Tag: work

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 276

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Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

It was a busy week. And it ended a little early, an hour off for a hard-work reward, those sorts of incentives you see for the fishhooks reeling you into a place, but that you appreciate anyway. I walked out with enough light still around to see myself. There were slate-blue clouds, a little rain, congested traffic. So I thought ‘This is perfect,’ even though I never imagined perfect to look like this. And I appreciated the rain for all the stiffness it shook out of me.

I met an old man who looks twenty years younger than his age. He’s 87. “It’s getting to be ridiculous, you know, how the doctors, and my boss, they all pull each other over and say ‘can you believe it? this guy’s really that old!'” He’s proud, and you can see it.

The 87 year old was twice-retired, once from the auto-industry, again from his own business trucking. he got divorced at 80 and lives alone, though is visited often by his family. A few years ago, he started on at a logistics place and met this parapalegic, the owner, who had a bad smoking habit. Now he and the owner are friends. They take lunches together, and are the kind of folks who pose for Christmas pictures.

They’re building two buildings on either side of my office. One is attached to the hospital, another is a five-story doctor’s office. The crews have been working for months now, we all remember watching them sweat out the summer, but now they’re cold, and when I see them standing on the tops of concrete skeletons they’re in puffy orange coats. Sometimes, the crews work around the clock. For the heavy lifting, they use big orange cranes.

You can’t escape it. You’ll find a meaning in working, and if you’re lucky, it’s a meaning you can own.

Currently Reading: Another Country, James Baldwin

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I don’t like work–no man does–but I like what is in the work–the chance to find yourself. Your own reality–for yourself not for others–what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 252

garethlivesayLeave a comment

Hi.

Coffee:  Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

I was standing outside the Chinese shop while I talked on the phone. Crisp night, autumn-darker, a few different engines running at low volume. A couple doors down is the ABC store so people were parking while their partners picked out liquor. I don’t know why people do this – hang like fish in the open ocean, suspended, ready to bolt with the tide – but they do, especially when alcohol’s involved. For the people purchasing, it must be nice to know there’s so much anticipation buzzing for them outside.

I was talking about work. My work, her work. We’d both had busy weeks, and the weeks weren’t always easy. She told me about a coworker who was having a rough time, how he was being tossed around by institutional pressures. And she wanted to help him if she could, or let him know that someone had an engine running for him outside, but she wasn’t sure where the line was between a person’s public and private life, what was okay to ask, and I wasn’t sure either. Along the boardwalk, as we talked, people went back and forth with brown bags, an old man in a green polo was shutting down a store advertising vacuum cleaners.

At home, after dinner, I was thinking about all the people I’ve worked with. Here, there, and elsewhere, some who seemed happy and some who didn’t. A friend from an old office is struggling with her identity and she talks about it online. I had a manager at a clothing store who chain-smoked outside the stockroom door. There’s a woman who moved to Iowa for her family and another who collects old metal keys to hang on her office door. I never asked any of them to elaborate. I never asked if their happy days were really happy, or what was rooted in the days that weren’t.

And I end up feeling thankful for the people who keep the gas running for me.

Currently Reading: Another Country, James Baldwin

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We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way.

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 223

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Hi.

Coffee:  Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

I want to thank a couple people for tipping me a coffee: S&C, old friends from the open mic, respected colleagues, much appreciation. I’m reminded of that time about a year ago where you had a Halloween party in your backyard, we watched The Conjuring on your projector, carved pumpkins, drank beer. It was colder that year, more like fall. The wind in the trees was more mysterious than the movie.

An M – another dear friend I got to know when she entered the life of an old buddy, and whose wedding I got to attend when she finally married him. I’m flattered, and glad my words meant something to you.

I’ll use the tips to try something special this weekend – a different sort of brew, something I’ve never written about on here before. Good or bad, I’ll love every sip of it because of the warm thoughts it was brewed on, and I’ll be sure to give you all my best attempt at a review.

As for the rest of today’s Coffee Log, I’ll keep it short:

A large brown dog came into the bank at the end of the day. He was walking a woman who’d be shorter were he to stand on his hind legs. A sheepdog, the pup was scruffy and long-legged, and when he got to the table where we keep the deposit slips he decided to lie down.

Sometimes you see something and automatically have a name for it: I called him ‘comfortable.’

