The same old dull routine
mailto:asullivan00@comcast.net
Everyday it’s the same old shit: get up, go to work, come home, go out.
You would think that somewhere in all that a guy could get a break. But us working slobs get nothing for all our hard work.
Take my boss, for instance. He thinks he owns me, like I didn’t have a life before or after I punched his time clock. He knows how bad the economy is, how a guy like me who just barely got my high school diploma couldn’t just get a job anywhere else too easily. And my slave-driving boss knows it. Well, we’ve both seen college graduates begging on the streets.
So went he gets on my back, I just grit my teeth and hold it in, and watch the tick of the clock as the day drags. Then, the bastard accuses me of day dreaming. And maybe I am. Maybe that’s the only way I can survive.
I wouldn’t mind if anything was better when I got home.
But the minute I’m through the door my wife is at me, telling me how hard she’s had it, how loud the kids screeched, and how I don’t earn enough to get them all the things they need or want.
She says I ought to be looking for a better job. I tell her to drop dead. And after that it’s nothing but yelling till I get fed up and leave the house.
The bitch.
The only place I get any peace is sucking down beers at the bar.
But a bar’s a bad place to try to forget since nearly everybody’s there for the same reason I am, mumbling about their bosses, wives and kids just as I did.
The talk is always the same about how unfair life is. How the tax man’s always picking our pockets to pay off those lousy lazy louts on welfare. And even when they dumped the bums off welfare, they gave them our jobs.
So in the middle of all this talk, some of us really get hot, telling each other we needed to do something to get even for all the shit we took from everybody.
Some men slipped out of the bar early, going home where they took it out on their wives or kids. Most of us kept drinking and getting more and more angry so when we got dumped out at closing, we started looking around for someone to blame.
Some nights it was a faggot. Some nights a nigger.
I don’t remember ever killing anybody. But I mostly woke in the morning with a hangover and swollen knuckles, stinking of beer and body odor.
But the worst part is looking at my own face in the mirror, at the blood shot eyes, knowing that I had to go to work and start everything all over again. The same old dull routine.