Writing to relieve boredom, as my arm bumps against that of an equally large and hairy man with a bit of a southern twang, on his way to Charlotte for the second time this month.
The day started as many of mine do, with Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsies, only this time it was 5:30 AM and I packed the final necessary items into the largest of my cheap suitcases and ran out the door, arriving at SFO just after the crowds at the US Airways ticket desk -- and just after my plane.
Too tired to think, I accepted the ticket for this, the 1:30 PM flight, and called my mother's boyfriend to update them on my plans. I will now be renting a car in Fort Lauderdale, if indeed they have any left. If not, well, I'm fucked . . . but my corporate American Express card is sure to save the day.
Oh, how I've come to rely on this card for travel . . . and oh, how used to travel I've become in the past year.
And yet, reading the story in Adbusters of a crazy road trip from New York to Arcata to Montana with shades of Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac and all the others, I began to feel an urge to save some money, quit my job, drive across to New Orleans for a meal at Acme Seafood and up to D.C. to visit old friends and Boston for more friends (nobody has friends in the Midwest anymore) and just generally run loose for a couple months . . . call it a leave of absence from life as I know it, a life where only the extra-curricular activities bring me joy.
But why, for ghod's sake, is fun "extra," why isn't it the primary pursuit? People much smarter than me have been wondering about that for a long time . . . but it's been well over a year since I enjoyed my job, or even my chosen career, or even my chosen industry.
Last spring, I wasn't just feeling let down by the dream of what that one company (the one that so many people mistakenly assume I still work for) . . . I felt (and feel) let down by the entire collective dream of the Internet industry, which has taken scads of bright-eyed technology-loving optomists such as myself and turned us into option-counting capitalists whose greatest sense of rebellion is "fuck work" stickers on laptops, and whose only real victories against the status quo are the ability to show up for work late.
I'm bitter not because I didn't get the money, but because I didn't get it before I became too disillusioned to care. To care about my employer, the Internet boom, almost even about the Internet as a communications medium . . . as long as I can still talk to my friends, the rest can (and, I'm convinced, will) go rot.
Okay, truth is I'm not quite that bitter, I still think the tide can and will turn, and I want to be a part of it. But I also want to go dance under the stars and smooch pretty girls and all the other things that are still "extra," still not "what I do," but instead "what I do for fun."
I don't really believe in New Year's Resolutions, but this year I think I'm gonna make some.
- When I'm at a party and somebody says to me "so, what do you do?" I'll answer "this."
- I'll support the small startups, the independants, the companies not yet destined to become merely another checkbox on some browser-specific portal. I do enjoy e-commerce . . . but that doesn't mean I have to support the current, self-destructive model.
- I'll try not to let my disgruntlement get in the way of my message . . . but still stay honest. Being disgruntled can feed the fire of the next small revolution. There's one born every minute.
- Love everyone. Tell them. Spread the love. That's what it's all for, after all.
