One of my clients has asked me to fly to the actual literal Cayman islands to do some real estate photography there. At first, I thought I would do it because, you know, it's not like I'm ever going to be able to go there with my own finances, and it's... the Cayman islands. 

But, tbh, the more I've thought about the more absolutely ass blasted with anxiety over it I am. It's making me think about my old job, and being unprepared, not being given clear directions, and having to navigate unfamiliar circumstances and places in order to satisfy unknown requirements for people I've never met or interacted with. The idea of once again hauling photography equipment on an airplane, but this time also doing it in an entirely different country, is exhausting me. 

There's not even a date for it yet because, you know, pandemic, but the mere thought of it looming in the future is starting to upset me. 

Part of this, of course-- and I'm going to use the t-word here because it's the only word I can think of to fit the feeling, is trauma from the convention circuit. I don't know how else to describe it. Like-- okay. Let me just walk this through from A-Z here so you can understand what this was actually like. 

Let's say it's Wednesday right now. Which it is. You get a phone call from a guy who hates you. He says, hey, need you to fly to Miami next Thursday. Get your stuff together. Here's what the phone calls were actually like. 

"You doing anything next week"

"Well, I... am working a shift at your other business"

"Doesn't matter, just blank it out of the schedule. You're flying out of Raleigh at 11am on thursday. Going to... I don't know the name of the hotel yet, I'll text it to you."

"Okay"

And then, maybe you would find out where you were going, maybe not. 

There was also a good chance you would have to meet someone in some random town in Georgia and have them drive you. Some random drug/or alcohol addict you've never met who is now going to control your every choice from where you eat to where you sleep etc etc. Maybe they'll bring hookers to the room, maybe not. They often did. 

So you fly out. Your company credit card doesn't work. No one answers their phone. It's 4am in Arizona and the rental cars are all gone, and you need to be at a place you don't know at 7am. Hope you slept on the plane. 

Also, it turns out the boards that were shipped actually weren't shipped. I also need you to find a camera store and buy a camera. Make sure you keep the packaging because you have to return it in 3 days, make sure they let you do that. The only place selling Canons is 2 hours away? You can make it. You're the guy right? If you don't make money you have to pay for this flight. 

You get a rental car at 6 am and drive directly to the job site. The event you were shooting at 7am is already over. They moved it an hour earlier because they could do that, it's their event, but they're also incredibly mad at you for missing it because Eloise got her lifetime acheivement award there and now she's already flown back to Houston. You stupid fucking idiot. I told you to be there at 7am. I tried calling you but you didn't answer. Sorry, it was on silent. 

You want to eat but there's no restaurants on this side of town because they build convention halls on the bad parts of town so they'll hopefully "rejuvenate" aka maybe white people will move in. You have to steal food from the hotel kitchen by just going back there and getting it, or you don't eat because they don't actually include you in the food orders for the convention. 

Your bags are all damaged from the flight. Your printer doesn't work. You didn't get enough printer paper. You ran out of order forms. They forgot to give you extra memory cards and they sent you the laptop that shuts down after every 60 prints, and you need to print 12,000+ photos. You still don't know what your return flight time is. No one is responding to any phone calls. 

This all happened. All this happened so many times. And my boss now is even less organized than Marshall was-- and that moron thinks you still work for him. He still calls you about work. And I'm supposed to go out of the country? With a $12,000 3D camera? I was nearly murdered in DC for less than that. 

I don't believe there's any way to do this where it ends well for me, but I have to do it. At least it'll be easy to talk someone else into it. Trip of a lifetime. All I need you to do is have never worked in this sort of business before so that you don't know any better.

Management means saying "do this" and not caring how it happens. We need the thousands of dollars, just do it. Who cares. Therapy is expensive and you're poor. 

I hate it. 

Every single thing is fine until I have to go to sleep and that is when all bets are off for mental health JUST F U C K M E U P

Walked to Olivia and Lilly's house yesterday for quarentine mimosas. Both of them were laid off weeks ago now and so they don't leave. My work is remote now so I don't leave. It felt alright. 

It was the first people I've seen in four weeks, first time I've talked to anybody in person in ages. I felt sketchy about it, but I did it anyway. 

One of my friends is a manager at Walgreens and is getting me a mask hookup so I can stop washing my bandannas every time I go to the grocery store. 

It's day by day here. I'm trying not to dwell on the sheer volume of time that I expect to be isolated because it's really taking a toll on me at this point. Off and on. 

Frustrated by America, but what else is new. 

Working from home for the forseeable future. There's something to be said for this and I think it's the hardest part of running a business or really doing anything at all that requries multiple people, but the actual human act of exchanging information is the single hardest thing there is in the universe. It's not something actively consider that often but holy shit is it hard. 

