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We often walk back and forth without even looking up to see the faces of those we bump into on the street. Driving around, the isolation is even more pronounced.

But sometimes, when we are forced to raise our eyes to avoid running someone over, amazing things happen.

Is he waiting for his loved one, flowers in hand, making sure he has the poem he is planning to recite upon her arrival duly memorized? Or is he just killing the time with a book in the mean time? What is he listening to?

The stock market is getting destroyed, Europe is falling apart, dictators are thrown out of power and killed. But in a little quiet corner of an otherwise noisy and crowded place in the heart of New York, someone longs for his loved one. And that´s all that matters.

Most of the people who suffer insomnia bear the bulk of its effects the next day. It is as clear to outsiders as the vision is blurry to the afflicted. Sounds are muted, situations are flavorless. Emotions get their volume turned down.

Hopelessly in love with darkness, I found in my new state of unemployment the perfect opportunity to make the conscious decision graveyard shift workers are condemned to. I decided to operate by night and sleep during the day.

Within the warm embrace of nighttime, my self confidence grew. Who would now focus on my slightly bigger right eye, uber-thin upper lip or distractingly hairy mole? I gradually became smart, creative. The dormant right side of my brain flourished again. In my mind, I was popular, attractive to the opposite sex. My conversations at the local waterholes became interesting, not only to myself but also to the listener. And that was just me outdoors! At home, I played music again. Singing, painting, dancing… I never thought I had ability for most of these fabulous activities. It turns out, I was just too busy to discover my talented inner self. Indeed, all forms of art previously forbidden to this tie-wearing monkey suddenly granted me their favor, like the woman who never dared look at you and now gets wet just thinking of your shadow.

How come art now flows like a river off my lips, hips and the tips of my fingers? I would put on a stripped jacket, jump on the street and dive into the crowds of bar patrons, homeless persons, garbage collectors and exhausted investment bankers coming home after another long day of pushing paper. At night, faces reflect the soul more clearly. Less natural light meant more life in a society obsessed with visual perfection.

My internet connection almost got interrupted for lack of payment, so I used my emergency funds to pay for one more month. A daily diet of street hot dogs got me sick. My beard got too itchy, then I discovered it had turned into a bug hotel.

No matter. I have to shave anyway. Tomorrow I have an important interview. It is time. One cannot be the owner of his own life for too long. The moment to exchange my time for a handful of dimes is once again at my doorstep, and the moment to wake up to adult reality has reared its ugly face.

For a moment there, it was nice to dream I was alive; to acknowledge I had no purpose.

I used to think life on land stood still while I flew. How could things even happen while with the seat belt fastened? The seat belt sign has lit. Please go back to your seat, and continue to wait like a docile cow until you reach your destination, ironically far away from your destiny. Remember, smoking is prohibited.

It turns out that reality is exactly the opposite. Time stops for YOU, the passenger, for the duration of the flight. Nothing takes place in YOUR life during the miserable hours in which you cram your body to fit on the anatomically incorrect receptacles you are assigned to.

You stop aging, your old ideas freshen up and present themselves to you anew (subconscious racism, homophobia, the traditional role of women in society), hair stops growing and falling, bacteria in your mouth multiplies while your immune system ignores your body’s cry for help.

When you manage to land, in another place and at a different hour, people close to you may notice you changed a little. Less patient, slightly easier to get you annoyed, uncapable of finding humor where others see substantial comedic value. The behavioral resemblace with your parents, which you thought you had finally overcome, evident in all its glory. But you didn’t move forward. You didn’t move backwards either. You reached that special point in evolution only available to those that managed to stop. To really stop, as your physical you advances at the greatest speed you are likely to achieve in this life.

They always told you life goes too fast; that you should take time to smell the roses. No one told you it wasn’t really about the roses, not even the single serving version that accompanied your airline breakfast to add color to those cold and tasteless microwaved scrambled eggs.

Today you asked me about my day. Once again, there was nothing that deserved to be mentioned. I just wasted another day of my life, mostly while sitting uncomfortably on a plane… Going nowhere…

Writing simply because you are bored is the quickest way to help others lose interest in the same fashion you managed to do so yourself. There is nothing in the plane I am on right now that will amuse me. Also, this migraine combined with nausea will end up making me ignore my seat neighbor’s loud sleep as I run to the bathroom to empty my stomach in a blissful of acid vomit. A single serving barfing bag won’t do this time, as I plan to empty my insides of both food and soul at once.

