Everybody's Doin' What They Want To Be Doin'

By Jeff M

i drink from a thick beer mug a married woman bought me in Columbia, Missouri, during a hometown Tiger football game, when it was raining, after i got some newspaper award. i drink from this mug my whiskey, my water, when i eat dinner, when i eat my broccoli. i put fruit juice in it and give it to my 3-year-old son, Noah, and he holds it tough between his small, play dough hands on the weekends he's with me. he's only doin' what he thinks he should be doin because his dad is showing him what he should be doin'.

i love boiling eggs. i love putting three medium sized eggs in an old pan on an autumn night, an old pan whose surface is chipped and shows a weird white aluminum. i like it when the eggs huddle close together when the water is hot. i love it when the eggs move away from each other when the water is cold. i love to hold the egg between my index finger and thumb and smack it against the sink side, unravel the white crust of its earthen covering, rinse the chips off under the water.

break of days you learn much, but i learned a lot about bill that night i came back to the Green Bay hotel and found all his clothes and stuff gone. you see, i only saw him most during the day. we were there to learn how to drive semi-trucks. i thought he was going to do great. he was a big guy. he was like a side of beef hanging in the cooler. he was tough. the kind of guy who was born to shake hands. i thought for sure this guy was going to make it, but he decided it wasn't what he wanted to do. the note he left me on the hotel table was one i'll never forget, and i forget things easy. it read: Jeff, they're lying to you. You won't make any money doing this. Go do something else. I miss my daughter. i quit three days later, and my wife was pissed.

i smoked for 11 years and loved every cigarette i ever smoked. non-smokers have no idea what they're missing. then i quit for three years because my wife said she didn't like the smell of smoke on me when we were lying in bed. then she left and i started smoking again. bitch.

my boys and me are standing in line at Wal-Mart and i notice there are two 10 dollar bills laying in the change compartment at the self-service station. i go over there with the boys wondering if anyone will see me if i snatch up those bills. after i paid for the items we were there to buy (a sickle and a dagger for my boy's costume), i turn to go, but my oldest boy grabs the bills, these bills laying there straight as sleeping Marines, and turns to go. i tell him to put the bills back, but my voice betrays me. he doesn't put them back. i take them from him and we stand in line at the service area. i tell him we should give the money back, that it's the right thing to do. it's not our money. my oldest boy looks at me like i farted. he said it didn't matter if we took it. mom would take the money, he said. then it occurred to me that he was right; that i would turn this money in and the woman would take it and she would feed her children or buy a magazine or go to a movie or buy a bookmark with an angel on it. meanwhile, i have no money and the kids are with me for the next two days. we take the money and i tell him outside that i hope he'd do different than his dad, but he said it wouldn't really matter what i told him, he would have taken it. don't worry about it, he said. later that night at dinner, he asked me to scoot over in the booth from where i sat across from him. he wanted to watch the news about Iraq.

her name became michelle bradford after it was first nicole. i met her online on a random day, a random sunny day. i found her by chance. actually, i met nicole first and wrote her a letter and told her hello my name is jeff and i live in Kansas City and i don't know why, not really, why i was writing, except that here i was writing her, you, maybe everyone who ever wanted a letter from no where. thing is, i got a letter back and it was from a girl name michelle bradford. she said to me that nicole left and that she thought we were a good fit, something like that. i wrote her back this long letter and put a picture in the letter and now i find myself checking the mailbox every day for this michelle lady, this girl in prison for forgery and B&E, this girl who wrote in her last letter: This could be the start of something beautiful.

i've been buying half-pint whiskeys every night for the past month. i've been getting drunk and low and high at the same time. been moving as far from being Jeff as close to. sometimes i'm lost and sometimes i'm found. i drift into situations like i drift into my newspaper dispatches --- long enough to know something to talk about but not long enough to know anything, not really, not completely.

i'm doing it because it's what i want to be doing.

you're the same way.