let me go

A guy I knew once told me about the concept of Fortune's (pronounced For-two-nuss) Wheel. He even drew it out on a blackboard. It's a ferris wheel, basically, and like the ride, sometimes you're riding the crest and sometimes you're inches from the bottom position. The mind blowing point being that the wheel is ever-turning and though you might be on the top right now, everyone has to serve some time on the bottom.

Hence the last two months of my life.

excerpted. you can click the thing to read the rest, if you're into those weird twitchy personal entries that are the coin of the realm. I won't remove it entirely, but I'd prefer people not be forced to wade through my long dark nights of the soul

A guy I knew once told me about the concept of Fortune's (pronounced For-two-nuss) Wheel. He even drew it out on a blackboard. It's a ferris wheel, basically, and like the ride, sometimes you're riding the crest and sometimes you're inches from the bottom position. The mind blowing point being that the wheel is ever-turning and though you might be on the top right now, everyone has to serve some time on the bottom.

Hence the last two months of my life.

I don't say this with any exaggeration. I don't do it to beg for pity. I say it because, goddamn, it's really true. I was willing to brush it off, shine on the notion and decide, nah, it's just a few bad days out of some good ones and let's not ascribe it to anything other than that.

And then I went to the garage.

Cornelius, my car, has been burning oil since I got it several months ago. It never seemed like too much of an issue until my last oil fill up, when they told me there were 'minor oil leaks' and assured me it wasn't much to get excited about. So I figured I would take it in, get the leak plugged and Cornelius could continue taking me where I need to go without fail. With Thanksgiving, Christmas and seven days of vacation I need to use before the year is up, I have plenty of traveling yet to do. So Darryl, the mechanic, comes out after looking at my car and lays the $800 price tag on me. My gasket is leaking. This requires taking the engine apart, sending one part to a machinist to 'machine' it and then reassembling it. 6 hours of labor, that's where the thumb in the eye comes from. That and it'll take two days to do it and I can't even get it done until next week.

So, that bad bit of karma descending on me, I head home. Where my cat, goon, is adamantly confirming that she is in heat.

I've owned cats all my life and all of them have been spayed when I got them. So I've never actually experienced the trauma of living with a cat in heat. I also naively assumed that such things didn't happen until about a year in or so. Just like humans, I figured cats needed some time to mature before they get the rutting urge. Turns out that cats can go into heat as early as 4 months.

I got my first inkling when I heard a loud thump on my air conditioner the other night. After the sound kept rustling, I turned and saw the silhouette of a cat in my window. We had an entire family of cats living in our parking lot for the last several months, watching them grow from little clumsy blips of fur to uncute kittens on the verge of catdom. The mother fought off raccoons and possums to let her 5 children eat and drink from the food and water laid out for them. Then two of the cats were caught and taken to a shelter. The mother cat disappeared with the one cat that looked just like her (i.e., not completely black) and the last two seem to not be in the mood to go out and make a life for themselves.

These are the two cats I found outside my window. One of them was climbing the screen from the outside, the other tucked away between the air conditioner and the open window. Goon was just sitting there watching them. I went out on the back porch and the cat climbing the window screen jumped onto the air conditioner, saw me, and jumped two stories straight down to the parking lot and vanished. The other one raced past me. I tried to convince myself otherwise, but clearly they were coming around to get laid. Goon didn't seem to mind.

So I finally sat down and did research and yep, it seems like my cat needs some spaying. That's another 200 or so.

1000 bucks imaginarily spent inside of 60 minutes.

So you might not think this qualifies for such doom n' gloom thinking, but this is just the grand procession of 60 days that have tested my very patience with the world at large and whatever bemused fucker is running it. My gig has suddenly detonated into a actual venture, with clients streaming in from all sides. I got 4 new papers as clients, doubling my workload without an iota of guidelines or pointers or even confirmation that whatever I was doing to their pages was a good thing or a bad thing.

My sub-boss, she's become this weird micromangeress, who seems to have it in for me for reasons I'm not entirely clear on. This tension has been ongoing for awhile, but it finally came to a head when I took two vacation days off (out of the 9 days I discovered I still had left to take before December 31st) and she savaged my work. She redid and redelivered half of my clients, some of them on valid premises, the others just micromanaging, anal-retentive nonsense designed to point out clearly that I am the underling. My boss boss turned on me as well because, with me gone and unable to defend each instance, he believed the worst. So now I'm kind of out there, all alone, and I feel like I'm being assailed on all sides. This is the same boss who, a few days before, assured me he had my back and wrote all this tension off to "the rooster in the henhouse" syndrome.

I also got my raise. A term I use extremely euphemistically, since it doesn't yet elevate me to the level of living wage; that magical place where you get paid and can still put money away. I could write pages and pages all about the struggle of what I get paid, the lies that led me into it in the first place and the continuing despair of realizing that any remedy that comes will require working there long after I've lost any interest.

As it stands, I've been working 50-60 hour weeks without fail, hustling to stay on top of my output without having to forego the sight of sunlight before the day ends. As the sun is setting around 7pm these days and we're getting ready to wind the clock back tomorrow, that's not really an issue that can be fixed, unless someone does something about the farmers, who are secretly responsible for this whole daylight savings nonsense.

My bank decided to shut off my ATM card at some point too, leaving me stranded without cash and no idea when my replacement card would be coming. I wrote a few big checks to cover my spread, but found myself sweating as the money ran out, no card showed up and my groceries dwindled down to pinto beans and individually wrapped cheese slices.

Thankfully, that worked itself out right at the peak of desperation.

Then the whole website thing happened. I won't go into the teeth-gnashing that ensued.

I'm hoping, praying and stupidly assuming that this has to be the peak of the bad times, a culmination of 60 terrible days that results in 1000 bucks exploding from my bank account. So if Fortune's Wheel indeed spins for it all, I'd like to publicly ask that it oscillate just a bit faster and get me closer to the top.

I'd even settle for the middle at this point.

Posted by xtop at October 24, 2003 05:12 PM