Kick Back

The living room was muggy and dimly lit and I felt uncomfortable. Everyone was drinking warm beer because the refrigerator stopped cooling anything. In my chair I sipped and tried to enjoy what I could of domestic brew from a can but it wasn't going well. It just tasted stale to me, stagnant and unchanging with no possibility of ever reaching it's full potential, which for this beer would have been to give me a buzz. Instead I felt full and uncomfortable.

People were laughing as is so often the case with a kick back. Laughing about what, though, I couldn't say, we had been drinking for a few hours and the conversation was so fragmented that I just let it become white noise. I knew I wasn't missing anything important. Gossip and memories mostly, long since overwrought memories which brought up so many more bad thoughts than good ones.

There comes a point when you don't really know if people are your friends anymore. Not in any clear way, but in the way that taints every conversation and curdles beneath the surface of every forced exchange. Laughing seems more like coughing - like everyone in the room is sick and liquor is the medicine. It helps us choke down each other's presence; makes the pain seem like acquaintance.

"Hey Evan, you find a job yet?" said my sickly friend.

In general I hated that question. It confirmed my own fears that I was failing to become anything and my answer confirmed their suspicions that I wasn't anything. But hearing it from a friend cut a little deeper. My quick being threatened by my peers.

"No, you know there's just not a lot out there right now..."

"I bet you wish you majored in something else, hahaha, I mean you could always go into another field, a degree is a degree, you know?"

"Yeah definitely" I muttered.

"I mean with a communications degree you could work as a teacher if you get your credential, or even some business HR. You can still be kinda creative there too, I mean it is a job after all."

Mmhmm.

It pained me to know the truth in what he said. That I would not find success because so very few people did. That maybe I had wasted 4 years believing I actually had a shot.

A smile crept across his face like he'd finally caught me in my lie. That devilish grin flicking ashes on the notion that a clear slacker like me would ever find success in a trade not based on hard facts or mental accuity, but instead that nebulous word, creativity - the cancer of academia. An affront to the hard hours he put into numbers and networking and straight laced suits and can do attitude.

But I had considered those things. Logic was always dogged and I rarely found relief from the pressure to make something of myself. So as he watched me, my expression, searching for a sign that he woke me up to reality for the first time, I gave him no such prize. Just a smile.

"Yeah a job is a job, you are right about that." With that I nodded my can in his direction and he took of swig of his, coughing and patting me on the shoulder.

I set down the beer without drinking from it. It had failed to do anything worthwhile and now it would become waste along with the other cans - in the end they all shared a similar fate. Someday we would all be adults, I thought as I glanced at my childhood friends. Someday we would all make that sacrifice of self for a greater good. Spouses and children and God and jobs. Something worth celebrating with expensive bottles of wine and delicate stemware. But for now we are just 12oz cans at a kick back.

Nothing more than a means to a cheap drunk.