Stories, etc.

To date, I have begun stories about a man, an old general who tried to conquer the world and was sentenced, by those who stopped him – after much bloodshed, pain, heartache, and loss – to be eternally imprisoned in a stone tower, which would move every day from place to place, at random, throughout that world, so that his followers (for even after all that he had done, there were those who wanted to go on) could never find and rescue him, and he created a companion in his mind, out of regret for all the life he’d lost and wasted and spilled on barren wasteland, a wraith of the innocence left in him, a hallucination; an old god who keeps watch over a tiny eldritch monster which lives in the bottom of a bottomless pot of soup; a guitarist who accidentally goes wandering into another world, where dreams are watched by the servants of the king there, to keep them from the daemons who seek to conquer all; a man who is cursed to die a thousand thousand deaths, and each time he wakes there is some new horror he must face, for all of eternity. I have finished none of the above, and I don’t know why.

I’m angry, and lonely, and hurt, and mostly I don’t know why. I used to really like my job, but lately work in general bothers me – I don’t mind working. I don’t mind coming home tired, and sore, late, I don’t mind dealing with people (mostly), I don’t mind doing dirty work. What gets to me is when there’s politics. When it’s tough to do my job because the boss needs to keep this or that person happy, when I can’t get things done because they need to be done by this person only, for some stupid obscure reason, when things need to be super-professional because we’re trying to impress someone higher-up-the-chain, and I want to say “Are you fucking kidding me? I just dug through three different garbage cans looking for a catalogue I threw out too early, the both of us swear like sailors when we’re working on something particularly hard, when it’s raining I come into work soaked and when it’s snowing I come into work frosted over, you barely ever wear a uniform because it’s so cold in here three layers of fleece isn’t even enough (for you, anyway, personally I couldn’t care less about the cold), there’s three different handwritings on the smaller bags because we all take turns making them up, and this business works fine because everyone who works here cares about it (I think…), and because you’re damned good at what you do, and everything works, even if it isn’t clean enough to eat off of (which, mostly, it is). Who gives a shit if my hair is frizzy as hell? I wear a hat when you tell me to… why does it matter that everything I did last night besides the drawer was off the clock? Nobody was around. The drawer comes out even nine times out of ten, or more, and customers rarely leave unsatisfied. When I tell people stuff about birds, I’m helping them. I like doing that. I… just don’t. Get it.

I don’t really care about money. This, I’ve been told, is a failing. I don’t need a lot of stuff in my life, most of the stuff I like best is beat-up and old, and as long as I have clothes on my back and enough to eat, I’m fine. Most people either don’t understand that or don’t believe it. I don’t understand them. I don’t understand why it’s okay to lie, cheat, fuck people over, as long as you’re getting paid enough, but if you’re playing guitar in the street you damn well better be collecting. I don’t understand why it’s good form to put change in your hat so it looks like you’re making money already. Will people only give to someone they think others have given to? I don’t understand why crack whores are despicable, but Artists doing crack at Parties are glorious.

I hate this life, and I think one of these days I’ll just disappear, and in retrospect, my deepest apologies to any of you whom I abandoned in the doing thereof. I hope you understand.