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Give me a shovel and a piece of earth and I’ll happily dig a rut until you bury me in it. Adventure is for bored people just as fucking is for horny ones. I find the careful maintenance of my routines to be adventure enough. Yet change does occur because change is an asshole like that.
Some people talk about “good change” and “bad change” but change is entirely amoral. Calling it “good” or “bad” is the goofy habit of a lazy mind. (As such, it’s something I regularly indulge in.) When measuring its goodness or badness you’re either looking back at something, in which case you’ll always think it was a good change, or you’re trying to predict something, in which case you’ll just be wrong. Good/Bad doesn’t matter. It has no real cost/benefit analysis.
It’s more accurate to measure these things in terms of disruption. There’s highly disruptive change and change you hardy notice. Losing your job or keys would be highly disruptive. A divorce might not be. It’d depend on the last time you saw your wife. It could just be a letter and some papers to sign. But mentally, you might lose your shit.
There’s no problem too small for imagination to make worse.
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If being sober for years has taught me anything, it’s that every single day is pretty much the same. The mistakes differ, are hopefully corrected and new mistakes arise from them. Beyond that, the walk to work remains the same, the things I do at leisure are the same things and the places I go are the same places. My perception of this static physicality is all that changes. My moods and thoughts evolve quicker than my surroundings.
Yet I always knew that. Difference is, it used to frustrate me. Drinking was a sort of prison break. I didn’t do it to escape from problems, I did it to create new and exciting ones. I’d look at a bottle of Jack Daniels and wonder: “What fucked up scenario is in you?” Could be anything, really. And therein lied the fun.
But my days of rampaging adventures are over. That sort of thing no longer appeals to me. These days, I value dependability, predictability and efficiency. I like the trains to run on time.
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The last thing I want to do is explode my world. It may seem odd to you – I really have no idea how things seem to you– but I used to want to explode it every night. Now I want to decorate and improve it. This leads some to regard me as an emotionless robot but what the fuck do they know about another man’s heart anyway? And while it’s true that I can be a cantankerous cunt, this grumpiness belies a deeper contentment.
It is with some wariness that I regard the few little changes that are now taking place in the physicality of my life.
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I’ve dropped a shift at work, cutting about a quarter of my income but gaining a four day weekend. This was a fairly easy choice to make. If I couldn’t afford to do it, I wouldn’t. I can so I did. Still, it’s a change. I’ve been on the same schedule for a couple of years now. This extra day off is a bit of a curve-ball.
Right now I’m trying to establish a new day-to-day routine. Having more time often means having more time to waste. I wish to avoid doing that. But it’s difficult to set up a new routine. You have to wrestle it from distractions until it becomes automatic. Then it’s all gravy.
Counter intuitive as it may seem, as part of some minor cost-cutting measures, I’ve also purchased my first cell phone. Bell Canada had become impossible to deal with. We were losing internet every time it rained, thus paying for a service we often lacked. (You might have wondered about the recent slowness of my post production. Now you know.) I’ve switched over to Rogers and cancelled my landline. Rogers will have their own problems, I’m sure, but as things now stand it’s better value coupled with less problems.
People who have known me for years are shocked that I’ve gotten a cell phone, more so that I’ve got a blackberry. Frankly, I’m a bit shocked too. If a telephone number wasn’t a modern necessity, I’d just get rid of all phones.
I hate talking on the contraptions and I hate being on call. I dislike people being able to easily contact me. This device adds too much fucking ambiguity. People might suddenly feel free to cancel, knowing that I’m not on route and out of contact, they might want to make immediate plans to do things and, within 24 hours of getting the thing I’ve already received my first text message assigning me a chore.
I now have a little chaos machine.
More communication just means more complaining.
This change will probably be the most disruptive of the lot.
By having one, I lose a certain rustic charm but can perhaps make that up in ferocious, mechanical super-plugged-in- cosmopolitanism.
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If being a hypocrite bothered me, I’d also have to stop bitching about what cellphone companies are doing to Africa. But being a hypocrite doesn’t bother me. Being a hypocrite is the only thing that makes civilized discourse possible. We’re all guilty and we’re all complicit in this dirty, old fucked up world. And the worst people are those who think their portion of blame is less because they made a lifestyle choice. Those are the people who become fanatics.
People only call each other hypocrites to use someone else’s actions to excuse theirs. I have some more blood on my hands from this device but those hands weren’t exactly clean to start with. If justice ever comes to us, I’m not going to the gallows claiming innocence, ignorance or that I was just following orders. I’m not asking for quarter, nor am I granting it. Fact is, I can live with some dead Africans if it allows me to get phone-calls. That’s the fucking problem.
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But we all know that part. The sooner we admit we know it, the better. Being evil is one thing, being unable to look directly at it is quite another. Reduces your ability to correct. Fills you up with shit.
And one thing I’ll continue to look directly at, no matter how full of shit they may be, is the person in front of me. No phone interruptions over coffee and dinner. I’m going to treat this thing as my new pocket watch. It will only come out of my pocket in company when I need to make an ostentatious display of boredom. Problem is, our society is so utterly bereft of subtly, I doubt anyone will even notice. I’ll probably need to remove my pants and shout: “I’M BORED!” to get people to put down their blackberries long enough to be entertaining.
Also, I’m going to start smoking hash.
