He crawls through his day, unrecognized and wholly underappreciated. He works as a banker with large sums, but despite this fact he is treated as expendable. Cutthroat corporations like his are closer in modus operandi to a beehive than a multinational banking company. One worker dies or similarly falls ill, another steps in dutifully to fill the void left by his predecessor.
While sitting uncomfortably in his dank, cramped cubicle, his mind is over-saturated by the nightly indulgences he finds waiting for him at his local watering hole–the singular window of solace granted to worker bees like him. This solace is short lived for him and many others stuck in the nine to five grind, characterized by a slow mediocre trod toward the end of their life. Without these nightly hedonistic pleasures, such as downing double-whiskies one after the other, chain smoking cigarettes while jawing with the local bar rats, and his favorite–shrouding his brain in a sweet and musky cloud of marijuana smog, a man of his kind would surely take the bullet train express straight through his frontal lobe. These sessions of solitary reflection achieved solely by bending his mind with the aid of these various substances are the sole piece of frayed twine keeping men of his ilk tethered to reality.
The tired air that seems to hang above him like one of those cartoon personal storm clouds is concentrated in the dark and rippled pools of some long-congealed organic liquid that colors the irises of his heavily-bagged eyes. Life wasn’t always like this. He used to be a carefree child with the future in his eyes before The Man brutally and relentlessly beat it out of them. His joints, tendons and bones creak with every calculated, exhausted movement– his lifelong service to the queen bee has left him weak and crippled. His long sinewy frame has seen its share of storms and hardships– much like a poorly-manned Schooner, sailing in the frothy seas of the forgetful and merciless Pacific Ocean. The few tufts of short, soft white hair remaining on his liver-spotted head flop limply to the side with every tottering step of his staggered gait. While shuffling along steadily, like the familiar Tortoise who once beat a Hare in a race, he has to rest his brittle bones on a stoop and catch his breath. It is here he deftly tamps down a bed of sweet, earthy tobacco into the pipe his father left him and tops it off with a dusty, dry layer of ground marijuana leaves. Before he can strike a match and replete his lungs with the earthy smoke of saccharine nostalgia, his ears are assaulted by the loud crash of the door behind him. The owner of the stoop could do without a lame old man sitting on it, stealing their precious oxygen and sunlight. With a grumble and a grunt of effort, he shoves his pipe into a pocket of his old tweed jacket and continues to trudge slowly and steadily to his destination.
His destination always eludes him. It eludes him the way that first high feeling tempts and goads the strung out Heroin addict into inadvertently overdosing. Seeing his superiors achieve one lavish precedent after the other corrupts him with a crippling depression and mounting anxiety reminiscent of scenes from centuries past. Scenes of bone-saws in the trembling hands of a battlefield surgeon, who must now reluctantly cut off a once healthy, but now terribly gangrenous leg. The tired man sees others reach their destinations– but for him, there is never any respite.
The tired man has to be careful when dabbling with substances that augment his frame of mind. He has seen many a colleague and friend alike spiral into an unfathomably deep fissure of which there is no escaping. It is not moderation that is key; quite the contrary. The key for the tired man is consistency. He consistently and frequently consumes enough inebriating substances to plunge himself entirely into a void of which the darkest shadows and their tendrils will never release him. It is for the fear of an even more agonizing fate than trudging slowly to his end in a death march, that compels this man to sip slowly, to smoke slowly, and exhale slowly. For after you lose yourself in the world of inebriates, life itself ceases to exist as you know it. It is an unstoppable mine cart careening uncontrollably into the shadow-riddled subterranean mine shafts of Stygian terrors. Perhaps it is the fear of this unknown which instills a sense of caution in men like him, or perhaps it’s just the lack of means to an end– either way it is for the better that they by default, are stuck with a slightly more palatable fate than eternal damnation.
If the tired man were to indulge at an unsustainable and rapid rate, this brief window of catharsis and bliss would be as unreachable as an Alien Radio station in a neighboring Solar System. The tired man knows that to become a pursuer in the eternal quest of altering the mind, is the same as being lost at sea on a life raft without even Polaris as a compass. He would collapse into a catatonic, unresponsive state due to the antagonistic interactions between these psychotropic substances. At a slower rate, in which he gives his tired heart and nervous system enough time to potentiate these stimulants and depressants, not too fast and not too slow, he comes to the Golden Realization that he is unable to put into words but wishes he can share with his fellow man. It is in the wake of this secret revelation seemingly transmitted by a Harbinger of supreme power and intellect, that he truly accepts the notion that the cycle of working until you drop dead is meant to be broken, irreparably and into a million tiny slivers.
This brief window of naive euphoria usually occurs around three to four AM. Around this time is when the weed smog settles deliciously in his psyche and reaches its sweet accumulations, when he smokes the last cigarette of the deck, when he reaches the familiar burn of the whisky in his chest that occur just one or two drinks before the drinker keels over in nausea. This twenty minute wave of incognizant bliss washes out all of his struggles much like the ocean waves wash away the writing in the sand indicating that two passionate lovers were, in fact, here.
Sadly though, he never is able to dig his cognitive claws deep enough into this Divine Disclosure to take it with him into the dawning of a new day. He attains such valuable knowledge with mind altering substances as his medium, only to have the notion slip through his fingers like the fine sands of the Sun bleached beaches of the Carribean that so often fills his dreams.
Once he passes the threshold of sobriety that helps him paint his monotonous life in slightly more comforting ink, he doesn't get up, dance and assume the role of the life of the party, nor does he attempt to approach the most beautiful woman at the bar in a bout of drunken courage. He just sits on his stool, sweating double-whisky in hand, with a sad smile on his face and his thoughts consumed by the gentle swaying of palm trees, that to a worker bee like him, may as well be in the next galaxy over.