BLINDMAN TWO

When we are young men we do not mind working shit jobs--we do not mind stocking shelves, washing dishes, busing tables. We perhaps take on a job at age 19, something little desirable that yet lets us pay the bills. We move into an apartment of our own; this is a new luxury, and we love it. Or perhaps we go to college. Perhaps some of us try college and later find it easier to simply work with our hands instead of exercising our minds, with all the frightening prospects of failure present when we work with our minds, so we drop out. Yes, but perhaps some of us take college to heart and work and work hard at it; while others leave for good, decide to settle into a life of labor; and we do not mind labor when having an apartment of one's own is such a novel pleasure. And while some of us excel in college and do what it takes to succeed, perhaps getting degrees in pre-med or finance or business or English or physics. And others of us enter the workforce stocking shelves at Walgreen's or serving people coffee at Starbucks or we take jobs in store security or we grill chicken at El Pollo Loco. And while some of us who graduated college may get a job in a bank as a financial analyst, with dreams and ambitions of living in New York and working in finance among the best of the best, others of us have dreams of being writers or poets or musicians. At 25 years old we still love the look and feel of our own place, we love fucking our girlfriends in there and smoking our pot in there and life still holds near-infinite possibilities for us at that age, and we do not mind the hard labor. But later in life we enter marriage, and the most successful of us realize our greatest dreams were never really within our grasp, working in the highest positions in banking impossible. And we lose our ambition and perhaps our wife wants a child but we do not really want a child, and those of us who are still working in that Walgreen's, perhaps we do have children. But now we look back and cannot believe we're going to keep working at that fucking Walgreen's, stocking those fucking shelves until we're 65 years old and then, even then, we have nothing ahead but decrepitude and death. And when we're in our late thirties working in that bank where no one appreciates us seems just awful, and we wonder why we tried to succeed at life at all. And our wife wants a baby and we can think of nothing more repulsive than a baby, and we dread work and are sick of trying and working at all. All our dreams have been revealed as chimeras and we can see nothing of value in our future; we are stuck in a sexless marriage that we know will end in divorce and we do not particularly look forward to fucking other women even then. The Walgreen's seems a prison where we spend most of our waking hours. Marijuana is our only pleasure but we do not like even that so much anymore. The kids are on their way to growing up to be criminals at worst or working stiffs like us at best, and we cannot stand the thought of this drudgery lasting till we are old and our life will be over then anyway. We are 40 years old now, and we realize we will never be at the top of our game in the financial industry; we realize all the dreams of our youth were in vain. We do not really care about finance anymore and anyway; it was just something to get excited about for sake of getting excited about something, it not mattering what this thing was. Our wife still wants that baby but we know we are tending toward divorce and can think of nothing more disgusting than a slobbering baby; sex comes less than every two months and most of our passions are masturbated away. And so you wonder why murder is so common, but it is no mystery to me why murder is so common. You would think it would take an especially brutal soul to actually kill a man, but it takes nothing very especial to bring a man to that point; and in fact in this world murder is more common than one would think.