Exhausted
Posted on 07 September 2010
So I’m sitting on Great Jones Street, The Five Point Restaurant on the Lower East Side, New York City. A clatter of voices to my right and – strangely – a parking lot across the street, lit like a movie set with cars on spindly straight iron rusted lifts, four levels high, the cars seemingly fragile and naked in the open night air.
A Maybelline ad presides above it all with blue eyeliner, tulip red lips and massive black and white faces. Beautiful in some cruel, sullen way.
And I’m exhausted. And guilty. I made one promise to myself – keep the website alive on a nearly daily basis. Admit the truth whatever/whenever it was, no matter how stupid and embarrassing. Okay, so the truth is, I’m exhausted, shooting this TV show, Blue Bloods, here in NY, flying back to LA on Thursday.
Exhausted.
And I’m far from what is really exhausted, of course, like the people hanging onto tenuous jobs with four kids. Or just four kids and no job. In Kansas City. Chicago. Or in a town in the middle of nowhere, fading cornfields out their windows. I remember what it was like raising two kids in a nice house…
Exhausted.
Which is what most people live with day in and day out, don’t they? No time to take in the big issues that wash over them almost invisibly, no energy left to face anything but a hopeful night’s sleep. Exhausted. No time to process what the Republicans and Democrats are doing behind the headlines.
Are we more exhausted than previous generations? The ones that fought the Revolution, the Civil War, or struggled across the frontier, built cabins, fought various battles in Europe, Asia, South America, etc.?
Exhausted.
And how much does exhaustion play in to our letting things slip through the cracks – BP oil, Global Warming, this Website? Well, the least I can do is admit it.
I’m exhausted
beneath these Maybelline faces that look so dazzlingly bored and important, certainly more important than me – these giant faces with their feathery eyelashes where far below my computer glows, pulling me up, at least a little – exhausted – to put a few words down here now, if for no other reason than to admit it.
Exhaustion
like something solid, like bus exhaust, like the sidewalk in front of me with its cracks and patches and litter. Solid. Defensive. Dirty. But capable of being walked on to someplace new.
Here’s to some place new.
3 responses to Exhausted
That’s pure poetry. For some reason it struck home with me & I just had to say so. Interesting spin on all the crap out there in this God forsaken world of ours. Good luck, hope you find some new energy for everything that stands in front of you.
Give in to being exhausted seems to do the trick for me.It’s O.K. to be exhausted,Yin and Yang,the curve must go down in order to go up again and beating yourself up about it will make you feel even more exhausted,empty and useless.Get a sensible massage-treatment or float to empty yourself out completely.I comprehend that like a reboot for my “system”,allow myself to be…be treated,be weak,be there where I am.And knowing that there are millions of people more exhausted than me because they can’t help it,because they have to in order to survive (not that I don’t have to feed my family as well with my job that involved studying& learning as many hours as to becoming a doctor,but pays me a tenth of his salary).sure,I do feel guilty and lucky at the same time to be born,raised here and not in Pakistan,for example…the trouble seems to be,that sometimes we see too much,feel too much and exhaustion only seems to render one only more perceptive,sensitive,less protected against these images/thoughts.
so bottom out,then maybe change focus entirely for some hours and spend some time salsa dancing,playing with toddlers,painting a chair or cook an unhealthy insanity…(hey,I’m only suggesting!maybe even making you smile by the mere idea of you doing the salsa…am I?)
I go through these periods as well and they help me actually recover from some past thing, creativity. mania and help me get on to the next thing. Hopefully it’s more creativity a little less mania, just a touch less. We can not be on all the time, alive or awake. Practice ressurection when you can.