6
I HAD SEVERAL DAYS ALONE TO MYSELF. It was cloudy and raining, though not as hot as the past few days. I nonetheless used this as an excuse to not feel guilty staying home all day. Everyone I knew was at work or was busy. For some reason I was fully content in spending the day by myself. I was always comfortable alone, never needing company to feel complete. In fact, other people usually ruined my mood. When I’m with others there’s often a tug of war between whose desires get to set the agenda. I always hated this constant battle. This was why relationships were so difficult. The constant pressure of how and when to compromise one’s own desires for the other, and if and when to try and dominate them with what I prefered to do would bounce around in my brain. I’d sometimes have to do a cost-benefit analysis of whether or not all this cognitive trouble was even worth the pleasure I got from the company of this person. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t. But often it wasn’t. Those were the times I was more comfortable being alone. And it was then that I suspected Sartre may have been right: hell was other people.
And rarely, on those few occasions when I cliqued with just the right person, where our agendas and desires naturally and effortlessly all lined up, it was magic. But this, again, was rare. I luckily did had a few friends who I was able to have this soluble chemical mixture with. Those friends however were unreachable at the moment. So I ate “breakfast” even though it was past noon, and I realized I needed to buy more food, including my camping supplies. I had a lot of thoughts on my mind but I had a certain relaxation in me that I hadn’t had in so many years. I had nothing to do really; no responsibilities to no one other than providing for my own basic needs of food and drink. I had nothing forcing me to get up early. No one I had to impress. No working deadlines of any sort to meet. I had nothing but the prospects of camping with some of my best friends to look forward to. And it made me happy. I thought that this was what life's all about, right? Getting to do what you want with as few worries as possible. Having endless time to relax and enjoy the moment. This is what so many spoiled rich kids enjoyed once they finished school. This was what so few of us, and even fewer of our ancestors were able to enjoy—and that was the inner contentment of being able to enjoy their lives at their own pace.
I was due to receive my last paycheck at the end of the week. It was from my saved up vacation time that I hadn’t taken. Vacations had been too expensive at my former job—not in money, but in workload. At work the moment I or anyone else went on vacation our caseload would get dumped on everyone else for them to finish. I’d have to then vacation knowing I just made the already overworked lives of my coworkers even harder. And the longer the vacation the more we’d all resent it. So few of us would take a real vacation, and instead would take a few days off here and there, so as to not ruin the lives of everyone else. In effect, many of us didn’t take our full vacation days. But this year I eventually got mine in the form of a paycheck—a paycheck I earned, a paycheck I would’ve received had I took an actual vacation using my allotted vacation time—the time few of us took in full because of the nature of the game we were in. Unemployment was my “vacation” of sorts. The one I voluntarily chose not to take while employed out of guilt for my coworkers. I would be collecting unemployment soon and it would be my way of taking a real vacation, of making my employer pay for the vacation they forced me to forfeit, to pay for the hundreds of unpaid hours they forced me to work.
But that was weeks away, and in my day-to-day thinking I wasn’t particularly revengeful. Although I clearly had some animosity, by my second week of funemployment I was mostly thinking about the activities I wanted to do. Work was barely a thing on my consciousness. It had become an abstract concept, to be philosophically debated amongst friends, where Hume famously said truth often springs. My consciousness was a compass towards truth, towards wisdom. But I had many elements interfering with its polarity. We all want to know the truth but our environments get in the way. Maybe we read a false article, or misinterpreted the right one. Maybe our biases got in the way. I needed to know what truth and wisdom was and I strongly felt I needed a second opinion. Perhaps a third and a fourth one too. Heck, maybe a thousand. I knew I had to seek out the best minds, but I thought I’d ask everyone from now on. I’d steer small talk towards what I wanted to talk about, instead of letting others dictate the topics of conversation. If you notice, most people talk about themselves. They talk about their work, or their family, or their problems. We’re very self-centered creatures, naturally thinking we’re the most important things in the universe. But I could usually only listen to people blabber on about themselves for no more than ten or fifteen minutes before I had to vomit. My head would hurt from their banality. This was probably why I had so few close friends. Most of us just want an ear for us to unload our problems and concerns on. I was not always the best at playing the role of the psychiatrist, but too often I found myself in it.
I picked up a dusty old copy of On The Road by Jack Kerouac and began reading it. I loved the epic road trip adventure. Having never had one myself, I lived it through Kerouac’s brilliant maniac prose. It left such an indelible impression on the American psyche and spawned so many imitators in its wake. I could only imagine what a twenty-first century On The Road would look like. I had nothing like it, but I did spent the last years of my teens partying and drinking with a semi-rough crowd. We’d all hang out at Mark and Rich’s apartment and drink and get high, play video games, watch movies, and bullshit. Lots of bullshitting. They were teenage brothers who both came here from Eastern Europe as babies and whose parents lived somewhere else for some reason. That left them with an apartment all to themselves, and so it became a flop house. Rich sold weed and pills and the apartment always had a colorful list of characters dropping in and out, making deals, stopping by to smoke a blunt, before disappearing only to sometimes show up a few hours later to do it all over. We were always getting high or drinking. Sobriety was never an option. Sometimes beef rolled around: rival dealers or neighborhood punks the brothers had quarrels with, sometimes over a girl, or sometimes over a graffiti or drug dispute, would sometimes come by and threaten Rich. Occasionally everyone in the apartment would be expected to prepare to fight another group of teens who came by to challenge Rich’s integrity, and I’d brace myself for a possible rumble. A beat down was not something I looked forward to. One time a group of kids came by and threatened to kill Rich, taunting him from the street outside his bedroom window below. One of them allegedly brandished a gun in his waistband, according to Mark. We all freaked out at the possibility of getting shot. I remember being high that night and needing to quickly finish my forty out of sheer terror and anxiety. Mark recommended we call the cops, but Rich protested: he had stashes of drugs in the apartment he’d either have to get rid of, which might entail flushing them all down the toilet and losing thousands of dollars, or they’d all have to consider the possibility of doing years in prison where fearing for your life would be a daily event. This didn’t take us long to decide: The cops were never called. Instead we kept silent and pretended not to be home, even though it was clear we were. In the end the other kids tired and moved on, not before making one last final threat. It wasn’t my beef, but I could’ve gotten shot for it. I thought that didn't make sense. But on the streets you always stuck up for your boys and had their back. After that incident, the half dozen or so of us that regularly frequented the apartment stopped coming by as often. I took a break from chilling over there for a few months until shit died down. The experience was never the same again. Rich was a bit of a fighter, always looking to prove himself, while Mark was the calmer and more rational one. Rich would always bring trouble, which was the main reason I didn’t like him. Why couldn’t we all just hang out and have a good time? Why all the fighting and bravado? Rich seemed to thrive on drama. He seemed to like being in these kinds of life and death situations. I didn’t. And not long after I turned twenty I decided to go to college, get a degree, and I slowly stopped hanging out with these characters, my old high school crew. I had to say goodbye to them and move on. And so that’s just what I did.
And it made me think, I could’ve written about all of those adventures when I was hanging out there all those years. I didn’t for some reason. Now all those memories are diluted in a Purple Haze and any attempt to recollect them I’ll inevitably confabulate. And so I went to college, suspended my partying for a few years, though not completely, while I studied computer networking. And when I finally graduated with over forty-five thousand dollars in debt, I luckily found work fairly quickly. But I also quickly realized just how strenuous and depressing working in the modern era was. I made decent money, but I worked like a dog. And I hated it. And it made me long for those days of my youth when life was relatively carefree, where I could get by on less than twenty dollars a day, and spend it on a blunt, a forty of beer, and a slice or two of pizza. When I lived at home with my mom, didn’t have to pay rent, didn’t have to pay for all of my own things. We never appreciate how good many of us have it in our youth. We’re taken care of, sheltered, protected from the realities of adulthood, for the most part. And then, you’re on your own, you’re out of the nest. If you’re lucky you have a loving family to fall back on if you fail to fly. If not, you better have solid friends. Because if you don’t, nobody’s going to care for you. The world will grow cold with indifference, and you’ll be forced to beg for handouts. That’s never appetizing for anyone. Definitely not me. But I’d be filing for unemployment in a few weeks and that would be my safety net, at least for the time being. So I wasn’t worried. But in the back of my mind these thoughts lurked. I had good times to look forward to. I was going to see Dan in Manhattan, and he was always good company.
