Thursday, October 27, 2011

“You have great veins,” declared the lab technician after drawing some of my blood on Monday, and all I could muster was “thanks.” I was at a loss for words. Was this a standard thing to say? A come-on, perhaps? I simply didn’t have a ready reply to compliments directed at my innards, you know? “You should see my spleen” would’ve been the snappy rejoinder, now that I think that about it, but it’s too late. The train has left! But I’ll be ready next time.

Usually, on most Mondays, I refrain from sharing my hemoglobin with other people. Call it a vestigial survival instinct, if you must, but I like to keep the red stuff inside. It’s been about three years since my last health screening, though, so I figured it was time to bite the bullet and make the trip to the doctor’s office. I believe I have an internal clock specially calibrated for unpleasant things like this, because I’ve also started reading recently.

That’s probably unfair. Reading itself isn’t a chore, once I get into a rhythm, but the prospect of cracking that first book open is daunting. At well under 100 pages, I thought Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet would be an easy read, kind of like season one of The Walking Dead in the literary world, punchy and economical with just six episodes. I still haven’t finished it. There are some profound sentences, obviously, but the back cover had gushed about how generations of writers felt like Rilke was speaking to them. Utter horseshit. The book is a compendium of what people did before the Internet. It’s like witnessing a one-sided e-mail chain, and even the mystique of paper could not hide the fact that these letters were never meant for me.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Years from now, when this economic hellscape subsides into a chapter in a history textbook—or continues to rage, effectively shuttering every last history textbook publisher on earth—I will look back and summarize it with a single adjective: mired. When this miasma was still fresh and new, I referred to iconic images from the Great Depression for guidance, particularly photographs of breadlines. We’re not quite there, yet, and at this current juncture, pictures of bear traps, swamps, and quicksand would be far more appropriate.

By rights, I should be thankful. I’ve got my health, a good job, meaningful relationships, a roof over my head, some coin in the bank. The inventory is full, empirically. But after some harrowing circumstances last week, gratitude is the last sentiment on my list, and in its place are some surlier emotions. I’ve found myself quicker to anger. Impatient. Restless. I briefly reverted to my old ways this weekend, in fact, when I deflected social calls to get shit-faced with the new Batman game. It wasn’t a hangover on Sunday morning so much as a gameover, if you will.

Above all, I feel lost. Where there was such surety before—a confident, clear path lined with optimism—there is now this feeling of being adrift, compass launched overboard in a storm-tossed sea. Ridiculous, I know, and part of the solution here is to take stock of all that I have, shake it off, and move forward. Rather than think of this recession as a trap, perhaps I need to regard it as a crucible from which I’ll emerge fire-tested and new.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Secondhand Rants will return on Tuesday, October 25.