A loathsome drone

For so long I’ve felt burdened. It’s not a crushing weight, nothing deadly or torturous. It doesn’t leave me gasping for breath, the sweaty skin of my face ground into gravel or concrete. But it’s there, tinting everything a touch of gray. It’s subtle, the marching clock of seasons. It’s time. Time that does not cease to march.

From the outside, time has been quick. It’s near two years since I graduated college. Five months since I placed the ring on her finger. The weeks are series of speed bumps; those big gentle ones that belong on a BMX course not a parking lot. Just up over down and done. One two three four five.

This ever-pressing burden disappears when time is spent wisely, be it graduating or traveling, proposing or writing. But it is the drudgery of daily life that amplifies its weight. I once wrote a promise to myself, a mouthy maxim: Espouse drudgery at every opportunity. That was my call, not for material success or hedonistic pleasures, but simply an escape from monotony.

And yet that’s where I find myself, the daily grind. Procrastination at work approaches Office Space proportions. The little labor I eke out is a repetition of things I figured out months ago. My free time is equally farcical, euphemized literally as “grind”. Even the tiny bright spots – the books I read, the bike rides in the park, the short-story scribbling, the new bands, trips to the lake – come off as obligations. Paying my dues for a well-rounded life, marking points on a scoreboard to atone for vice and sloth.

I should heed my own advice, something I quoted in a creative outing last year: “this too shall pass.” And it will. But for now, these are my thoughts and what I write. Perhaps I’ll make a “therapeutic” blog-tag so these emo entries can be easily bypassed in the future. But for now, I’ll supplement my whining: