Ftrain, by Paul Ford

I need to get out of this block. It's the most important thing I can do, is push off the projects I love and take the couple of days necessary to dispatch things that don't particularly matter before hell rains down upon me. For some infinitesimal value of hell. Get back to an empty inbox. I'm taking the day off rather than trying to struggle through this shit in the office one more time without results.

It is, always has been, extraordinarily difficult for me to focus on the task at hand if there is a more interesting task also at hand. In the past I was able to grind things out, but the way I made the grinding work--the lubricants, I guess--were always (1) food; (2) alcohol; and (3) cigarettes. Those were my magic keys to access the realm of the typical, to go from bright green and blue down to gray. Since I've cut those off I don't have the keys. I want a cigarette.

Sometimes [Wife] and I talk about what the men downstairs at the club do for a living. They've been here for decades. We imagine they go to work most days--contractor's office, say--and tell other people to get the work done; then they take phone calls and organize various activities. They put cars in the corner of the warehouse, behind a curtain. They sell a vacant lot. They drop off a box of stuff with their cousin and talk about the Mets, and yell when they see each other. If they don't want to do something then they probably don't do it. Unless the family wants them to.

I also wonder what some Special Forces operative in Afghanistan would make of my mopery, but I imagine they get fed up with shit and don't want to do the boring work either. Duty pulls them through. They light up a cigarette and get back to the mission. The military strikes me as an eternal gym: that idea that one should be your best and go the distance and so on, people slapping your back and yelling at you, pure unadulterated apery, and at the end you are rewarded by the sort of shared intimacy that only mutual cruelty can bring. Thick skin, and discipline, and teams, and protocols; you fall back on those things when you or those you work with are slipping. It is a beautiful thing--likely the most profound experience humans can have, judging by the reactions of veterans, and also the most destructive. If you fuck up, you or someone else might die. If I fuck up someone says, "Well, when do you think you can get it done?"

Perhaps I should have been one of them. A manager of contractors, or a military man, or a banker, or a programmer pure and simple. But when I look back at the branching points of my life, I have to acknowledge that there is a great deal of destiny in place. The patterns of my existence were fully in place by age 12. I was a fat nerd seemingly from birth and have never particularly minded losing opportunities as a result, as long as the basic nerdery was permitted me. I remember telling a coworker that I failed a class in high school; he was shocked. The idea never occurred to him. What I imagined for myself was sitting behind the glass at a gas station, writing poems in the off-hours. Some mild crimes.

Weight: 326.75 lbs