Tommy Gavin Withdrawal

August 17th, 2010

There is no excuse.

As Beck would say, I am loser, baby.

I am a Kurt Cobain song.

My blog…my little daily affirmation of my laid-off, childhood inducing life kind of fell into a coma there. And no amount of sorry can make up for my ineptitude.

But I had reasons. Namely steady work. I am employed through an agency and working for a large bank writing proposals for them. I just got offered a job for decent pay, but its far away, so I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m going to turn it down. Yeah, I know. In this economy, it’s the equivalent of kicking yourself in the chestnuts…which I think is physically impossible to do. But the bank wants me. Two levels of upper management have told me directly. They’re extending my contract and looking to hire me at the turn of the year. Big organization. Big bennies. Double the holidays – they’re a bank after all. J And tons of room to move, grow and do different things. So I may be a bone-head, but I’m going to go with my gut. And my gut says, go with the bank that was able to survive all that sub-prime bullshit without the government’s help.

But that wasn’t all.

I was distracted.

See I had been working on a novel. A genre novel. Science fantasy. Take a few moments to stifle your giggles. Got it out of your system? Alright. Yes. For the last few years I have been trying to finish a genre novel to try and obtain a literary agent. In order to get an agent, you need a product for them to sell. So I came up with a product.

Well, in the last two months – I ROCKED THE PRODUCT. Yeah, baby. Who’s a loser now! I wrote 180pp in two months. My fingers are finally recovering from the burns I sustained in my writing ferocity.

You’re still giggling. I know it’s a fantasy novel – did you really expect me to write Great Expectations? Didn’t think so.

So I haven’t just been sitting on my ass doing nothing – hell, no. I have been productive.

But there was something else. Something far more tragic. Addiction. A vile, cruel, black addiction gripped my mind like a black glove for the past two months.

That addiction – Denis Leary’s FX show Rescue Me.

Now that we have the Netflix streaming Wii disc, the wife and I have gorged ourselves into Freebird inducing Rescue Me sessions every night after the news. (For those of you who don’t know, the show is raunchy, violent, dark and EXTREMELY hilarious – which makes it the epitome of everything children can’t be exposed to.)

So we’re into Season 4, the introspective season, and for the last few days, we’ve opted to hit the hay early. So I haven’t had my Tommy Gavin fix. At first, I barely noticed it, but at work today, I got a violent headache and my hands began shaking. I figured I needed more coffee, so I drank a whole thermos of coffee. That just made me piss every two minutes. And still no relief. It really made me think, when the news hit that Brett Favre was returning and I detected nary a hint of excitement. A depression hung over me. What the hell was wrong with me? Then I realized, I hadn’t had my daily dose of Tommy Gavin and his bluntly honest remarks, constant lying, rampant cheating and breath-taking terrible decisions. Something wasn’t right. Somewhere in the great transmission of the world, the gears were grinding and nothing picked up speed.

I need Tommy Gavin. I need to see him make all the decisions I never would, say all the things I’d love to say to people and punch the people that I would like to take a swing at. Is it wrong to live vicariously through a fictional character? Am I troubled because Tommy Gavin is secretly my Id? Does it mean I may be susceptible to his types of behaviors?

I don’t think so.

But every night at 10:30, Tommy Gavin enters my living room and shows me his world, swaddled in all his colossal flaws. He entertains me. He makes me feel better about myself. Not about who I am, but perhaps about who I am not.