Oh so many fucked up situations going on and they’re not just mine. Marcus Mike Bill and his play Lord have mercy. It’s all going on around me. I gotta duck and make sure that I don’t get hit by the bullshit.
On the plus side I ordered a salad that should be ready in about 2 hours which I will pick up. There was a paranoid thought in the back of my head yesterday that Mike was going to do damage to the apartments but that’s paranoid thinking in my head.
I came home and everything was the same as it ever was. There was a protest or a rally regarding the benches on Washington Street and I promised to attend and when I got home I realized that I forgot and after climbing those four flights of steps to my apartment I wasn’t about to go outside.
So I feel bad for Kurt who is recovering from a stroke a few years ago and was quite irate that street benches were taken from the sidewalks. I sympathize but cannot show up. There is a feeling of guilt. But with what was going on in my head yesterday I had to get home.
Time is crawling and I’m trying to busy myself at work
Bob Huff his birthday was yesterday Martin Chambers drummer of the pretenders his birthday is today. I do this x amount of candles for so and so on social media and I have to do that again when I get home tonight
Things are better between me and Mike as I wrote last night I suppose. High school hijinks perhaps.
Well Bill had a nice phone call with Mike and it went well. Bill is in love with the enthusiasm that Mike has for the theater world and realizes that it’s a different relationship that they have that I have with Mike. Mine was based on cigars which is limited as I know quite a bit more about cigars and Bill’s is an ongoing theatrical day thing.
Changes day to day I suppose that’s the nature of our relationship. Some days are better than others but he doesn’t understand or didn’t understand and I think he’s coming around now.
Work is the usual oddness mixed with pleasantries. Marcus, aloof when he walks in and hour or so later He’s telling me what’s going on with his life and I try to be supportive with him. His drama is everywhere it seems where yesterday was mine. Today is Marcus’ day for high drama.
Jimmy Chile is out at another office so I’m doing a lot of flying solo which is fine I suppose so interacting with somebody is usually better and helps the day go by but until then I’m a solo act.
I just listened to the first Cars album as well as a few songs from their second and third album. I am a bit embarrased at how I greatly admired Ric Ocasek lyrics back in the day 48 years ago. Now I look back with some embarrassment and a lot of laughter towards those lyrics ‘I’m flying like a cement kite’, now I mean WTF?
Xavier High School is near. It’s a Catholic High School, a boy’s high school, and I’ve just seen at least 30 or so students walking by, so full of life and energy. They have to wear uniforms that involve a tie, which I did not.
It appears you’ve given me a modern-day diary entry and asked me to reimagine it in the style of **Oscar Wilde**. This requires a transformation of tone, vocabulary, and perspective, from the blunt realities of the present to the witty, often detached, and aesthetic sensibilities of the late 19th century. Wilde’s writing often uses paradox, aphorism, and a polished, slightly cynical lens to view life’s absurdities.
Here is your text, rewritten in that style:
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One finds oneself, quite without warning, at the very epicentre of a vast, chaotic opera, and one’s part, alas, is merely to observe the spectacle without being struck by the falling scenery. What a delightful comedy of errors it is, this incessant drama of others! One hears of Marcus and Mike and Bill and his theatrical pursuits, and a merciful Lord is one’s only hope for a peaceful curtain. The whole affair, you see, is not merely my own, but a grand public performance played out with the most appalling lack of subtlety.
A small act of self-preservation is a most admirable quality. I have, in a moment of foresight, arranged for a salad of sorts to be procured for me. The collection of it, I am told, is to be effected in a mere two hours, a time frame so vast it suggests the dish is being grown from the seed for my very consumption. This is a far more tangible pleasure than the peculiar, half-formed anxieties that flitted through my mind yesterday—a notion that Mike would, in some fit of pique, lay waste to the apartment building. Happily, upon my return, I found the residence in its usual state of perfect, unassailable mediocrity.
Speaking of things one has forgotten, there was a great protestation regarding the unseemly absence of benches on Washington Street. I had, in a moment of uncharacteristic civic enthusiasm, pledged my presence. However, after ascending those four arduous flights of stairs to my flat, the prospect of an immediate descent struck me as an act of Herculean foolishness. One simply cannot be a martyr for a bench after one has been a martyr for the staircase.
I feel a certain pang of guilt for poor Kurt, a man of such passionate conviction regarding public seating, especially as he is, I understand, recovering from some unfortunate physical malady. His indignation is a thing of beauty, a testament to a well-ordered mind. I sympathize deeply with his cause, but, alas, could not lend my physical presence to it. One’s moral compass, you see, is often in a state of flux, pointing not to what one ought to do, but to what one is capable of enduring on a particular afternoon.
Time, that most tiresome of companions, appears to have come to a standstill. I find myself feigning industry at my place of work, lest it notice my profound ennui. Yesterday, it was the anniversary of Mr. Bob Huff’s birth, and today, that of Mr. Martin Chambers, a drummer of some repute. This ritual of marking the passage of years with a number of glowing sticks on a social medium is an endlessly repetitive chore, and I find myself quite without the proper enthusiasm for it.
The tension between myself and Mike, one gathers from last evening’s musings, has quite evaporated. The whole affair, one might say, was nothing more than a childish caprice, a mere high-school skirmish in the grand theatre of adulthood. Bill’s conversation with Mike was, I am told, a roaring success. Bill, you see, is captivated by Mike’s enthusiasm for the world of the stage. My own bond with him, I am afraid, is built upon the rather limited foundation of cigars, an area in which my expertise is woefully beyond his. Bill’s connection, however, is a daily affair, a matter of ongoing artistic discourse. One’s friendships, I suppose, are as fickle as the weather.
Work, that grand and peculiar institution, is a mixture of the oddly grotesque and the pleasantly mundane. Marcus, for instance, arrives with the aloof air of a man entirely above the world, only to spend an hour later confiding in me the endless tribulations of his life. His drama, like a particularly invasive weed, seems to grow everywhere. While yesterday was dedicated to my own private anxieties, today, it appears, belongs entirely to Marcus.
Jimmy Chile’s absence from the office has left me in the curious position of a solo performer. While I confess a preference for a witty exchange, one can, in a pinch, entertain oneself with one’s own company. Until then, I am an actor without a scene partner, playing a part known only to myself.
I have just now endured a rather peculiar musical retrospective, listening to the works of a certain band known as The Cars. One finds oneself quite mortified by the lyrical follies of one’s youth. The notion of a person flying like a “cement kite” is, I confess, a paradox so exquisitely absurd it quite beggars belief. One must simply laugh at the foolishness of one’s earlier aesthetic judgments.
And so it is, a small procession of boys from a Catholic school, all dressed in uniforms and ties, marches past my window, filled with a great deal of what appears to be an unseemly amount of life and energy. One is struck by their youthful vibrancy. Alas, I myself was spared such a sartorial fate, as my own institution did not demand that one’s neck be throttled by a piece of cloth.