For those that don't remember, flashback to one year ago today. (You know, isn't that just the greatest thing? I can negotiate a flashback to my personal thoughts from a whole year ago in this thing with a few keystrokes.)
Yes indeed, it has now been 2 solid years (and a day) since I have had regular face-to-face contact with any humans other than my family! As you might have guessed, I am now utterly and completely insane! Because, as we all know,
All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.
All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.
All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.
All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.
All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.
All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.
Now where'd I put that axe?
Alright, alright, very real murderous thoughts aside, let's look at this with a bit of impartiality.
OK, so as far as any personal office relationships I might have had two years ago... yeah, those are shot to hell. I go into the office and half the people don't know who I am. Apparently I carry myself off with enough aplomb that people don't call the cops at least. So if it ever comes down to "let's fire the people we know the least about" I'm as cooked as goose liver in a fancy French cafe. That said, I *am* logged into my work computer at 9 p.m on a Friday night (rather than down at the Harley Motorbike Rally with one of my honeys) waiting for a customer to email about some problem or other so they'd be mega-silly to get rid of me. *hem* Never mind that there's no space for 'personal blog' on my time sheet.
My blog is officially a piece of shit. In the old days I had an hour or more a day to let my mind wander over all sorts of random topics. Now I'm lucky to find time to actually do my job, get the random household chores done that I'm responsible for, get everyone where they're supposed go to in the morning and back home at night before it's suddenly time to go to bed again. Frankly, I'm not sure how I ever managed to do all this and commute to work as well. All that said, our house has never been tidier.
All that said, most of the mind-bending isolation has worn off utterly. I'm now completely accustomed to the fact that for the most part I go weeks only speaking to my wife, her parents and our children. In fact, I don't remember the last time I spoke to anyone else face-to-face who didn't want to either take money from me or rip teeth out of my face. Granted, I have a horrible memory but one shouldn't have to look at a CALENDAR to answer such a question. Such is the life of the modern, American misanthrope I suppose.
One thing I have done is replace the random office chatter. Now rather than listening to the inane conversation floating over cubical walls I listen to inane nationally-syndicated talk radio. The only problem with that is that it's often the same sad crap from one month to the next. One can only listen to narrow-minded conservative talking heads complain about how narrow-minded the liberal talking heads are for so long before one goes completely mad. That's when it's time for a little bit of TV-land reruns from before I was born. Talk about TV that was made to ignore.
Lastly, I seem to have reverted to a lifestyle I adopted as a child. You'll recall from the autobiography that I spent a lot of my 13-year stretch at the Sim's Street Academy for Unruly and Incorrigibly Sneaky boys reading anything I could lay my hands on. Lately I've taken to that practice more and more but haven't completed the process by documenting what new ideas came out of whatever I was reading.
When I was in the office, I would take in the office babble, assimilate it and then poop it out into blog entries. These entries constitute what my wife refers to the 'interesting' part of my blog. Whenever she tells people about this thing she always makes a very clear distinction between the 'interesting' bits and the politely termed 'other' bits. She's completely right of course; nobody gives two poops about my opinion of 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' but they might give a crap (or at least get really pissed) if I wrote in more detail about what I think the book has to say about Americans and their bigoted and self-centered attitudes. The blog's focus for far too long has been on the specific. I need to return to the practice of taking the very personal events of the day and distilling them into a more generally meaningful output that anyone can relate to.
When this transition finally happens, I think I will have officially recovered from the loss of community and 'inner quiet' that working in an actual office and driving to it each day provided.
No comments:
Post a Comment