Riding Metro North S. With the Glow.

Posted on by Live & Learn

Work.

Mon 6:10 am start. Home at 8:10 pm.

Tues 5:31 am start. Home at 9:12 pm.

Wed 4:43 am start. Home at 9:36 pm.

Thur 4:30 am start. Home at 9:45 pm.

See any patterns here? Any obvious trend lines?

I lean my head against the window in the train car. Eye lids heavy, flap shut. Mind rotates snapshots of Freddie in Bohemian Rhapsody.

Mary: “Freddie you’re burning the candle at both ends.”

Freddie: “Yes, but the glow is so divine.”

No throngs of adoring fans.
No booze.
No sex. (Sigh)
No drugs.

And doubt. That ever-present black mist drips, and drips.

And the glow.

Oh, the glow.

Notes:

  • Mary / Freddie quote from: Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek), Bohemian Rhapsody (2018 film)
  • Inspired by: “I don’t know what breeds obsession. I don’t know if it is hardwired into the body or if it assumes its role after the long habituation of practice. I don’t know if what we do becomes what we do or if it too just is. ~ Devin Kelly (LitHub, June 2017)
  • Photo: Newthom

70 thoughts on “Riding Metro North S. With the Glow.”

  1. There we go AGAIN…. your working schedule drives me crazy! Just reading it exhausts me! OK, I’m a bit (much) older than you but buddy, you gotta think of your health, your family, your bleeding LIFE! You can’t abuse your body in that way…. I don’t say make your body a temple, by far not, but be a bit kind(er) to it! For your wife, family, us….. Please!

    Do I just hear a mother talk to her child? Blimey, I’m not THAT much older than you 😉

      1. …. but hardly ALIVE?! How the Dickens…..??? It’s nearly 10am here and that’s alright, but even though we’re both insomniacs, this is wahaaaayyyy too much! Go back to sleep, sweetheart!

          3. These days, I’m less inclined to rejoice in the way my head is lit up at night, like an out-of-hours factory, when the whirring generators flip on, powering up the lights and the processing plants for a frenetic shift. Geared up this way, my mind trips ceaselessly from one mundane thought to the next, alighting upon a single word or meaningless riff or song snippet I happened to hear that day. Or it runs backward and forward over endless lists, stitching and unstitching. I compose strings of emails that could wait until morning, line up tasks in a shoulder-shoving queue. Mostly I just fret, worry-beading minor problems and irritations until they form a manacle of woe.

            ~ Marina Benjamin, The Genius of Insomnia (The New York Times · January 5, 2019)

          4. oh but THAT…. can’t get any of those fab articles any more so have to rely on trusted friend David!
            Reminded me of Hero Husband over breakfast. He had to check a German word on his phone (as a French spoken Swiss working in an international firm with literally nobody speaking real proper German he’s often at a loss of words) and then was totally absorbed with business mails….. Told him to pack up his phone and go to the office to sort things out instead of infuriating his dear, long-suffering wife who made him lovingly his breakfast….. and off he took…..
            btw, the word he ‘learned’ was Legastheniker (= dyslexic), and I explained to him that I could never fathom the creation of such an excessively difficult word for someone with a problem of writing correctly….. 😉 🙂 😉 🙂
            We ALL have our crosses to bear!!!!

  3. Besides the fact I am reading you at 3:58 (Thank you, Zeke; thank you Morpheus, for abandoning me. Again.) , I am thinking your pattern is backwards. The earlier you are up and at ’em, the later you get home? No bueno, amigo. That glow will get less and less divine and we sure as hell don’t want your light to dim… xoxo

  4. I don’t know what to do with you this morning! I don’t. I read this and I keep repeating something over and over in my mother tongue that is untranslatable!

    1. Laughing!

      “You can stop repeating yourself, stop taking all this oxygen up and make way for something else.”

      ~ David Whyte, The Conversational Nature of Reality – Interview with Krista Tippett (Onbeing, December 27, 2018)

      I have been as doomed to repetition as anyone else, even when I didn’t know what it was I was repeating.”

      ~ Rachel Cusk, “Outline: A Novel” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January 13, 2015)

      1. “No throngs of adoring fans.”

        We’re all not good enough for you now. You want “real fans.” I see how it is!

          1. I sure hope so. Because cyber acquaintances are flesh and blood. Just like Freddie’s fans 😉

          3. This week, including today, is the last week of my fiscal year at work. Im focused on wrapping it up strong. Then I’ll see Freddie.

          5. When it’s out on Red Box, or Prime.
            I know I will love it. I’ve been staying away from it for the andré reasons I’ve been staying away from everything Anthony Bourdain.
            Im so uncomfortable reviewing anything. Might have published one or two reviews, only because someone asked. Otherwise I find myself writing how something made me feel, which is not a review!

