We borrowed a trailer some friends use to haul equipment for their lawn care business and started loading. We strategically tumbled love seats and book cases inside in ways we hoped would cause them to nestle together snugly enough to keep them from jumping ship at 50 mph somewhere on McCarran Boulevard. It was like a game of Tetris where the loser gets charged with vehicular manslaughter. There was also some discussion of whether the absence of a "pin" in the tow hitch on Eric's Bronco was cause for concern, but not being a truck guy, I trusted the group consensus that it was not a necessary component. It was only when we arrived back at the house some hours later and everyone seemed mildly surprised to see the trailer still attached that I began to wonder.
After an offloading process that left me fervently wishing I hadn't decided to take a break from lifting weights over the summer, the strangest thing happened. For the first time since I'd lived with my parents, my place looked more like a home and less like an uneasy alliance of rooms where roving gangs of drunks occasionally rolled up in rugs in the corners. To my untrained eye, it almost looked like the couch matched the carpet. Things seemed unusually squared away on the home front and it felt good. I took some vodka out of the freezer and mixed it up with 100 percent cranberry juice and tried out my new love seat for a while. So far, I have no complaints.
It's been a hard couple of months. After leaving the beach and a job where I was the (self-proclaimed) star reporter and chief smartass, I've found myself in a new job where I'm just another cog in a corporate business plan. The air in Reno has been hazy at best as brush fires rage on all sides, reminding me daily that I'll probably never again live anywhere like the beautiful seaside town I so blithely left behind.
Worst of all, no one at my new job seems to think I'm especially funny. I pitched a new blog for the paper's Web site, essentially a sanitized version of this one, and was all but laughed out of the room. Thank God the official rejection came over the phone several days later, and thank God the department head actually likes me.
Her: "OK, so this is just basically you being you. It's like a normal blog you'd come across on the Web. I'm not seeing a focus."
Me: "That's what I'm going for. That's why it's called "Mixtape." Everybody else here has these rigid categories they write about. I want to stay flexible. I want to do fun stuff one day and serious stuff the next. I know I can do it. See, I used to have this column..."
Her: "We're going to go ahead and pass on it. The people that do this sort of thing have spent years establishing a personality in the community."
Me: (Aside: Right, and now they're old writers who never leave their desks who only appeal to old readers who never leave their houses. That's why no one under 50 reads this paper. Why won't you guys just help ME help YOU?) "I see your point. But you let Jay start his blog when he was only a little older than me. And he just rewrites the top story on FARK for our site every few hours."
Her: "How do you know that?"
Me: "Um... Because I spend so much time... working on my assignments and only surfing the Internet on my lunch break?"
Outside the office, I've recently been carooming through a swamp of relationship drama so gnarly I still can't joke about it, which is beyond unusual for me. Generally, there's hardly anything about male-female relations that doesn't crack me the hell up. Whether I'm just hooking up or getting dumped flat on my ass, I always find it at least a little funny on some level. But this time, it's just shock and awe that I've lived through the thing. Maybe I'll have a quip next week. But for now, call me Tom Hanks, because I'm that unshaven guy washed up on an unknown shore with the wreckage, drained but happy to be alive.
But the thing is, I am alive, and turning 27 next week. And one of the few lessons I've retained in my old age is that sometimes "alive" is all you get. I used to complain and suffer whenever I lost a round, a job, a girl, a friend. I still don't like it. But, finally, I've seen enough to know that for every three months that toss me around like a ragdoll, there will be another three that go well. They might not be the next three, but they'll show up eventually, and the juice is usually worth the squeeze.
So I'm chalking summer 2007 up to experience. There's plenty of guys who hit a rough patch and never really recover, and for a while there it looked like I might be one of them. Now that it seems I'm not, I'm just keeping the other guy off me until the bell rings and I can stagger back to my newly refurbished corner. There's nothing broken that won't heal, no esteem lost that can't be regained and no one leaving that won't be back. And while the days are still muggy and harsh, sometimes at night there's the barest hint of a chill that reminds me that fall is on its way.
Posts
