A Case of the Mondays

I want to write something for you, between the peanut butter jelly toast and the toddler reassurance sessions.

Between the too-bright lights in my office and the speakerphone calls on the other side of my desk.

Between making boxed “macawoni” and eating the last hot dog in a fridge bereft of anything interesting.

I want to say something profound about something I’ve done, or something I’m going to do, or something I’ve observed.

I’m two coffees and two vodkas and an overdue testosterone shot into a Monday afternoon, and I want to be the guy who sizzles your synapses with something profound.

Dance, monkey. Do the thing you do. Make the words sing.

But I have butts to wipe and frustration to overcome and I need to leave to make grocery money even if I can’t make rent.

I saw a Substack today, from a guy whose work I cannot stand, who has four times as many subscribers as me. All he talks about about his embrace of the depressing and the run-down and the surreal, like he’s stumbled onto some kind of hobo virtue.

Maybe that’s my problem, though. By that I mean, the way I keep trying to hang on to hope. Maybe I should be diving headlong into the comforting, familiar abscesses of low standards and decay.

I shared my frustrations over my lack of traction or direction with the woman I love, and managed to do it without bitterness or rancor. She was able to hear me when I spoke in those muted tones, but still, she had a busy day, and had to pencil me in. Later, always later. Always a fire that needs putting out.

That’s not a petty complaint. She is the antithesis of me. She is action, and I am abstraction. She is the reason we survive and endure.

I find myself harangued once again by the thought that I’ve already accomplished all that I ever will, and that if I’m lucky I’ve got a few decades left of making recipes from website printouts for dinners nobody really wants to eat, thinking about books I’m never going to finish writing because I’ve never had any idea how.

What am I for?