I want one of those

I live on Highland Drive.

A rare bird, that.

It’s not a street, not an avenue, not a road. It is a Drive. That is the urban equivalent of lane. It’s a cart-track perched on a hill somewhere—paved, but otherwise indistinguishable from the dirt road I grew up on. It’s rutty, steep, quiet and out of the way.

Quiet.

Except the seven times nightly that sirens cleave the air and rattle my skull with ricocheting sound waves. Except when the water engine has to lay on its horn to warn people it’s turning onto the thoroughfare. You have to give fair warning to oncoming motorists because it’s impossible to see over the crest of the hill from Highland. It’s a goddamned death trap.

Tonight, it is also a sleep trap.

It’s 2 AM and I’m ready to crucify the great-grandchildren of whomever thought it was a good idea to put a fire station in a nook of a residential neighborhood whose only outlet to the rest of the world is Highland Drive—my quaint little cart-track.

Murdering the twice-removed progeny of a man who was once in charge of making poor city planning decisions would be a nice reprieve from the gut-twisting angst that has kept me awake waiting for the fire engine to come by. But I’d almost fallen asleep. I’d almost placated myself enough to dose off.

One nice thing about Seattle: it has emergencies you can set your watch by. The city is very efficient in that respect.

[Fade in, Sirens blare. Protagonist sits up, glances at watch]
Protagonist: Wha? Is it the worst possible time already? *

It’s always either at a crucial point in a movie or when I’ve finally almost convinced myself I’m not wasting my life doing a job I hate for a sum of money that is no longer justification in itself.

Tonight it was the latter.

Now I’m writing this to try and direct the rage at something useful and constructive like bitching to an online community of people whose unifying characteristic is a passing interest in my well-being. It’s also too muggy to attempt REM sleep.

So—ahem—fuck money, fuck job experience, fuck my bills—fuck the person who won’t stop calling my upstairs neighbor^†. She doesn’t want to talk to you. Fuck me for not attacking opportunities.

I don’t know why it’s so hard to find a job where someone will pay me to discuss issues and voice my opinion. Maybe it’s that I never actually look.

Richard Roeper gets to review movies and his editors gave him his own daily column. It’s all pointless musings in no particular order and with no unifying theme. It exists only to let slip the banalities from his over-round head—apropos of absolutely fucking nothing. He uses lots of these: *** to separate his disparate thoughts. It’s like a police blotter of stupidity. I’m drunk with jealousy.

I’ll make this easier. Don’t pay me. Give me food and shelter, handle my student loans and find someone to buy my car. You can throw things at me while I type if you want. The only catch is that you have to find me; I won’t be coming to you.

***

I think I just went semi-catatonic. I found myself staring at Shannon’s A&F bag out of the corner of my eye. My head was cocked at a weird angle. I can’t remember what I was thinking about. It’s been like 10 minutes. That’s probably an exaggeration.

***

I can’t survive another day in that place, it makes my soul weep.

***

I could go on I suppose, but it wouldn’t be anything I haven’t said before, and the Law of Diminishing Returns applies to catharsis just like it applies to field hands and bowls of Corn Flakes.

Besides, I have to get up soon to survive another day in that place.

***

* Those are the first and only two lines I’ve written in a screenplay about my life as a hopeless, angry fuckup. I envision it as Waiting for Godot meets Natural Born Killers [Insert rim shot here].

I need to stop watching so many Woody Allen movies. They aren’t funny anymore and I’m starting to sound like him. I also think he’s making me gray prematurely. You haven’t seen a bad movie until you’ve seen Sleeper.

† Ben swore a blue streak in his blog yesterday so I think I have to as well. Sorry.