It Starts

It all began about 6 months ago when my kind-hearted cute and scruffy boyfriend asked me to clean his morbidly filth ridden apartment. I like cleaning and was becoming bored with staring at the cracks in his ceiling, and having pieces of plaster fall on my face, so I agreed, for a fee of about 30$ an hour. I’ve come to learn that the going rate is really more like 10$ an hour, so either Nathanial was being generous or he’s a sucker. Considering his reputation as the East Village dole, I suppose it’s a little of both.

It was win-win for both of us for a few months. I got money for taking care of a place that I squatted in most of the time, and he got to give me money, which doles feel extremely compelled to do all the time. So that’s where the cleaning began, but I guess the real story begins six months prior to that, one year ago.

One year ago today I was laid off from Company. I make all this dramatic fuss about it like I had really been wronged, but the truth is, my life stunk. I was living someone else’s dream and they’re dream was boring, loathsome and lame. I made decent money and had a comfortable thousand dollar desk chair. I got to redecorate my office with pictures of my choice. I put up a print of a contorted rainbow staircase on a black background. It was Pink Floyd-esque. My Dictator (they call it “Director” at Company) decided then that something was “off” with me: “I knew you were a strange one. I can’t quite figure you out.” I wanted to be like, “Cause you stupid.” But I didn’t say that. I giggled and turned red in the face.

Despite the blushing and giggling, I lost my job, but it wasn’t all that bad. They offered me to go back to being Legal Assistant which was a nice gesture that I returned with a gesture of my own and asked “How much is my severance?” At the time $12,000 sounded like a fortune, but I blew through that faster that many other things that are blown really fast, like a eastern European frat boy blows through coke, or like your mom blows her nose, or like your mom blows her neighbor, or like my dad blows through my brother’s prescription Adderall and blows his money on Keno and wishes he was your mom’s neighbor.

Stay tuned tomorrow for what happens next. Will there be Adderall? Will there be boogers? There may be both. You'll have to read and see for yourself.

Tao Te ZING of the Day:

The Way that can be experienced is not true;
The world that can be constructed is not real.
The Way manifests all that happens and may happen;
The world represents all that exists and may exist.

To experience without abstraction is to sense the world;
To experience with abstraction is to know the world.
These two experiences are indistinguishable;
Their construction differs but their effect is the same.

Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way,
Which is ever greater and more subtle than the world.