A couple minutes later, in comes another customer, one of our regulars, and she sees Mr. Comfortable and wants to pet him. The short lady speaks up “Please don’t get his attention.” There’s a pause, a thickening, confrontation, and the lady follows with “He’s a service dog.” That’s the end of that story. A couple minutes later, Mr. Comfortable takes his partner by the leash and leaves. The deposit-slip table looks vacant without him.

Don’t bother a dog when he’s working, I guess.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

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The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 122

garethlivesayLeave a comment

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

Back at work. The week on pause, now it’s off. Commercials. Soaps. A sale. Two sales. Calling on a landline, waiting for an answer, so I can stick my fingers through the tiny holes and watch them travel between the telephone poles, nudging nesting birds or misplaced squirrels, kinetic, practiced, my voice running katas, until two tiny prongs protrude through the other end and I’m licking you with my fingernails, showing you the shape your face could be, the best look, your brightest, if only you would…

Too damn tired to take account of the day. I sit in two chairs, one for the morning and one for night; they both swivel; the only difference is whether I have to sit upright.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

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Every time the telephone rings, you feel a frisson of excitement. The call is almost never exciting, but it is in our character to keep on believing.

Chloe Thurlow, The Secret Life of Girls

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 45

garethlivesayLeave a comment

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Drip, Office Coffee

Rain came dramatically after work, a thunderstorm. It’s turned us all into frogs hopping between tiny islands of dry ground. We need the rain. It’ll wash off some of the pollen. Earlier, everyone was coughing on a yellow pine-pollen cloud.

I made something new for dinner. It had many familiar parts – onions, soy ground beef – but the seasoning was different. I chopped up cilantro. I added two limes’ worth of juice. I topped everything with cans of black beans. Mexican-inspired. I served it over rice. It was a good experiment.

Today was long and frustrating. I spent a lot of time spinning in place. Not literally, of course (that might have actually been fun). Work was a series of problems. I solved all of them, but they weren’t the kind of problems you feel any sort of accomplishment having solved.

I think that’s where I’ll leave it today. Right now, I’m drinking a glass of water and listening to the rain. I’m trying to move from ‘frog’ to ‘fish’ so when the thunderstorm goes long enough and the creek outside stars flooding, maybe it’ll carry me away.

Novel Count: 37,208

Currently Reading: The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

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And since today’s all there is for now, that’s everything.
Who knows if I’ll be dead the day after tomorrow?
If I’m dead the day after tomorrow, the thunderstorm day after tomorrow
Will be another thunderstorm than if I hadn’t died.
Of course I know thunderstorms don’t fall because I see them,
But if I weren’t in the world,
The world would be different —
There would be me the less —
And the thunderstorm would fall on a different world and would be another thunderstorm.
No matter what happens, what’s falling is what’ll be falling when it falls.

Alberto Caeiro


Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 32

garethlivesayLeave a comment

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Drip, Office Coffee; usually the office coffee tastes terrible but in a good way; today it tasted like nothing but in a bad way; I used the same scoops, same amount of water, same machine; no telling what was different.

The first day back to work after a vacation (even just one day off) feels momentous. All of a sudden you don’t recognize your coworkers. You can’t find that paperwork. Someone moved the stapler. The rest of the day it trickles back, these bits of beige confetti. “Hi Sandra, how’s the kids?” “Oh Steve, you joker.” But the suspicion that you’ve walked in on something – the whole entire world with it’s pants down – persists. By 5:00, you’re comfortable, but you’re keeping one eye open while you sleep.

I’ve got a short work week. Friday feels like it’s just a day away (really it’s three). I’ve got no plans for the evenings, no plans for the weekend, but spring’s perked up and now I’m restless – that feeling you should always be doing more. Ah, well. I’ll ride this wave as long as it lets me. I’ll write a little more. Or maybe I won’t. Either way, next week will be here soon enough.

Novel Count: 34,291

Currently Reading: The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

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Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.  Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.  Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.

Maya Angelo

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 14

garethlivesayLeave a comment

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Drip, Office Coffee

I had a new conversation with an old friend. She’s at the same old job. She’s got new responsibilities. She’s working harder. They laid people off. The company’s making money but not enough. They can’t meet growth. There’s new management. There’s old wages. They don’t get raises. They get more hours. They’re all salary. They get more responsibilities. There’s a big project. An old deadline, from before the layoffs, but the new boss had a meeting with the shareholders and now there’s a new deadline a few weeks early. My old friend’s pulling out her hair. She’s drinking black coffee at midnight. She’s wearing bright scarves. We’re talking old memories.

