It’s a little before 1am and I’ve just gotten home from the neighborhood bar where my intention was to stop in for one drink. A regular at the bar bought me a drink and then the bartender bought me a drink and well… it’s 1am and I’ve just gotten home from the neighborhood bar.
Tonight I met a woman who asked if I planned on walking her home. Being both funny and naive, I said that depends on how far home is. She got a ride with her brother but insisted I take her number and call her. People say silly things when they’re tipsy. How easy it would have been to take her up on her silliness. I was genuinely concerned about her safety and I’m not sure she actually had a ride – I think she faked a phone call as she stumbled out the door.
Back in my apartment (at a little before 1am), I eat a cookie and take a piss – not at the same time. For absolutely no reason at all, while I’m pissing I think about the day a woman who was living with me said she wouldn’t want to be going through life with anyone else and several hours later said she couldn’t do this anymore and left. How insane is that – four or five hours between those two declarations? At 1am, standing in front of the toilet, I feel a little sorry for myself and the damage such whiplash caused, the years it took to process, but also strangely proud of where I’ve arrived and the shape I’m in. I button my pants but don’t zip up or buckle because it’s almost 1am, and I’m planning on going to bed and I’m in my apartment alone, recently home from a bar where people bought me drinks and a woman asked me to take her home all because several years ago something serious didn’t work out and years before that something else, equally serious, didn’t work out… Or at least that’s kinda how the chain of events has played out.
I suppose I’m thinking of this because I spend a lot of time around people who… I spend a lot of time around people, talking to people, listening to people… and people have a lot of different struggles and a lot of different stories. I only see the surface of those struggles – what they’ll share with a stranger at a bar. I don’t know what they go home to. What their lives look like at 1am. What they think of when they’re pissing. In the end, “we’re all just walking each other home.”
Also at the bar tonight was a man who had a distant but intense stare. It was the stare of someone who seemed deeply confused. It had the intensity of someone who might cause harm to somebody. People kept an eye on him. He mumbled in a type of gibberish. When I asked him his name, he said, “retired gardener.” When I asked him again a little later he said a retired officer, retired FBI, retired… He mumbled a lot and it was hard to hear him. Club music played from the jukebox despite this not being a clubby type of bar. He doesn’t need a long-term place to live. He has a place at Franklin and Lombard for a few days. His stare was intense, his hair shortish, curly, and blond, his language difficult to discern. He had a $10 bill and a few ones on the bar in front of his drink. He wasn’t disheveled. His money was crisp. The woman who works at the ice cream shop next door picked up his tab. The woman who asked me to walk her home found out his name is Brian. Brian left the bar and walked in the opposite direction of Franklin Street.
I went to the bar at the end of my evening walk. I went to the bar because it has been that type of day. I was feeling anxious/bummed about having interviewed for a job on Monday (final round) and not having been given an offer yet. I was dreading the thought of starting the job search process over again. Earlier in the day, I started to revise my LinkedIn profile. I was looking at the profiles of people in positions I might like to have. CEO of this, Director of that. By comparison, I felt inadequate. They all seemed so much more accomplished than I am. It was that type of day because I was expecting rain for most of the day and had planned my day around looking for jobs and a brief call I was supposed to have about an executive search – they never called. It was that type of day because instead of exercising and getting outside, I ate my feelings in the form of two pepperoncini beef sandwiches for dinner. I’ve been so good in controlling my more gluttonous urges. I wouldn’t normally have two sandwiches. It was that type of day because the two times I left my apartment (once around lunchtime to buy rolls for dinner and once for my evening walk), the clear and sunny skies turned gray and rainy.
Stopping at the bar seemed inevitable.
That was last night – close to 1am. I don’t usually attempt writing when I’ve been out and people have been feeding me drinks. Usually, I’m just tired and want to go to bed.
