I ran out of money and needed another job. I looked. Something part time to wrap around this job, the one I'm currently sitting at doing this-aka-nothing. No one was willing to work with my existing hours. A customer offered that I could paint his house. I went to look at the house. It was half an hour away by car, two hours by bus. We worked it out that his wife, retired, would pick me up in the morning and drop me off in time for this job. On my days off from this job I could take the bus. I said it would take me a year to paint this house. He said OK. I said O.K. I'm not sure his wife was OK but so it went.
It took me a year. I worked 7 days a week that year. My only days off were if they went out of town. There were two stretches that year where I worked 7 weeks straight without a day off.
The same year, they would also renovate the building I was still living in. I moved to three different apartments while they renovated around me. The laundry room went away and once a week I had to walk to the laundromat, honest-to-god a mile away, and I did that on Tuesdays. Meaning on Tuesdays I would get up at 4:30 a.m. to get the bus two hours to labor 8 hours to bus two hours to walk the mile to laundry 90 minutes to walk the mile to go home and have dinner. I could not complete Tuesday before 10:30 PM. The days I worked the two jobs were easier, I got up at 5:30 a.m.
It was an extraordinary year. What amazes me most is I did it. I did it thoroughly, without cutting corners, and to the finish. I did it well.
I remember still, walking home from the laundromat every week, so exhausted, spiritually, physically, deeply. I would want to whine to myself and I would cut it off, telling myself, "Too bad, you big cry baby." I also came to realize sometimes you don't get to have an opinion. Both these sentiments went a long way towards revealing and then shaming my inbred entitlements and privileges, because in the end I was the lucky one. I wasn't a single mother who still had to go home and cook for and then tend to her children. I at least got to have a drink in silence and go to bed. I would look at all the expressionless faces on the bus at 6 a.m. My year would end, theirs had been and will continue to be forever. The house is long done now, I've long resumed shuffling around my mostly simple, quiet life. All this time they've been getting up and getting it done long day after long day.
It was the only year I ever lived where I didn't have to worry about money. That went a long way, I must say. To be able to just buy something minus the constant debate over its necessity. Just because. but I painted that year not at all. That's privilege right there. When I was in college I was in an evening class with a lot of locals who'd registered it as a continuing education course, a lot of guys who'd been at some shit job all day. They were magnificent artists, these guys, better than I could ever be. They'd made different choices, or one that changed everything. Or maybe they just didn't need it like I did, sure that's possible. But living poor, novel in college, isn't very romantic at 60. Add a family, whoever really gets to do what they love, anyway?
A year in the depths of my entitlement and privilege, I thought about past relationships and how separate from everything else I had so many fucked up expectations and concepts and total delusions. I was wrong about so very much. I have so many regrets about who I was, about how I conducted myself. I'll never get to apologize to any of them, they'll never know I one day came to see how wrong I was and how sorry I am to them for it. I'd not have remained with a single one of them, they were each themselves as horrible as I ever thought, but this doesn't mean I get to be that, EVER. Under any circumstances. "Sometimes you just don't get to." (Often the sentiment that followed Too Bad You Big Crybaby.) I'm so ashamed of my own behaviors, and so aware their depth, I don't think I could ever gamble another relationship. Were I foolish enough to do so, I hope I've at least learned the politeness of walking away versus tearing down. How much I suffer it's effects on me, how awful that I've passed that on to someone else. I'm so sorry to them all, and this is my legacy to live with.
In the end, I don't really know the purpose of relationships, why we have them in the way it's set up, what we are allowed to expect from them. The year I learned everything I learned the privilege of telling someone about your day, or getting something off your chest, that really whatever you're going through JUST DOESN'T MATTER. It just is what it is, it's what life is. You don't get to have an opinion about everything, you don't get to express your everything or share it or leak your life out of every pore and crevice. How does it change anything? It has no bearing, it doesn't mean anything to anyone but you. Me. Whatever. Oneself. Once upon a time I thought people existed to absorb me, that relationships were this. That I could emote at will and they should accommodate it. What a fucking asshole! I flung freely because I could. And I remain entirely ashamed.
Still, I don't trust myself. Because I see in this the DNA at work. Ever vigilant, still shows up. I usually see it a day or two after the fact. I am the world's greatest apologizer. Lots and lots of practice. But I can't seem to see it before it shows up, I've not learned that.
I've grown so paranoid of my SELF, I can barely function in the world anymore. I can't put a sentence together, I'm scared to express any thought. Everything I am about to say is a lagging stutter behind all the fears: is this thing I'm about to say real? Do I need to say it? Am I taking up space that doesn't belong to me? Does it really matter? Is it self-serving? Pretentious? Ignorant? Stupid? Disposable? Arrogant? Is simply stating it evidence of privilege? That anything I might want to say is so important it needs to be said at all? That what I even think is entitled to be heard? That I'M entitled to be heard?
Whenever I am in public, I catch the sentences of passing conversations, none of them ever necessary. The last one I recall was the guy talking about the spider bite on his arm. Who cares? I assure you, no one listening to this, if in fact they are. Because it doesn't matter to anyone but him. But we do this, this is how we fill the day, fill our lives. The punchline of all this is I'm actually a rather chatty person. I love talking. I don't know why. I've never been able to understand what it's about. Is it simply a means towards connection, however mundane the content?
Most of me is time alone anymore, I can go long chunks of time minus any conversation at all. Most interactions are brief spurts of witty repartee - customers, store clerks - the few minutes we interact between here and there. Few purposeful or meaningful. Every once in a while something actually happens to me in some meaningful way and I remain with the urge to call someone, share it, talk it, yes, I still can get stupid excited by life. I hold the phone. I linger over it, dissecting the moment, recognizing this ancient urge. Eventually recognizing the self- indulgence in it. I put the phone down. Too bad, you big crybaby; you don't get to. Silence carries on.
