I Think I'm Depressed
I imagine myself in five years, still writing, and no one reading. Sitting alone in my basement with a life of memories that are too easily forgotten. Life has passed me and my word processor on� Am I ambitious in cataloguing my life? And why so much care? Is this personal history set to be a masterpiece someday? Will I die, and my estate bind my papers and publish this as �Robert�s last work, own it today!�? Or maybe, I will find myself having wasted my time. What I write might end up cheap and empty, the ravings of a third rate hack, destined for the dreck pile, as James Michener put it. Thinking about all this makes me a little dizzy, and turns me off writing for the moment. The phantoms of the future are too vivid for my liking - I move on, and sometimes too fast. I think about things that could have been. I think about the last few days. I think about everything, and I think of nothing.
�Honey, can you make a gazillion copies of this, then go down to the library and do this and that and blah blah blah�.�
A little walk. Back here in about an hour.
This old building, redone to look like the bureaucrat�s dream house with remnants of the word �old� still hanging around the musty and slowly dying interior. Walking up two floors past a guard who like to have enlightening conversations on ways to beat the system, all the while cheering him on before sudden goodbyes, then through a hall filled with buzzing lights, bathrooms with doors that don�t quite close and are really just glorified screendoors, offices with coffee and no people, desks with pencils and no paper, copiers with paper and no toner, shelves with toner but no forms to sign out toner, and finally, my desk with my computer, in the offices of the good doctor. He works late hours, and even if he�s married, I swear he�s having an affair with his couch. He�s always up there in the morning, rumpled clothes, rumpled hair. Somehow this idealistic picture (details brushed in by the good doctor and his well-intentioned minions) has been soured by my time spent here, observing. The world is never as it seems � just like the webs I weave. They break under pressure. My lucky day in hell, I think. I imagine research based on the efficiency of love and care to be something other than the dry swallow and digestion of paper and ink, pushed around with meaningless symbols to end up in a proposal to Congress in a decade that will ultimately be accepted or struck down without any change in practical action either way.
I think I'm depressed.