A Soul Sucking Jerk at 4 In the Morning.

I'm not really sure why it was that I stopped writing. At some point life became so full, that the need to express something about it dried up, and was replaced a desire to simply sit in it. Blaise Pascal once said that "most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room". So it is that I feel I have been attempting to stay still more metaphorically within the space I occupy; not explain or give meaning to my life, but sit still in the moment. Driven by a hunger make my years count for something, and a realization that against the props and settings of time my life is but one single tree falling down in the forest, what is meaningful and what is insignificant seem more or less like the same things. And so I pull together the meaningful and the commonplace, watch the grandiose needs I have to say something never before said disintegrate, and get life with real days, real pain, real people and the joy that comes from experiencing them.

Exibit A:
Work has always meant suffering to me. Like the "ah shit" Adam uttered when he first failed to break the hard-packed ground within sight of the gates of Eden, or that sinking feeling Sisyphus probably got in his gut every time the boulder reached the peak of the hill it would eventually roll back down, every job I have undertaken has left me believing that contentment with one's work was the practice of inane, hopeless shit-eating, with only the hope that the daylight broke before your back did. Somewhere along the line, I heard the message the work was redeemed and redemptive, included in the Christian story of the souls who had found their worth. But the evidence was contrary, and while my father destroyed his body behind the wheel of a semi, I tried to memorize John Donne as I stocked the ailes of a supermarket straight from a zombie/slasher flick, filled instead with the Walking Stupid.
It isn't that work was so difficult to find, it's just that, as Beck would call it, the "soul-sucking jerk" was everybody's boss, and the dregs of society oozed past like the hours. Perhaps now my cynicism is based upon what was perhaps an unhelpfully optimistic teenage mind. Those I was repulsed by, I attempted to place the face of Christ upon. If I have learned anything since, it is that sometimes ugly people are just ugly, and that hoping to see Jesus on the face of a homeless man or alcoholic woman is more about me hiding my own fear, than it is about showcasing my magnanimity. So it is now that I work with drug addicts and I still have the same fear, but their worth to me is in their humanity--not potentially, but as it is right now. I used to see "rehab" as almost ignorance of the present state for the sake of the future, but rehabilitation is done with the same human, start to finish. An old gentleman with a long history of alcholism said to me the other day, "some days I'm Xerxes, some days I'm Pericles, some days I'm in the treatment center". Though I too am a victim of the "feelings disease", I see that days spent in an attic, wearing a HAZMAT suit while fighting off bats, or feeling my brain-stem go numb after bouncing across Montana prairie on a John Deere tractor, my burden that of being unable to engage part of myself. People have told me that I am too quiet, could have smoked weed, don't have much of a personality, am too relaxed, and yet now, my peaceful demeanor is in a place where I can push back, be ornery, recieve other's hurt, cut up, be angry, be sad, or just be. Now instead of being yelled at by old ladies who can't get their damn cupons to work, I get to face down 19 year old coke heads who are pissed because they can't smoke their cigarettes whenever they feel the slightest bit of anxiety.