So I’ve started a new job. It’s at a manufacturing company about a 30 minute drive from where I live right now. I think that’s a pretty reasonable commuting distance. I’ve been there for about a week and a half so far. I’ve had two other different jobs in the past 9 months or so and they haven’t worked out for various reasons. This one seems like it could work. So allow me to be stupidly adult and modern for a moment and say “I think my work could work for me.” I’ve always subtly detested that phrase: “It (doesn’t) work(s) for you.” I don’t know why.

Many exciting things seem to be happening in my life at the moment: new job, making my car sportier and flashier via various modifications, taking a trip to the Southwestern United States with my dad in the next week or so but… I feel quite sad for some reason. Like a lot of the things I wanted when I was younger haven’t come to pass and like despite being marginally successful by some measures, I am woefully inadequate by others. It just seems like the harder I try the more things seem to go astray somehow. Gaging what is and is not acceptable action seems more difficult than ever for me.

Life is hard, it always has been, it always will be. But I always feel like there ought to be more tools at my disposal for turning life’s many difficulties to my advantage in one way or another. And, yes I admit, I always feel like things are just plain worse for me than for others. Experience and conventional wisdom tell me that that is simply not true, that everyone’s burden is unique, that it’s all relative and I occupy a certain space on the spectrum of things with some people having an easier time of it than me and others having a more difficult time than I am. But goddamnit, it just FEELS so true, the thought that life is just plain harder for me than anyone else.

I don’t know much about history, anyone’s or anything’s besides my own and I don’t pretend to. I think of myself a bit like Sherlock Holmes in that he once commented to Watson, after Watson told him that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around (I think that was the factoid), that he found that piece of trivia moderately interesting but that he would now put all his energies into forgetting it completely and entirely. This flabbergasted Watson to say the least but Holmes explained that he had all the knowledge in his mind more or less neatly arranged and a factoid like the one he just heard would only serve to clutter things up and get in the way of other things he was more concerned with remembering. I have no real interest in history and I imagine that little pieces of historical fact would only serve to clutter up my mind and get in the way of other things I’d rather keep there.

What am I trying to say…. I don’t know. I’m 41 years old and I feel quite beaten down by life to tell you the truth. Like the harder I try to just go out there in the world and live, the more the universe tries to make things difficult for me. I wonder if I will ever look out upon the world from some as-yet-unknown vantage point surveying my surroundings and say to myself, “Life is good, I’m happy where I am, I’ve done things I’m proud of, and I am at peace with the way things are.” And mean it. I just don’t know.

I hope this job proves to be interesting, lucrative, and doable. Bye for now.