here's to life

we’ve haven’t spent a hell of a lot of time here, but we’ve learned enough about the real world to know that it is nothing like what we came to expect. there is no panning, no zooming, nothing gets framed or cropped, nothing is well-lighted. when you meet a girl’s gaze from across the room, no music plays, nothing slows down. when you raise your voice, the other person doesn’t wait for you to finish any more than you have any idea the next word that will come out of your mouth. when you pull the trigger, nothing explodes, no sparks fly, there’s just a dull, deafening crack, and the person you were aiming at is either dead or getting there pretty damn fast. and no, it probably wasn’t his last day before retirement, and no, he isn’t going to get to tell his wife he loves her with his last breath. he’s just dead.

in this place, this life we call home, not the one we wish we were in, with the good lighting and the clever script, but the one where we sit in traffic and go to meetings and die of everyday, boring diseases like heart disease, the moments that define our lives are gone before you realize they were happening, before you realize that that was the time you were supposed to say the line, to have the answer, to reach out and grab her and kiss her and never let her go. either you did it or you didn’t, and no amount of preparation could have made you ready for it, just as no amount of thinking about it afterward will change it. but oh, you’ll think about it, yes, because these moments are the critical corners in the road that makes up our lives: you’ll always remember the intersection, and you’ll dig in your head for years to find out why you chose to go left instead of right, and you’ll constantly wonder what your life would have been like if you would have gone the other way, but none of that will matter, because the truth of the matter is that you went left and you’ll never get to go back there again.

and there’s nothing quite like that feeling when one of those moments just passed, while you’re standing there over a guy who, while it probably wasn’t his last day before retirement, is not going to get to tell his wife he loves her since she wasn’t around when he had his last breath, with the afternoon sun sort of glaring through the high windows and reflecting harshly off the tile floor and into your squinting eyes, with your ears ringing softly and the gun heavy in your clammy hands, that feeling that you just turned left when you should have turned right, that feeling that the last two and a half seconds will replay in your mind until the day you die.

there was this big bang once

it's days like these when i finally get home and the noise stops but i can't relax that i feel like some sort of giant, sweeping change has come over me. very rarely have i ever been able to explain what it really actually is, especially because it usually never pans out, but when i look back on it i'll always associate it with that damn cranberries song. no, i don't even know what the song is called; i've never tried to look it up or look up the lyrics or try to download it.

you see, when i hear that song, something is going to change. it never comes on to tell me that a change has occurred, no no, it's very, very specific: when i hear it, always on the radio, sometimes when i'm waking up, sometimes in a random place--as with this particular time, at a restaurant--it means that that not particularly welcome feeling of change is coming. i don't want to listen to it. i don't want to hear it. i don't even really particularly like it. but it means what it means, and i can't force it by going out and finding it. so no, i know absolutely nothing about it, except it's a cranberries song and it came out some time while i was in high school.

anyway, i heard it on wednesday, at a restaurant, for a going-away lunch for my boss. i chuckled to myself when it came on, and i heard myself simply saying "yep." suffice it to say it's been a very long four days.

so now i'm sitting here at my house in poway--had to get out of pb for the holiday weekend--wide awake despite the fact that i could barely keep my eyes open on the drive back from lindsay's, trying to explain something that i've never once been able to explain in the vague six to nine years that this bizarre phenomenon has been occurring. huh. i suppose i'm trying very hard to make this peculiar repeated coincidence more significant than it really is, but it weirds me out sometimes. i suppose i can pretty much explain away my current anxiety, at least.

having spent the day at usd, i now know, finally and absolutely, why i am miserable at ucsd. i don't miss my old job, i don't miss usd, i don't miss the kids--well, no, that's not true, i miss the kids, at least. anyway, what i really miss is mattering. i don't ever fucking do anything at ucsd. nothing i ever do matters. and when i come back to usd for a day and really honestly don't do anything, it somehow matters to people; regardless of the fact that i didn't actually do anything today, i still left feeling like i made some sort of a difference. while i realize it's terribly selfish, i don't really care: i miss being important. even if it was only important in my head, what little importance i had at usd is infinitely more than i have at ucsd. where once i at least had something to fight for, now i am just invisible and worthless.

i think i'll leave and go to bed with that happy thought.