Confessions (#3)

Tomorrow begins a two-week countdown to an important deadline. The journey is going to take me through some unchartered territory. And the difficulty is that this is the time of year I would rather focus on other things. I outlined this struggle in last week's post. But I am taking this time to blog, despite two days of exhausting work, and a strong desire to shut down and tune out, because right now, this habit of maintaining my blog is important to me. 

So, here I am, on a Sunday night, typing away, placing on the internet another piece of a puzzle that is my life. Apologies for picking up one of the smaller pieces...

(Once again I find myself turning to Edward Hopper. This one fits my post so well, but you will have to read to the end to find out how.)

  

From time to time, as a child, I would lock myself in the bathroom, turn on the shower, and, before entering it, perform a ritual. Atop the bathroom rug, I would throw down a clean towel, curl up upon it, and cover myself completely with another, larger one, so as to block out all light. And then, with the drone of the running water filtered through the layer of cloth surrounding me, I would shut myself out from the world, and bask in a sort of sensory bath. My escape from reality would last between five to ten minutes before the fear of knocks at the door dragged me back. With a sigh, I would shuffle into the shower, and get on with my day.

Sometimes, when a shower was not convenient, the bathroom fan would be good enough, and I would lie longer knowing that I was not wasting any water. But the threat of people piercing my cocoon with their knocks still existed. So then I took to stealing away into my closets with pillow and blankets, closing the door, and shutting out the light and noises. 

As I got older, when the opportunity presented itself, I embraced hotel rooms. There was something about curling up inside a hotel bed, heavy curtains tightly drawn across windows, and the hum of the air conditioning or heating unit chattering along, reinforced occasionally by the churning of the mini fridge chiming in. 

Then there was the finished basement at my previous residence, with a thin wall separating a couch from the furnace and air conditioning, and thick woven curtains covering small windows filtering the outside light. Many a day, and quite a few nights, I would sneak away and bury myself into the worn creases of that couch, listen to the song of my HVAC system.

Even my former workplace granted me a reprise from reality, and the loud cacophony of children at play. Nestled away in the loft hidden by a tall wall, with open ceiling, and overlooking the gym (which was main part of the building where everyone congregated), chugged a huge fan that fed the heating system. Climbing up there via a ladder, which was hidden away in a locker room, and lifting back a hatch, I would make my way through the metal shelves of that storage space, to the far side of the loft. There I would pull out two chairs, one to sit in, and the other to rest my feet. And during my break, when I needed a respite from troubles of life, I would drown myself in the siren call of that huge fan.

All these moments reinforce a recurring memory I find myself dragging up from my mind from time to time. My father owned a business that leased a warehouse space. One day, he took my brother and me to tour the place on a Saturday afternoon when no one else was around. At one point, we passed through the boiler room, which was roaring on pushing warm air throughout the building. It was loud and deafening, and overwhelming. But in the next room, and empty on without windows, with the door now shut, it was muffled just enough to bring me a sense of serenity. Finally, as we came out of that connecting space into the main office with its open cubicles, cluttered desks, and naked windows streaming in waves of daylight, I felt a loss. 

So powerful was that experience, that I have carried it across three plus decades, and draw upon it to this day.  

These revelations are the context for the following confession. From time to time I daydream about taking a job in a large industrial complex, and my office is a little windowless room stowed up deep inside the bowels of a building, near machinery that drones on all day long. People rarely bother me, deciding that I work best alone. And there I pass the hours focused diligently on some project. On rare occasion I find myself needing to sleep on a cot in the corner of my office, because of how late I had to work. The whole time I am there, I am happy, snuggled up in my cocoon. 

Now take this daydream, and add the following: an episode from a television series I enjoyed watching while growing up, and one of my favorite songs. The former is "Time Enough at Last" from the Twilight Zone, and the latter is "A Better Place to Be" by Harry Chapin. You will have to click those links if you want to understand their place in all of this--unfortunately, I do not have the time to explain them.

Mix it together, and you have the backdrop to story I have been developing for years, but have never written down. A short, balding maintenance man of a large warehouse who likes to be alone in his room near the boiler. A woman with graying hair from accounting who loves talking. And the empty, silent world they encounter together as they emerge from a stuck elevator.

No, I do not have a title yet.