life's questions

there are many things i'll never understand. i could innumerate them here, but who wants to read a list of unexplainables. we spend our lives trying to answer questions that don't have answers, to solve the insolvable and we die still wondering. once you've stopped wondering then you might as well stop living. but this is a bold statement isn't it?

i am told to write stories, to put down the events of my day, to inject a little humor into the mundane, to hold the obvious up to scutiny's light. but my days are unremarkable, and perhaps entirely boring, but they are above all, mine. i work at a hospital. i catalogue and deal out pills. you could say i'm a drug dealer, but the hospital doesn't like the connotation of such diction and so i work in the "pharmacy". i wear really white shoes, my clothes are ironed and my hair is neat. don't you trust me now? my white shoes squeak when i walk, squeak with all the things i want to say, but keep locked away, carefully guarded, even more so than the psychotic protection of the narcotics. i make my rounds, run the same pattern day in and day out. same room first, same room last. not much changes, well besides the drugs and the patient, but my job is the same. one tray of drugs out, and a new one goes in. sounds easy enough. it's easy to get lost when you first start, the drug names are more esoteric than breeds of unicorns and of course, these letter combinations (i wouldn't call them "words") make no sense to me, that is, they have no meaning. i might as well be dealing with hyloglephics. i let my eyes take a beating, i match up the curved and straight lines that denote the powerful substances i hold in my hands. vials and pills and solutions and powders, am i an alchemist? if so, tell me where the syrrum of happiness lies or the elixer of love. but i don't find any of these. i see only medications for insomnia, for tremors, for constipation, for nausea, for hypertention, for rash, for fever, for pain. i don't make the coctails either. not in my job description. i just fill what some invisible source tells me to fill then i go a knocking on doors. "pharmacy" i say, my shoes squeak, i try a smile, but i'm not even fooling the patient. if i can't fool a dope, who can i fool? perhaps i'm the dope or i'm the fool? i haven't decided if these are mutually exclusive terms quite yet. just another of the questions i ponder in the long list of questions i ponder. i switch out the trays and try not look at the patients, whether this is for my sake or theirs i haven't quite ascertained. it's difficult, i'll admit, to see such sickness everyday. to see people at their weakest and most vunerable. the smell of death fills me and all i can offer are some white tablets no bigger than the head of a thump nail. it's a crazy business, drugs; i feel i might be too soft for this sort of thing. my heart sinks when i see you, mouth open, barely breathing. what are you thinking? or are you? what do your dreams look like, can you remember? to feel so disconnected from the content of the cure and yet so accutely connected to those who rely on those cures, is a very strange middle ground. nothing seems to happen as you expect it. i can honestly say, i never thought i would be working at a hospital, i never thought i would be seeing people the way i've been seeing people, to be in charge of all that i'm in charge of, to belong to a system that i begrudgingly believe it. and so i'm left wondering, the same questions that i started with at the beginning of this entry, the same questions that i have always been wondering. the human quest for reason, for meaning. why are we? who are we? why this path? why here? why now? where does this go? where does this go? where does this go?