I came home from the bar and wanted to write because I wasn’t having a great day. I wanted to write because I was being nagged and needled by a few things. For most of the day, I had been nagged by a sense of failure. I had been nagged by not exercising as much these past few days. I had been nagged by the fact that the smile journal I keep (the place where I write down what has made me smile) has thinned down to one entry per day these past few days. I don’t think I’ve smiled less, but I’ve spent less time capturing those moments. I had been nagged by this persistent pain in my left shoulder – a pain that I’ve had on and off for a few years and seems to have been re-aggravated and gotten more intense. Because it was 1am and I was tired, I could only approach some of what was flowing through my mind.
I like to think I have a reasonable shot at getting this job yet with each passing day I brace myself for the disappointment of not getting it. For much of the day, I was comparing myself with people who seem more qualified for the type of work I’d like to do and also thinking of some of the unserious ass-clowns I know who somehow manage to be successful despite their lack of qualifications, or ineptitude, or poor behavior. I don’t like making comparisons, but I spent part of my day thinking of a few people I know who don’t think as strategically, creatively, or deeply as I do, who aren’t as good at managing people and situations as I am – and yet they make more money and have fancier jobs. I was having a moment at 1am in which I was asking myself how did I get here… hanging out at a bar until late, a bar where women ask me to walk them home, where odd characters wander in and out of the frame, and locals who I barely know buy me drinks? How different would my life be (not necessarily better or worse) had I gotten married four or five years ago? Had I stayed in publishing fifteen years ago? Had I invested in real estate? How different might it be if instead of downplaying my talents in an aw shucks, self-doubting type of way, I was the type of go-getter who holds out for, demands, applies to, and gets those out-of-reach jobs?
For part of the night, the “I’m just going to have one drink and this other one that was bought for me” part, I sat next to two slightly older gentleman who talked about real estate and joint tenancy arrangements. Each guy owned two or three properties/buildings in the Bay Area. They struck me as pretty average guys. Their diction was that of two guys at a bar – by which I mean it wasn’t the language of lawyers or the extremely wealthy, or even the financially savvy… but when you’re casually talking about buying and selling multi-million dollar properties you’re probably not struggling with finances. Listening in on this conversation only fed some of my insecurities about not measuring up and some of my doubts about whether or not I’ll make it out here. Yes, behind the self-confidence tosses and turns the restlessness of self-doubt.
In addition to feeling unqualified for the life I’m living (quoting a Tony Hoagland poem there), I had spent some of my day yesterday writing what I thought should or could be a preface to this blog. Readership has picked up since I moved out here, and with that, my desire to control the outside world’s perception of me has also increased. Readership also picked up when I took my last job and typically when relationships or friendships started or ended. I’ve had friends, family, exes, and potential dates tell me that they’ve read my blog. I’m usually flattered and mortified. I often want to say hey… take that stuff with a grain of salt. Just because last Tuesday I wrote about what it might be like to stroke out and die in a restaurant surrounded by strangers, or because on a Thursday in 2020 I said I still love my ex more than ever doesn’t mean I want to die an anonymous death in a restaurant or that I currently pine for my ex. It’s complicated and just because I wade into the depths of my own thinking doesn’t mean it’s the only prison cell I know or from which I cast my gaze and grin. As a slow traveler through life, I’ve made a habit of walking into and out of prison cells – some of them look like blog posts, some of them look like books of poetry, some of them look like offices and street corners, some of them look like dimly lit bars on a rainy Thursday night.
Yesterday was one of the first days since moving here where I felt my confidence waver a bit. Yesterday was one of the first days here where the enormity and beauty of place and life didn’t out-box my pugilistic inner-critic. The physical pain (shoulder), the lack of exercise (a broken stride in my run), the two times it rained when I happened to be walking around, the creeping doubt about my job prospects, the unhelpful comparisons in which I thought about extremely talented and smart people and was jealous and also some less talented but financially successful/stable people who also made me jealous…
And so I arrived home a little before 1am feeling watered down and thinned out by the day’s worries, bad timing, and overthinking – yet buoyed by spirits and the distraction that comes from mixing it up at the local pub. Life on the rocks, shaken, tumbled, poured out, and stirred.
Today, the sun is out. There was a brief sun-shower and probably a rainbow. This is also how I’ve come to understand that whiplash moment. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, but sometimes I have my doubts of whether or not I can live up to my own expectations.