i won't be leaving you leaving you child / i'll just keep driving you driving you wild

Number one: I got a raise. The composter did some market survey and figured that they weren't paying their employees enough, so we all got bumped. It's something that we've all been half-expecting/half-hoping would happen, and it isn't quite as much as I expected it would be, but it's better than grabbing my hand and taking a dump in it. It's good news, is what I'm saying.

Number two: I'm going to get a chance to get certification in a couple of weeks, which would mean I could potentially work for the city someday, or get some other union-type job. Certfication, a piece of paper that proves that I can do my job, a hard thing to come by actually.

Put together, these two bits of news made this a pretty handy-dandy little day. I have a performance review coming up in the next month, and I'm pretty sure I'll get a raise out of that as well.

Of course:

I can't get anyone to stay interested in playing music with me, least of all myself; that, and my only outlets of creativity these days have been these pathetically short little dribs which I've been posting here. Not much to go on, eh? Unclear what this guy is really about. Infrequent, no center, a man who has not made best friends with his dreams.

I've been listening to downloaded Alan Watts lectures pretty much non-stop for an hour or more, and thinking seriously about what I am supposed to be doing, you know, with my life, with this moment, with the eternal now. I feel as though I am failing to be an authentic person.

There was a moment for me at work a couple of weeks ago where I let my paranoiac wanderings play about my head. There was an incident - a very serious one. Noone was injured, though someone surely could have been. It was, to say the least, expensive. Also, it involved equipment which I use on a daily basis. I'm not sure just how nebulous I should be here. The investigation, as far as I know, is still going on.

Anyways, left to my own devices, I somehow convinced myself that it was my fault. Somehow in my head it made perfect sense. I could see the line of responsibility extending backwards to me. I'd had it all wangled around so the true cause - a man, not me, did something very, very stupid, and the environment in which he works allowed it to happen - paled in significance to the thing passing from my hands, being at some point under my control.

This guy - I want to call him this fellow - he hadn't been working with us for too long, but had more or less drifted into a position of quasi-responsibility. I'd barely worked with him at all, but in my short time giving him a hand with what he was doing to the thing I'd passed on to him, I got the impression of a really objectionable co-worker. He was barking orders, being a real dink. I'm too savvy to really let someone like this get to me anymore, but I used to be really fearful of guys like this.

I truly am beyond giving a shit what anyone at work thinks about me.

But, and here's why I'm talking about this, he gave the impression he knew the up and down of what he was doing. I was taking his lead; it was his department.

It was so miserably cold outside. The sun was just up, and the wind was brisk. I just wanted to leave, to go for my coffee. But I was thinking, I should stay, take a late coffee, absorb what this guy's doing, give him a hand, learn a bit. But I didn't. I left him with it.

Not ten minutes later I'm sitting in the lunch room and it comes over the radio, the whole mess. Fire. Serious, and fast. Over the next half hour, rumour had vent. This guy had made a choice, a poor one, and it had disastrous results. And then, when things have settled down and we've all gone back to work, because you can't sit in the lunch room with shocked looks on your faces all day, I am left alone to think on it a bit. Something like vertigo has a bit of a go at me the first time I think the following: If I'd been there with this guy, I probably wouldn't have had sense enough to tell him to stop.

I am grazing on my own insecurities, my feeling of unheimlich-ness, my not belonging here, at this place. And all the stairs are crumbling wet sand: my fault, my fault, my fault. Was it? It was my responsibility, surely, and so, my fault. Irredeemably. I would be discovered. This time I was going to be caught, and my face would really be rubbed in it: What are you doing here? You're not meant to work here. You have been trying to fool us. Your charade has cost us dearly. We have always hated you. You are different.

I am going to be fired, I thought, completely sure of it.

I felt relief.

I felt, now I can get on with my life. The past two and a half years - god, the Beatles changed the world with less time, twice over - have been a mistake. But it's not too late. Now, I can really concentrate on writing. My life isn't over. Only my phony allegiance to this place, which has just been tripped up and made a ridiculous trinket. It's no secret anymore. Thank you, I thought. Now there's no excuse. My attempts to cling to the world have always been pathetic. I was not meant to be a grownup. I will either be completed or be institutionalized, or both. I will fall into the cracks, and the bottom of the world will be the next to say: "But you had a degree!" And as always, I will shrug, as if hiding some secret. A chrysalis within a chrysalis. There was that day, I would think at those moments, the last humiliation, the day I set my job on fire, the day I set my place in the straight world on fire.

It was not my fault. Not even remotely. Even in my own head, the way I think about it, now. "What are you doing?", I see myself saying to the fellow, fire extinguisher preemptively in hand. If I'd been there I surely would have played it as such. And as I've said, I've been in fact rewarded with a raise, with certification. My future here even more cemented. Persevering, beying loyal, being competent, deserving it all.

A valentine from the wrong girl.