My co-worker thinks I'm depressed. He pops up in my office at infrequent intervals with popcorn, with worried looks, with blonde jokes. (Yesterday's: Three blondes who decide to go hunting come across some tracks. The first blonde says, "These are rabbit tracks. I'm gonna kill me a rabbit." She pulls out her rabbit gun. The second blonde says, "No. These are deer tracks. I'm gonna kill me a deer." She pulls out her deer gun. The third blonde says, "No. These are bear tracks. I'm gonna kill me a bear." She pulls out her bear gun. Ten minutes later, the train kills all three of them.) He asked me today if, in all honesty, I enjoyed my job.
This man does not seem to understand one word: fatigue. I'm tired. Not depressed. Tired. Sometimes busy. But not depressed. Getting vaguely annoyed. But not depressed. Interestingly enough, he is not the first person to think I'm depressed when I am, actually, tired. The symptoms seem similar: a certain lack of social interaction, droopy eyelids, a less lively lilt in my voice . . . When I get tired, I tend to forget my people skills. Or, at the very least, let them hang by a miniscule thread. I try not to get snappish, but I don't make any effort to be welcoming. You know what I mean.
But I have discovered an advantage to my interactional modes when I get as tired as I have been lately. I have more time to write, resulting in a somewhat less lonely and more thought-filled hermitage than many people would expect. Lunch becomes a time for composition. The bus ride home, a unique opportunity to mull.
The bus got caught waiting for a train today, and someone had graffitied on the side of a boxcar: The killer in me is the killer in you. I thought about it the whole way home. I sense several poems coming on. The impact of the statement, in large part, is lost by not knowing who sprayed it across the gravelgrey surface. The me has much less power as a fourteen-year-old than as, say, the Unabomber. (Yeah, yeah. I know the odds of the graffiti being from the Unabomber are about 70 bazillion to .3, but I don't care)
In a very rare moment for me, I envied Thoreau today. I envied him his Walden, his sucking the marrow out of life, his grand experiment. I envied him all that time to think.
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4 comments:
Oooh, ooh, I know who wrote it! Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins.
There. See how easy that was? (Though not, unfortunately, poetic.)
Prosaic indeed. I was thinking less of the *originator* of the quote and more of whoever sprayed it on the train . . .
Oh, I know. But seriously, it was Billy Corgan. I hear he's been hanging around Utah recently.
I'll take your word for it. Too bad he didn't run into me while he was here. Might have made for an interesting blog post . . .
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