The Mundane

Sometimes, work is boring. My younger brother works in a forge, where I’ve been told he does all sorts of things, but mostly he stands in place and punches in directions that a machine can follow. In the summer, it’s beastly hot in there. In the winter, he stands in place punching in directions, but his fingers are frozen and his breath hangs in the inside winter air. In the spring, he stands and punches directions into that machine. Same for the fall. He’ll do this for 12 hour shifts, mostly six days a week, and he’ll do it until he can retire or he dies, whichever comes first. From my view, there’s no way his job is not exceedingly boring.

My older brother works in a city with tall buildings and bright lights. He has worked in that city for years, at different jobs, never particularly enjoying much security at whichever desk he sits. He is smart, smarter than me, and he works in that corporate world that I’ve only read about in books and watched on silver screens. His job involves numbers, lots and lots of numbers, constantly numbers. He is probably bored, but perhaps his work is less boring than it is tedious. It’s stressful, too, and there may be no worse job than one that combines the mundane of numbers with over-doses of stress. My brother will work there until he retires, or until another job comes along, or until he dies, whichever comes first. From my view, there’s no way that his job is not difficult to desire, and irrepressibly boring.

My friends, they work, too. They work in trades and they work in offices, and some work in living rooms of random strangers, singing each night and strumming a guitar in exchange for a small paycheck and perhaps a pot-luck dinner. The ones who work in trades curse the heat in summer and they curse the cold in winter, and when they’re not working, they curse. The office working friends are still young enough to have hope that they’ll someday be something, but mostly they’ll be in vinyl ranch homes in rural towns, and they’ll eat at Chili’s on Tuesdays because kids eat free, and they’ll go to church on Sunday because they’re more disciplined than me. Either way, they’ll work in that office or the others will work in that field, or some will work in those constructions sites until they retire or die, whichever comes first.

I sit here, at this large desk that’s really just a built in shelf, and I write on this keyboard a few mornings a week, and some days I show houses to nice couples from Lake Forest and from River North. Some times, I show houses to rude people, those who are mean or disloyal or otherwise demanding in a way that has very little bearing on my reality or theirs, and those are the days that I’d rather just be fishing in knee-deep water, surveying the run that’s just around the next bend, scanning for rising trout. Or I’d rather be afloat, with a phone number that no one knows and a face that no one recognizes, with nothing on my horizon but the rising sun on one side and the setting sun on the other. Other days, I sit on that boat or I wade that stream and I fear the day that no one knows my phone number and no one recognizes my be-jowled face, and I think I should get back to that desk that’s really just a long shelf, and I should type on this keyboard.

I won’t be selling a Lake Geneva vacation home to my factory brother. I will never sell a vacation home to my city brother. I won’t sell a vacation home to my tradesman friend, nor will my musician friend buy one from me, unless he concocts just the right mixture of rhythm and rhyme and his songs play on the real radio, not just the subscription one. I will never sell a lakefront home to my friends who live in corn field ranches, to those who work in the morning until the night for meager scratch that they are grateful to earn. But to those who are sitting at their own desk this morning, to those who have both job security and means, to those who have spent their own time wishing for something different, for some place different, for a way to live a life that they’re not living now, to those I’d say we have 2015 to make a change. Mondays are stressful. Tuesdays are boring. Wednesdays are tedious. Thursdays are intolerable. Fridays, they’ve always been a mix of the prior, but they can be exciting. They can be a portal to another world, to another life, to a boat adrift and a sail filled with wind.