When you're working in a place and you can't just open your mouth and expel the information it just breaks down instantly. It cannot be done in any meaninful way when you're balancing more than one project. It's a nightmare. There's no software to fix this. 

Either caught the worst cold on earth or I got the evil. 

- Increasingly anxious during last week, wanted to work from home, boss said next week. Snort roach is our designated gross guy at work, filthy disgusting rancid nightmare man. Straight up said he would not start washing his hands. This made me spiral into depths of despair. 
- Thursday Snort roach coughs onto my face, I have a class A world championship freak out. Idk. He said he was sick already with a sore throat. 
- Friday afternoon I start getting sore throat. I think I've maybe anxietied myself into getting sick. I prep for 2 weeks at home and buy food, go home and lock up. Feel okay.
- Sleep till 1pm feel terrible. Take a shower, feel worse. Joints hurt. Feel tired. Nap all day. 
- Wake up this morning wheezing terribly, having difficulty speaking without desparetly trying to catch my breath. Fever sustains. Cold medicine ineffective. Throat no longer sore. Are these two sicknesses. Did one lead to the other or are they the same. 
- Low energy/appetite. Trying to stay hydrated. Not prepared to spend weeks with this. There's no cold medicine left in town. Called about a test, unavailable. Told to stay home. 

I was making some half hearted, sad attempt at cleaning up my inbox tonight. I have ~19,000 emails in the gmail acct. I created back in 06 (WHEN I MORONICALLY DID NOT USE MY REAL NAME), and, with great joy, I found myself confronted with some emails I exchanged with a former boss I had back in 08 when I got fired from my columnist position. 

It's not something I've thought about in a long time, but something I feel is relatively ahead of its time in terms of being obliterated for a poor choice of words.

When I was in senior year of high school I was selected to write a weekly column for a community/local newspaper. There was no topic, no thesis, no real editorial, I simply had to write a page of double spaced text each week and send out. I was really good at it. I had fans. My mayor wrote to me once when I wrote a column about the concept of death and sort of the avoidance we have culturally of admitting we're all two thoughts away from an existential crisis, and about my grandparents dying. 

But, when I was 19 and going through some hard times, I wrote a really angry, politically motivated column about things I didn't really understand and had no business putting in front of an audience of several thousand people. 

I made a statement to the effect of "This is the Vietnam generations' fault", or something of the sort. Note, this was peak George Bush era, pre-Obama's election. I had grown to feel sort of invulnerable in my position after being lauded so often, and so I said some incredibly, powerfully hateful things about people that I didn't understand, that I then defended bitterly. 

And my boss fired the living shit out of me. He himself was a Vietnam veteran, who had grown complacent with my columns being very light, fluffy, humorous things with occasional dips into depression, but I had never sent in anything like this, so he didn't read it. He didn't even scan through it. When it hit print, he fielded phone calls for days. Days and days and days about the things I said, and he unceremoniously dropped me from publication. Denied me the chance to apologize, which I wouldn't have sincerely done in the first place, and told me we had a good run, have a good life, don't contact me again. 

I was, of course, livid at the time, but reading through those emails now, as I've just done, is sort of a harrowing experience. 

Regardless of your feelings on the "social media purges", "getting canceled", or whatever you want to call them, that seem to happen every so often today (Chris Matthews just bit it for both saying horrible things and being a vague sexual predator), I had the startling realization that had this occurred today, or perhaps in a larger market and in a different newspaper, there's a very real chance that the things I said would have had serious, life-altering consequences. Like, you're canceled. 

I made these pathetic, grating, whiny passes at my editor who instead of replying to me as I deserved, an obnoxious 19 year old bully, simply told me to enjoy my college years and to leave the newspaper behind. I, naturally, did not enjoy my college years, mostly on purpose, but that's beside the point. 

Reading that column now-- I don't know. I am sorry for what I said. It was ignorant, and I deserved to be fired. If not for that, than for my ever present comma splices. What I'm most disappointed about now is that I never did get a chance to apologize. I was ripped from the paper and never mentioned again. I had some people write in to my editor even, in an incredibly pathetic show of power. Those people just saw me say something gross, and then go away. That was it. The end. 

I really wish now that I would have taken a second to show that column to someone, to have somebody point out to me the things I was saying, and to take some responsibility for myself. But I didn't.

The only thing I really am grateful for is that it was only a small township that saw me showing my ass, making a fool out of myself. Only a boss no one now knows I had, and columns that have long since been purged from the world forever, never to be read again by anyone at any time. I guess at the end of the day, I'm grateful that the only consequence I really faced was having to realize I cost myself the one thing I've always wanted since-- to be paid to write. Is that fair? I don't know. I'd prefer it to losing my career. Or a hypothetical family, or the ability to show my face in public. I'm lucky I got what I got. I'm glad that it wasn't worse.

