I was singing a little tune today on the way to work and my voice cracked. This is what happens when you spend the night before in a musty old bar drinking pints with your coworker and smoking some two hundred cigarettes in quick succession, talking shit about everything and especially about yourselves. It was astonishing how quickly the conversation came around to religion (and 'Spirituality', of course); what usually takes a solid four hours of throwing 'em back was accomplished in a matter of 45 minutes, and then I stumbled home. I can't quite piece together what happened after that, but I remember having an incredibly intense discussion with Dan about him and me and the nature of Us and what he does and not love about me. And by intense discussion I mean I quizzed him on the depths and breadths of his love for me and asked questions that have no good answers. (I remember only that the personal feature I most need to work on is my feet.) Then we had a play fight about something or another, which ended when I stormed into the bedroom, hauled out our largest suitcase, threw my toothbrush in, put on sunglasses and stomped into the night. Barefoot and in pyjamas, it goes without saying. Then I realized I had no follow up plan. So I stood around flapping my arms because I realized that I didn't have my keys. A few moments later, Dan kindly went to the trouble of opening the door, coming outside, telling me I'm an idiot and insisting that I come back inside. Obviously this was all great fun to me. Jury's still out on whether I get to sleep in bed tonight.
Anyway, my voice cracked this morning and then I thought, perhaps I need to be just be still for a minute. With my humming and buzzing and jittering and snuffling and coughing and talking and talking and talking I sometimes feel like I'm trying to disguise myself as a whole city, in order not to hear myself think too clearly. Sometimes I think I use my voice so often and for the wrong things that I can't even remember what I'm trying to say. This mostly happens at work. Work at our office constitutes a "challenge" the way that slamming your face into a wall is an "uphill battle." Sometimes I feel like my real self is being subsumed into this creature I become at work, this feathered reptile that has evolved to fit into an absurd world, adapted to these improbable conditions . What kind of person do you become if you spend fifty hours a week in a place where people sitting ten feet apart write each other electronic letters? And where people answer the phone with that particular sing-song tone fall, the one that signifies fuck all except that you are on the phone, a fact that any jackass on the other end could have told you anyway. It exhausts me to go to work in the morning, but it also exhausts me to leave again. Mostly because, on my way out, I realize that THAT is where I just spent one whole precious day that I have to live on God's green earth.
But the POINT is that my voice cracked this morning and since I couldn't sing I wandered down the street and hummed, instead.
