The Drummer

There once was a Tom. A bald-headed, silly, squirrelly old dude that we'll call Tom.

Tom worked at the newspaper I worked at for a while. He had been there so long, he didn’t know anything else. He didn’t want to know anything else. He legitimately seemed to love everything about what he did. His expertise was the page design. Meaning he was the guy who took all the things that were going into the paper and he would arrange them in the manner that was the most efficient use of the space given the amount of material each day’s news had. A whole lot of news to report? He had to cut things out or skim them to make them fit. Not a lot happening? He had to stretch what was given or work with local ads.

Now it probably doesn’t sound like much to you. It didn’t seem like much to me either, to be honest. I don’t know how he did it with such joy, it would have driven me crazy. Worrying about that as my primary responsibility in the world, I might have jumped out of a window onto a pile of cacti first.

But it worked for him.

It took me a long time to warm up to the guy too, you gotta understand, he wasn’t always easy to sit next to. He was a constant source of noise, not just comical anecdotes or unsolicited advice or poorly whistled tunes from the 70’s or famous musicals, just random noise sometimes. Like clicking noises out of the side of his mouth, which became louder and more frequent and always accompanied a specific problem with the format of that day's results. One thing he did, he used to drum on his desk. With his fingers, his pens, rolled up packets or programs, didn’t matter, he was holding down the beat to his own… whatever. And that’s what he did, he sat there at this desk, he talked shit, he cultivated cholesterol in that chair night after night, and occasionally he lined up the pages and he drummed.

But it worked for him.

I tell ya, I used to hate this man. I mean, the paper was part time for me at this point, I was busting my ass at another job elsewhere that I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t get any peace at home without my girlfriend letting me know all the things I wasn’t doing well enough for us as a couple, I had insane student loans so I basically wasn’t working towards anything at the time, no real idea on what i was supposed to be doing with my life, and just felt like i was slowly losing my sense of what sanity was supposed to look like. Sometimes the newspaper was a scene of tranquility. And it never seemed to be peaceful once he started the bup-dididi-bup-dididi-bup-bup-bup next to his keyboard. He could shatter my peaceful moments with something so quick and easy, like the exact phrase he would use to inquire about how our local basketball team did. He would interject into conversations the most useless of all trivia known to man. And it seemed for so long like everyone else just didn’t care, they were able to just get over his existence and just kind of shrug it off, and only I was tortured by this incessant tap-machine of a man.

But after a while, I began to wonder about the drumming. I mean, he actually seemed pretty articulate with his rhythms, he could mix it up with all 10 fingers, with just 2 or 3 on one hand at a time, with fingers on one hand and a pointed object in the other, he seemed to be dialing into something. Curiosity began to set for me? Was he really a drummer somewhere else? Had he been musically inclined in a past life? A past career?

Turned out, no. He had never actually drummed but had played a few other instruments and regretted not going back to the drums. he had, in fact, taken 3 drum lessons in his life. He seemed to look back on it with a certain sadness, a certain regret.

But it also seemed to lighten him up just to be asked about it. It was like he had wanted for someone to at least care enough to inquire. As it turned out, others in ear shot took the same opportunity to zing him about how much a pain in the ass he could be, but I honestly hadn’t meant it that way.

Anyways, it made me look at the drumming differently. The drumming may not have just been driving me insane. it may have been doing the same to him. I mean, think about all the things in life that you wish you had done and may have ended up being great at, but you never tried. Or think about things that you tried too late, and were really good at but still didn’t get to really enjoy it or do in the right time of your life. To me, that’s what the drumming on the desk represented for Tim. it was this constant reminder that maybe, maybe just maybe, there was something out there that he would have been even more in love with than putting newspapers together. Having a reminder like that all the time, that would truly drive me into an early grave.

But it worked for him.

This made me think of something terrible: not all of us get to be truly happy. Or rather, not all of us get to be the same kind of happy. I mean, happiness and satisfaction are very different things to different people. I wonder about Tim, tapping away on the desk as he did something much different than he may have been thinking about. Like in his mind, maybe the drummer was the reality and the newspaper job was a dream. Another world. Just another person with another life, foreign from his own. Would he have spent a life as a drummer, wondering how his life would have turned out if he had just gone and taken that newspaper job instead?

The CEO in the penthouse seeks a type of happiness that the bum on the street corner would not necessarily understand. And definitely vice versa. Think about it. Think about what the rich executive with a full bank account, a healthy 401k, 3 houses and a supermodel girlfriend. Someone might think that this guy should just walk around happy, he shouldn't even have sadness. But anyone that is at that level probably still has a lot of aspirations, so maybe this guy has to be successful to be happy, like stay successful. The bum on the street? Maybe he wants to just be off the street, and back in the comfort of any home, have a regular job, a single apartment or room to himself, and just someone to talk to, even if it's not romantic. Which makes for more happiness:

1. Someone with nothing who finally gets to have something, or gets something back?
or
2. Someone with everything that keeps it and gets a little bit more?

So, it stands to reason that the bum on the street could be significantly happier with incredibly less stuff than the CEO, under pretty reasonable circumstances. Or maybe ten thousand bums, for that matter. Ten thousand people could live the rest of their lives relatively comfortable and very happy with the same amount of stuff that the millionaire will very possibly get bored with by the end of this year. It doesn't seem outlandish, does it? But what do you want to bet that exec up in the pent house with the townhouse and the mansion and the condo in Vail doesn't give much of any thought to the people on the street that he strolls right past? Even if he stops, what does he give up? A dollar? A twenty? A fifty? What is that to him?

And yet I can't help but think of all the different unfortunate souls on all those different street corners out there, who won't get to leave those corners. Doesn't that chill you to the bone just a little bit, that they started out as kids, full of hopes and dreams and goofiness and all this good energy, and the end of the line is nowhere? Isn't that horrifying, that this can actually happen to people in our own country, in our own city? I mean, one part of me thinks that's so crazy, that the same things couldn't make those two happy, but I know elsewhere that it's true. I know that everyone is not on the same playing field. And it's not even like I can change it. There are some things in life that you can aspire to change, but how do you even make personal peace with an idea like that? How can I, someone with at least a few dollars here in my pocket, accept that there are people across the world or 7 minutes away somewhere that are both just dying, and no one is coming to help them? Isn't that heavy, when you really let yourself think about it? But we don't let ourselves think about it. I know I don't, in most cases. We tell ourselves that there are finite resources, that we do the best we can, that some charities are shams anyway, that he'd probably blow it on booze, that he chose his path, that you can't save everyone, that you can't save people that don't want to be saved, all this shit. And some of it is absolutely true but it doesn't change the fact that knowing it makes us feel way better.

If we were all on the same wave in life, we are in all sorts of places when the wave breaks, and some of us get to ride it out and have a great time, and some of us get sucked under and tossed around and pulled under, and some of us never really get anywhere close to any real action and we just sit around waiting for the wave to subside. But the end of the story remains the same: we don't all get to be great, or to have fun, or to be...anything. That's what I learned about the world, in my own mind, while working with Tim. The horrific idea about how unfair life is to the sound of tap-tapa-boom-tap-tap.

And it worked for him. Should that work for me?