For all your aches and pains
The past few mornings I’ve woken up nearly dead.
Or so it feels. I don’t really know what it’s like to be nearly dead. I don’t do hard drugs, and hell I’m not even all that much of a drinker, and I’m a relatively healthy guy. But we all have a need to over-dramaticize whatever’s closest to us. And me, it’s working a 7-day week in the holiday season at a headache-inducing CD/Movie store, and two days before Christmas, I wake up with a chest cough.
It didn’t bother me that day. That day I was more bothered by the bitch-eyes I got from a customer who wasn’t going to take “Maybe another one of our stores can replace this defective Blu-Ray” for an answer. Sometimes all it takes is one bad customer to ruin your day, and when you’re the guy with the keys there’s never a day without a bad customer. But that’s not why I felt dead. That day was my sixth day in a row, opening the store after closing the night before. I was desperately in need of a break, and laughably, I wasn’t getting one until Christmas Goddamn day. The reasons for that are convoluted and nonsensical.
That night, I went out to drink with some co-workers. I felt miserable. And once again, it wasn’t because I felt a cold coming on or because after 6 days of working I just wanted to sit down for 48 hours straight but walked to the bar instead. It was because what started as me-and-another-coworker shooting the shit had ballooned. Another co-worker was invited — nice girl, but someone I was desperately afraid of running out of conversation with. Me and two co-workers I could handle, but a fourth and fifth were slated to come (only one of the two made it) and the dynamic wasn’t looking good for me asserting myself into conversations and shit. And then the first co-worker, the one I really did want to drink with (because we’ve been saying we should do this forever) shows up with two of her fucking friends from high school.
And it’s bad enough that this bar, the only bar nearby, is the one where everyone’s high school friends drink, so we were all going to (and did) run into at least one person we didn’t expect to/didn’t really want to. But she went ahead and brought hers (or, as she explained, couldn’t avoid bringing them. It happens, but I don’t mean to take excuses.) So at varying points of the night, I’m sitting there quietly listening while they talk about: their tattoos, their dreads, their shows, their high school memories, while I wait for an opportunity to turn the conversation back to work or at least something I know. Socially, I’m a cripple in a dynamic like this, not to mention I was just a little tuckered out already anyway.
Once I have about a pint in me, I get a little more assertive and start to hit on my co-worker’s friend because I’m not not going to do that. It serves both to amuse me and to reinforce to her that she should not bring her friends to our (extremely rare) attempts at a post-work hangout. The girls have boyfriends, but it’s not like I’m pawing at them. I’m not a total dick but I’m at least a bit vindictive and if these girls are good for conversation I’m not going to let it stop me.
At the end of the night, I’m way drunker than I should be off the paltry amount I’ve had, and am feeling emotionally barren, like I’m nothing or less than nothing. The girls with boyfriends go home with their boyfriends, the last co-worker to arrive can’t leave the bar without saying hi to everyone he knows in the bar (which is everyone in the bar) and the original co-worker has given up on trying to warn me off her friends, for now at least. I walk home, alone, stumbling drunk, staggering sore and uncontrollable toward my own half-demise in the morning, sore to the soul.
I wake up the next morning feeling like the walking dead. I’m all snot and phlegm and fiery painful joints and muscles and bruised bones and aching spine and self-abuse. Sniff, snort, sneeze, spit, shuffle down to the shower. Even the roof of my mouth is sore and I spit blood into the sink.
After a shower I feel more ambulatory, but still like a wreck. I go into work against all reasonable judgment because I know — and it fucking kills me that I put this ahead of my own well-being or even ahead of not-spreading-sicknesses — but I know that if I didn’t go into work, there’s nobody that can take my place. So I shoulder the burden. Sigh. Groan.
Just a couple weeks ago the co-worker that didn’t show up on the 23rd told me I shouldn’t be so obsessed about helping everything.
I make my misery known to everyone I work with, and I go through the day probably infecting half the town as I hand them their DVD’s. Serves them right for doing their shopping on Christmas Eve, but I’m also sneezing only into my shoulder and Purel-ing every time I wipe my nose. Well most every time. Besides, what’s life without a few germs? I want everyone to feel as awful as I do. It builds character.
At the end of the day, with the combination of a few well-timed Generic DayQuils and the fact that I’ve been standing in one spot at cash rather than running all over the floor helping a million people at once, I feel better. Emotionally if not physically.
Christmas is another story, but it’s a story that mostly has me dead on the couch at my Aunt’s, fading in and out of conversation and picking my way through a turkey dinner.
This is suburban pain. It feels real but it won’t kill you, and it never lasts too long: all you need’s a day off and it goes away. It’s just waiting for that day that makes it so bad.
Keep on rockin’
-Scotto
