A Different World

         I want to live in a world without Facebook updates and silly little tweets.  I want to live in a world where I am free from plugging myself into the wall for a social recharge.  I'm tired of the idea that I am the only one not living such an exciting life.  In everyone's pictures there is such a brilliant expression of joy; whenever I take pictures, I find that I'm trying to match that level of exuberance.  It's just all so fake.
         I'm sitting here, bored out of my mind at 2:36 in the morning.  I am switching my schedule from a midnight shift to a normal day shift.  It's not easy transitioning from the grave to the living.  For awhile, I know it will seem like I'm the walking dead to some of these day walkers.  They hardly could understand; for the last year a rotating shift schedule has been my life.  Not much of a life though.
         So why don't I just quit? I'm not a quitter.  The contract I signed will be up in two more years.  Two more years of hell.  Sure some days I wonder if I got into an accident that made a limb useless or even paralyzed me, would life get easier?  You see, it's not just that I'm in rotating shift work.  I work on average eighty hours a week.  I guess it wouldn't seem that bad when you stretch it out over seven days.  I work seven days straight before I get a break.  The break is designed to allow me to change my schedule.  Some times it's thirty-six hours, some times it's sixty hours.  It's always never enough.  Even God rested on the seventh day.  Amongst a system that pays no heed to God or the needs of men, a crippling accident seems to be my only source of hope.
         The average bloke works a nine to five job, five days a week.  I don't know where this average guy is, I've yet to see him, but that's what they tell me.  So this average guy anyway works forty hours a week.  That's not even subtracting the time he gets to eat lunch or whatever breaks they may give him.  Still it's forty hours not at home, not with friends, not doing the things that individual wants to do.  The average guy comes home, eats dinner and watches some TV, talks to his wife or his children, or whatever else he wants to do.  Then this average man goes to sleep.  He sleeps for an average of eight hours a night.  That's another forty hours.  During that five days of work, this average man has forty hours to himself, to use as he sees fit.  Then, he has another forty-eight hours of weekend time where he doesn't even have to worry about work.  Assuming he rests for eight hours on weekends too, that is seventy-two hours to update the world via the virtual social network and still have a life via the not-so-virtual network.
         I on the other hand, with my on average eighty hour work week, and fifty-six hours of sleep, am left with thirty-two hours to use as I see fit.  Thirty-two hours.  I know, it seems like a lot of time.  Well, maybe to me it does; however, I know from experience it's not a lot of time.  It's enough time to feel like you've just begun to waste your life on the couch before you get up and go to work again.  I am able to coordinate my schedule with friends about once a month.  We get together, enjoy a laugh, and then re-enter the mind-numbing cycle of death and rebirth.  So I try to find solace in the virtual social network, where emoticons and snapshots of happy moments are the ambrosia I use to reinvigorate my soul.
         The problem with tonight is that the ambrosia has lost it's zest.  I now see the electron flow of substitute emotion to have no appeal.  It doesn't make up for the warm touch of flesh, or the bell like laughter of life.  The bell of life ringing for us, to let us know that time is ever fleeting, and we should cherish every moment.  Yet, I scroll down the list of friends, burdened with the lack of movement in the outside world.  It's three twenty four now.  I'm sure there are many like myself who are existing in limbo, ever waiting for the moment when hell or heaven will open their gates.  I come across my exes profile.  Hell surely unlocked the gates for me, opened it's maw and swallowed me whole in that instance. 
         In her little personal space of electronic data, she is the happiest I've ever seen her.  Her and her husband celebrate their one year anniversary.  Everyone wishes them the best of luck, and many more anniversaries.  People who used to give us their wishes for a bright future.  Traitors, all of them.  The suppressed sadness of my heart leeches the dull sense of existence through the walls I try to place around it.  Why should her internet status updates, and the warm wishes conveyed through the cold medium of electric noise bother me so much?  It's because deep down inside I can imagine the seventy two hours a week she spends with him.  I imagine the seventy two hours of warm laughter and smiles that I am missing out on.  The seventy two hours my contract with the devil deprived me of.  The seventy two hours that she left me to go enjoy, because she knew that with my thirty two hours a week I'd become a black suffocating void of lonely emptiness. 
         Rather than use my thirty two hours toward productive endeavors, I've wasted it away in front of computer screens, playing games, or surfing the interactive database of false emotions.  Even if I could spend every hour toward some productive ends, there is currently no means to be productive.  The reclusive life I lead in the middle of the night, through necessity, and not entirely any choice of my own, still deprives me the warmth of life.  The warmth of interacting with the corporeal essence of my fellow man.  So in the end, I still feel the need and desire to satiate this lack of social interaction.  I need a means to establish my existence.  The only end that seems noble enough to pursue.
         In the world of binary data and lighting fast existence it's easy to fall into a farce where the means and ends being pursued are meaningless.  Meaningless social interactions aren't limited to that isolated world in the wires.  It trickles out through the insulation, or maybe it trickled in from the outside.  I'm unsure of the exact order.  All I know, is that for a long time, I've worn a mask of smiles and tried to build scenes of joy in which I could become immersed in, maybe captured in a snapshot so that I could show the world how wonderful my life is.  If you've been reading this all the way through, you know that I don't think my life is all that wonderful. 
         I enjoyed drinking for awhile, because it was easier to lie to the world about how happy I was.  Unfortunately the truth comes out in worse forms when you've had too much to drink.  I don't know how many girls I've chased away with obvious desires to drown my despair in between their legs.  How many times did I drink so that I could drown the fear of dying out of my mind, so maybe I could get enough courage to end the suffering of meaninglessness.  How many drunken rants or tirades did I direct at unsuspecting individuals, revealing all my emotional scars and horror.  It didn't matter, the end was all the same.  The truth could not be suppressed with liquor or beer, but just thinking about it makes my mouth water with anticipation.  That is called addiction; that's what I live with for my efforts.
         It's four forty six. I've wasted two hours and ten minutes of my thirty two hours.  In my mind the world is dead.  Even when it comes to life, it'll just be the animated bodies of aimless people.  The undead.  They'll be in search of that rare thing, the truly alive souls.  The ones that aren't being magically compelled by some sense to find a purpose.  They'll devour that rare living soul, and take it's life from it, but still have not found a life of it's own.  Disgusted with what I've become, a vampire, I hide behind the pale light of my computer screen.  A virtual social junky, miserable with life.