A Letter From a Work in Progress

It is no wonder why most songs, movies, and books are about love. You can be bitter about love when you are out of it, but when you are in it everyone knows there is nothing better. Sitting there in the dark with Kate I knew I loved her. I knew because I was happy. I think I was too young the last time I was happy to remember what it was like, but the feeling is now crisp and bright.

We spend most of our time hiding our weaknesses. We act brave when we’re afraid, we pick fights with people who scare us, we pretend the future isn’t there, we say we are “okay.” We perceive all this resistance we put up as strength. Then we take a wrong step somewhere and fall in love, and all the resistance is no longer needed. It’s scary because we feel weak; rather we realize we are weak. All this resistance we thought we were putting up was nothing more than hiding and we find that we haven’t grown strong at all.

Then the most dreaded word, after love, comes: Vulnerability. Before, we pretended that we were impenetrable. Nothing got in or out, but now we lower the bridge that we never told anyone existed, now there is a big gaping hole in the side of your stronghold, and we find out that we want nothing more than to tell every filthy secret about ourselves and every fear we have, in the name of love.

The third word comes: Happiness. Not so much dreaded as it is thought to be mystical—and uninteresting. Just like love, we tell ourselves we don’t want it because in the act of wanting we suggest we need something, and therein lies a weakness. So we say it doesn’t exist. We wanted to be interesting like Elliot Smith or Fitzgerald, so we drink too much and do too many drugs, and push loved ones out of our lives; anything to make ourselves feel more miserable each day. After we feel it, though, we know that being happy is much more interesting than being sad, and we realize we know more miserable people, and read more miserable authors, and listen to more miserable musicians, and less of the happy ones, not because the happy ones are so uninteresting, but because they are so rare.

And I know that in reading this letter you don’t find it as interesting or good as my other letters (as I still kinda feel that way myself), but I think that’s just because we have trained ourselves to look at these things with our head half cocked to the side, and with one hand in front of the face so as not to get a full effect, afraid of what it might do to us, and we miss what’s there.

So, like every other poor sap that has fallen in love, I have tried to explain it, and I think I did as good a job as anyone could do.

Some Color. Yaay!

While sitting in my gray rectangular work home yesterday I realized I needed to run out to my truck. While walking through the parking lot I walked by a sheriff’s car in our parking lot, which isn’t that odd because there are always cops at the Crown Burger next to our office for lunch and dinner. The rest of his crew cutted moustched friends were parked in the Crown Burger parking, but it was pretty busy so I guess he decided to come park in our lot. The only thing was he parked in our handicap spot while there were plenty of spaces open right next to said handicap spot. There isn’t much that grinds my gears worse than someone who has too much authority or too much money and believes themselves above the rest of us normies, and doesn’t think the same rules apply to them. I mean nobody is going to give this guy a ticket.

On the way back I walked by the cruiser again and thought that I should leave a note on his car, a ticket if you will. I recruited an accomplice and we wrote out the ticket on a purple post-it that said, “This is your ticket for parking in the handicap spot, douche. Sincerely, Everyone.” We walked out the side door and as we walked by the car I slapped it on his driver side window and then proceeded to go in the front door of the office. As we entered we felt that justice had been served. Neither of us had a view out a window that would enable us to observe the officer as he read his ticket. I kept standing up from my desk to look and see if he was coming, but knew I would probably miss him.

About an hour later someone came into my area and said, “Who has purple?” I looked around my cubicle wall and sure enough there was the sheriff, moustache and all, holding the note I left on his window. I took my post-its and put them under my leg. Of course everyone else was pretty confused and asked him what was going on.

“I want to apologize to whoever called me a douche.”

“Someone left a nasty note on your car?”

“Yeah, they called me a douche.” I was laughing pretty dang hard at this point and IM'ing my accomplice.

“Oh man, no one here would do that.”

I think the cop said the D word like 50 times while he was in the office. It tickled me every time.

Apologize? Yeah right. He was pretty pissed and we all know that cops, along with politicians and referees, don’t apologize to people. Even the people who didn’t know what was going on knew that he wanted to confront the person who bruised his giant cop ego.

He then proceeded to walk around the entire office looking for purple post-its and colored pens (I had written it in red pen). Most everyone has purple post-its because those are the ones the office purchased most recently.

“I didn’t realize it was a handicap spot.” Uh-huh. The big freaking blue square with the handicap symbol inside didn’t tip you off, huh? Neither did the post with the same symbol? Yeah right, but still, if the rest of us wouldn’t have realized it we still would have earned a parking ticket.


I was kind of bummed that the people around me didn’t think it was funny as it was, but after the officer left we claimed the note and gave the whole story of him being parked in the handicap spot while there were several open spots nearby. They didn’t realize he was parked there so then it all made sense to them then. They told us if we ever did something like that again we need to let them in on it so they can enjoy it as well. I actually got yelled at because people were scared when he came up to talk to him, but the overall sentiment in the office concerning what we did was pride. Good times.

We sufficiently got our point across. In hindsight, while trying to stick it to the man, maybe calling him a feminine product wasn’t the greatest of ideas, but I was upset, and I am sure had a disabled person needed the spot they would have called him much worse.