  5. Oh my Godness… your working hours… going earlier every time… seems better to stay in NY… Dear David, amazing post, especially mentioned glow, Bohemian Rhapsody… Thank you, have a nice and happy weekened, Love, nia

  8. As Joe Walsh wrote in “Falling Down” …burning the candle at both ends. Twice the light in half the time”. And, I sigh with you, pal. 😔

  9. There’s another way, DK, just HAS to be. I’m sure you’ve heard of Icarus. Fly too close to that ‘glow’ and the outcome isn’t good. Life is too short….

  10. Ah, these hours I know so well (and arguably why I still don’t sleep a full night). The muscle memory that never atrophies. I remember the silver-backed-gorilla-beat-my-chest toughness of playing hurt, being one of the road and work warriors – the glow that comes from midnight oil burning. But one day my friend, this will give you pause…and as much as it reinforces, it also takes away – and it is that which you will want returned to you. Find the balance Grasshopper – you deserve it.

  11. Confession is good for the soul, my son, but aren’t you tired of the Mothers slapping you upside the head here? Surely, you’ve reached a position of Delegation, so this is a choice.

  12. It looks like you are back on the first train of the morning – that’s the David I know. You must have promises to keep, and miles to go before you sleep…

  13. There are fine lines between hard work and obsession, seeing the glow and recognizing the fire. Sounds like you know you have crossed them. Take it easy Dave.

      1. 😁 Coincidentally, I attended a luncheon yesterday. The guest speaker was a man named Jim Fannin. He calls himself the Zone Coach. His approach is interesting; the acronym is S.C.O.R.E. (Self- discipline, which you apparently have in spades, Concentration, Optimism, Relaxation, and Enjoyment). You can find short clips on You-Tube. Might be worth checking out.

  15. Been there, done that, and have the t-shirt as well, Dave. Except the t-shirt wasn’t worth it in the end. Find your glow … find your balance … recognizing the difference between the glow and the fire … all sage pieces of advice from people who obviously care and are concerned. It does sound like you have things backwards, and you need to refine your personal to do list to put you and your health first, because without your health you will have nothing.

    “We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ‘to do’ list.”
    ~ Michelle Obama

  16. I worked a lot of hours back when I was a chef. I loved every minute of it. I thought I was making a big splash.
    And I wouldn’t have given you a nickel for a guy that does a job like the one I do now.
    Now? I get to go home at 4:30. The big splash, its over-rated. But it was fun while it lasted.

  17. Call me a bit anachronistic…money is a necessity though don’t let it be a stranglehold over you Health, Family and Peace of Mind…

    1. “But if silence is so peaceful, I wondered, why do many of us choose to live in busy, noisy cities? Ours is a poetic dilemma: We want silence, but we also want to blot it out. We confuse silence for peace — then go a little crazy when we have it. After all, silence allows troubling realities: what Philip Larkin called, in “Aubade,” his brilliant 1977 poem about predawn silence, the “arid interrogation” with ourselves over “the dread of dying.” The truest kind of silence is the ultimate one. Is that why we choose to live in noise, through centuries of complaining about it? Adrift in it, we can duck confrontation with the metaphysical and the existential: the piercing, enduring regret at how you treated an old, estranged friend; the inequities evident on every corner of the city; the fear that your life has been a project of self-delusion — that its elaborate armature, its gilded hand-stitched brocade, may in fact be moth-eaten…

      To hear ourselves, we sometimes have to flee ourselves, diving into silence until we’re uncomfortably alone with the noise within.

      ~ Meghan O’Rourke, from “Lessons in Stillness From One of the Quietest Places on Earth”, The New York Times (November 8, 2017)

  21. I read this and think…is this what your job demands? Your clients? Your boss? I know it’s a high stress world but (and I am not trying to be rude) I would never, for any money, live the life you are living.

    I don’t have children — or the need to support any. My parents are fine on their own. My only financial responsibility is to myself and my husband and, at 61, we met with a financial planner who thinks we are in pretty decent shape. I know, for sure, we have never earned what someone in your world makes, but I could not tolerate so little life of my own. I’ve chosen to live on less and in a 1 bdrm apt for decades and drive a 20 yr old vehicle — precisely to avoid this kind of pressure.

    Is it worth it?

    1. Somehow your insightful comment fell out of my cue (or perhaps my subconscious was avoiding answer a question that froze me in my tracks). I took a few days to noodle this, and the answer is Yes. It is. As to additional color, that will come in a future post. 🙂

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