Staying up for 26 hours straight isn't as hard as I thought it would be. It's amazing to me that so many parents that work midnights do it every single weekend. I went to visit my cancerous friend on friday as planned but I'll be damned if Toronto isn't the most frustrating place I've had the pleasure of being driven in. It literally took 15 minutes to move 120 metres at one point. I'm going to say this once, and once only, fuck GPS. Fuck it to hell. Give me a fucking map because GPS is an offensively bad joke. Somehow we drove 50km past Toronto without even realizing it and I'm blaming the fucking son of a ratfuck bastard bitch GPS whore. Fuck it. Now that that's done on with the show. You think it might be weird going to see a friend with cancer in a hospital. What do you say? How do you react? It turns out it's not that weird at all. 3 of us went to see him and all that happened was we talked amongst each other for a few hours just like the old friends that we are. We talked about the stupid things we did when we were younger, about the women they (not me of course, for I am the lonely worker) are seeing now, about how the leafs suck and whatever else pops up. We didn't bring up the cancer at all and decided we would leave it to our friend to talk about if he wanted to bring it up. I'm sure it's all he hears about, thinks about and talks about the rest of the time. Our goal was to see him and make him happy. Just bring a smile to his face. I think we did the right thing. He definitely seemed very happy to see us and get a chance to escape from the harsh reality of his cancer. I have to say he didn't look that great though. He has a massive lump coming out the side of his neck, he can't move one of his arms and he has growths on both sides of his chest as well. He's just started a new cycle of chemotherapy which hopefully will make things better, but his cancer is so rare no one knows if it will help or not. I have no idea how his girlfriend is able to stay so strong during this time. They were only going out for a bit over a month, though they knew each other for over a year before they went out, before he found he had cancer, and she's still with him seeing him whenever she can. I have a bad habit of thinking ill of of women from time to time and I forget just how much amazing they can be. My hats of to her for sticking it out as long as she has.

Live and let die. Life can be a fucked up thing. I just found out that someone I'm working with literally killed a man and is under house arrest. He has a wife and kids, is a very nice guy, but a few years he ran someone over and killed him. Apparently witnesses say that the guy that got killed and my co-worker were arguing earlier and the family of the victim wanted my co-worker to go to jail because they think he did it on purpose. It's weird the things you learn about people. Speaking of life being fucked up and death and all that, I'm going to visit an old friend that has some rare cancer that doesn't seem to want to go away, leaving my friend in a state of depression. I saw him a while back when things weren't as bad and though he didn't exactly seem happy, it didn't seem like the end was coming. It seemed like there was a hint of optimism about the future. Now it seems much worse. Cancer has spread to his vocal chords so he can't talk at the moment, he's having chemo every other week as opposed to every three weeks, and he's in Toronto instead of KW. I'm not sure what to do or say to a friend who can't speak back but is totally aware of what you're doing. Especially to a friend that I've only seen a few times in the past year. I'm totally out of my element here. Cancer at 27. Shit.

It's hard to find people with common interests when you don't even idulge in those interests yourself. It's like I can't help but make my life miserable. What do people talk about? What am I talking about? I like to listen. I like to be left alone, but I hate being lonely. Why do I make life this complicated when I know how simple it really is. People think life is hard. It's incredibly easy, I just haven't been making it easy for myself lately. Often times by doing the easier thing I've been making life harder to deal with. Not talking to people about difficult situations is the easier thing, but if you talk about it, think about it, feel it, life is so much easier. I know that, I just don't do it. Fuck it.

Today is an exciting day in The Lonely Worker's world. Well maybe not so much exciting as it is relieving. It only took 2 years but I'm finally employed at a real job with a decent wage and benefits and everything. It's sad how much I've let money control me for so long and how so many people have to do such things. This is going to make life so much easier. It's going to be the little things that are going to make a difference. I'll talk about things I've had to give up or do to keep myself afloat down the road I'm sure but I'll be damned if I can't enjoy life at least a little bit more now. For example I've only had one towel to dry myself with after a shower for the past year. Disgusting I know, but now I'll finally get that second towel, and even a third and a fourth. I can get new vaccuum bags. I can get paper towels. It's the little things like that that I've been missing out for so long now that I can finally afford again and it's such a relief. Not to mention my confidence has gone up tenfold in the past 12 hours. I'm doing the same job as I've been doing for 5 months now, but I'm so much happier now that I actually can afford life.

