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The way things really are

This story has to be told just the way it is.

The scene opens with me getting fired from my job in San Francisco after a heart-wrenching year apart from my wife and kids. I return home to a depressing, dead-beat town where the wind blows life sideways, often punctuated by cold pellets of rain.

I am unemployed and in really bad shape, and so are the people I love. My wife and I take the time to fight about every little niggling detail—from the compost pile in the yard to the correct time of day to start drinking. It’s fucking ridiculous, and sad.

I don’t know what’s going on. It gets so bad at times I can’t even move my body. I can’t even remember how it feels to be baseline normal, to wake up and feel like there’s some sort of purpose to living.

Friends and colleagues call and I don’t respond. The world jumps out at us and I don’t even shrug. This is not the way it’s supposed to be, but it is the way things really are.

The sickening thing about writing like this is that I want to express these feelings on my public blog, but I can’t. I have to put on a charade to appease the corporate world, the marketing world. Nobody wants to hear these problems when they’re trying to sanitize their life.

Yet if I don’t write, I will die and I’ll bring the whole ship down. Watership down. Yet it feels good to do a little stream of consciousness like this—gets the gnats out and the words flowing. It’s so pure and un-marketing like. It’s the kind of writing I buried alive years ago, when I decided that I had to join cabal of copy and marketing and sales and corporations—the art-killers, the money holders of the world. The so-called movers and shakers.