Half-lost weekend, half apologies

The last week has been rough. Not like “digging trenches in the summer heat and I don’t have a canteen of cold water” rough, but I’d been warned that next week lots of people on my team at the office are going to get laid off. So the impending news has been weighing on my mind.

Yesterday I was driving around with my wife after work and I announced that this weekend I was going to be drinking a lot. “I’m going to let the booze flow,” I said. Her response was almost enthusiastic. “Oh yeah?” she said. I was driving, navigating a particularly crunchy patch of rush-hour traffic, so I couldn’t turn to see her expression but I could tell she was smiling.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to drink my way through this one.”

“We should go buy some tequila for you,” she said. She’s supportive like that. She’s got good ideas about how to help me.

“I won’t be driving, and I won’t running through the streets without clothes, but I have that end-of-the-world feeling,” I said. “You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, like when we lived in L—,” she said.

“Yes, like that,” I said. I hesitated, trying to find the words to describe the gutted feeling, like nothing mattered. Everything would soon be disconnected, destroyed, diminished. “Or like at the end of the Internet days in San Francisco way back when.”

She nodded. “I hear you,” she said.

We’re at a different point in our lives now compared to when we lived in San Francisco, or in L—. For one thing, we’ve got a kid. For another, we have a mortgage. I’ve also held this current job longer than any other gig. I almost feel like an adult, rather than a perpetual grad student. If I’m among the laid off, some interesting choices will have to be made. Move? Stay? Start looking for work right away? Take a few months for creative projects? Take our kid out of preschool? And if I’m among those who still have a job after next week, it’s understood that we’re going to take on more work and that we’re supposed to feel grateful for that honor. As I drove, I tried pushing the thoughts out of my mind. It didn’t work.

Despite my intention to get loaded for the next several days, last night I drank only one glass of wine. If the world was ending then I would be doing it only slightly buzzed. After dinner clean-up, my wife napped next to me while I watched the pilot episode of a new series on HBO in which a few million of the world’s people disappear suddenly. There were many scenes of warped domestic relationships interrupted by a few sudden bursts of violence. When my wife woke she asked what the hell was going on with the characters. “I don’t know,” I said. But I was intrigued.

Maybe it’s useful to have our lives disrupted. If everything always went according to plan, we would be bored and somehow, I imagine, unexpectedly disappointed. When we’re called to stretch further than we’d anticipated, to think quickly in a crisis, to save an old man from drowning, for example, we see ourselves - and what we’re capable of - in a different way. That’s probably a good thing.

Chekhov is quoted as saying that any idiot can survive a crisis. It’s the everyday living that wears you out. I wonder what he would have said about surviving an everyday crisis. He probably would have said, “When dealing with an everyday crisis, it’s best to get yourself another drink.”