NOTE OF HINDSIGHT: For what it’s worth, this post was written during a particularly difficult mood. The following text here underlines that mood. Sorry.
It’s 9:40 AM on a Monday morning. I should be at work, but I alas, I ain’t gots no (real) job due to my less than stellar educational history, now redundant early 90s design skills, geographic locale, lack of employable talents, and no man’s land age. [See Underemployed, Being on the About page]
No, I am sitting in front of a computer writing this stuff. I have no idea what I’m about to write, but I need to vomit up some sort of verbiage in hopes of convincing myself to ride my bike. An activity—outside of a 13-mile rail-trail ride and a 30-minute Zwift™ session— I have not done in almost a month.
Why, you ask? Fuck, I don’t know.
NOT A SOCCER PHOTO! The beginning of soup. I lost interest in photographing the process two minutes later.
Sunday morning, I woke up to crisp fall temps and brilliant sunshine. I put air in Mr. Burgundy’s tires, filled two water bottles, got my cycling and camera gear ready, and promptly never left the house. Apparently, the lure of making homemade potato/broccoli soup and watching the footy on TV all day was just too much for me to resist.
I could sit here and try to come up with reasons: Same flat gravel roads, same photo subjects, same mileage, and same disturbing amount of brainless mother fuckers flying Trump 2020 flags like it’s nineteen thirty-fucking-nine Berlin, killing my vibe.
Yes, I am aware I could have driven a bit and gone mountain biking, but I also have a long list of shitty reasons why I didn’t want to do that either. I will spare you the details.
Now it’s Monday. The shop is closed today, and I find myself once again looking out at a beautiful fall day with no desire to get on a bike or leave the house. Wifey is unshowered and in her pajamas, firmly ensconced in the spare bedroom (formerly known as the Chamber of Farts) working as she has been for 8 hours a day since March, and B is in the basement family room, already two hours into his school day. It’s not supposed to be like this, but it is and has been so in one form or another for seven goddamn months! I realize it’s not all bad; I love being able to walk into the spare room and sexually harass Wifey or lay on the bed and fart and talk to her while she works. It was awesome a few minutes ago when B asked for some Photoshop help while working on a digital media project, but when the initial joy of pissing Wifey off with my desk-side flatulence and realizing that there is one Photoshop skill left that B has yet to master fades, I’ll find myself right back to thinking that shit is fucked up. Because it is.
I’ve considered that I may subconsciously be sabotaging myself out of guilt. A year ago, Wifey would be at her office, B would be in school, and at roughly 10 AM, I would leave for my daily ride or gym workout. With everyone here, I’d be lying if I said I felt “right” to go for a two-hour ride while they are stuck here working all day, and despite now being open, there is no way I’m going back into a gym right now. Those places are germ farms in the best of times. I say all this knowing full well that both Wifey and B would rather I be out on my bike than lurking around the house like a doddering old fool. Yet, here I am.
Aside from potential guilt and some of the shit that I pondered in my last piss-pore post, I’ve also considered that I am just lazy. I mean, when I was a teenager, my father did once say, “Jason is so lazy, I can’t believe he gets out of bed to take a shit.” I would give some credence to my hypothesis and my dad’s less than helpful critique of his emotionally struggling teenage son if I wasn’t cooking dinners, meal prepping, cleaning, doing laundry, mowing the lawn, taking care of two bulldogs, working some hours at the bike shop, and doing all the grocery shopping. In addition to my volunteering to shoot, edit, and post hundreds of action photos for B’s high school soccer team 2 to 3 times a week, a process that is made a tad more difficult by the MHSAA throwing a shit-ton of floodlight kickoffs and long-distance away games the season thus far.
It’s now 2:06 PM, and I haven’t ridden my bike. I have typed all this, washed and dried B’s uniform for tonight, prepped my cameras, got directions for the hour and forty-minute drive to Davison, cleaned the kitchen, exported some photos, did more laundry, did 30 minutes of lumbering on the Dreadmill™, fixed and ate lunch, and made threats to projectile poop in Wifey’s direction as a result of a disagreement on what time is considered lunchtime.
Since March, I have been generous to myself and to others regarding moods. Shit is fucked up on many levels (Pandemic, the Great American Dumpster Fire, the Orange fuck faced moron in the White House and his merry band of racist fucks, etc.), but this month-long drought of not giving a fuck about anything at all is all new to me. I almost wish I was depressed and not just “meh.” Hating myself is so much easier! I mean, it’s sort of been my “thing” for over 49 years, so I might as well keep doing it. I mean, nobody hates themselves more than me. I know, it’s a gift.
On some level, I know that everything I do as a human is merely to kill time between my ill-advised birth and my—most likely earlier than expected and undoubtedly embarrassing—demise (I predict a stroke while rubbing one off), so what does it matter what activity I choose to do, as long as it properly kills time and prevents me from thinking too much in between life’s two unwanted bookends.
I know this feeling won’t last forever, but I don’t know what it will take to get rid of it.
Until I get out for a ride or some quality photo hikes, I’m going take a sabbatical from this shit show of a blog. I’ve got nothing of worth to say, and fully recognize that reading a 49 year old, middle-class white male bitch and moan is not making me any friends, but I doubt we’d ever really be friends. If you’re lucky, this mental glitch will last until my aforementioned “earlier than expected and undoubtedly embarrassing—demise.” Or I’ll fuck you over and be back tomorrow.
Later.
NOTE: Because I’ve done nothing worth taking photos of over the past [few] week[s], you’re looking at more soccer photos. I’ve been using the Z6 over the D4 due to its superior low light performance while using a varying aperture 600mm zoom. Anxious to get back to daylight shooting with the D4, it’s a soccer shooting beast!!