A Hateful Little Word Called Compromise

"If you close the door, the night could last forever. Keep the sunshine out, and say hello to never. All the people are dancing and they're having such fun, I wish it could happen to me. But if you close the door, I'd never have to see the day again."

At the Home Entertainment Store, they play trailers for recent and future releases on a loop. Approximately every twelve minutes, it starts again. I am now well positioned to tell you for a fact that a group of people forced to hear trailers for dull and samey British crime flicks day after day after endless, godforsaken day will - eventually - start greeting customers with the line, "Welcome to the Layer Cake, son."

On top of this, the music from a certain advert featuring a certain skateboarding tortoise will be the first thing that comes into their minds each and every morning they wake up. Sometimes they will sing it, unaware of the thin strings of drool that hang from their slack lower lips, nor of the terror their blank stares strike deep in the hearts of the customers.

But this is how the Home Entertainment Store does business, and who am I to argue with policies that have me reeling off our many bundle deals in a bored monotone or answering the phone with a script that contains twenty-one words fired off at such a breakneck pace that the usual customer response is, "eh?" Nobody, that's who. Yup, it's back to being a cog in the big bad corporate machine. Sad but true.

I know, I know. It's no big deal. Almost everybody works, and almost all of that almost everybody has a degree of loathing for their job. Maybe the three month break has given me a perspective I wouldn't otherwise have had. Work - like a bad smell - doesn't seem quite so monstrous when you're used to it. Give me a couple more months and I probably won't be mentioning the Home Entertainment Store at all. For now, though, it's looking like the main subject.

Again I'm reminded of being fourteen and fifteen years old, this time remembering all the solemn vows N and I made, promises that we would not be 9-5 office clones, that we would chase our dreams wherever they led us, never giving in and selling out to The Man...

I miss being that age. Not that it was tons of fun or anything; I just miss the confidence that naivety gave me. The prime years of puberty are really the last time you can feel genuinely rebellious. After that, all revolts come with a disclaimer attached. You can still chase your dreams, but not without getting acquainted with a hateful little word called compromise.

It's hard. There it is, I said it. This is officially a pity-post. I am aware that I am not a starving orphan, that I still have my limbs and my sight, that I live in a country that hasn't been torn apart by some senseless war. Nonetheless, some days are a bitch to get through lately. I'm tired and uninspired, my back and my feet and my head ache, I'm having trouble sleeping again. The old me keeps trying to convince the post-resolution me that just one night of throwing back bourbon and chain-smoking Marlboros would be good for the soul, would give me the boost I need to climb up the far side of this grey mood. I know that's not true, but I won't lie and say it's not tempting. Every day I wake up and wonder if it's an anniversary of some event in my life, if there's history to be celebrated or sorrows to be drowned. And every time it isn't, my heart feels heavy with the effort of getting my head down and ploughing through another of these monotonous, meaningless days.

At this point, I may as well admit that I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about what I want from my life. When I wrote that piece about Hunter S. Thompson, a fairly large part of me was considering it the final entry on this blog, maybe even the last gasp of the teenage dreams all my friends left behind so long ago. I'm honestly tired of hurting myself for the sake of art or fiction or whatever the hell you want to call it. I've been putting as much of myself as I always have into my work, but somehow it feels like I'm getting nothing back. If you're talking about word-count, I can write just as much as I always could. What's missing is that sense of...release...satisfaction...achievement...I don't know. The words don't seem to fit.

In the end, this might just be a transitional thing. I'm normally pretty good at analysing myself, but on this occasion I find myself at a loss. I know exactly what's in my future and I know I want that future very badly. I wouldn't be making the sacrifices I'm making if I had doubts. What's troubling me is the thought that the - for lack of a better term - 'Darkened Room' Michael will be somehow erased or lessened by all this. Because I miss being drunk and dazed and watching the sun come up through eyes that have to squint even against that most gradual of illuminations. I miss waking up to darkness and switching on the computer, knowing I'll be uninhibited enough in a few hours that I wouldn't care about word limits and grammatical errors and sentence structure. I miss feeling miserable and angry as fuck and sure that I'd be dead by forty.

I'm just - as fucking dumb as this sounds - scared that everything will work out, and that a part of me that's been my only crutch for however long it's been now will just die, and that I won't be able to write anymore because I'll be holding a gun that's no longer loaded.