Writing

“We don't have a lot of time on this earth. We weren't meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.”

- Office Space

I hated Dilbert. I laughed at Office Space and wrote it off as quaint. It wasn’t until I worked in an office that I gained a new perspective on these comedy’s. I began reading a bunch of testaments to the forgotten heroes who battle on everyday in an office. We are Leonidas’ 300. Insanity is our Persian army, stomping forward every second as our spirits try to rise up from their broken and destroyed state. Our pass of Thermopylae varies from person to person. For some it’s music, others turn to the inane world of social networking, and a precious few turn to artistic expression. In a world where creativity is stifled and constantly battered against, the creative are our prized possessions, talked about in hushed voices and with amazement: “Ally is dancer”, “Katya is a fashion designer”, “Chad is a writer”. We cling to these notions of creativity, we say that it’s because we love expressing ourselves…but I’ve come to another more shocking conclusion: I call myself a writer to avoid calling myself an office worker.

Being called an office worker is a fate that I will probably spend the entirety of my life trying to avoid. Yet, in the end, the best jobs in the world are desk jobs. Every writer spends hours and hours in front of a laptop or stuck at their desk scribbling thoughts and outlines on legal pads. Lawyers are respected members of their community, every child with a shred of intellect and ambition wishes to be one, but ultimately the job is glorified bookwork and no lawyer will tell you different. Do you want to be an actor? If you wish to stay employed or have any creative input on your work, be prepared to be chained to your chair reading a bunch of scripts. Musician? Either the lyrics or the actual composing will chain you to your desk. That's just the nature of having a career, no matter how much you enjoy doing something there will come a point where the creativity is sapped and the joy is removed and you just find yourself stuck with the obligation to create something better than the one that came before it. As the futility of trying to avoid the office life get’s barreled into your skull , you begin to feel a lot like Peter Gibbons. Except you’re not fucking Jennifer Anniston, so the silver lining is a bit thinner.

I myself began to look for anyway out of the quicksand. Today was one of those days where I took upon the role of Steve McQueen and led me and my creative drive outside to a Great Escape. As soon as I finished my assigned tasks I began running towards a friends house--and straight into the rain. At first it was a sprinkle and then it was a tsunami, covering me in water. I walked for four miles. My black tight jeans were riding up and causing an uncomfortable amount of chafing. I could barely tell where my skin began in comparison to my now wet and tight Led Zepplin shirt. And I could feel every ounce of slime gather in my shoes (I had opted not to wear socks this day). Alone, cold, and with aching knees, I found myself imagining this piece and writing it down all in my head. I sang songs, I painted pictures, and for the first time since I began working in an office: I felt free.

As the rain began to clear and the people on the streets of Miami began to notice I existed, I found myself bombarded with questions. All of them ending in “What are you doing?” and the only thing I could say to that last one was oddly simple. With a pride filled voice and without a pen in my hand or even a paper to imagine text appearing on…

“I’m writing.”

And for the first time in a long time, it wasn’t merely an escape from my cubicle cage.

Smoking

A good friend of mine recently had a cancer scare. Now this is a normal part of life, it seems that in this day and age anything can give you cancer; but this friend was nineteen years old and he had only been smoking for about a year. That’s one of nature’s cruelest pranks, you had people who start smoking at fifteen and keep going until their on their deathbed without the slightest hint of asthma much less cancer. Then you have people like my friend who start smoking at eighteen and a year later find themselves in a doctors office being told they might have lung cancer, all the while struggling to not light up right then and there just to take the edge off the whole ordeal.

What is the allure of smoking? Everyone who smokes knows it’s bad for you. Nobody tries to say that the ads and the D.A.R.E. programs are exaggerating; nobody glorifies the big fuck you they’re giving to the surgeon general. From my observation, smoking is just a form of stimulation. You see people go on smoke breaks just so they have a reason to go on a break. At the same time, while smoking can be this melodramatic crutch to get you through tough times, it also allows the creative spark to be stimulated as well. I myself have spent many a day, sitting in front of my computer puffing on a Marlboro Red and sipping on coffee just praying to motivate my fingertips to dance around the keyboard and provide me with something substantial to show the world.

From Tom Waits, to Bukowski, to Palahniuk, these icons of the dejected and the disdainful can be found with two things: a pen in their hand and a cig in their mouth; Inhaling all the corporate marketing and death and despair that can come with a pile of tar tightly wrapped in cheap papers and exhaling it in the same breath. And that’s what’s addicting. Smoking isn’t like alcohol or any other conventional drug. Your judgment isn't compromised - it's bloodied with brass knuckles, curbed and left on a sewer grate for dead. The destruction of the survival mechanism deeply ingrained in us, the one thought that keeps us from running into traffic. We don’t smoke because we don’t care about getting cancer, we smoke because we want to think that we’re standing strong against all life has to bring against us. To do something we know will kill us and survive.

My friend had a cancer scare, but it was just that, a scare. Calcium deposits found it’s way on to his lungs and while we both shared a moment of consolation, the hugging and crying that two men do when nobody is watching and we just want to act upon the impulses of brotherhood that we tend to ignore for social graces. He had won. He had stared death in the eye and punched it right in the face. I was celebrating with him much like he was the winning team at the superbowl and I was his coach. And as we stopped for gas on our way home and approached the cash register, he looked up at me and then behind the cashier where all the ads that tricked us everyday lied there waiting for us. He stared at them and then back at me before speaking up in a voice that resembled a kid at Christmas…

“Chad! They have a two for one special on Camel Regulars, think you can spot me for a pack?!”

The Beggining

Welcome to The Drunk Tank.

In here you will find the ramblings of an eighteen year old slacker. Soaked in gin, smoked carefully in Camel Wides, and with all the calm and cool of a baboon swinging wads of shit indiscriminately at a bus full of nuns. There's nothing fun about working in an office, nothing inherently cool in writing about those adventures that are pretty much a given at being eighteen, and nothing remarkably cool about a kid whose search for liquor behests his search for knowledge and insight (it's terrible luck -and awful form- to search for ones self stone sober, don't fret, it's always happy hour somewhere).

My writings will be weekly and I will keep to that schedule for as long as possible, expect the first post to be up in a couple of days. A good intro is important to grasping readers by the balls and dragging them forward into your mind...

But, I doubt that's what I just did, so don't worry much: I'm accustomed to failure.