Drive by

I had to pee. So, I stood up from my computer, leaving the silly game story I was writing about a girls basketball game that I couldn’t even remember the score from to be finished whenever I was done.

Walking past the empty cubicles, I thought about the people who used to sit there. I never worked in this place when they were filled. The day I started, they were all empty. Never to be filled again. Yeah, every so often one of us sits in one of them. To chat, to grab election-night pizza, or to watch election returns on the television. But for the most part, the sit empty.

But that thought passes. I continue walking.

I notice that my vision is a little blurry. I’m seeing double a little. Nothing new, I think, just staring at that

computer screen too long.

I pee.

As I’m walking back to my desk, I stumble. Then I stumble again. Eventually, I have to use the wall to walk.

“This is strange,” I think, going back to me desk.

I sit there for a moment.

I get back up, stumble to the break room. I call my fiancée.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“I’m seeing stuff. I can barely walk.”

After a few minutes of chatting, she tells me she’s coming. It’s 44 miles from our house to my office. I drive this every day. I can’t think of a job when I didn’t at least start out driving 40-plus miles to work – one way.

Just sort of became what I do.

For girls, mostly.

For the beach once.

I go back to my desk and finish my story. Just like me. When I got laid off, I asked my by-then old boss if he wanted me to finish my story.

He said not to bother.

Still, the one I’d written the day before but had not run yet, it ran the day I was shit-canned.

Love the biz.

My fiancée arrived. She checked my pulse. She checked my eyes.

By then, I was feeling better. Not good. But better.

“You should go to the emergency room,” she said. Wise lady.

“I’m feeling better,” I said. “I think I just want to go home.

Unwisely, I drove home.

It was dark out. Being March and all.

We took the long way.

I made it home. Ate some food. Went to bed.

The next day, it was back to normal.

A few weeks later, I was at home. The same stuff started to happen.

I drove to Wilson. 44 miles away. And then I went to the doctor.

They sent me to the emergency room.

After a bunch of tests, I was told “Well, we know you didn’t have a heart attack. And you didn’t have a stroke.”

A few weeks later, my neurologist told me “you had a stroke.” This after telling me there was “no way” I’d had a stroke.

Doctors.

They sure as hell all didn’t mind billing me for their wrong diagnosis.

Should’ve sent some paper instead of money…

Instead, I’m more in debt.

I still eat frozen burritos.

I don’t eat frozen pizza as much.

I don’t go to fast food places. Except for Hardee’s for a hot ham ‘n cheese and Andy’s, now Highway 55, for a cheeseburger. Guess it’s good I don’t live in New Orleans anymore. I’d be dead.

If I’m not already.

Maybe watching “Raising Hope” is my hell. If it is, I know I’m dead, because it’s on right now.

Banality. Yep. That’s what this is.

The written word isn’t coming like I want it to. It’s just shit oozing out of a tightened ass. A tightened hairy ass, at that.

I wonder what that dude, can’t remember his name, from my Arizona days who shaved his ass is doing right now? Not that I really care. But for the first time in probably 15 years, I just thought about that guy. And his shaving his ass.

I couldn’t imagine shaving my ass. First, I’d probably cut myself. I cut off a mole shaving my face as a youth. Still use electric razors to this day.

And David Bowie is dead, and the people have already turned on him.

It doesn’t take long anymore. Hero today, shit bag tomorrow.

I now wonder if I truly do need to drink to be creative. I know I don’t, because I write for a living and sometimes, not all the time, but just some of the time, I do it pretty well.

Getting a phone call tomorrow in the A.M. from a temp agency. Never thought I’d utter those words. I’m considering working for a temp agency instead of trudging (or driving, whatever…) 44 miles to work. Could this be a new start? Or just another misguided stupidity fix?

At least I’m not paying rent on a house in Florida. For three years. That I got to spend at best 2 months in.

A house I drove past in 2009. Three-plus years later. And still cried.

I wonder what would happen if I drove past it today?

Who am I kidding…

David Bowie died.

David Bowie died.

I was sitting where I am tonight, staring aimlessly at the internet. At the same pages over and over again.

Not doing anything.

A week or two ago, that David Bowie was doing this at your age thing went around. I never clicked on it. I didn’t want to get depressed. Now, I think about it differently. I almost want to go and click on it. Just to see what the fuck he was doing at the age of 44 (soon to be 45). That was 24 years ago for him. He died at 69. So that was 1992.

I was a virgin.

I was in college, fawning over a girl that I would one day actually get a date with. A bunch of dates to be exact. Then, she broke my heart.

Nothing new there. Well, it was then, but now, not so much.

He was doing Tin Machine, maybe?

Still better than what I’m doing. Hell, I never gave Tin Machine a chance back in the day. It’s probably damn good. My good buddy Josh from the college days, he loved them. Preached their gospel all the time. I ignored it.

Did the same with Lucero. You see where that got me.

Anyways, all this outpouring of love and sadness over a celebrity that very few of us ever even got the chance to see perform, let alone meet, is usually looked at as silly.

People fill their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram whatevers with posts about dead celebrities every day.

This guy was different. I found myself crying about it. Not balling all over the place, but sniffling whenever another story came on the TV, or the radio, or the internet.

I listened to his new album ‘Blackstar’ on the ride to work. I wish I’d listened to it the day before. It wouldn’t have hit the same way.

It’s a goodbye. And it’s a damn good one.

I wrote my dad’s obit. It sucked.

I said a bit when we buried him at sea. That didn’t suck, but it still wasn’t perfect.

David Bowie did it perfect for us.

All of this has gotten me to think a lot today. I’ve been angry about things out of my control for a while now. Nothing new. Job, you know.

I don’t want to waste any more of my life.

I’ve got a great son.

A great woman.

A cool dog.

A sneezing cat.