My generation makes money for other people.

Novel Count: 29,897

Currently Reading: Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami; FINISHED!

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You can be young without money, but you can’t be old without it.

Tennessee Williams




Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 8

garethlivesayLeave a comment

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Drip, Office Coffee

I was walking past this bird in a bush on the way to my car this morning. The bird was going haywire. When I went by, it stopped. It was cold outside. It’s still raining. That bird had a secret – it had to thrash around for something, something important – but it didn’t want to tell me.

The day was buzz-buzz busy at the office. Cars went by. No-one kept dry. They tracked red mud back and forth in the bank lobby. They tracked it through my office. People having problems making ends meet, too busy for the mud on their shoes. I was on the phone. I was making calls. I was clicking waltzes and salsas on the keyboard. Rich and stressful. Then comes the client and I freeze. Smiles. I know something they don’t – a lot of somethings. Half the time, they don’t want me to tell them.

A week of birds. Bird week. Everything has wings. It can pick up and fly away. I’m waiting on a letter from the other side of the world. I’m waiting on good ideas, better sentences. I’m waiting on September because everyone is always waiting on September. I’m waiting for the weekend.

Oh, that last one’s actually here.

Novel Count: 27,617

Currently Reading: Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami

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From the land of red clay, and lottery worship

Spillage Village, ‘Metropolis’



Coffee Log, Day 348

garethlivesay1 Comment

Hi.

Coffee: Locomotive Blend, PennyCup Coffee

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been waking up a little early, hopping in the shower, and sitting down in the dining room to have my coffee and breakfast before work. It’s an extension of the weekend habits I’ve been forming. It helps keep me calm.

Creativity is a strange thing. Some days, if I don’t write before noon it’s ‘good luck’ if I write at all. Other days it’s the opposite – I can’t pull any ideas out until close to midnight. Yesterday, I got up at 5:30 and milled around for six hours trying to finish a chapter. Then I got groceries and ate lunch and spent another four trying the same. It was only after I was tired and drunk and pulling out my hair that I got something down. If anyone tells you that you’re the mind’s master, they’re really downplaying a fraught and dysfunctional relationship.

The sun’s rising now. It’s blued up the trees, breaking bread with the branches. I’ll be off to work soon and these two hours will feel like they happened to someone else. But there’s always tomorrow. I’m lucky enough to have all the tools to carve out this time.

Novel Count: 20,073

Currently Reading: Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami

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The streets are empty and quiet this early in the morning and I can hear my own footsteps as they fall.

Uzodinma Iweala, Speak No Evil: A Novel

Coffee Log, Day 328

garethlivesayLeave a comment

Hi.

Coffee: Cafe Pajaro Extra Dark, Trader Joe’s Brand

I did an off-site training at the corporate office today. I’ll be doing it for three days, most of this week. It felt like being back in college. We were in a small room with shared tables. There were whiteboards and projectors. We did group activities and answered questions. College – not a place I was looking to go back to.

But I’m always open to new experiences.

There’s a certain slime to corporate spaces. It’s a gregarious slime – fancy, accommodating, obsessed with cost-calculated comforts. I ate lunch with friends in the cafeteria and noticed the treadmills and lime green walls, the tv’s that were easily accessible but not too imposing. A lot of money was spent to make this a place people want to be. Consequentially, it turned me way off.

I watched a 3 part interview series on youtube between a Belgium man and Charles Bukowski. It was filmed in the 80’s, late in Bukowski’s life. They talked about a lot of things and didn’t seem to like each other. At one point, Bukowski takes the guy to this hostel he holed up in for the first few years of his writing career. He told a story about how the landlady would leave him baskets of fruits and veggies because she thought he was mentally unstable after he’d told her he was quitting the post office for writing. The camera caught poor kids in no shoes and suspenders and one young Latino family with gold teeth and jello cups and a chihuahua that kept trying to eat the jello cups. Bukowski said: “There’s stories in these people. Most writers don’t want to talk to these people.” That made a lot of sense to me.

Novel Count: 15,629

Currently Reading: Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami

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Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.

Charles Bukowski