I’d be typing this out and posting it at 3:44 am if the management spent less time and money on monitoring the pc screen and more time and money on a functional lock on the entrance door. I’ll write this on paper and type it up later before my baby daughter and wife wake up. I have to promise myself to do this because I know how I feel right this second at 3:48 am on Wednesday May 21st: exhausted, terrified, embarrassed, and more urgent than I’d like to be. I know when they wake up ill see them and forget like their presence is an analgesic, but one that lasts only till 3:48 am Thursday the 22nd of May. So I have to promise myself. I’m trying hard not to be negative, but the panic rises with the anger and I have to squeeze it all into a digestible shape and send it back down the way it came. Men aren’t supposed to feel like this, right? I’ve been told they should never admit it. Being raised without a father I never held many assumptions on what manhood was. I only knew very clearly what it wasn’t. I haven’t been a husband for too long, and I’m just months into being a father myself. I need to be better. I will be. My daughter can’t ever see me like this – it’s bad enough my wife has occasionally – I’ve never been more motivated. I’ve never felt so empowered and at the same time in pain. Is that being a father? Why share this? I have no idea, outside of a strange bright sunbeam extending from destruction to creation and lovingly enfolding around a green trifoliate leaf of hope. Hope dies last they say. 

My life isn’t bad, this is made clear to me every night by some of the teary eyed customers I meet and the homeless drug addicts who we have to bar from entering the aforementioned door, most are zombified by fentanyl, stooping over at the waist in such an aggressive angle that it seems like Hell is sucking them down by the forehead. It eats your soul in bites just to see it, let alone to imagine living it, but I think selfishly, and often, that at least they won’t have the agility or stamina to rob me – or worse – like the strutting douche who robbed the staff room hours earlier and stole a coworkers lunch, house keys and I.D in what was left of the daylight. Scary stuff when the drugs that burn peoples lives to the ground and melt their spines from the inside out keep the staff a little safer. The new security guard hired to watch the door tells me we’re deep into the Kali Yuga. Looking outside at the different folks nesting into the hard cold pavement every night, It’s hard to disagree with him. Today makes 2019 seem like a Golden Era.

My life could be worse, I could be a cop confronting this mess and struggling with that particular brand of cynicism and compassion fatigue that builds up by each event ID every night. One thing you learn quickly working the night shift close to the heart of the city is how the job would be impossible to do without the police; and how related the rule of law is to a functioning economy. I guess I could have known that intellectually, but after being threatened by a desperate sort of person with nothing to lose you learn it in your chest, which holds a far deeper reservoir of understanding than your skull. 

Its not that bad I tell myself every night, things just seem so chaotic and like they are getting worse by the day. Maybe it’s being away from the Sun, my family, or sleep but my emotions and thoughts have been scattered, yet that makes the certainties all the more clear – so there’s that to be grateful for: my wife is both beautiful and lovely, my daughter’s toothless smile when she sees me in the morning is a more intensely positive and powerful feeling then the occasional drug addled threat is a negative one. And it’s that new certainty, that new understanding that has made me realize how foolish I’ve been. I’ve been far too negative, I’ve focused on what is hurting everyone rather than what and how I could be helpful. In my own personal experience and life long hobby, how much more I could offer people than simply pointing out what is wrong – the negative is easy and so obvious, go downtown in any major city in North America (and Punjab apparently) at 4:12 am on a Wednesday and you will be taught a lesson on the negative. I can offer more than that – and it’s okay to ask for more than that back from people. Anyone can break stuff. Anyone can point out something that is broken. Anyone can hurt someone, but can anyone heal them? I will now endeavor to provide something more, to build something new. And like a mystical fool I believe that as I change for the better so will the connections. 

And old Indian man, a sage, advised me once on a personal level that I should offer a Bilva leaf to Shiva, to imagine the offering in my mind and that would be enough outside of my own hard work. That even something so simple and full of grace would help. So I am and I hope it will, and not just for me or my family, but it has to start somewhere real. 

Time to provide more, time to offer more, so, more is to come…