All day, full body, blurry eyesight exhaustion. I discovered four versions of my resume and still had to (what felt like) completely re-write the damn thing. I then had to customize my cover letter for eight jobs. Which wouldn’t take so long if each one didn’t have its own application system along with the necessary “attached documents”. But the real kicker is that I spent most of my day clicking through jobs that, at first glance, interested me, and upon further inspection, were completely worthless piles of manure. Not even the kind you can John Deere over barren land to invent the possibility of creation. These jobs did not have the potential for rows and acres of produce. These jobs were shit. The kind you excrete and forget about. The kind I shouldn’t be considering. The kind I shouldn’t be wasting my time even reading the descriptions for. I can’t believe it took me all day to apply for eight fucking jobs.
Over the weekend I finally visited my dad’s property in Madison. I didn’t have time during the entire fall semester to go, so, believe me; I needed it. We took the four wheelers like a cliched CMT music video through trails he’d carved out of the woods himself, right through the dried-up streams to the open pores of the Withlacoochee–our four wheelers like blackheads bursting to a stop next to the small river’s shore. Then we turned around and rode eight miles down a dirt road sized one way but clearly used as two. I rode beside him to avoid the dust, which stings your eyes like millions of tiny insects over about 25 mph. The hills began to feel like bordered Georgia; I’d get scared riding to the top, not knowing what could suddenly breach the sky, then I’d get exhilarated as I let go of all brakes and gas, gravity careening me down. I looked around for the Georgian clay, the color of a fresh slap in the face, but only Florida’s light brown clouded itself behind me. The idiosyncrasies of the borderlands…
We’d been riding past empty fields for miles, the wind catching fresh, flattened or piled manure every five minutes or so along the way. Eventually I expected nothing at all, even though my dad had told me to look for it. The absolute nothingness made the whole world feel like nothing. I even felt like nothing, and it was a good feeling, to be nothing for awhile. Then, on the other side of a hill, suddenly, there it was. A small, abandoned farmhouse across from a dilapidated tobacco hanging shed. I walked around it, peeked inside, stood in its backyard and marveled at the fields, which ended at forest acres ahead. This was something, yes. Away from the city, into the wild, I could feel it again, and I wanted more than anything to be alone with it. To throw that feeling down onto a table and put the five senses to it. Dissect it. Discuss it with myself until it told me something I didn’t know about myself or the world before. Discuss it with myself so much that I get sick of it and, lonely, it becomes the light brown dirt, and I lose it.
But, like always, I lost it way more easily than all that.
Oh, dear, indeed. It has started.
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