As I reflect on what made me feel this way, my thought process departs from physical agents. It wasn’t what I ate, drank or snorted. It wasn’t even the insanity of my job, nor how taxing it can be on my fragile spirit. As is frequently the case, a combination or factors conspired to have me want to reach down my throat with my bare arm and pull stomach and intestines out my mouth. Once again, germane amongst these factors is the inevitable “moving on” syndrome commonly affecting adult life.

Everybody is moving on with their lives. Having kids, buying a house, getting promoted, traveling as couples… Cars, washing machines, strollers, ties, diapers…

As normal people get their life in order, as they push their existence in the direction of their choosing, the inevitable process of losing them forever goes on the same way blood invades the clothes of the wounded.

Work has a numbing effect that helps throw these feelings of abandonment into oblivion. Work does not enslave, it liberates. It does not pollute the soul, it purifies the mind. It provides us with a false yet valuable sense of accomplishment that will allow us to go on with our purposeless lives, essential for emotional survival.

Dear Corporation:

Thank you for providing me with the circular running wheel that, save a few moments of painful sanity, keeps me thinking I am going somewhere. Without that, without religion’s promise of a better afterlife, without a future or a reason, I wouldn’t have made it this far alive.

Another glass of scotch will do the trick. Who cares about this nauseating headache? Scotch will once again come to my rescue. I need to be sedated in preparation for the open chest surgery that is life.

I raise my glass to you; its very content.

To become a true artist, one needs to develop a STRONG stomach. Taking non-constructive criticism and outright rejection requires character. Staying the course demands discipline. To move forward, to move on, tremendous will power is indispensable.

Things, places, people and events we left behind cannot be missed if our mind is focused on the future, nor is keeping them in our brain a good use of the precious space inside. Still, we can only see with the eyes of our past for we are what we lived and how we reacted to those events, even the seemingly irrelevant.

Knowing the road ahead is plagued with thorns helps make peace with our destiny, if such thing exists, in our indefatigable quest for meaning. To seek no pleasures, but pursue knowledge for greatness sake. To be and to become, as they both combine in one.

In San Diego, California, on the southwest corner of K Street and 6th avenue, you may find a young and dirty homeless man loosely playing the harmonica. He is not playing it to entertain the occasional pedestrian, but with an attitude that indicates his objective is to force time to pass faster. To him, the relativity of time has another meaning. It is as if he has decided that the hand he was dealt with isn’t worth playing.

I looked at him with curiosity. His able arms and legs contrasted sharply with those of other fat and/or handicapped homeless persons lying on the sidewalk nearby. Nothing physical seemed to prevent him from getting a job to pay for a place to stay. Apparently, this is his lifestyle of choice. It is easy to pass on judgement in circumstances like this. I sat next to him and asked him for his name. Will – he said. I offered him some of my water, which made him slightly friendlier. I asked him what he did for a living. You would be surprised how much perfectly good food people throw into the garbage around here – he responded. His eloquence impressed me. I told him so, and he smirked. I am a writer – he said – a poet in fact. My poems gave me life, and it is poetry that ruined me in the eyes of society.

Well, it didn’t exactly ruin me – he continued, looking a little less uncomfortable. – It opened the doors that separate what is known from what is unknown. It provided for the perspective necessary to look at life and at the world from another angle, one in which the insignificance of material possessions is blindingly evident. In fact, the things I used to own ended up owning me. They were feeding on my soul, slowing me down. All I own now is what I am wearing, and my poems. Everything else that is important for life (the sun, the air, rain…) is free. I am my own soulmate, my own beginning and end. Family does not interest me, as to me that represents fear of being alone. We are all alone, there is no point in being alive but life is an objective in itself -.

I asked him about the moment when he realized all this. I asked him how he managed to shake modern society off his back.

Walking home late from the office, I came to the realization that I was miserable. All I wanted to do was write poetry. During meetings, I entertained myself imagining fabulous new worlds, roses whose color has not yet been discovered, love so deep and passionate it didn’t survive past the first week… And I started writing, and writing. On any surface, at any time. I stopped going to the office and answering the phone. I wrote on every blank page in my apartment. When I ran out of blank pages, I simply kept going on the walls, on the leaves of my plants, on my furniture… It was incredible! A new sense of freedom was running through my veins. I was hooked.

