Time in the Rut

I always feel run down after the holiday season is over and the last Christmas tree has been taken down. Then, it's hunker down for the long cold winter. It's my historical Time in the Rut.

Being in a rut is like having a powerful, invisible leech on your forhead sucking your energy away. I continue to go to the gym everyday, lifting the same weights and running the same miles, but I do so with less energy. My sex drive wanes. My appetite drops. I go to Nick's but since the smoking ban took hold it's not really the same---the bartenders give off that tense vibe of smokers who will have to wait two more hours to greedily inhale a drag in freezing weather. A vibe I understand and remember, from my smoking days. And am I the only non-smoker who thinks the current ban is unnecessarily draconian?

Contributing to my rut was the news that a significant portion of my bonus will be paid out in restricted stock. Nice. I was counting on paying off my credit cards. Well, since my company's stock is down 85% on the year there's nowhere to go but up, right? Right?

My lovelife continues----everybody digs Marla. J emailed me that she has that "French chic" about her. Even Len remarked that she was even cooler than I said she was. She never ever gets dramatic or clingy or embarrasses me in front of my friends, either. And she cooked me a great pasta dinner last weekend. It would be just perfect if I loved her, but I don't. Somewhere there's a girl on her therapist's couch trying to figure out why her life is so messed up. She's taking a cocktail of drugs since prozac no longer does much for her. She's very well educated but has trouble holding a simple retail job. She cries often. She writes poetry. I will meet her in a bar this year and fall head over heels for her.

One thing I am able to do in the rut, however, is read. Beside my bed is a copy of Conscience of a Liberal, by Paul Krugman. His thesis is that the rise of the middle class and the great prosperity America enjoyed from the fifties through the early seventies were not the result of impersonal market forces but the result of government actions like the new deal, the wage controls of the Second World War and the rise of the power of unions. An intriguing thesis and he defends it well. It keeps me turning the pages.

Will it get me out of the rut? I don't know. Right now, I want spring to come. I want the coming recession to be brief. I want business analysts to stop using the words "possible bankruptcy" when referring to my company. I want Barack Obama to win the Democratic nomination. I want to visit Turkey. And I want to meet a woman who sweeps me totally off my feet in such a way that when we fuck I forget my own name and afterwards I tremble as if I have just climbed a high cliff without a harness and am aware now of the danger and proximity to death and because of that I know that I am truly alive.