Bryan Joiner

I’ve suffered from an incredible fatigue recently, one that leads me to start sentences like this with “I’ve suffered from an incredible fatigue” instead of saying “I’ve been really tired.” But I have. Work has taken on a sine-curve like tolerability, and non-work has become cumbersome. I’m typing this from a coffee shop around the corner from my house; I’m desperate for some, any sort of escape. My boss and I had a somewhat contentious but well-spirited discussion today about the process of getting my magazine to print, and it was one of those things where we both found a way to do things better. But the one “hidden cost” of our way of doing business of which she was unaware, or simply not paying attention to, was that in our chasing-the-tail ways (in which stories are assigned by the publishers at the perpetually extended deadline), the Editor in Chief (that’s me) has to plan for the previous deadline and watch it get dragged out like a piece of yarn. I.e., I have to actually be at work, where I’ve been without a vacation or a trip of my choosing for an obscenely long time. I can feel it in my bones, and the methods I use to stop the walls from closing in (exercise, writing, buying shit, drinking) have proven dwindingly effective. Even this coffee shop looks a little smaller than it did last week.

Of course, I do see the light at the end of the tunnel, and involves doing things to get me slightly out of my comfort zone, like getting my ass to the gym for a class instead of just pretending that running three times per week is going to solve everything. It’s odd, though. The weekend has completely inverted itself for me. All I want to do on the weekend now is relax, whereas before I wanted to do stuff. I mean I still want to do stuff, but the most important thing I pay attention to is recovering from the week. I’m not sure I’ve stumbled on a novel concept, but seven years of doing my own version of chasing-the-tail, filling in my own map of NYC and life with shit I’ve wanted to do, constantly pushing back the deadline for calming down, it’s been harder than I’d imagined to do once I got there. It involves a whole set of new routines that I’m constructing out of the ash of the last decade. Yeah, like this. And that stupid link tells me that the Chicago people actually knew what they were talking about, which steams me more than you can imagine. I want to go punch something. I wish there was a boxing class.