The Decay of Industry

I work in a dingy office building in SoCal.  It hasn’t been properly maintained in years, a victim on big-company-disease.  Every day we bleed people.  Most peel away to the new company HQ in TX.  Others jump ship to rivals and better local prospects.  After life in SoCal the mind numbing flatness of TX is more than some can handle, including me.  So I sit here picking up odd projects as the decay intensifies.  It’s a surreal existence.  I recall moving into this building back when we were the underdog of the industry.  Back then there was excitement and promise here.  Not so much now.  For me this week is particularly challenging.  I just spent three weeks in the Nepalese Himalayas.  Being back in the June gloom of SoCal, nursing a cough acquired above 17,000 ft., I feel a bit out of sorts.  My first day back I was unaccountably happy.  My heart was still firmly in Nepal along with most of my brain.  Then I came back to the decay.  My first day back I was locked out of the computer system.  So I spent an entire day cleaning my desk, organizing paper files, basically menial tasks while my workload continued to build up.

Now I find myself at the end of the week.  A friend is visiting from Hawaii and we are going hiking in the Sierras tomorrow.  I’ve been guzzling an herbal expectorant hoping to allay the Khumbu cough.  It will be wonderful getting back into the wild.  It calls to my heart.  I was thinking how much it would be nice to relax a bit, and try to shake the cough, but I feel like I belong back in the snow.  So it will be a weekend with crampons and ice ax. 

I find it curious, should I sit around my apartment relaxing, I feel like I have wasted my time.  But if I spend the same amount of time trudging about a desolate landscape I feel so at peace and accomplished.  I don’t wonder about it too deeply though.  I just enjoy it.  Life is wonderful.