On the days when I’m just buried at work — days when my inbox is overflowing and people keep prairie-dogging over the walls of my cube to try and convince me that they’re going to have a heart attack if I don’t do their<\/i> project RIGHT NOW, ahead of all the other projects that belong to all the other people who are also having heart attacks, and I’m wondering at just what point in my life the road diverged and I ended up on this particular path, and oh by the way, is there an alternate-universe version of me who’s having a lot more fun right at this very moment in time? — yes, on days just like the one I’m having today<\/i>, I find myself drawn irresistably to the pop-rock music of my formative years in the mid-1980s. You know, the stuff that’s heavy on the crunchy-sounding rhythm guitars and always has a wailing solo after the third verse, but never gets really hard enough to cross the line into true metal? Yeah, I’ll admit to listening to a lot of that stuff regardless of what kind of day I’m having, but on days like this one, I really<\/i> get dedicated about it.<\/p>\n
Maybe it’s because the bombast effectively masks the background noise in my office environment, or maybe it’s because the simplistic lyrics about teenage sexual frustration and youthful machismo are easy to tune out when I’m trying to read copy. Or maybe, just maybe, some part of me is yearning for the time in my life when I didn’t have grey hairs because I can’t seem to figure out how to fit everything I need to do into an 18-hour period of wakefulness. A time when all that was on my mind was music and teenage sexual frustration and dreams of the future…<\/p>\n
Well, you get the idea. I’m having a miserable damn day at work and that makes me pine for freedoms I never appreciated when I actually had them. It seems like the longer my to-do list becomes, the more frantically my overworked brain craves escape. I have a lot of fantasies of just walking away from the meat grinder and going vagabond, of tramping through Europe and driving with the top down and riding a Harley somewhere on a desert two-lane. Which would be a good trick, since I don’t actually own a Harley.<\/p>\n