an exploded tofu sandwich - some tofu cooked with half and onion and a few olives, splashed with a bit of leftover tomato soup and some basil added, and a few hunks of potato scone (they get a nice texture like gnocchi almost) served on top of a slice of toast. Ace.
There’s some hard stuff at work, made some phone calls about that yesterday, not enjoyable but also rewarding to be there for people, and also I’m having some challenges compartmentalizing, gotta push the job in a box and keep it there! I watched a Ken Loach movie the other night, maybe last night, Sorry We Missed You, about a working class family in the gig economy in the UK, drowning. Powerful and very sad. Tonight I started Boiling Point, set in a restaurant, also very sad so far. Feels funny to take social realist sadness as entertaining but it’s good TV, eh?
I mighta forgot to do one of these one night, maybe even two, this week. Once again feeling a lack of noteworthiness. There’s that quote about quiet desperation, I don’t think that’s me, just that ‘write what you know’ is hard when what you know is kinda dull, eh? As my high school gym teacher once said, you can’t make chicken soup out of chicken shit. Of course, I’m a vegetarian so chicken soup doesn’t interest me anyway. Now ramen, that does interest me. Anything with a high sodium content. Salt me up, burst my heart!
Time to invent something. I think I’ll invent an app that tracks how you appear on social media - happy, sad, shallow, deep, whatever, and tracks everyone else you know and compares them in order to make everyone feel worse and so vulnerable to advertising. This paragraph was supposed to be me making up a bit of obvious fiction and the second sentence was meant to be a play on words, taking ‘invent’ literally when I meant it figuratively but it took a dark turn, eh?
*
I’m sweating through my suit because this pitch has to be good and I can feel myself threatening to spiral, a mix of resentment - that I didn’t grow up with the advantages of these fuckers - and shame - that maybe I don’t deserve the advantages, no fuck that I do, we all do (still kinda low key a commie despite it all) it’s not deserving, it’s that I feel like a dipshit sometimes because while I can chameleon-codeswitch I’m often playing along and I can feel big gaps in my background knowledge, not on actual brains but on cultural cache, and those gaps give me twinges of self doubt and my confidence comes back in fast but in the moment of those gaps I can hear the floor creak and I worry they’ll crack, I’ll fall into the basement, the cellar of life, when the whole fucking point has always been to get out of there. I’m controlling the spiralling, I’m threatening to spin out but threatening to do isn’t doing, I’m keeping my shit together. I’ve worked too hard for this. There’s another sort of risk here of overcorrecting, getting cocky in that fuck you kind of way: I need to sell this drug as recreational without letting onto the suits that everyone in their life hates them, that’s the real point, the real reason we made it in our little home lab, the pill dissociates you so you fail to experience all the shit you have to eat in the basement of life and there’s a huge ass market for that but these suits - I feel like a dick being in a suit myself - they gatekeep that market and don’t want to know that everyone who interacts with them is desperate to take a pill so they can let the interaction just slide off the surface, turn off the lights in the eyes. We’re gonna make so much money and some day I’ll be a suit, for real, but not like them, I won’t take the freedom for granted.
The secretary stands and walks over, leans down to tell me they’re ready for me, I feel sick inside with jitters, I should have taken something for my nerves but I wanted to be sharp, and I am, too sharp, all spiky wires poking every which way, every feeling too much right now. Time to do this. Gotta stop thinking. If I worry about fucking this up I will definitely fuck this up. The only way is to just own it. Fuck it. I will fuck this up on purpose, these suits are nothing, I hate them, I’d like someone to take hammers to them, this meeting is mine to dominate and I’ll fuck it up just to spite them. This is how I rise above, I embrace my fate, I stop cursing the dealer and play my hand. I do hate them for real though.
“Gentlemen, thanks for having me in today. I trust my assistant emailed you the information but I brought copies as well,” I pass round the papers, put my hands face down for a second on the big black table, enjoying the coolness on my palms.
