Keys

The key cutting machine makes this distinctive noise, metal being cut, keys being shaped to a lock, shaped to match a key that opens one. The keys being made yesterday were made to fit the locks of my apartment building's doors. I was getting them made for Jacob and was thinking about my life a fair amount, about this person who I was getting these made for, and about how happy I have been lately, the noise of the tools cutting metal allowing me to lose myself in thought for a short while in this store. This person has spent every night at my house since Christmas and I felt bad that he has had to wake up with me with darkness still out my windows as I left for work so I could lock up my house. Now he can sleep in past me and lock up whenever he leaves.

My boss was fired a few days ago and her desk next to mine now sits empty, it a bit weird to think that she and her often annoying presence will no longer be there each day to exasperate and occasionally entertain me. My job is changing, the fun now less present, things a bit more strict, and I am thinking that I need to really begin to take seriously my life and what I hope to do with it.

I had this dream a couple nights ago, after she was fired and while I was asleep in bed next to Jacob, that I was still working in this same job in a couple of years and that it had become my life, that I no longer had interest in art or even mild aspirations to be an artist, but rather was content in this job because it paid well and each day ate a footlong sandwich from Subway and got stoned and watched stuff on Netflix. It was a nightmare of what my life could very easily become, something that it is in fact now.

I had this dream on the same day that my co-worker came in to work with a sub from Subway, something he does every day, on the day he talked about how he only would be working there for another year, long enough to pay off all his debt, and then he could do things he cared about, in his case acting. In the year that we have been working there, I have seen several actors who all were going on auditions when we first started working there, when the hotel first opened, all for the most part stop and who rarely talk about that anymore. I don't want the comforts of a bourgeois life to sap me of any dreams I still have. And there are some.

The constant presence of Jacob in my life these days could also be a distraction from that, much in the way work is, something that eats up my time and in which I cannot be solitary, cannot type away on my computer thoughts about him, about human bodies, or about what it is that is happening with my time here on this little planet. He has just started school again though and so hopefully some balance can happen. I don't know. I know that I do love sitting next to him on my couch, cuddling with him, getting really stoned with him, and watching Skins on my computer, often turning my attention from the screen to look at his face and how fucking cute he is.

I have gone to the bookstore twice this week and both times left without a book. I am looking for something. I don't know what. I need a book to jump out at me, for our eyes to meet and there to be some spark, and the things I have been picking up at used bookstores haven't been doing it. I am going to try again though tomorrow because I really need some good sentences in my life, a narrative to propel my own stalled one.