I probably got laid off, who knows? The phone went permanently silent a few months after I decided to stop paying my bills. My landlord came to the apartment to personally confirm I hadn’t died. He found a hairy long-nailed hermit too busy looking for empty surfaces to be bothered by his arrival, or to react to his demands for rent money. The devil gave me the gift of joy through writing, at the price of my capitalist soul. It was quite a bargain.

I wrote odes, can zones, ballads… Left haiku poems where people could find them, sent a sonnet to every woman I knew. I couldn’t stop. It became an obsession.

I asked him about his family and friends. He had none anymore. Everybody abandoned him to his newfound life.

This gift – he continued – has been a blessing and a curse. I have sent letters to my mother, but she is incapable of deciphering the meaning of my sestinas. I have been cornered; ostracized from the world.

My half-finished bottle of water stayed with him. I left, depressed and confused. How can poetry, the main distinction between human and machine, end up turning us into the latter? Did I just have a conversation with myself, instead of a random homeless poet?

Today is March 10th, the last day to pay the rent without incurring late fees. Upon dropping it in the mail this morning, I realized that I was saved. Poets don´t write checks.

Journalist: How about this weather?
Lady driving: I have had it with the snow. Can we get decent weather already? Please, no more shoveling.
God: Beg you accept my apologies for the inconvenience. It will stop very soon. Or will it?

Journalist: Are you coming back from a ski excursion?
Family in a car: Yes. We like the snow there, but not in our home town. Enough is enough. We need this to stop.
God: My bad. Next time, I will make sure it only snows where it is convenient for everyone. Your feedback is very important for me. Please rate this response in the 1-5 scale, 5 being the best. I will appreciate it if you could give me a 5.

Journalist: Enough snow for you?
Lady attempting to walk on the sidewalk: Yes. This is enough. It was fun for a while, but not anymore. This is definitely not fun anymore.
God: But you looked so excited when I made it snow the first time this season! What did I do wrong? Too much for too long? I am so sorry. I am pretty bad at knowing when to say enough. But don’t worry. I shall make it up to you in the summer.

Jan, 2011

A test conducted on the human specimens that inhabit the firm consists of showing up wearing something slightly away from the strict internal social convention – easier for males than for females, but also doable for the latter -. Even a slight tracking error from the established benchmark will spark comments that will be directed to your owner manager in turn. Said manager will then feel compelled to have “a talk” with you, preceded by a sincere pledge that this talk is being had “for your own good”.

Add to the list of delinquent events arriving to the office in boots or sneakers (even if immediately removed upon reaching ones´desk), a not-sober-enough tie, too much hair gel, too little hair gel, shoes that have not been shined in the last 48 hours, etcetera.

On a chilly casual-friday morning, I arrived to the office on a kick scooter, which I carefully folded before getting on the elevator. That was not enough to avoid passive-aggressive comments of adequacy and client facing concerns. “What if a client or a senior officer saw you arrive riding the scooter?”.

It is just too easy to incorporate the element of chaos in a carefully designed social environment solely focused on maintaining a poorly understood Pareto equilibrium.

Jan, 2011

The firm has a Big-Brotheresque mentality to office behaviour. Every step you take, gesture you make, word you utter… Everything is observed. These handy samples of humanity will be methodically stored in a database for careful comparison with the established patterns of accepted behavior in front of clients. The ultimate test: “What if he or she did that in front of a client?”. There is a sense of accomplishment in casually mentioning to somebody “senior”, almost too leniently, how a certain colleague´s language, attitude or piece of clothing could be perceived in a negative way by a client. It is a culture of constant paranoia that renders very attractive short term results, at the expense of the group´s esprit de corps. A tribute to John Maynard Keynes´ “In the long run we are all dead”, the economist´s equivalent to kicking the can down the road.

This research project I undertook with such limited enthusiasm may have just taken a turn for the better.

Jan, 2011

A human specimen sitting behind me complained that I cough too loud and too often… to my boss! Apparently, he concluded that his effort was likely to be more effective if conducted at a higher level in the corporate structure.