High Anxiety

"This kind of thing happens all the time in journalism," according to NN.

I hightailed it out of Guadalajara on Friday morning, completely unaware of the conflict brewing back at the office. Apparently, when my co-workers read the finished newspaper on Friday morning, they discovered that the version that went press was full of errors. Although we spent copious hours copy-editing and correcting every single page on Thursday night, somehow the updated pages were lost in the shuffle, and the rough pages were the ones sent to the printer. Naturally this caused a bit of uproar and disappointment, but the reality of it was that TH (ultimately responsible for the mistake) didn't do it intentionally and probably felt worse about what had happened than anyone else. Still, EB the intense Canadian took this mistake as a personal affront. Without thinking it through he scribbled out a brief letter to TH, which decried the paper's amateurism and called TH a "motherfucker."

The issue sat for the weekend until TH came in on Monday and found the letter, and, enraged, promised to fire EB as soon as he appeared at the office that morning. We didn't have to wait long. EB breezed in at 11:30 and TH started to yell, eventually telling him that was it --clear your things out, and you can come pick up your check on Friday.

I was pretty frozen in shock the rest of the day. I wasn't afraid that TH's anger would spread unprovoked, it was more just that weird feeling of knowing that something awful has just happened, not knowing what's going to happen next, and as a result being stuck in the moment. To add to the anxiety, I was having a hard time coming up with story ideas, and having skipped work on Friday, I was already behind.

Unable to crank out anything, and having conducted only one interview the whole day, I sulked out of the office and went home for a nap.

Later that night, I went downtown for a walk and still ended up feeling lousy. So I waited at a street corner ready to catch the bus back home, and soon there was a whole line of us there waiting and waiting. As the bus pulled up, a disabled man with a walker dragged himself up toward the the front of the line. He wasn't old, and he had scraggly facial hair coming in around a goatee a few days old. The line of people moved back in sympathy and in pity, and just then the man vomited a mouthful of liquid on to his shirt, and it then fell to the ground. The people in line, all men, recoiled in horror, but one grabbed the walker and another helped the man up into the bus. I was powerless to move, thinking about how lousy my day had been and how this was the culmination, something so disturbing and pathetic as to trump it all. I felt revulsion not in my stomach but in my mind, and not aimed at the disabled man per se, but more nebulously at Mexico in general. I decided I couldn't get on that bus, and started to walk back home, trying to reassure myself that the day would soon be over.