The Realized Dreams of a Failure

Tyke Johnson

11/24/03

Dr. Carolyn Conner

Writing Assignment #1

I was starting to wake up a lot later than I had planned. My alarm was going off at nine thirty A.M. and then again at nine thirty five, and both times I would hear the loud buzzing, and turn off the electronic tantrum. I had switched to the buzzing alarm from the radio alarm because the radio woke me up more abruptly and when your goal is essentially not to wake up, abruptness is a problem. This habit was becoming more regular, more accepted, more apart of my sleep, so that if the day were to ever come when I needed to use the alarm to get up, my pre-trained cognitive thoughts would be to turn the alarm off, go back to sleep, and deal with daylight when it’s less harsh angles reached to the middle of my bedroom and not where I rested my tired eyes. These tired eyes were usually caused by long nights of looking around my room thinking about ways to fail. Not essentially fail, but to not succeed fully.

The idea behind succeeding has always seemed foreign to me. It has always been for those people who wanted something bad enough to work equally hard to get it, which I was prone to have mixed feelings about. I wasn’t against working, that is to say, I wasn’t against the ideals behind labor, but I didn’t have the self-discipline to become a laborer. I had equally non-existent self-discipline when it came to any jobs that were less labor intensive, such as answering phones, filing, or talking to whomever was around, and getting paid for it. Basically, I can’t stand working at any one place very long.

I don’t like working and the effort it takes to get another job is too much of a hassle, hence the reason why all my jobs I get are through a friend’s or family member’s resources. Some might say that I’m just ungrateful and to those people I tip my hat because you are probably right. Anything I receive, no matter how easy, I take with the burden that further conditions will be incorporated and therefore that which I received becomes a hindrance instead of a help. Even if this condition is to simply acknowledge someone else’s existence in passing is too much and I immediately regret ever accepting the charity once given to me.

Now I’m moving away from what I set out to write. I’ve admitted that I’m ungrateful, yes, you’ve gotten it out of me, but this is not the reason for this rant. I’m writing in a way so as to self analyze the problems I face when it comes to my will, or lack there of, to succeed. If you must know, this is an assignment my psychiatrist has set for me to do. Her existence in my life is just another charity case from a previous employer gone terribly wrong.

I started work at a children’s hospital with the idea that I could work there a few days a week, mess around with the kids, probably get sick, most likely terminal, die, and be mourned as a martyr for the children. Following the funeral, which would have been a citywide affair, my coffin, a modest thing made of extra peg board scraps from the local mill, would be carried through the town on the shoulders of the kids I made smile time and time again while still alive and well.

The nurses, two of which I would have had relations with on company time, would mourn with extra sobbing, knowing they would never quite know the caress of pleasure that was only mine to give, again. Their names would be Lila and Cassandra, one with blond hair, the other brunette, respectively, and as a means of juggling the two, I would confess to the kids and other staff members that I was only into red heads. The only red head on the entire staff was a lesbian who worked in the psych department and whose body looked very much like an oversized baked potato, and not the twice baked ones with all the cheese and bacon, but the regular brown ones with those pointy spuds whose growth you had to log in ninth grade biology.

Some people have told me, as if to correct me, that they measured the growth phases of potato spuds when they were in sixth grade, and to those people I say, fuck off.

Lola would be the better nurturer, Cassandra the better lay, and both would accept the role of subordinate when I told them I needed to stay in and not see either so I could see the other one. This would go on for sometime and when my illness turned for the worse, my only worry would be to make them stick to strict visiting hours and more importantly, make sure they believed that what I had was not contagious.

My kids, the ones that I took care of at the hospital that is, would help me eat and chew and change the channel when I was too lazy to do so with the remote. The kids would also sneak me sweets from the cafeteria as well as bourbon that they stole from their parent’s liquor cabinet.

Soon the days would grow short and the crust in my eyes would become a hardened glaze to awake to every morning. Quieted tears would start to shed in the darker corners of the room with the shades drawn more often to hide the sobbing. The kids, whose resilience would be second only to my own, would refuse to stop stealing liquor from the dwindling cabinets at home, even though my daily consumption amount was becoming nearly a quarter less from when I first showed signs of sickness. The kids’ parents would struggle over the loss of their sons and daughters to the throws of cheap bourbon.

The hospital would turn to alternative practices to deal with my fading health, unable to diagnose the cause of my condition, as if it was a disease sent from the almighty. The doctors and nurses and community alike would turn their backs on faith, never understanding how their God could be so unjust as to take me. I would explain, through fits of coughing, to, “Stay strong and never quit believing in love, for that is the only faith to live by, and our children, for they hold the dreams and hopes of an unknown future in their eyes, sparkling in every color and tone; blue and brown, green and silver, and all the vibrant shades in between and beyond.”

The head doctor, the one who was always too tough on me because he thought that I cared for the children too much, as if that’s possible, would make a quiet reconciliation to me after midnight when he thought I’d been asleep along with the rest of the world. With his head down, I would place my hand on his, surprising him to blush, and would calm his sorrow and fear by saying that, “Somewhere in the world people are awake and living, and so was I, and always will be.” I would notice the glisten of water and salt speed to his crescent eyes, carrying a trail down his cheeks as he apologized. I would forgive him and he would nod as I wiped the acceptance from his face, wetting my hand, and placing the dampness on my own face, telling him that he must, “Cry for the both of us, for I have no choice but to stay strong, for the sake of the children.”

