Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Back at my desk.

Ah, yesterday I returned to the paper-cacophony I call my desk. The chaos, the noise, the friends, the stimulation, the alive-ness, the mess, I call my desk.

I landed at JFK--after a lifetime of reconstruction, a much improved JFK, at 11:30. Magically, I was in a cab and speeding for my desk by noon, making it to my desk by 1:15.

For all the Van Goghs I had seen in Amsterdam, For all the Steens and Rembrandts, for all the death I had tasted in Berlin, for all the sleep I had missed while walking a dozen miles a day over ancient European cobble, I had missed my desk.

As angry, depressed and disconsolate as work can sometimes visit us with, my desk--and my days--have meaning for me.

It is here I do my thinking. 

It is here I fuck up.

Here I fail.

And here, too, I have such successes that I have.

Even in the days when I was lavished with an office the size of the Ritz, my desk looked very much like my desk today looks. 

It's loaded with things I might need. Half scripts, briefing documents, the flotsam and jetsam of the life of a brand. It's ringed with small stones I have brought in from the beach. To remind me of the ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny of the waves. Or to throw at a wayward head, if I ever have the occasion.

I have notes to myself. Writing puzzles I try to, like an advanced mathematician, unravel. And of course, this being the digital age, myriad wires and cables that, despite all the technology advances of our age, insist on tangling themselves in the most Gordian of fashions.

That's my desk.

I missed it.

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