Maybe someday I'll get it again.

Here's a really cool performance of Once In A Lifetime by David Byrne from the other day on SNL. I dunno why they had him on to play this song, maybe he's doing a big show or something, but man.

So this is a song I've been in love with since I was maybe ~15, when my friend Jason was really into them and by proxy I started to explore them as well, through 128kbps downloads from Kazaa and LimeWire. 

I'm fairly confident that what initially attracted me to this song was how weird it was-- same as with the Pixies, there's just something about the nature of its songwriting and performance that felt like outsider art-- obviously I wouldn't have phrased it that way, at that age, I would have instead said something like "ITS COOL, MAN", which, of course, it is. I've used this song in work I've done over and over, for different reasons, as an ironic joyful accompaniment to terrible things and events sometimes or just because I think every character I write is like me, so, of course, they like the Talking Heads.  

But hearing that song at 15 and hearing it now at 31, it just hits that much harder, because now I understand what it was it meant, what Byrne was actually saying, or at least what my interpretation of the song means has changed. 

It's just about how sometimes you feel like you've created a reality for yourself that suddenly feels alien and confusing, horrifying even. What have I done? 

But, despite this. 

Time isn't holding up
Time isn't after us
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was

There's no assault, no scheme by the machinations of time or age to make you feel worse, or bad, everything is going along just the same as it always has and will. Ride it or don't, there's no getting away from it. 

Every time something bad happens to me I always end up coming back to this song. Every break up, every five year long relationship that goes in the garbage can, every bad job, here we are. 

It's comforting both to know someone else looks at their life and can feel the need to fall to their knees and scream out in horror at what they have created for themselves, but also, at the end of the day, it's just another drop of water in the ocean. Gotta keep going. 

• Dark Order Vs. SCU - Got this one right. Daniels is not the Exalted One so I got that too. This was an okay match, SCU is a fine tag team but I just can't find myself to care about them that much. Scorpio maybe, his match with Jericho late last year was pretty good if not just okay. I expect a reveal of The Exalted One Wednesday and I surely hope it's Hardy. 

• Pac Vs. Orange Cassidy - Got this one too-- pretty much right on the money. OC put in some work and some laughs, Pac got the win kind of through semi-dubious means, they both look good, OC's big match comes later. Pac was a good sport here. His reactions to OC unleashing his power were hilarious. 

• Nyla Rose Vs. Kris Statlander - Got this one right, but the match was garbage. Kris has been down with the flu and it looked like they had barely worked the match. Both of these women can do better. This was easily the worst of the night. Embarassing. 

• Darby Allin Vs. Sammy Guevara - Big miss, Darby won this clean as a whistle. These two dudes are going to be legends in our time if they don't kill themselves on the way, they're both SO good. I'm glad Darby won, I just didn't expect it. 

• Jake Hager Vs. Dustin Rhodes - Jake wins, as expected. This match was ok. The best parts where the out of ring bits with Jake's girlfriend. Jake looked rusty, and Dustin looked old, which are both true. 

• Page/Omega Vs. Young Bucks - I can't even describe this match. I called it wrong, Page/Omega won it through blood guts and sorrow, but the story is ongoing. I don't think Page and the bucks will ever reconcile after this, but at least he's cool with Kenny. I was wrong because I expected this to be the end of the story, but it's not. It's just the start of a new part of it. What a match though. Like 35 minutes of just insane, ridiculous action. It honestly should have closed the show. The crowd was wiped out by this. I know I was. 

• Cody Vs. MJF - Wow fuck me did I get this wrong. Cody cheated to win, and win he did. Big win. Cody got wrecked. Where does this go now? Cody honestly looks like a dweeb now. He loses always. MJF is going to go for the title I think, and Mox is gonna shut that shit right down. Spoilers. But what does Cody do? Tag team time? Idk. 

• Mox Vs. Jericho - Thank God Mox won. AEW Is Jericho is over. I long to see what will happen next. Wednesday is gonna be a hot ass show, man. 

Overall: Misplaced match card I think. Open with Dustin/Jake still but then get to womens match, then Darby, then tag team, then OC, then final. I think that would have built better. The tag team match was so good and so perfect that everything else just looked slow, including Mox/Jericho. And look-- Jericho is old. He did great work as champ. He gave it his all tonight. But how many big matches does he have left? It can't be that many. He's not what he used to be. He can still work the mic but his in-ring is just slow now. He built a great identity for the AEW champions in his wake to follow. But I feel like in a couple of years he's out of the business. 

It was worth the money, that's for sure.