And I don’t want to be so unhappy for 8-12 hours every damn day anymore.

Tomorrow (today, actually), I have to go in and talk with a management consultant in the office. I’ve been down this road before. Anyone who works at a newspaper 10 years ago and still is, has gone through this dance before.

They’re going to fire people. Or at least give you new jobs. New duties.

I hand-wrote my job description. It is filled with spelling errors and scratched out bad words … no not that kind.

I have no idea what I’m going to do tomorrow. I actually just found out I would be able to make the meeting time I signed up for due to baby-sitting issues. We always have baby-sitting issues. Another reason to get the fuck out.

I know I’ll be wearing my Pete Maravich socks.

And jeans that I have worn for six days in a row.

My shoes will have holes in their soles.

I will shave. That I will do. I will not wear a suit. Or a tie.

But I will wear clean underwear.

Then I will write a column. I’m thinking about writing one on why I can’t stand professional football anymore. How I didn’t watch a game this year involving my favorite team – the Washington Redskins – even the playoff game.

And you’re a sports writer?

Yep.

I still love writing stories. Telling them, I guess. I always thought I’d tell my own one day. Boy meets girl, girl breaks boy’s heart, boy drinks, boy dies.

But I took a left turn instead of right. Went East for a while before turning West again.

Now, it’s time to do what I’ve talked about for years.

Get the fuck out.

-30-

How am I supposed to get to 750 words. It seems this one will make it happen faster, harder, longer? Probably, not. But probably.

Eat a peanut. Drink a Yoohoo. Some day you’ll look at the sky and not see the stars anymore. The computer will be at fault. Silly.

good david vs. bad david

You know, these things shouldn’t come as a surprise anymore. All one has to do is look in the mirror to get a clue, yet, the way things have always worked in the past gives one hope. I guess.

Out and about, getting a crappy sub from Subway because I’m much to lazy/uninspired/not willing to deal with gaggles of jarheads to go to a local indie shop for my sandwich fix. Coming back, there is a pretty ugly accident at the local hangout, aka the BP station with a McDonald’s inside. A motorcycle vs. SUV as I have so named them after seeing so many of the damn things going all the way back to my Arizona days when I lived with three cyclists -- one of which seemed to make a living at getting hit by motorists and living off the settlements, because, “the car is always at fault” he said.

Anyway, I’d noticed before leaving the office that the cute reporter named for an emotional state of being -- Hope -- was the reporter for the weekend. I still shudder at the thought of one reporter working in an office on weekends. Even I remember the days when a reporter never really had a “day off.” Instead, they’d work from home when the news happened.

“Hell, we publish 365 days a year,” a man I respect a little more every day told me when I was a young cub reporter. Hell, I wasn’t even a reporter, I was a skinny, long-haired, wide-eyed lost person who stumbled into a weeklong tag-along with a couple of real reporters. I was 21 at the time. They were in their late-20s or early-30s. The man, he was in his sixties. Last I heard, he was still writing his clunky, but always correct prose. Most likely scaring the crap out of what passes for journalists today, and hopefully inspiring some other young fool to follow in his footsteps.

“And that means we work 365 days a year.”

He also drank a lot. And was divorced twice.

I drink a lot. Haven’t been lucky enough to be divorced twice. Let alone married once.

Hope, she’s a cute lass, as the old guy would’ve called her. She wasn’t a very good reporter. I’d read her copy. Heard her weak excuses for not having things in them. I think she wants to be a good journalist, but if you don’t have any mentoring you, there is really little hope. (Ugh.)

Anyway, again. My time at the paper has been kind of strange. Pushed aside from the beginning, I just carved out a niche as the broody, quiet guy over in the corner. However, in the last few weeks I’ve kind of come out of that shell. It’s my usual pattern. I make a couple of friends, become kind of a dominant part of the discussions in the newsroom while we’re in the place, but not really branch out. Then, one day, the branching begins and before you know it, you’re talking to everyone all of the sudden. Usually, this leads to going out and drinking with, etc. It has not this time. It’s led to curious looks and smiles, mostly.

After doing a bit of manuevering to take a look at the crash, it looked somewhat awful. The motorcyclist was being attended to by three medics and there were two ambulances there, a fire truck there and a couple of cops. As I drove down the road, a third ambulance was en route.

I got to the office, walked over toward the cute reporter. Her cubicle was a bit of a maze to get to. Just as I enter, my boss yells out my name. Awkwardness. She sees me right behind her, holding food and looking dumb. I look at her, then at my boss. I start to walk towards him.

“Huh?”

“Can you take that story again?”

“Um. Yeah. Sure.”

“Sorry, bro.”

“Not a problem.” I had suggested taking a story on a kid who got paralyzed in a football game from him to put on the sports pages due to lack of space. He agreed. We set it up. Then he took it back.

“Unless the obits run long,” he said.

And now, two hours before deadline, two hours after obit deadline, he has decided obits ran long.

Eh, whatever.

I turn back to the reporter. She’s back at looking on the internet. A favorite pastime of journalists now. Especially those under the age of 30.

“Hope,” I meekly say.

She turns and smiles, then says “Yes sir?”

Taken aback a little by this, I stutter out “I saw something…might make a story.”

I then explain the wreck, clumsily. I’m still thinking about being called “sir.”

She asks me how bad it was.

“Looked not that awful,” I reply. “There were three ambulances.”

“Ok,” she said, turning back to the internet.

I walk away. Feeling sorry for myself.

I am old, I guess. At least to a girl who graduated from college in 2008.

I think about asking her about David Bowie, since I'd been jamming to what the old folks would have poo-pooed on the ride to work "China Girl" and on the way home "Suffragette City."

I think better of it rather quickly.

Me and my boss start talking about “remember the days when…”, further solidifying our own demise.