I guess we all got that moment. Where you sit down and gather in every little breath a’ life and you wonder where you are and you look at where you been and you suck it all in and you suck it all out. Nothin ever feels quite right even if everythings quite right and if anythings wrong it feels like everythings wrong. It’s easy to forget about the things you have and just think about the things you want but if you’rn alive theres a lot more right then y’think. The fact of th’matter is that it all just is what it is. Things in life ain’t never as bad or as good as you think they is. Things just is what they is and nothing else.

 –

Bill might have had an anger problem. We chat and he happily opens any locked door for me and asks about my life in Texas and he tells me about his son in college and he goes off to sweep the next room. And then I hear the clatter of chairs. I hear the sound of curses and a trash can kicked. I peak my head in. Crumbled paper balls and Bill sweeping up the trash he just scattered. Sorry Jason he says. Just had one of my tantrums. He’s the night janitor at a high school and looks exactly how you think he does.

It’s more first job solo, in a Dayton, Ohio high school at midnight sitting in an electrical room by myself typing away on a laptop and walking out and looking at lights and coming back and trying again and going out and checking the lights, rinse, repeat. Occasionally I recruit the help of one the electricians onsite. And then it’s me again. I rejoice and revel in a button turning on a light. In the lights turning off eight minutes after I leave the room. No more and no less. I forget about eating and take late “lunch” breaks.  I finish at about 1:30 AM and take the twenty minute drive to my hotel. I usually fall asleep immediately.

Dayton was described to me as “the armpit of Ohio”  but really it’s like any other place.  Subways and Starbucks. The roadside foliage turns burgundy and gold.  Unlike Texas, the drivers follow the speed limit which is no greater than sixty on the freeways. I speed my rented Jetta along empty highways. I didn’t see a cop in my whole time there.

It’s jarring to think that it’s all become business as usual. The traveling, the continental breakfasts, the airport to airport starts and ends of my weeks. None of it shocks me or makes me weary. Austin begins to feel like home and I enjoy being greeted by a cat named Nigel and my roommate Liz. I play the guitar that I missed through the week and I lay in the bed that’ll beat any hotel bed and the stomps of our neighbors upstairs and the vibrating cacophony of the a/c doesn’t bother me.

I take a drive to San Antonio with Joey and friends. It’s a night like any other and the riverwalk is nice, filled with families and couples and generally happy folk. After eating we find a nice little jazz bar with a one drink minimum, and since they insisted, I enjoy the alcohol of the ten dollar old fashioned. I had a much better one at the hotel bar of the Akron, Ohio Holiday Inn for half the price. For a while it’s just Jawoine and myself, drinking our cocktails and listening to jazz on a San Antonio night and all is well in the world.

After gaining a buzz, we regroup and begin to explore once more. To the Alamo I say. In the process we run into a congregation of three bachelorette parties that I take the liberty of infiltrating. I high five them and sneak into their pictures and try my best to be one with the drunk thirty somethings  flaunting their abundance of penis motif’d items. They insult Joey’s haircut. They stumble drunk through San Antonio streets. Soon I grow bored and my Alamo senses are tingling and I somehow manage to lead us to the Alamo without any navigation tools. We stand in its night lit glory, yelling profanities in merriment while the night guard of the Alamo stares at us. The great defenders of the Alamo died there. We stand there half drunk. Our tribute.

An aside: She’s pretty. Very much so. Stop thinking, you son-of a bitch. Stop. Look ahead and stop all your thoughts and forget everything. The silence of that backseat kills you doesn’t it. It is what it is and ain’t never gonna be nothing else. And don’t get so surly, you beautiful bastard. Go live your life and quit thinking about tail you’ll never get. But you won’t stop thinking and you’ll never stop thinkin’ because that’s just what you do. It is what it is.

Weekends feel too long and too short. I’m conflicted by my love of work and my love of my new home and new friends and old friends. I’m in Dayton again next week. And I look forward to the solitude of that electrical room, the hum and buzz of the equipment around me. I don’t look forward to the loneliness of that electrical room, the annoying hum and that god awful buzz of the equipment around me.

But. Business as usual.