Awesome, another day closer to the sweet release of death. Highlight of the day: letting a dog chew my sock. Such excitement.

I love my toilet. After growing up in a family of 5 (and a couple of years with 7 when my granparents lived with us) and having only one bathroom to share amongst us, then living with roommates when I moved out and never really feeling comfortable in the bathroom, the past year and a half living by myself has been great bathroom wise. I've grown incredibly close with my toilet. Sure it's a piece of junk that doesn't flush properly, has an occassional leak and the room looks terrible and has a flower border to it, but I can't tell you how much I enjoy it. I can go the bathroom up to 5 times a day and not worry about what others think of me. I can sit on the can and read for 30 minutes without being interrupted. I get my best reading done on the can. Hell, right now I get my only reading done on the can. There's something about that room where it's so much easier to read in there then anywhere else. I'll be like I'm just going to read a page or two, then 20 pages later I'm still reading. I've been done taking a shit for 25 minutes but I'm still sitting there reading this damn book. I watched a bit by Louis CK a week or so ago and he had something good to say on the subject. He was saying how when he was younger and his wife and kids were out of town he would spend the time just masterbating and whatnot, but now that he's older all he wants to do when he's alone is just take a 2 hour shit. He doesn't have anyone bugging him so he just wants to spend as much time as he can alone in the bathroom and take one big shit. And I gotta say I agree with him. Long live long shits.

I actually had two days off this weekend and was planning on making them fun. I was going to play some pickup hockey on friday, then go to a sports bar saturday night to watch the football game. You know, get out of the house, do stuff, be social, stuff like that. However the pickup hockey game was at 11:30am friday and I got home from work at 6am that day and managed to sleep through it. Then yesterday I decided that going to a sports bar alone wasn't fun enough to warrant spending money on it. Instead I spent too many hours playing video games, watching Dexter, sitting on the toilet reading, generally just staying at home and letting my arteries clog up. I did manage to see a friend for a little bit on saturday afternoon though! Unfortunately we didn't do much and I spent more time playing with his dog then anything else. It's a little sad to see me lose my passion for life. It's even sadder when you're hanging out with your best friend of 15 years and you can't think of anything to say to him since you've lost the ability to communicate properly because you've become a hermit and lost most emotions. I'm so neutral I might as well be taking prozac.

It's funny, this being poor thing. When you have just a spare $20 you feel on top of the world. It's almost a miracle that you can manage to save $20 to spend however you want. Should I buy a snack, should I buy a book, should I just save it so that it'll be spent on things later that it probably should be spent on instead? I ended up buying beer for the first time in 8 months last week. It was only a 6 pack, but with the football playoffs starting I felt like I needed some beer for it. I was wrong. It turns out that not only do you have to aqcuire a taste for beer when you first start drinking it, you have to continually drink beer to keep that acquired taste. I've had maybe a beer every other month since July so this was the first time in a while that I managed to drink a few beers in a weekend and they tasted pretty assy. Maybe I just can't drink beer alone. Beer always seems to taste better when in the company of others. Unfortunately for me that's part of why I haven't drank much beer since July, I have nobody to drink with. Maybe I should make internet friends to drink with.

Welcome to my world

I'm 35 years old, I am divorced, and I live in a van down by the river. None of the things in that classic Chris Farley quote are true in my life, but the sentiment behind it describes it perfectly. My life sucks. Don't feel sorry for me, it's completely my fault. I've been making $11-12/hour for the past year and a half, and the year before that I was unemployed. My ass is broke. I've even been at work 6 days a week for the past 3 months, more or less, and I've just been told I can expect to work 35 more 6 day work weeks in 2010. Yay! And on top of that I'm desperately lonely. I haven't had a stimulating relationship in years and since I've been working on a midnight shift for the past 4 months I'm lucky if I see any of my friends more then one or two times a month, not that I can afford to do anything with them.

The reason why it's all my fault is because I let it happen. I'm a smart guy that went to univeristy and college and was an honour roll student. I was well liked, funny, a little weird and crazy, but also extremely shy. I lacked ambition and I never knew what I wanted to do with myself (problems I'm still fighting with), so here I am, 27 years old, poor, lonely, probably clinically depressed, and unable to get what I want out of life.

Welcome to my world.