It was raining.  I lifted the shade to watch it streak down the glass.  Across the street I could see office workers plugging into their intravenous caffeine drips.  I headed down to the gym to sweat the liquor out of my system.

I skipped breakfast and wandered off in the rain.

My eyes went in and out of focus.  I felt weary.  I pulled my hat low to hide my bloodshot squint and caught the Local.

I stepped off downtown and headed past the Brooklyn Bridge.  I was accosted by a hipster on Park Row.  He walked at my shoulder, babbling about polar bears.  Manhattan on a Monday morning.

“You have until the end of this length of fence,” I said, pointing to the wrought iron bars, “. . . and then you stop talking.”

“I don’t even know what you just said, but whatever . . . ” he replied.

He wanted me to join Green Peace.

“Fuck off.”

“Excuse me?”

“You fucking heard me.  I said fuck off!”

“There’s no need to be rude . . . “

“Get away from me, motherfucker, before I knock you the fuck out . . . “

My face flushed red.  I wanted to run his head into the fence.  He stammered a response and walked off in the other direction.  I made it a few more steps before the adrenaline hit me.

Chemically induced well-being mixed with my anger, bringing it into sharp relief.  I stopped, looked up, and realized where I was.  I thumbed the code into my Blackberry and Googled an address.

After some twists and turns, I stood on the corner of Church and Vesey.

On the pedestrian bridge, looking out over the pit, I waited for the Transcendent Moment! to arrive.  It didn’t.  Ground Zero looks like any construction site.

If they wanted a Memorial, I thought, they should have left the rubble.

What are they going to build?  Some shiny steel and glass?  Polished granite?  Bits of stone with names on it?  The tinsel of sympathy, and ten million square feet of commercial office space.

I’ll take concrete shrapnel, glued together by organ meat.  Walk by that every day and try to forget.  I wanted to smell jet fuel.

They killed more than a few thousand people.  They drove a nail in.

Walking through downtown in the rain, I felt disgusted.  Seeing that steel climbing slowly into economic viability turned my stomach.  It made me realize that all of this is about money.

The rucking.  The training.  Weeping into my shirt in an alley, broken down and pathetic, the morning I first called the recruiter.  All of this is about money.

The gene seed of this decision started growing over twenty years ago.  It lingered, dormant, infecting every choice with guilt that didn’t lead to its flourishing.  It grew a root through my heart and cast its inky shadow over my entire life.

. . . But it took money to move me to it.

It took being broke, dumb and desperate.  It took realizing that I had worked so hard for nothing.  A few pieces of paper I don’t even have copies of.  Debt.  Nothing.

Fragment life, shrapnel people.  Transient friends.  Everyone passing me like shards, leaving nicks and scrapes and embedding themselves somewhere else.

I can’t find one small success.  Only increments of failure.

No amount of drinking or fighting or fucking has ever made me feel adequate.  Getting a degree didn’t.  Being a pogue certainly didn’t.

Despite this, I might never have put my name on that line again if I didn’t find myself staring in the mirror at some sad-eyed blue collar loser.  I couldn’t hold a relationship together.  I can barely hold myself together.

I couldn’t bear the thought of struggling to pay down bills and debt.  I couldn’t bear the thought of laboring my life away for any amount of money, only to have six people crying at my funeral, with one of them muttering;

“He was a . . . well, uhh . . . he was.”

If there is untapped potential in me, I am putting a match to it.

I know that I am cutting out parts of myself to do this.  Some of them parts I like.  Most of them parts I don’t.  I don’t worry about the awful cost I’ll have to pay.

Part of me worries about the awful cost for those who love me.  I’ll have to cut out that part too.

I can’t explain myself anymore.  I’m tired of explaining myself to people.  I’m tired of watching their eyes roll.  I’m tired of that vacant expression of pity, like I’m losing my mind.

I’m tired of sublimating my impulses.

I’m tired of feeling alone.