Today is the first warm day of the year, and as I sit in a job site trailer staring through the tiny window into the mudhole that is our Newark project, I find myself day dreaming as I often do. Mixed thoughts of different days, what could have been, what should be, and sci-fi adventures fill my brain to the point of almost exhaustion. The reality of having an actual job that actually, you know pays me pretty well is a sobering gravity well, slamming my feet back into the knee-deep sloppy muck.
We all daydream, I refuse to believe there is anyone out there who doesn’t. Simpler times, the freedom from regular life and stress, the imagination of what our lives could have been or yet could still be, is something that speaks to all humans at some primal, instinctual level. It’s that feeling that we can break the invisible bonds we all feel at times during the nine to five grind, that so invigorates us, motivates us, helps us simply escape from our own form of reality. It’s magical. How complex of a creature we are that a muscle housed in skin and bone can do and see these wonderful things around us and then give us an ability to create our own journeys. While those journeys may not be real, sometimes the feel so real you can see it, smell it, and in rare cases maybe even taste your fantasies depending on what you’re into.
Frequently I find myself daydreaming of something specific; money. Everyone dreams of more money am I right? Who wouldn’t want the lavish lifestyle that constantly throat fucks you through a television or social media. Look how easy they have it! Fancy parties, the yacht trips, the sports cars, all the glitz and glam you could ever imagine packaged into a half hour or one-hour segment for your brain to consume immediately craving more once the hit has been provided. Really, it’s quite dangerous. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cursed my parents in my head for not leaving me with a trust fund. How ridiculous do I sound? But it’s happened. Now don’t get me wrong my parents are hard working, loving people who would do anything for family, I just wish they had hit the lotto or something so I didn’t have to be hard working.
I sound like a lazy douchebag, but I promise you I’m not. I don’t know when it started, maybe somewhere before COVID-19 swept through us like an STD at swingers convention, I was working some obscene hours. It’s construction that’s normal! Well yes and no, see it wasn’t so much the hours it was also the drive home. Leaving the house at 4 AM and returning somewhere around 8 PM on a good day, it was arduous. With a promotion on the horizon (different story for another time), life could only get sweeter. Less hours, more money, the absolute jackpot. It still wasn’t enough. I sat behind a desk, slowly but surely drifting to the thought of millions in the bank, no need to leave the comfort of my home.
“You can do it if you try!”. Ahhhhh there it is, the good ole American go get ‘em attitude. Don’t take what I say as mockery, I love this country, am I proud of it? Well, that topic is up for debate. As is my nature, I had to get to the bottom of my own thoughts. This was coming from somewhere, some deep down gear inside me had shifted resulting in a new drive that had nothing to do with work and everything to do with me. If I had to pinpoint the exact moment this feeling really began to be a repeat dream, I would say it was somewhere around May 2020.
Why May, you ask? Well sure I’ll tell you. COVID-19 is in full force in the sweaty armpit of the country we call New Jersey. Bars, restaurants, gyms, everything is basically closed. For a brief moment Hoboken bars and restaurants were selling alcoholic drinks to go, which turned Hoboken into New Orleans for a fleeting moment. Seriously, that was a good idea though, bring that shit back. Anyway, that has nothing to do with what we’re discussing here today, but what else happened in May? People were working from home.
Now one day I’m going to write about the onset of the pandemic, my experience, and what I had hoped would have happened, but that is not this day. Oh no, you see I was one of the “lucky” few who still got to go in to work in Newburgh NY everyday. That’s right, I’m what you call “essential services” motherfucker and excuse me a minute while I brush my shoulder off. Construction almost never stopped on federal projects in our area, and while the world went to shit around us, we were able to keep going in our weirdly protected little bubble.
I love what I do for a living, don’t get me wrong, BUT if there’s an option to replace that income with something else, bet your tits I’m going to do it. So why does working from home have such a big impact? My home is my sanctuary, that little 700 square foot castle I can call mine along with most things in it, since I live with my girlfriend and she actually made the place look nice.
Almost every time money comes into a daydream it begins with me being home, whether its Hoboken or some imaginary house, a touch of modern, a touch of rustic. As I mentioned home is where I’m comfortable as I would hope everyone reading this feels the same. That wasn’t the answer though, there was something more, something further beneath the surface. When I often find myself dreaming of having an obscene amount of money I always notice it’s around the time the lottery is at some of it’s highest levels. Correlation fucking found! We’re onto something!
A while back the NJ lottery was somewhere over a billion dollars, yea with a big old B. Around that same time I read something on Reddit detailing what you should do if you were to win that money. I know, Reddit of all places, but every now and then you’ll find someone genuinely giving sound advice that’s worth listening to and in this case what the user was saying made sense. As thoughts of winning the powerball drew near, so did the thoughts of what I would do with that money. Immediately, I would take care of family and friends, build a compound somewhere warm we all can live on, and not have a care in the world for the rest of our days. Was that it? Did I just want to be able to be the one to take care of those who have taken care of me? Well that’s part of it, but not all.
As I said before I love what I do for a living right now, as thankless as it is. Just because I’d drop it in a heartbeat if I had enough to retire at 31 years old, doesn’t mean I’d stop working. I think if I ever fully stopped working, I’d go crazy in a matter of minutes. Instead I would invest in things, continue writing these crappy blog entries, or maybe even start my own company. There’s a lot that I would still do. Don’t get me wrong either, I’d definitely have some nice cars and a moderately sized house, and while I’ll be grinning from ear to while using those things, they aren’t the answer. Do I just want the power of being a boss or having a partial share in a sports team? Hell yea, but that wasn’t the full answer either.
I had to go deeper, and I got my answer during a….disagreement with my girlfriend one night. You see money can get you a lot of things right? Cars, clothes, houses, we’ve talked about all that, but at least for me, that isn’t the basis of why I want it. You see a lot of money affords you something very often forgot about, especially if it’s enough that you don’t need a job. The answer to my self-searching questions was simple; money affords you time. Time to do whatever the fuck it is you want to do. The most underappreciated and overlooked aspect to having a lot of money is answered by a round object with three little arms that we stare at every single day waiting for our shift to end and our normal lives to take back over.
I work a lot of hours as many do in my industry and near the end of 2020 I decided to make a change and work for a new company for the first time since graduating college. It was the change I thought I needed. Would it bring me millions, LOL no, but it would keep me busy and motivated to achieve something new in my career. Jury’s still out on whether it was the right call or not, but if you ain’t riskin’ you ain’t livin’? Right? Anyway here I sit, on the first warm day of the year, staring out a tiny window at a slop filled hole in the ground, dreaming of time.