A Confession

According to Big Orange (who knows a thing or two about this), in Roman Catholicism Fridays are supposed to be sorrowful. In the praying of the rosary Fridays are given over to something called the “Sorrowful Mysteries.” I guess that means amongst hard-core Catholics, Friday is not quite the joyful experience it is for the rest of us working stiffs. It DOES, however, seem the appropriate day to do something ELSE them Catholic folks do, and that’s make a confession.

I hereby do confess, openly and publicly, that I couldn’t take it any more and I…

Well, I…

You know how yesterday I was talking about The Pact cracking? Well, yesterday that crack widened to a fissure and then split completely asunder the way the moon breaks in two in the opening credits of Thundarr the Barbarian (I’ve got to stop IM’ing Big Orange during the workday—his lexicon is beginning to rub off on me even at work…). Yes, I… ::deep, pre-confessional sigh:: I rented a movie last night and I watched it. I spent money to rent a DVD in direct violation of the Prime Directive of The Pact.

There. I said it. I feel better now. I suppose you would like to know how this all came about. We’ll have to blame a few people and things, one is the Nature of American Work that forces me to do multiple tasks at the same time and manipulate vast amounts of information and data, and the other responsible party is MS Excel.

I have spent most (practically ALL) of this week wrestling with a behemoth Excel spreadsheet. The thing has somewhere in the range of 120 columns, over 200 rows and tips the scale at a hefty 3.75 megabytes, which is HUGE for an Excel file in my experience; most weigh in like hummingbirds that could fit on one of those old-fashioned 3.5” floppies, but not THIS mother. THIS sucker needs either CD-ROM or a jump/thumb drive to be toted around. This sucker has WEIGHT.

How long any one person can stare at a spreadsheet this big and not experience some sort of retinal degeneration or damage to the optic nerve has yet to be established, but in my darker moments (which are growing more frequent) I worry that I’m the first test subject to really find OUT just how long any one person can stare at a spreadsheet before going stark raving mad. By yesterday afternoon I had spent, by my rough calculation, approximately 25 hours on this bloody thing (I used a spreadsheet to calculate that, BTW-- I don’t know if my brain can USE a calculator anymore). That was BEFORE I drove off downtown to mediate an evening meeting with principals and leaders of the local schoolboard for a good, solid hour and a half.

By the time I was on my way home the sun was beginning to set, my nerves were frayed to the point of resembling the hair on a troll doll, and I was beginning to have trouble with noun-verb agreement. In short I was a complete mess, a mental carwreck akin to the “Blood On the Highway” movie they showed me in high school Driver’s Ed class. I swear I could hear a soft voice calling me home; I’m convinced it was the hottub.

Doc had fed the girls and himself as per my instructions, and when I mentally perused what I knew to have in the fridge my already-low heart just sank. I thought of going out to dinner by myself-- soup, salad and breadsticks at the Olive Garden or something; something light with maybe a nice glass of wine-- but the hour was already late and I was missing my girls. They have a way of grounding me and reminding me of what is REALLY important in this life. Call them the antidote to the snakebite of Excel.

Still, nothing that I thought I had in the fridge appealed to me so I decided to stop off at the local Giant Eagle and grab something out of the deli case, or maybe even a whole roast chicken: whack that sucker apart with a knife, eat it with my fingers (as a supertaster I reserve the right to do such a thing, especially when butt tired), take some of it to work tomorrow for lunch. Cooking was DEFINITELY out of the picture.

This, dear friends, is when everything started going to hell.

I don’t know if they HAVE Giant Eagles where you live, but this one of those “super” supermarkets; the ones with a floral shoppe, a kids area (drop your kids off with an attendant and shop without them grabbing things off the shelves), some of them even are large enough to have optometrists or dentists or other services in there as well. MOST of them have [cue suspenseful music] a VIDEO STORE.

There I was, pushing my chart by those tall things that beep if you take a video out without it being damaged, and they had strung tacky lights up around the entrance that would blink and run around and were clearly invented to both intice and catch the eye and subliminally draw people in.

I stopped in my tracks. There, inside, was… what? 500 different movies? 1,000? 10,000?? Who knows how many you can stack in there, but there they were, in the warm, inviting, cave-like video room. It was like a sweet perfume was drifting out, like a tent standing in the middle of the desert and the sweet scent of water wafting out at you. My soul was thirsty for video. I wanted to go in.

You know the rest, don’t you? I wandered through the store randomly, not really seeing the food on the aisles but all the videos in their lil’ boxes, standing at attention like puppies in a window-- “PICK ME! PICK ME!! TAKE ME HOME! YOU’LL LOVE WATCHING ME!!”

Since the only checkouts open at that time were RIGHT IN FRONT of the video store, I fell off the wagon like a dried out drunk on Burbon Street. That is, knowing full well I shouldn’t do this, but deciding, “oh, what the hell…??” and doing it anyway.

I walked out with “Fight Club” in my hot, sweaty grip.

Why THIS film, you might ask? Why not something light or cute or more my speed? I’m not sure, I think it was a choice made in haste (I’d spent a lot of time in there and realized that Doc was probably wondering what the hell happened to me), I think it was partially because it was near the checkout, and I think it was partially because Pitt was in his typical bad-boy role. In any event, I took it home with me and left it in the car. MAYBE I’d have enough willpower to NOT watch it-- that would be my punishment for breaking The Pact. I’d have it, NOT watch it, and forget about it.

Uh-huh, right. I had that sucker locked onto it’s little spinny-thing in the portable DVD player out on the deck by midnight after Doc and the kids went to bed and I knew they were asleep.

What did I think of it? This was, by far, one of THE best damned movies I’ve ever seen. Sure, it’s nice to see Brad-boy prance around without a shirt beating hell out of other guys, but it wasn’t the violence that drew me to the film. I liked the way the whole thing ran, the story in flashback, the adolescent angst-filled philosophy that these men espoused. Sure, peeing in the soup d’jour or blowing up corporate art as a way of expressing your anger at Da’ Maaan would have struck me as infantile, fatuous rubbish if you were to sit down and tell me this over coffee, but out there on the deck, watching my movie I was TOTALLY able to suspend disbelief. I could BELIEVE that some pencil-necked geek WOULD beat total hell out of himself to blackmail his boss and join up with a completely narcissitic, condemned-building-squatting, human-fat-rendering, violent psychopath as a way of “getting all the way to the bottom” and getting out of the corporate world. In fact, I could begin to believe that it’s actually happening RIGHT NOW, and I realized that the weak-of-spirit, lead-around-by-the-nose, don’t-ask-any-questions men who filled the army of Project Mayhem are the same sorts of men who strap explosives to their chests and blow up whole busloads full of people over in Iraq.

The whole day had that sort of out-of-body-back-in-5-minutes feel to it that “Fight Club” just fed into. Lying down next to my Doc some 2 hours later, I wondered, like the narrator in F.C., if THIS was all some sort of dream, too….