Prosaic interlude #4

The Other Side of Fitness (4^th set)

A sedentary mentality nipped at me. Technically, in a macabre statistical way, I was pushing the envelope. In 2003 I was 38 and mid-way into a conservatively averaged longevity. Most people beat the average by 10, 20, even 30 years sometimes. I was long overdue for a crisis, a shift, a redirecting of energy a reassessment of what I wanted from life. I could finally stop the insanity. I could stop the 50 repetitions of abdominal crunches, walk down the stair climber forever, I could stop trying to remember poems I formed roughly as I biked the loop.

In 2012 I left medical records on a technicality. I was dismissed for miscounts, for errors brought on by, in the end, negative visual reinforcement. A case may have been made for a gradual, methodical, framed termination. The events that led up to April 2^nd that year arguably violated the ADA, albeit in a much contrived fashion. I have no doubt that a case for wrongful termination could have been made. I chose not to find out. I have never been so happy to lose something. After 14 years of a job whose best get was a paycheck and a location next to a gym, I was more than happy to go. I may have even thanked the manager of all negligible omens. (I did recently hear of her termination and felt a bit vindicated.)

Mistakes on the job were never conscious. Would a writer, just as their own experience might channel into a book, unconsciously try to sabotage their day job. The idea for Agent of Orange came to me at work. Yes, my thoughts drifted from time to time, but there were environmental factors also that were beyond my control. (That is another story, blog post, or testimony.) I wanted to write. I simply wanted to write. I was born to write, I was bumped in the head by a car to write. It is quite circumstantial, my want and need to write. It is what I studied to do. It is what I practiced to do, honing my craft by writing to publish, following a pattern of many misses leading to the occasional hit. To make a misanthropic analogy, it was like the repetitions with a weight in a set leading to that climax, the failure of muscle elasticity, the “after-burn.” That was, in many ways, as randomly found and incrementally satisfying as a publication.

I took off. I could focus on writing in my forced “retirement.” For the first several months I journaled my changing attitudes and graditudes of living. I recorded my thoughts, my progresses, my recesses, my re-accesses. I did make an effort to work again, in time, at a pointless position in medical records. Does one have to find their daily job objectionable? Is that a requirement? It seemed to want that spiteful quality, that intangible nagging that makes one curse the alarm clock each morning, so I kept on searching for a working-for-the-man (or woman) kind of exercise in self-destruction until about 2014. No one wanted a tech with a checkered history who could not type 20 words a minute. Apathy set in, reality, chronology and logic set in somewhere close to me. It was close enough for me to reach inside myself, to learn something about myself and be happy. I would try to get that respect I went without everyday. I finally snapped and condoned the hell with it. The hell with me as they see, or as I see, or had seen for year, what I should be. The hell with Them, the them as in the title of my upcoming collection Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation. It was not for lack of trying. I tried, in a possibly too proud way feesable for someone of physical difference, to ingratiate myself to them. I tried for the best—and worst—years of my adult working life to find their niche, not mine. So I gave it my all.

Gyms, health clubs, treadmills are a past life. I notice, if I need to crawl into a small space, it is nice not to have that muscle. It is nice to be able to sit cross-legged. I eat whatever I want as often, or infrequently, as I want. My wife works, although I will not call her the “bread-winner.” To me this too convenient euphemism implies that someone is supporting someone, that they are supplying their bread. She is not working any more than when I was working. Writing is actually harder, much harder, in endeavor, than my job ever was. If a writer were paid hourly, like a lawyer, for the time spent writing, revising, rewriting and then marketing a book, a good book, they'd be a millionaire. But, unlike from a pointless unfulfilled career, or the incidentally and logistically motivated trainings in a health club, they wouldn't retire.