WE’RE NOT DOING IT BECAUSE IT’S EASY

When we next spoke, she asked what keeps me up at night, but this became the mother of all Pandora’s Boxes that could not be closed, once opened. I’m not the only person to have become a professional insomniac lately. I regularly hear stories about the legions who rise in the middle of the night feeling wired and it takes them an hour or two to fall asleep again. For me, it is one of regret, in that I let things get to me one Thursday afternoon, a cold and snowy Thursday afternoon, when I didn’t choose to talk on the phone and I told him that, that it was noisy and I wouldn’t be able to hear, but he insisted. He insisted on explaining the incongruous, he would not stop, alternating between the manic and depressive. Yeah, that’s it. He wasn’t merely an oddball, but a manic depressive oddball, and I let him get to me.

I completely ignored one of his hare-brained schemes because it was totally off the charts hare brained, whereas I persisted with a second and I put his associate in front of the best person in the world for his purpose, but he royally fucked up. He spent 20% of his allotted time referring to the periodic table of elements! Does little Thumbelina get off on failing? So many sleepless nights because of a few hours of torment, anguish and anger. Had I managed to survive this stressful agony through the next 24 hours, everything would have been OK. I can not forgive myself.

He liked to boast about his academic and philosophical prowess, that when taking on a business task, he rarely chooses the straightforward or low margin but high volume route. “We’re not doing it because it’s easy,” he’d say, citing pompous JFK’s fly me to the moon speech, unless it was Judith Campbell Exner’s profound autobiography. Moreover, JFK also said, “I shall be in Sweden on the 12th. Where do I go.” And as Attorney General, RFK said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”6

Not, you’re doing it because it’s impossible, and not in a figurative sense. How about let’s do something because it’s easy, I’d like to for a change count my chickens after they’ve hatched, because something is better than nothing. He wheeled out the lazy adage that a small job will require as much work as a large job, without realizing how absurd this statement was, particularly as it wouldn’t be him doing the work. Half the staff has just died of the plague and he was hassling the other half for a meeting. The moral of this story: he wished to test his theory that he was immune to the plague because of his philosophical prowess. When caught en flagrante having a tantrum with himself, he retrofit retorted that he was intentionally coming down hard on someone … to help them visualize the crux of the matter or to become instantaneously more productive? No, to be odd. Think, think, how would MB react in a situation like this one? How would he keep his sanity? He’d flick his hand in the air and explain to a colleague that “he’s made of different stuffing to the rest of us.” However, I don’t possess the necessary mental energy at this point in time.

And then I cracked it, it took me too long but I cracked it. People who are manic depressive are not much fun to be around. Should I apologize for being short tempered and criticizing his hare brained schemes? I don’t need to manufacture any reasons to be at my wit’s end. Never go along with someone who says, we’re optimistic, we have to be, and why would I do something that doesn’t interest me in the least?

“If we start behaving like the other side, then we become the other side!” He said it, he said the phrase (though he also said “I only want to work with real clients who will pay us real money” when there were none of either, and the color of money is not brown). Correct, if you’re talking the butt ends of the Horseshoe Theory, and the horseshoers are more contradictory than a bear who’s afraid to hug where have I read that before. It was good and original, but what was good wasn’t original and what was original wasn’t good. He claimed to be a sexual intellectual but in reality he was a fucking idiot. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades speaking of which and there are no honorifics for splitting that difference.

I freely admit that if it wasn’t one thing, it would be another, something else keeping me awake at night. However, in the past it was my ambition, options for the future that I could contemplate for hours, what had to fall into place, and how I could achieve my ambitions. I was roused because of what I had to look forward to, things I would enjoy so much I could taste it, and it was not relevant that as a matter of course I would have four or five hours of shuteye rather than six and a half or seven. Or, I was reliving incidents I had approved of, recreating them in my head again and again.

I was living in the moment, the past and the future, all at once. It is so much better to relive the enjoyable during the quiet still of the night when there are no distractions, than during the clatter of the workday, when there is only distraction. Therein lies the difference, so much anger and regret over a few hours of angst. Once again, I do not feel sorry for myself over this regret, but rather I’m angry with myself for letting him get to me, for trusting him in the first place. This is not righteous anger, it is true anger, it is power to truth. Is it legit to tell someone he needs to have his head examined? Only this time it won’t be personal. Ha!