002: The Face of a Shadow

It has been a rough week, honestly, and not even because of anything particular that happened during it. I just feel less and less apt to put up with the frustrations of everyday life - carrying on in a job that barely gives me mild satisfaction, and held back both by outside forces and internal ones - okay mostly my own crippling self doubt and lack of motivation - from my true passion and what I believe to be the only thing in life that would give me true satisfaction to do for a living (and even that is something I doubt.)

At the end of a long week or wondering what the hell I am even doing at my job, I think the last thing I wanted was to sit in a 2-hour meeting where the overall direction of the company and performance over the past quarter is discussed, and individual accolades are given out. Of course never to me personally, since I don't seem to make it my business to perform well enough to earn recognition. Oh, I'm good. I'm very good. But I find it hard to excel.

You have to laugh. The winner of the award - whom I don't begrudge in the least because she deserves it - was Catherine, lauded for coming into a new category with the biggest book in the business on her plate. Which is, you know, so funny, because I could have sworn that one year earlier I, too, had come into a new category with the biggest book in the business on my plate, and I was not formally recognized. (I didn't mind then because again, I respected the person who got recognized at that time.) I'm just conflicted because I don't even really want to be recognized but at the same time, what are you even doing in your life if you are working somewhere where you don't feel like you're worth being acknowledged and are doing good enough work to be? Like I said, I was in no way bitter or jealous, only that I was not in the right headspace to even broach the topic.

Catherine was also celebrated for branching out into Planning, which I had been talking with Jess about doing for months and yet seems to have fallen by the wayside. And I almost don't want to push the issue because deep down I just can't bring myself to care about my trajectory at this company anymore. I'm spent.

The thought had been percolating within me all week. With every micromanaging request from Caryn, I shudder. With every discussion of in-stocks and sell-through I cringe with something approaching existential despair. I don't know how I'm going to hide it in my next one-on-one with Jess. I am in turmoil and I don't really have anyone I feel like I can talk to about it. Even my wife, because of the dire implications for our future if I were to, you know, bug out and leave a decently-paying job with benefits to specifically do nothing but, I suppose, chase my dream, which I could - hypothetically but not in practice - do while staying employed.

My dream! I hate my dream. I wish I could be happy just working at a damn desk all day. The world doesn't want, or need, my dream, I've checked. But guess what, it won't go away.

I could be writing right now, you know. I could be making progress on something that might actually go somewhere. But for major things it feels like, if I have to confine it to the smaller corners of my time then I shouldn't even bother. I got a little bit of writing done on a script earlier this week - more on that later - but where will it ever go?

Ahem.

I took a break from this rant of existential despair to finally set up  LinkedIn Profile for myself. I thought, if I'm going to cry so much about my lot in life, the least I could do is some small gesture toward changing it. Now, as it happens, I am not interested in virtually any job that could be fond on LinkedIn, but it was a concession to myself that it's entirely possible that my next job is in fact out there and that some kind of professional presence could be warranted.

Life is just so chaotic these days. It's become hard to reset to zero. I got home and started on chores, long-neglected cleaning and laundry, and everything, only to find the motor of the dryer appears to be busted. Outside forces appear to be working against me, not that I need any help.

So the place is a mess. Dishes, grime, clutter, clothes. The tap drips all night, water torture in the sink, the furnace is burning but it's still cold I think. Oh wait, that was Sarah Harmer. Just those first things though.

I don't feel like we have much room to improve our lot. It's always something, you know, like the gym or whatever, and even when it's not, it's just fatigue from life.

Randomly - under circumstances too sensitive to discuss here but that I will be sure to remember when I am inevitably re-reading this tragic entry years down the road - I ran into Robyn. Of all people to wander into my world at the ass-end of Toronto on a Tuesday evening! It could have been any damn person from high school, and it was Robyn. Go fucking figure. It only lasted a moment because I had to go soon after, but I couldn't help but be rattled. I had been working - only moments earlier - on a plot that involved the return of a person from a character's past, and then a character from my past appears as though I conjured her. My most unwelcome magic.

It felt significant, but as I said it didn't last long. When I got home there was a message from her on FB, apologizing for the previous message she had sent four years ago. Water under the bridge, of course. I thought maybe this would lead to a requisite conversation, and then - what, a coffee? But no. I'm not even sure I ever fully disclosed to Mel the exact nature of Robyn's and my friendship. I'm not even sure I've ever truly comprehended it. And if I did, I doubt Mel would be in favour of me looking her up. It's probably better if we don't follow up, but it could be considered inspiration for this writing.

I...

Ugh, this post. In the annals of awful, soul-crushing posts I've done, this is... well, it's up there. It's a grown up kind of despair. We watched the new Paul Rudd Netflix series, Living With Yourself, which hit too close to home, not because the couple was unhappy, (well, in that we fear becoming such a couple) but because of all the other reasons Rudd was unhappy and flawed and looking for release. Of course it was your typical white guy drudgery porn, the kind I will inevitably end up peddling if I ever make it out of here alive.

Well.

Have a little faith.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

Edit 12:40 AM: I'll give you this. As embarrassing as this whole rant was, putting it down in words was actually really stimulating and therapeutic, and now I'm not so frustrated for now
 If I could harness this to write in the same way I harnessed my bitterness some 17 years ago to write Half Past, I'd be set. But I'll settle for doing some X-Cerpts for now.

001: The Buffet

You know, somehow I really thought I had posted here since New Year's?

It has been absolutely crazy how much nothing has happened. Tons of it, keeping me busy, so much so that I really have lost track.

One day, I will look back on this post - don't laugh you know that's what happens - and I won't remember things like going out for burritos with Mel before the gym this past Wednesday, or how cold it was today compared to the previous week, or my frustrations in trying to manage my time at work while fielding a neverending stream of inquiries from an unwieldy large number of people. Admittedly, sometimes I am just too fragile for life, I can hardly deal with what, to some people, is probably a reasonable amount of work.

I wouldn't have remembered all of that stuff, except now that I have written it, there's half a chance I remember it because I wrote it, or more likely, I remember it briefly once I have re-read it a few months or years from now.

To some degree - at least the expected amount if not perhaps slightly more - I have made good on my promise to myself (not a resolution, let's make that absolutely clear) to do more writing in the new year, when work is calmer and the wedding stuff was done. All the more impressively, work isn't that calm, and the wedding stuff gives way to the "being married" stuff. So I may have some more time than I did a few months ago but the best part is having more mental real estate.

I'm not saying I suddenly believe I am going to crap out a masterpiece anytime soon on my lunchbreak. I'm not saying I'm even doing that much more of it. But it is some and it's not all for my X-Men blog, so that helps. It pleases me. I'm glad to be doing it and it makes my brain feel good to have it to think about in my spare moments and there have been a few knots to untangle, but the untangling has been enjoyable. I find moments like this one at the end of the day, or first thing in the mornings on weekends when I let Mel sleep way later than she wants, or yes, on my lunchbreak. Today I entertained the notion of stealing away midway through the afternoon to the Wellness Room to give myself at least a half hour to work on a few paragraphs, but honestly, the real work was calling me and I was on a good roll with it. Alas.

Earlier this week, I had what I consider to be a really reassuring conversation with Mel about my writing. I brought up a thought that has been rolling around my head for years. It probably doesn't sound like that big of a deal outside of my brain, but it really does feel pressing to me. I asked her how she would feel if my writing needed to take my real life as inspiration - if she would constantly be seeing herself in things I had written and have a hard time with where reality ends and fiction begins. I didn't think she would have a problem, and yet feeling like she might really seemed to stop me up.

All she said was to not make her look bad. That still leaves things ambiguous because after all, most of what I write (hypothetically) is about fictional people. And they may just happen to bear resemblance to people from my real life. I brought up the TV show concept I had years ago about a more grownup me, who is in a relationship with a confident, capable person, and a still-slacker brother - this does resemble my life as it is today, but it didn't always. My life just happened to grow into this idea of where I thought it might someday be. And now to execute that, I would need to draw on my real life experience. But I wouldn't want to treat it like I was telling out story - you know?

Well, of course, you know. I'm not sure I made myself clear but I did get a fair answer and honestly just vocalizing it helped me feel better. Feel a little unstopped. At the same time, we've been having this conversation about couples that run out of things to say to each other. Could that be us someday? Maybe, but it won't be as long as I don't feel like I need to guard so much of my life.

That's a separate issue though.

Earlier tonight I was reading my old Tumblr, from around 2013, the time I stopped writing in this blog for years. That site was my primary outlet for a long time because I had people there I wanted to communicate with so things that would have been put here wound up there, albeit in modified form - I would write more frequent, briefer allusions to thins and occasional long rundowns, as opposed to the form SWP posts usually take which just sprawl all over whatever happens to be on my mind for one post every few nights (at the time.) I was getting a lot of attention there, and a small group of people really liked getting that window into my life and I liked getting mine into theirs and then it all fell apart and the site because wet garbage. Well, it happens. We've moved on.

Anyway. At that time I was writing a novel, working on it furiously every Sunday afternoon sitting in the Mall Food Court (as if I didn't spend enough time there.) Although I will always be attached to the ideas I was using for that book, the style was pretty unpolished and juvenile - it had its virtues, and nobody else would have written like that, but the novelty was undercut by a real lack of study. I was really just putting it out on paper. Well, the screen. I know people did enjoy it, but to me it doesn't look like a real book people would read, just something created by a guy who knows a little bit about what works but still needs to learn how prose actually goes.

I still still need to learn, but I fake it better now.

