The Beat Down

Tell me if you've heard this one before:  I am going to write this tonight because I know I won't have time in the morning.  I have to be at the factory especially early, and it won't be fun.

I am tired already and beat.  I had a terrible, terrible day today which I will tell you about in a moment.  This is not how I should feel so soon after a vacation, but even my vacation was somber.  I am, as I think I wrote from California, and I take this directly from Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," too much alone.  Perhaps I have become one of Anderson's Grotesques.  Probably have been.  The only joys I took in California were quiet and sweetly melancholy.  Wordsworthian, perhaps.  Jesus, though, I hope not.

But to the point.  Today I lost access to not one but both large format printers I have been using to print my works.  No kidding.  Two in the same day.  When the call came from the fellow who owns the one that is located in my studio, his voice was dead and flat.  He didn't really need to tell me.  He will move it this weekend.  The other. . . it is a long story and would reveal too much about me, but let me just say I have been able to use one at the factory.  And now, through a conspiracy of another foreman who is a mean moron of a man, my supervisor who is smart enough to favor him, and her supervisor who is second in command, I've been. . . how should I say it. . . fucked.

If I want to continue, I will have to buy an Epson Stylus 9900 Pro Printer for the new low price of $5,000. Plus ink which is hideously expensive.  And it drinks ink like a camel.

Do I wish to continue?  I was thinking about that and everything else (you see, it is not just the printer at the factory, but much more, for my career is in jeopardy) as I sat in my studio tonight waiting for the model to arrive.  My money woes, I thought. They are mounting.  And if I lose the foreman's job, well, that is another 20%.  I have been a spendthrift, I kept thinking.  I have saved no money.  I am evil.  This is what I deserve (I will write an essay on the idea of "deserve" soon).  And so I opened a bottle of wine and sat on the couch and pouted much and hard.  For a long time.

The model did not show.

No call.  No text.  Nothing.

And here is what I wrote in an email to my mother just this morning (I write to her every morning even though I call her and she lives in town) before I went to work:

"Work is hard.  I don't know if you knew that.  I am going to try to get there earlier today.  I have a lot to do.  I didn't get home from the gym until late and didn't eat my microwaved meal until quarter 'til nine. Went to bed before eleven and didn't get out of bed until close to seven.  And to think that all over the world (and even in this country), people would LOVE to have my life.  I keep reminding myself of that when I start to whine.  But I still whine.  And then I say that there are many people in the world. . . . "