{36} Crux

Woke up late due to forgetting to set the alarms (I have three…no, I’m really not a morning person). Had 20 minutes to make it out the door to the bus stop, only to discover my travel tumbler was missing (left it at work) but okay, if that’s how morning was gonna roll…

Which is all pretty standard, I think. We all have those days, we all know the frustration of starting off on the wrong foot by just being human.

I was going to write a book once, called “Crux” (remember I always think of the titles first) which was supposed to be a play on the phrase “the crux of the matter” because it was about a group of people like me in Orlando in the late 1990s, early 2000s, and the choices we were having to make as broke adults.

What I discovered is that over all we were pretty boring. Poor people usually are. We don’t travel, we don’t have interesting jobs, we don’t have expensive hobbies.

But even past that, we were all rats in the maze, going to work and then going to the club to dance and drink, sometimes getting laid…I don’t know, it was all very plebeian, with leftover malls from the 80s and chain restaurants and tourists. It’s hard to make a place like IHOP interesting, and tourists are all the same after a while.

Sure, I knew interesting people who were individually witty and smart and creative, but the combined stories of our lives? Once you cover unplanned pregnancies and romantic dramas (soooo manyyyyyy romantic dramas) you’re left with car repairs and clocking in to your shit-pay customer service job.

There is a reason the movie Clerks resonated with genX so hard.