Mixed in with all that is the typical sad boi stuff, not to mention a chronicle of meeting the person who would eventually bring me to the person I married. I didn't even remember taking it so seriously, but I didn't have anything else going on and was desperate for attention so that does ring true. It's just funny when you see something in your voice, verifiably written by you, and you think "I do not remember thinking this way at all."

Well. It's been a few years. We just watched that episode of How I Met Your Mother about the doppelgangers, where the big summation from Ted is that, in the end, we become our own doppelgangers. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one growing and changing in this way, but I'm sure most people do. I recently compared two far-apart articles by Nathan Rabin - his World of Flops entry for "Pay It Forward" when he was a cynical, angry young man, and his more recent writing when he is sincere and hopeful for the world even as he battles anxiety and depression and the usual host of mental illnesses. I still think modern Nabin would hate Pay It Forward, but differently.

It's funny I mentioned, a few paragraphs back, about writing at lunch. Last week on Friday, I had determined to use my lunch to do some writing in the Café, even turning down a chance to sit with some of the usual folks to do so. Then I saw that, for like the only time in memory, some certain other people were up in the lunchroom. And how would I feel missing out on sitting with them? So I hastily finished my writing and sat with them - where my presence added nothing and they did not really acknowledge me. Ouch. It's like high school all over again, where people know me and maybe don't have a problem with me but I'm not really close to most of them. I'm not a group person, I'm not a joiner. I will become invisible in any group of 4 or more, it's inevitable, and it still hurts. But I don't want to be left out. It saddens me to see the ways in which other people are closer with each other than with me, even though I have many years of experience that this is the way it is.

It's something I miss about my retail jobs where it would be me and one other person. You could talk to that person, if you needed or wanted to. Or you could not. But for the most part it was just you two. There was no feeling left out. I'm great at one-on-ones, but there are no one-on-ones anymore. Except for when I have lunch with Tony, which is all there was to do for nearly two years at the old office, and for much of the time at this one.

Switching gears - Shortly after New Years was Grandma's Funeral. I don't really know how to encapsulate that experience. The viewing began with a truly bizarre declaration from our cousin that she still has trouble around the birthday of our Great Grandfather, who lived to be 101 and did not die shockingly or suddenly. Ever since Grandma passed I have had horrifying visions of posts in years to come on her birthday or the anniversary of her passing "Missing you more every day," that sort of thing. Far be it from me to police anyone's way of processing grief, but it's called processing. It's unhealthy to trot it out year after year and wallow in it.

Later, this led to a discussion between me and my brothers about the sincerity of these gestures - was  it just an attempt to look the saddest, did it come from a place of genuine sadness, or was she just of the belief that this is how you act when someone passes? At the funeral, she read a poem to the effect of, you were gone too soon, so suddenly, we had no chance to say goodbye... and, I mean. We had chances to say goodbye. And 90 is not too soon, not when you are suffering like she was. To that, I say, just because something is sad, doesn't mean it's applicable or appropriate to be reading at a time that is in a different way. There are different flavours of sadness.

At the viewing, we mingled and looked at lots of old photographs. She looked less like herself than any deceased person I have seen, which made it hard to bear. Lots of people came - Dad and Deb, Mel's family. My brothers and I were all asked if we wanted to speak at the funeral, and they trusted me to do the talking. Is it weird that I had been thinking about it well in advance?

It was hard to sum up what I wanted to say, and I didn't want to just give the speech you are supposed to give at funerals where you attach a huge amount of meaning to one specific aspect of a person. I did speak about my personal relationship with her, and to the degree that it mirrors' my brothers, theirs. I spoke about sitting and talking with her, including the last conversation we had that was more than smalltalk, which was years ago, when she spoke to Mel and I about her Sunday mornings gardening with her grandfather. It's a memory Mel treasures and so do I.

And then I gave what I hoped would be the big takeaway from the speech, that she left behind a family that she raised and influenced in ways we may never even fully know, and that will continue for years, so she will live on and never truly leave us. I wanted it to sound hopeful and optimistic and just this side of platitude. I didn't want to think about what we had lost, I wanted to think about what we had been left. And I wanted to thank my aunts (including Gail) and mom for the care they gave her late in her life because I knew nobody else would. Lori, with her tribute, turned the mood up quite a bit, and Karen revealed the significance of the Bob Marley song, which is beautiful to me now. It really is exactly the kind of tune Grandma would enjoy, I can see her tapping her fingers along to it.

Afterward, the mood slowly transitioned from a somber funeral to a bustling gathering of Woods and Fourniers (and Stemmers and Williamses and whomever else.) We brought some flowers back to Toronto, which are slowly wilting on our kitchen counter.

There's more, I suppose, but not much.

I need not to wallow so much. I still want to write more but it's getting late. I did want to write this though. Maybe tomorrow morning for other things.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto