Back in the office

I'm upright, and that's the best I can say about myself right now. After five days with the flu, I'm standing up and I'm' dressed and I'm getting to the office. It's a kind of relief to actually be here. There's something a bit comforting about the office, the rituals and familiarity of it all. My computer and being surrounded by the walls of my cube and the pictures and grimple that I've got pinned up on my bulletin board. Even the rather mind-numbing project I'll be working on the the next week or so is fine: I can just sit here with headphones on and put my mind on auto-pilot.

This works for now. The comfort of the office is also the danger, though. You can get awfully lazy. One day can slip into the next for weeks on end, until you realize a whole season has passed.

And the hours, well, I don't mind
How they creep on by like an old love of mine
It's the years that simply disappear that are doing me in

I've spent more of my life in an office than I care to admit. I see so many of the people here at work, and they remind me so much of me twenty years ago. Wanting the dream. The career. The family. The white picket fence. They're keyed in on major trends and they are as focused on the goal as the dogs are on that rabbit over at the racetrack. It's a good life, if that's what you want. But you have to be so sure that it really is what you want, because so much of society is shouting at us that this is the way to go, it's easy to overlook that really important quiet voice inside us. Just yesterday I was sitting in a meeting, and I swear the look on one of the young woman's face in that meeting told me that she didn't have any clue why she was sitting there. Maybe she is like I was twenty-five years ago, not really knowing but thinking it was the right thing to do because that's what everyone else was doing. I just wanted to be part of the things. Be part of the crowd. Finally be one of the popular people. Well, that didn't pan out, did it?

My God, I stand next to one of these kids in the men's room and look at their faces then at mine, and I see Keith Richards staring back at me.