I Used to Be Smart.

He may have pretended that he wasn’t listening, but the truth was that he couldn’t help but listen.  They were talking loud enough that his only guess was that they wanted to be heard.  If he wasn’t supposed to be listening, the would be more discrete.

When the guy said that his favorite smell was money, he knew that he was full of shit.  Nobody who has ever smelled money likes the smell of money.  Nobody who has sat in front of a stack of bills finds anything pleasing about the scent that they give off.  It’s disgusting.  Every day it’s the same, and every day it’s disgusting.  It’s cigarette smoke and sweaty palms.  It’s dirty minds and dirty fingers.  It’s a pile of disgusting stories, each more lurid than the next.

Who knows where each bill came from?  Who knows why they were exchanged?  Who knows what sorts of stories are the product of these scraps of paper?  What harm have they done?  What good?

(He was, at this point, immune to the conversations of Those Full of Shit.  His own thoughts, at this point, had become much more interesting.)

He liked to think sometimes that he was making a movie, and he wondered how he would show certain things up on the screen.  He wondered how cliche it would be if he  used one of those scenes where everything was short at a really fast speed, but in reverse.  The money would leave the hand of anonymous man counting  it and finds its way back through some horrible trail.   Maybe it would weave its way through the handshake of a drug deal, or find itself in the turning of a trick.  Maybe it would float aimlessly through  fast food drive-throughs or even spend time in offering plates.  He wasn’t sure.   It would all depend on what he was feeling at the time  — whether he had decided that piles of money were mostly evil or mostly harmless — and that changed from day to day.

He was sure of one thing, it would always return to Those Full of Shit.

It’s always the same conversation.  Like heat in the summer and cold in the winter, we always know it’s going to happen.  I’m not sure that we ever even change the words.

We’re not happy with what we have here.  We need to be somewhere else.

So why are we still here?

We’re smart enough, confident enough, resourceful enough to make it anywhere else.

But we’re not anywhere else.  We’re here.  Having the same talk again.

So why are we still here?  Why hasn’t anything changed?

I’m still here because I’m scared.  I’m scared death of what I’m going to find.  I’m even more scared of what I’m not going to find.  We’ve all convinced ourselves that we’re going to find “the answer.”  We think that this thing that weighs us down, this thing that we can’t shake — there’s an answer to it.  There’s a way to shake it off.  We all find a different answer.  Some of us think the answer is somewhere “out there.”  We think it’s in leaving, starting on something new.  It may just be.

…but what if it’s not?

What if we strike out, dead-set on finding a way to shake this emptiness that keeps draining our souls, and we find out that we can’t?  What if it keeps hanging around our necks?  What if we figure out that one thing that we can’t leave behind is ourselves?  What if novelty is just a band-aid for a wound that we can’t heal on our own?

What if we step out, convinced that we have the solution to the problem that steals our happiness on a daily basis, and we find out that geography isn’t a strong enough elixer to cure our ill?  What do we do then?  What do we do when the thing we had placed all of our hope in fails?  What then?  How do we go on?

We’re all buying into lies every day.  We can’t help.  They’re shoved down our throats by a machine that we can’t possibly avoid.  Are we just buying another one of those lies?

Every day I deal with businessmen.  They’re well dressed.  They’re well groomed.  They drive very nice cars.  They smart enough to know how to get exactly what they want.  I can’t stand them.  I tell myself that their lifestyle is ridiculous, because most of them are probably in so much debt that they can’t see straight.

I only do that because I’m jealous.  I’m jealous that they look like they’ve found the answers that we’ve all been promised are out there.  Every day I try to shake that version of success as something valid, and every day I’m mired down by jealousy for something that I don’t even want.

We all do it, and we all do it with different things.  For some of us, we’ve bought the lie that getting married and have children is the ultimate end to life, and that is our solution to “the problem.”  It’s a lie passed down from somewhere that some other person has the power to make us whole.

And what happens when all of those solutions fail?  Where are we left?  What happens we take the chance to go after what we think will fill up the emptiness, and our clutching for a solution only leaves us emptier?  What then?  What do we do?

In the days before cell phones and caller id, how you never knew who was calling you?  It was always some surprise.  It could  be a telemarketer, the girl you’d been dying to hear from, or your grandmother for the third time today.  You just never had any clue what was going to be on the other end of the line.

And if you were just coming in the house, and you heard the phone ringing but couldn’t get to it, and they didn’t leave a message, you never had any idea who called.  You just had to guess.  You had to wonder who might’ve wanted to talk to you.

If you needed someone’s number, you had to write it down, and if you wanted to talk to them, you had to dial it.  If you called them enough times, you would have their number memorized.  And if you did that enough times, you would have this whole list of seven digit combinations stored in your head for people that were important to you.  You would be able to dial them all, without thinking, because your fingers had traced the paths so many times.

Now we all have these monsters in our pockets that scream for our attention every second and make it impossible for us to run far away enough from anything.  It’s inexcusable to be unreachable.  It’s unheard of to be unconnected.

Maybe what we thought would make our lives easier has had a completely different effect after all.

Lately it’s been hard to write.

I don’t know why.  I have trouble with the fact that people just might read what I have to say.  I start writing with that in mind instead of just writing, and it changes everything about the way I write.

This job doesn’t help.  It’s 40 hour of monotony, and it managed to drain every bit of creativity that I may have, and that’s frustrating.

That’s all.