This guy I know
Maybe you know him, too?
I got a friend. He’s back east. But not all the way east. Somewhere between here and there. He lives just outside a city, but not the one you are thinking of. He looks one way and he can see the factory hues just beyond the willows and when he looks the other way it’s mostly nothing and flat. But that is about to change as the fucking city people keep moving farther out in chase of something. And the roads aren’t built for the infestation.
He’s got a job he hates. He’s always afraid his head is on the chopping block because — A- sales are not what they were B- He doesn’t think the other guys like him, and C- he’s the new guy.
But he is an expert at compartmentalization. He just pulls his hat down low and grinds. His dentist says he has been grinding too much, especially at night when he sleeps but forgets to dream. It’s one of the things he knows he has to do something about, but keeps putting off.
He got engaged to his old lady a while back. He wasn’t sure why. Habit? Maybe it was because they have a kid. Or pressure from his gal’s mom, or his mom. Society. Or fear he will become his own dad. Probably a combo of all of those things. And probably not for the reasons why you are supposed to… even though shit like that happens every day.
Money has been tight. Tighter than it usually is. And he’s been having trouble sleeping again. One of his friends who married a hippie chick and now goes to therapy says he might be anxious or depressed. Maybe both. But he just puts his hat down and digs in at work. If you don’t look at it, it doesn’t exist. Besides, he’d got enough to worry about.
He doesn’t want to know why the backyard lawn is turning brown, and his power bill keeps getting higher. He doesn’t want to open that bill that says his home insurance has doubled because of all the recent extreme weather. He noticed the oak tree out back kept some of its leaves all the way to December and remembered something about that one headline from March of last year in the gazette that read “the winter that wasn’t.”
And he gets angry when he stares at the fuel pump. But doesn’t know what to do with that anger. When he’s trying to help his kid with numbers, he loses his patience. The kid runs upstairs. Then his lady lays into him and it gets worse. There doesn’t seem to be much escape or relief from this thing he feels.
Taking a walk used to help, but he’s been trying to quit cigarettes, so that just makes him feel like he wants to get in his truck and drive off. Somewhere other than here.
He sits in the driveway a lot at night. Not wanting to go inside. Because he doesn’t want anyone to know that he hurts, he has no answers, and feels alone.
Like he doesn’t belong.
Even the guys at work sit together at lunch don’t make him feel included there either. He’s been thinking of maybe if he got over his shit and married the chick or just do something else for work, that might help. Sometimes he looks at the price of apartments in a town on the other side of the river. But the lack of choices increase the experience of feeling trapped.
And if anyone asks how he is doing, he lies. And those he can’t lie to, he just shuts down. He voted democratic most of his life because that’s what you did when you were the son of a union guy. But lately, that same union, the one he belongs to even though there is no work left and why he had to take this other job (the one he hates) - has been talking about change. And the head of the local wears one of those red hats. He seems confident and sounds like he knows what he talks about. Plus, he drives a nice car. And the things he says make more and more sense.
He looks at his bank account and wonders where it all went. Seems like when he picks his check up every other Friday, it magically deflates on the way to the bank. And the two weeks in between get longer. Time expands or contracts relative to the poverty line in a much more quantifiable way than Einstein ever could have imagined.
He thinks it is the taxes or the price of everything going up and he wouldn’t be wrong. He just wants to know what the reason is. Because if he knows that, it can be fixed, you know?
Then, he turns on the TV for the forty seven minutes he gets between the kids going to bed and etc and sees an ad for How Trump promises to make America great again and he falls asleep and dreams of something that is very different than his current reality.
He wakes up for a minute around 3 am and considers going to the bed room, but he and the old lady have been staying together by staying in different rooms, so he chooses discretion rather than change. Some nights he jerks off quiet. But usually he just turns on the TV.
Law and Order is on. It’s always on. But not the original. It’s good enough though. In between the wheels of justice, when insurance and health care commercials come on… there is that commercial again …
And the vote is already made. Months before the election. But it is a shadow vote. On paper, he doesn’t traditionally look like a guy who voted for that guy. And he never picks up the phone when those polls call. He is a shadow vote. His doesn’t count.
Which is why it counts.
