Fire and concrete

I'm suffering a fire inside my head. All day today I've been fighting with this raging flood of negative energy running through my mind. I've been down on the idea of a vacation, insecurely thinking that I'll be fired or replaced some other way. I'll come back and it'll be a minefield of angry readers wondering why the listings are different. I haven't trained Keith all the way, I think. It'll be a mess.

I was shitty to my friend Cori and my coworker/friend Heather. Heather hates to see me when I get worked up and Cori just got word that one of her poems got published. I had to rain on both of their days today.

I'm in the down slope, scraping lows I haven't felt in ages. I'm trying to figure out what's behind all of this. I was shitty to Cori last night on Instant Messenger, a shock since she had just gotten back online after her big birthday weekend. I was excited to talk to her again, but I end up being very despondent.

Today, I've been bitter and angry, ready to just up and quit, two days before I start a vacation. I’m hiding in the bathroom for 20 minutes, using a stall as a cheap copy of an isolation tank. I scream, actually yell with rage, at another driver who was giving shit to a pedestrian for not getting out of his way fast enough.

I ready to walk out of my job. And my life.

I've been ready to burn myself down, throw everything away and wander off into the world, losing my wallet and shoes on the first night sleeping in an alley. Of course, I'll have left my cell phone and car keys on my desk. Since I'll be one of those people who vanished from society, my work will eventually fire me anyway. Luckily, four weeks of pay will head to my wife. It's not much, but at the time I think it's the best I could do for her…at least until she gets the legal right to my 401(k).

Today, as I drove home to my wonderful wife, a hot meal and our spotless condo and adoring cats, I gave serious thought about what it would be like to just vanish. Would vanishing be like the non-lethal version of suicide, ending the life as you knew it and becoming a walking ghost, invisible to society but also shut out of it? Yes, you don't have to manage all the bullshit at work, but then you don't get the subtle joy of leaving it to go home to someone who loves you.

What keeps people in the world? What are the things that connect us to society at large? If you cut enough of those threads at once...or maybe one at a time, just when would you lose your grip and fall into the cracks of society? When would you start doubting yourself? When would you start to abuse yourself, eventually falling into a pit of self-hatred?

When will you give up hope?

When will you decide that you don't deserve any of what you have, and you figure the true way to "atone" for your ill-gotten gains is to leave it all?

And just what would be your reason for vanishing?

I've been following the blog of a writer named Kevin, who says he's been homeless for years. With a casual expertise, he documents what life is on the street while telling his story of trying to put his life back together again. His entries are compelling enough to read on a daily basis, if only for the idea that blogging has now penetrated every strata of American life. Kevin updates his blog from public libraries, where anyone can use a computer.

Kevin shines a light on the underside of the American Dream, a place where just a few wrong steps, maybe missing a couple rent payments, can put you on the streets. And once on the streets, you get invisible to the rest of the top-dwellers who will look the other way from someone asking for change. He's someone who is getting a story out that the mainstream press won't cover, putting together a do-it-yourself written history, the textual version of the oral chronicles collected by Studs Terkel.

Kevin’s writing is sharp yet poignant. It’s access to a hidden world and the thousands of smaller worlds occupied by people who walk the streets all day with no particular place to go. Kevin writes about the myriad reasons why people drop out of society, suggesting that there isn’t one sure cure-all for homelessness. He also keeps an eye out for news reports and government studies regarding the homeless. He’s the best kind of journalist and advocate: an unpaid soul doing it so someone can leave on honest, insider record of what happened.

And yet, when I read Kevin, I feel a little bit of guilt. He's becoming one of my favorite blogs to read, and I can't help but think that I'm reading him for an entertainment value, as in "Oh, let's see how Kevin is doing today?" It's not sit-com material or the extra-soft-porn of reruns of "the Anna Nicole Smith Show," but it's infotainment like "Trading Spaces" or "Ground Force" where a little bit of excitement, art and knowledge get bookended by amusing talent running around the yard.

Is this what it has come to: Homeless bloggers and their words as a destination for evening entertainment.

Or is it me? Am I the one with the problem? Am I getting so bitter and petty that I can’t just read the site without thinking that Kevin is creating the textual equivalent of Bumfight, a venue where we gawk the lives of the less fortunate from our plasma screens or our custom-made laptops. It feels something like the Ethiopian famine of the mid-80s, where we watched in full color the starvation deaths of thousands of Africans before we did something about it. As the comedian once said, we have the ability to film them with expensive equipment, but no one thought of giving the film crew a few extra sandwiches to hand out to the hungry. There’s something humiliating to the human spirit to have such a complex piece of trickery as computers and blogs and the Internet, but we haven’t figured out how to keep people fed and off the cold concrete.

I’m sure Kevin is doing the best he can, and his blog is built with the best of motives, but right now, I’m just numb to the world. I’m tired of great moral struggles and noble causes when I can’t get myself right.

The thing is, I get to start over again tomorrow after a good night’s sleep in a soft, warm bed with a loving wife and two cats. I would call it lucky, but I’m too numb to fully appreciate it.

And that’s when I get very scared.