He would leave by quietly letting the door “click” into the subdued glow of the street light that peers into my room, casting shadows of the flowers, the endless bouquets that surround my bed, and making the walls come alive in a fragrant wonderland of silhouetted madness. The hours I’d spend watching those flowers dancing would be countless. Knowing my nights with the dancers would become less and less as the death overtakes my body, I’d sigh with regret for having never wrote my memoirs.

The final days thereafter, would race past and when the lights finally went out in my world, somewhere there would be a sail that loses it’s wind, a dreamer that loses their will, and a summer breeze that loses it’s breath.

I never died of any terminal illness to the chagrin of my hapless wishes, but instead kept toiling away at my job with the kids, who, though sick, still had the capacity to annoy me to no end, and never, not a single one, seemed to get worse. Everybody’s problems went into relapse, or remission, or whatever it was called. I am, of course, unqualified for this job, which I got through a series of names and phone calls I never once placed. Kids were getting happier and healthier everyday, which made my job much harder, for my chance to relax and smoke or read or just stare at the walls of the alley next to the hospital, were being rapidly replaced by games and story time for the immune system phenoms.

I kept the job for three months.

It was a beautiful Tuesday morning. It was pouring, finally, and the only urge I had was to go back to sleep and listen to the water hit my windowsill, giving me dreams of waterfall tropics and apes that spoke and maintained my favorite bar, and always had a special booth for me and my lady. From time to time my lady happened to be an ape and though receiving some begrudging looks from some of the apes at the bar, there was never too much trouble. However, instead of continuing my world of slender legged and ample breasted ape-women, I had to turn my dreams into the reality of another monotonous day of acceptance.

It hadn’t rained the entire time I had the job, until that day. I know because one of my jobs was to place a sun, drawn by the kids, on the calendar each morning. Looking back on those days, I remember always feeling bad for the kids who chose to draw the rain showers. One such rain cloud was crying his rain like teardrops, and looking at that poor cloud I’d think to myself, at least one kid knew the truth as to why he or she was there in the hospital. The rest of the sunshine artists were obviously lied to by their parents and caregivers, most likely a combination of both, or just lived in a bliss filled state of denial, where the sun was yellow, had shades, wore the colors of an African tribe, and spoke Jamaican.

I went to work, punched in, said hi to the head nurse, someone more apelike than my calendar girls of an hour earlier, and then headed to the kids’ general playroom, where a group was already waiting. They watched the calendar and then me, me then the calendar; finally the stream of yellow orbs would be broken. I accepted my duty with pride and placed the crying cloud onto the calendar. A girl with short dark hair, which was pulled back into two ponytails, eyes’ lit up. It was her cloud. I returned her smile and promptly left the room.

I walked back to the ape in pink with tiny roller skates and told her it was nice knowing her and that I quite. I walked out the door, went home, and went back to sleep. I had rent due in two weeks, but for now, the beautiful jungle of exotic drinks and women were calling, and nowhere in sight was there a sick child or pink gowns with roller skates.

To my surprise, the hospital was not very accepting of my resignation for where all my previous employers severed ties completely with me; the hospital instead, kept calling and calling.

I finally returned the call with a despondent demeanor, which changed to smiles and exaggerated hellos as soon as the other end of the line was picked up. Because of their love for me at the hospital, or something to do with a legal obligation, they had, “Taken the liberty of paying for counseling to help you with your problems of career disloyalty,” is what the ape told me. She continued by telling me I was to, “set up an appointment with Dr. Carolyn Conner—the red head in the psych department.”

This is my second session and my first assignment. The first session was all talking, now we move on to writing, though I feel there is no hope for any sort of advancement from me to yearn for a respectable career with all the benefits of having a designated parking decal that I have to put on my dashboard; on the left side, not the right, to let the “unsuccessful” parking attendant know not to ticket me.

He has been a parking attendant now for three years, which is three years longer than I have ever held a steady job, yet if you survey the population, the majority will admit to saying that a parking attendant is an unsuccessful profession. Therefore I choose to be unsuccessful. Not because I’m a blue collar minded person who cares about the working class, but because I don’t care at all. If one can consider every job equal in luxury and societal standing as the next, one can never find, nor aspire to, a job better than the next, and therefore find no difficulty in quitting or keeping said job. In the end it’s all work. In the end its all the escapist reasoning of the mind to the will of the dollar that controls us all. I’m quite aware it controls me as well, and I will accept my fate and will get another job as soon as my bank account declares it.

The truest heroes, or failures, depending on your outlook, are the homeless who refuse to work. Not all the homeless mind you, for they’re all not heroes, but just the ones that make that choice to stay completely out of employment, choosing a life of squalor before selling themselves to a world of lunch break rules and phone answering policies. The same goes for the rich, the filthy, or at least their spouses and children, who make the same choice to never work a day of their lives, essentially becoming failures, though living in warm palatial dignity instead of highway on ramps. However, each of their dreams of not working have come true.

Thinking about it, I finally see how similar the two crusts of society really are, and that if I am able stick to my intuition of unsuccessful thought, I will finally realize my own dreams of a being a failure.