The Lungs You Are Breathing From
Conflated scenes from the past few weeks: I’m on a bus and maybe it’s after dark or maybe the sun is just setting as it does in longer summer days, and as soon as I board there’s a guy turning around telling two obnoxious Northwestern kids to literally "shut the fuck up." I didn’t know what was going on until after I had already been riding the bus for several minutes and after the guy had gotten off the bus (giving the side eye to them as he walked off). I get where he’s coming from listening to someone try to relate them – "Do you go to Madison?" "Madison? Um, we go to Northwestern." "Oh, I just heard you say Rocks for Jocks and…" It was painful on a lot of levels having to listen to the guy from another couple seated next to them quickly try to compensate for his mistake.
Another one is me getting on a packed bus and having to stand up front by the driver who looks suspiciously like will.i.am, but will was having a bad day: Swearing at bicyclists as they veered unexpectedly around potholes, the dreads were down. Dude was in a hurry of some kind (Blackhawks playoffs? Heat-Spurs? What housewives franchise is still running?) and made it clear to anyone in close proximity.
I separate this story because I’m going to come back to this entry someday and laugh: Getting off the bus and walking across the intersection, the light turns green going east-west. Traffic hesitates and horns honk at a homeless-looking guy on a bicycle gleefully, recklessly wandering in the opposite direction of traffic as it moves. The highest comedy or the lowest? Still not sure. Keep coming back to this to see if the answer shows itself in a few years’ time. If Open Diary is around that long.
A friend of mine sent me here when we were 14. It’s still strange to me that of everyone I know, I was the one that kept it up.
Another strange development: Monday, I’ll be in charge of people and paid for it by someone other than a university. For the first time, an inmate runs the asylum. This is significant on a couple of levels: First, most everyone above me looks like they’re moving to Staples for jobs in Boston. No need to retrace the steps to understand why that’ll never happen to me, which: good. Let them all go. Free all of us. We have like six whiteboards in our office and a coworker and I have been using them to draw lately to take out some of the stress. It’s been Winnie the Pooh saying "Get honey, get paid." It’s been the Pink Panther. It’s been Moby Dick. Tonight it was Billy Corgan from the "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" video. I guess my penchant for sketching never really left. Before, it was all I had to survive the fruitless 13-hour days; now, I don’t know. The future of what? I guess I get to be the change I wanted to see. I also guess I’ll have to get used to using the word "delta" and "cadence."
Recently, that same coworker and I asked this girl we know to order us a print straight from the vendor; meanwhile, I asked an Image Designer I’m friendly with to touch up the original so we can expand it. This is what we got on a 16"x24" canvas from a vendor we work with closely. The Account Manager had to get a guarantee from the vendor before sending the image through. Along with Spider-Man shooting Ruby code, it’s one of the best things that’s happened to me recently. If that makes you want to be friends with me on Facebook, I don’t know what to tell you. I’d rather just show you here.
Long bus rides home and the familiar pot of stew that is public transit, late nights up, bottles broken open the same old ways. Returning to a lucky dress, you’re risky business and the wind picks up. Someone said with a slight drawl, "Gather all around, feelin’ fine." I can hear the baritone adjacent – it’s in headphones, it’s in the conversation outside the open windows two days ago when my neighbor has "that conversation" with his ex-girlfriend wherein he asks to know "everything" while he "was in." I’m half-listening and there’s Daughn Gibson going on a loop and someone shouted out, "You can ring it back, any night." I took a little more. There was a fuss about who was left, or next. Someone shouted out, "You can read it back, anytime."
In the old days, I used to save my notes for entries where I thought I had something to say; now I feel obligated to say something because there aren’t much of us left. Something about community, something about commerce. Same as ever or thereabouts. Someone said, "You can bring it back anytime." But you know how that goes.