A Regular Day

Just don't blame me for reading this.

I am simply a man. I am a man who lives in a low-scale apartment that is characterized by its large volume of books, a mysterious lawn-size garbage can that resides in my living room, and a 35-pound cat that hates all other living beings besides me. I go to work most days of the week, hating my job but making enough money to survive. I come home and I consciously find a way to forget an existence that provides little meaning. An existence that always leads me to analyze what happens around me, an attempt at providing meaning to otherwise meaningless events.

After looking in the mirror, I look around me and see others battling their own demons and fighting their own battles. A husband and wife losing a child and having no answer and no replacement for the lonely void created in anticipation. A girl trying to grapple with the psychological damage inflicted by being raped by a person who worked with her on a daily basis. A man who grew up with no parents in a low-income neighborhood who struggles with bipolar disorder and tops it off with an “aberrant” sexual orientation from which everyone defines his identity. A girl forced to leave her home because she changed her religious beliefs and finds herself one night fleeing from her gun-wielding father. A girl whose most vivid memory is being kidnapped and raped repeatedly by absolute strangers over a period of several days. A woman who goes to bed every night with fears of a man she calls “Dad” walking into the room and touching a body she desperately wants to call her own. A girl who “wakes up” one night to find herself sitting barefoot in a jail cell, listening to another female make sexual advances on her, and feeling helpless from her own body leaking its natural monthly discharge because the officials on duty are unwilling to provide protection. A woman who struggles with the idea of leaving a man she has loved and supported for over 40 years because the temptation of “enough is enough” seems more like the right thing to do. A woman who looks in the mirror everyday and fights her own image of herself because the battle has consumed her for so long that existence without it is far too threatening for comfort. A woman facing the potential loss of an adopted child she’s raised for over a year due to a bureaucratic process that ignores the person and abhors the idea of a second chance. A woman who struggles from the daily guilt of having abandoned her best friend of seven years (her husband of two) because it took precisely that long to simply figure out that she was her own person. A man whose wedding anniversary is marked every year by the bitter memory of his own father who passed away the same morning of his wedding. A woman who regularly battles with the memory of the child she aborted several years ago.

Once I stop looking around me, I open the newspaper and see that over the past few years thousands of young men and women have sacrificed their lives in a foreign country for a cause that, regardless of its false premise and unknown destination, still provides conviction and direction to a life too often devoid of it. I turn the page and read about Angelina Jolie’s most recent love adventures and Britney Spears’ most recent child-raising blunders because the editors of the paper know that making money to raise their family requires them to feed the general public with addictive bullshit that helps them to escape from their own daily reality of meaningless events. So I close the paper and pour a drink and turn on the TV to watch one of my three regular shows that helps me to escape from my own reality…yet again.

I see the cycle but I can’t escape it. Everyone around me sees it too because they have their own cycle and means of escape: marijuana, work, alcohol, tanning, chocolate, caffeine, food, exercise, cocaine, writing, driving, playing and/or listening to music, ecstasy, video games, religion, smoking, reading, watching TV, obsessing over their significant other, sex, and the list goes on and on. The fact of the matter is…everyone has their drug.

I finish my show on the TV and go to bed, ready to wake up to another regular day. I lie in my bed thinking of days gone by and days to come and how so many around me do the same every single day of their lives. We’re all alone in a crowd because we don’t know how to reach the other person. In the words of a character from the motion picture Crash: “It's the sense of touch…I think we miss that sense of touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.” We’re so damn confused on how to communicate and relate that we just end up doing something to feel it.

I wake up to greet a new morning, sobering from whatever drug I chose the night before, remembering and recognizing that there’s a part of me that I am incapable of exorcising. It’s a part of me that I deeply fear. The part of me that leads me to sit down and write this post. The part of me that knows that none of you can provide an answer to a question that each of you live with every day.

I’ll end this the way it should be: casual and oh so serious. Each one of you, as do I, feels that the answer you have is makeshift and temporary because the real “answer” is out of reach. It’s always just an idea. You can look to a person called Jesus, an institution called church, a nation called America, or a job called _____________. But it’s not fully there, is it? And now you can’t even write it off as another angry walrus rant because he’s hit too close to home, on your own doorstep or at the least, the one next door. We’re all in the same fucking boat and the person (or thing) each one of us calls “Captain” (see the ideas above) isn’t a person we know. I mean, not really. In the end, you’re still offering ideas. Ideas are great, no doubt, and should perhaps even be considered the breath of life, but they’re not meant to be Captains. It’s somewhere in this analogy that I’m asking you to engage me.

In the end, I’m asking you something simple. Sit at this bar and have a drink with me. Believe in me and I’ll believe in you and we’ll get this whole connecting thing going. We’ll eat some type of deep-fried finger food (your choice) and try to figure out what went wrong, what’s going wrong, and what could go wrong…and then we’ll replace all those wrongs in that sentence with rights. After that, we’ll stand up and embrace and we’ll know that we’re waking up to these days and these lives together... If we're lucky, maybe we'll have one more before last call...because last call always comes too soon for those who anticipate it...