Life

by Tom Minkler

There is no big resolution. Life just goes on like a damn river flowing around all these stupid rocks. I want all the rocks to suddenly be moved into a big pile and then I can ride my little dinghy where I want. I keep waiting for the big announcement. Here is the job you’re supposed to have. Here is the person you’re in love with; it’s obvious because they are exactly like you. Or they are opposite you. And it’s like some big dream like in the movies. Is it really true that there’s no clear answer? Life is like a big long bumbling journey of vagueness? Until you wake up one day and find out it’s over, just like that; what a cruel joke! I’m like 35 years old and I just fucking realized this. I guess they must have told me and I missed it. Like the “soul-mate” you end up with is not some magical perfect being, just that much of a closer mix than all the others. Like a cake with a certain amount of sugar, butter and flour mixed up just the way you like it, but you’d never know unless you tried every cake and there are just so many, so you have to pick one, fast, before you get too old to have kids. Like the person you choose has the highest percentage of a bunch of ingredients that you like, like some sort of human recipe for goulash? Well, Sally has 3 cups of sugar and 2T of salt, she’s made with purified water and vegetable oil instead of corn oil. But she’s just a cake. Not this most wonderful all-encompassing dessert that fills you up so you’ll never have to eat again. How boring.

Like work is just a bunch of blocks that need to be arranged into the right order, over and over again? And someone else decides if you did it right or not? I want my job to be a part of me, not 5 minutes for this, 10 minutes for that. Writing “I will not daydream or look up pornography on the Internet” five billion times? Like who cares? I want all-consuming passion, overwhelming sense of accomplishment, ownership, I want my work to be a part of me; part of my soul, one with my mind and body. Not some crap that I do all day the way someone else wants and then go home. But nobody will pay for me to do what I want. Like the comedian said, “They say ‘Do what you love, the money will follow.’ But who is going to pay me to eat chocolate and masturbate?” …Do you call this life? Or drudgery. Trudge, drudge, fudge, budge, lug, rub a dub dub dub glub glub glub. Drown. Die.

I think I have that gene that keeps you from feeling pleasure. Like no matter how great a job I do it isn’t good enough (for me, let alone for anyone else). If I don’t love someone I barely even know to the point of overwhelming misery that they aren’t exactly like me and feel exactly like I do even though I don’t know them then life seems meaningless. Just going out with someone you casually like is no fun. Besides it’s too much trouble. By the time you convince yourself that they are worth all this stress, you’re in love with them. And you haven’t even said ‘Hi’ yet, so they think you’re weird. Ever feel like if you didn’t keep shopping or eating or smoking pot or snorting coke or shooting heroine or dialing 1-900-OVER AND OVER you would just die of boredom? And then once you’ve filled that hole with everything you can stuff in it you still feel hungry? That sucks. I can’t possibly buy enough CDs or LPs or eat enough chocolate or buy enough clothes or jump out of enough airplanes or dive off enough cliffs or drink enough alcohol or smoke enough crack or shoot enough tainted heroine to make myself feel better. But yet I keep trying. And if you do succeed in feeling better, the rest of your life is either downhill from there or you spend it trying to get back to that point (well actually it’s both). What a useless exercise in futility. Maybe I’d rather not know what it feels like to be on that mountaintop I’m not on all of my life except once.

So since there’s no destination I’m supposed to enjoy the journey? While I change the oil, put gas in, fiddle with the radio, try to figure out the map and get the temperature just right inside the car while the world whizzes by? And now it’s time to change the oil again…damn I thought I just did that! Oh look, a road sign. Damn I missed it. What the fuck did it say? Was that my exit? Damn am I out of gas aGAIN? Where are those goldfish crackers I bought at the last rest stop? All over the floor and the bottom of my shoes? And my soda all over my lap? Next bathroom 300 MILES?…..Fuck! Maybe I could pick up a hitchhiker, you know, take a chance, live a little, make a new friend, help out a fellow human being? But then they would either beat and rob me, or else I’d get to know them a little and become slightly attached and then poof, they’re gone, just like another piece of crap out of my smoking crack. No thanks! I’d rather just die.

But anyway I guess I am, slowly but surely. Every act I do, including breathing, wears my body out just that much more. One less breath, one less step, one less cough, one less smile to go. Hell, relief is just around the corner! But what if I get sent to hell? (But could it be worse than this?) Then it was all for nothing. Or maybe I’ll come back as a rich king. But that’s all for nothing too, because it won’t be me it will be some other poor asshole. It won’t be me anymore me than YOU are. Of course we are all a little teeny part of each other, but that don’t mean shit because so is a piece of rat feces in a swamp in bum-fuck Malaysia. I guess we are all just piles of maggot-filled dung in the mad cow pasture of life.

So where’s the beef? It’s me.