Hell is Other People

Far and away my favorite existentialist quote. Sartre was a pissy, moody whining bitch (who boxed several intellectual weight classes below Simone de Beauvoir), but that single nugget of wisdom redeems him in my eyes.

Nothing like a day of wading neck-deep in your coworkers' neurosis to make you wanna take a mallet to the soft spot on the side of your skill. As I wrote previously in this space, even the a******* in your life have something to teach you. Today I was using my inside voice to yell at the heavens "WHAT IS THIS A****** TEACHING ME!" I felt a bit like George Costanza yelling "SERENITY NOW!", but with my inside voice. Old Siggy Fraud said "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". I think that translate across into "sometimes an a****** is just an a******".

The detached, internal intellectual that usually won't roll around in the stink posed a question in the midst of bashing my head against ramparts of stupidity. In your late teens and early 20s you crave sex and respect. By your late 20's you crave credibility in your chosen profession. In your 30's you crave competence and recognition of such. Anymore, I crave a Dick Proenneke life, spent in a self-crafted seclusion. A great number of people in my profession spend a large portion of their professional life constructing the Dick Proenneke exit of some fashion. While I acknowledge this very idea is occupying a larger portion of my psyche with the passage of time, I wonder what comes after this. Or will this be the defining obsession henceforth? I don't see an exit or an alternative. As you can tell, it was a long, hot day and the beer isn't doing anything for me.

Ares