South City Confessions: It's the hard that makes life great, right?
Sometimes, a comfy bed and willing television is all I want.
There are some days where I don’t want to leave the house. I am not depressed or buried under a weight of guilt; I’m just tired and want a pause. A break in the action. Give me a morning where I get up, and lay right back down and go to sleep after feeding the pets. Someone knocks at the door and says, “you’re not going to work today, sir, now please put those comfy pants back on… after I leave.”
The only rule is it can’t be a weekend. The weekend is reserved for all the adulting bullshit that gets pushed to the side during the work week. You know, that five to six day period of wake, work, eat, chill for a few hours, and get to sleep because the next day fucking begins promptly at five in the morning, you lazy ass. Days are literally flying by like bullets, ripping through free time and moments of silence or plain existing. Wait, existing? Don’t we all exist? Sure, but I mean a patch of time where you don’t do anything and just… exist.
When I had the pleasure of interviewing the supremely talented Ben Foster, he was talking about being unable to stop or avoid making plans in his free time. He wanted a break from it all. I couldn’t agree more, cracking the idea of “existing.” He chuckled, and for a moment I felt proud for making a guy who could send a chill through your spine with some of his characters laugh. But we’re both right… sometimes you need time to not do anything. Again, a break in the action.
Do you ever pull back for a moment during a work day and think, “damn, this is hard?” The physical part of work? Sure. The day-long schedule and evening of tired limbs and fried minds? Yeah. The adulting required after work, and that includes weaving home through a gluttony of mad cars to get home, makes the evening get called for a false start. Pets food, dinner, laundry, and anything else. If I’m being honest, a bag of chips and some cheese looks nice and hardy some nights. And suddenly, it’s nine at night and the time to power down the engines.
A thought runs through the mind. Stop whining and just do it, you big stack of bricks. It’s what Kelly from my work would say: Just do it! In other countries, people are avoiding gunfire and bombs, or scrapping around for food. In the kitchen, my wife is putting together a pesto chicken dish. The last two words don’t matter, given the word they follow. Pesto anything is good in my book. It’s nice and calm around Princeton Heights, so I get the idea that a guy like me shouldn’t complain.
But still, this is my soapbox and I can climb up and whine here and there. Or, every day. There was a moment today where I was slinging truck straps over a tower of PVC pipe-a box-less stake body truck with undercarriage straps-where I stopped what I was doing to wipe the half liter of sweat building on my brow. In case you didn’t know, I sweat a lot. I’m talking about a soaked shirt before 10 a.m. kind of sweat-ING (RIP, Patrice O’Neal). A few wipes and soaked shower towel later, I got back to it, but not before I took a second and just remembered what I’m doing it for.
I’m doing it for my kids, and six of the seven have four legs. I’m doing it for my wife, who never stops moving. Or her brain never stops moving its feet. I’m doing it to make my mom and dad proud, because what I’m doing isn’t as chaotic as working in a busy hospital in the city. I’m doing it because I like the paycheck and the look on my wife’s face when I’m lifting something heavy. For those few minutes, I’m Chris fucking Evans.
Jimmy Duggan once said it was the hard that made it great. He was talking about baseball, but he could have been talking about life. Thanks for reading, and keep on doing the best that you can. In the end, that’s enough to tilt the scorecards in your favor.