hard hours

A pile of cash sitting on the desk. A few hundred dollars. not enough to pay the rent but enough for some beer and a bag of tobacco and, if I were to lose my mind, a hotel room near the airport, a bag of mid grade cocaine, and a cheap hooker, thick in the tail with a belly to boot.

But I gotta keep it level. Cant go losing it now. I just got offered another job at a record label, it’s the third time they’ve approached me about a gig. This one is part time and the pay isn’t great but I get health insurance. And I need health insurance. Desperately.

My warranties are up. I'm falling apart. I've already had to replace part of my spine, and that just weakened my foundation. Next is my teeth. Then my feet. I’ll be in a wheelchair by March. Unless, of course, I get health insurance.

So its in my best interest to take this job. And that means a third of my week committed. 24 waking hours gone.

Then I have this company –somehow easy to forget since it has fully immersed itself into my life. The company is a natural extension of me. I live and breath it, I move in it and it in me. it is behind my eyes and at my fingertips and digesting my food and pulling at my anxiety, keeping me on my toes. Simply put, I am the company. The same goes for my two partners.

We work every day, every hour, every minutes, on the company. Preoccupied with its movements, worried and afraid and excited about where its going. So there really is no set amount of hours dedicated to the company, they ALL are, in a way.

But lest I forget, there is also the bar. the other, OTHER side of me. the side that dictates my sleeping habits, my diet, my rent. That was 36 hours of the week, but I recently cut that down to 26, dropping my movie Monday night (my favorite of the shifts because not only was it my Friday, but it was always mellow, we got to play a movie and get drunk, and I made decent money). Small sacrifice though, I had to start school.

Oh yeah, school. That fucking shit. That’s 8 hours a week in class and at least 20 hours a week homework. 28 motherfuckin hours. Learning just gets more bitter as the years carry on.

That’s 78 hours. Too many for this poor bag of bones.

So I drop another day at the bar. cutting those hours to 18. Now I'm working with 70 hard hours. And I'm feeling exhausted already. prepared to collapse. bracing myself for impact. Looking at a pile of cash. Wanting to just lose my mind.