As the song goes, “everybody’s working for the weekend.” I never wanted to be the person that song suggests. I wanted to be the person who lived the weekend 7 days a week. Yet, here I am, and I never even particularly liked Loverboy.

Work has just sucked whatever teeny weeny little miniature bit of soul I might have ever had. Just too much and never ending. (Of course, there’s more than that, but, ya, the web, public, yada, yada, need a job, blah.) Suffice it to say, I don’t feel like I can keep up, and every nerve just feels rubbed raw.

In the middle, though, there was a jet-setting trip to Cape Code for practically just hours not days. It was worth it to see two really great people start a new adventure. It was worth it to see old friends from along the way. It was worth it to dive back into the Atlantic Ocean and recapture that feeling from so many Julys of my past.

In the old friends vein, I kind of had one positive epiphany. I like performing stand up, but I don’t love it with the brutal love that makes you go out night after night after night, like many folks do. Even when I was someone out night after night after night myself, it wasn’t for a pure love of standup. It was complicated. My passion was there, but it wasn’t single-minded. I kind of envy those people I know with that single-minded focus.

I’m more diffuse in my focusing ability. Soft lighting with vaseline gel on the filter spreading the beam. No laser pointed, narrow spot am I. I suspect the equation of my success, or lack thereof, is directly in proportion to the diffusion of that focus, to the reality that I don’t share that single-mindedness.

That’s not my epiphany, though. My epiphany is that had I never tried, had I never worked to release a little bit of that inner voice that had previously only sounded in my head not out a microphone, I would never have met some people I now call friends. Our paths would never have crossed. Ever. Or, given Boston’s and Cambridge’s diminutive size, our paths may well have crossed, but we never would have bumped into each other.

If for no other reason, if I never achieve any success personal or professional in writing or in performance, I have that to show, and it was worth it to get on stage.

I wonder if it was that same progression that has me sitting waiting for a man nicer than any I had previously dated. I might never had my own lemon tree had I not ventured out to the adventure of getting on stage. On the down side, I might never have grown the saddest tomato plant ever either. My fantasy of quitting my job and living organically from our backyard is shattered at the sight of this dime-sized crop.

Yes, literally dime-sized. Harvesting my vast crop isn’t on this weekend’s agenda.

I like my friends, and I like my weekends. But, for fuck’s sake, why was I not born rich enough to have the adventures all week long? Why wasn’t I born rich enough to never, ever, ever experience the gritted teeth and swallowed pride of not yelling out “Take this job and shove it, I ain’t working here no more.”

Tomorrow, we shall kayak. At least M. made reservations to take a lesson and rent. Back in Boston, I may have tried to drown my sorrows metaphorically after a bad month’s work. On this coast, it will be a more buoyant sorrow drowning, with all of the Pacific to help me out.

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