fate

I have this friend, Bob. He's sixty or so. I met Bob in Colorado working on the Obama campaign. I didn't like him as he smelled and always had his ass hanging out his pants and kept going on about Roosevelt and giggling a lot. But then we became friends and I drove him everywhere in my goddamn money-draining fucking Mercedes and we used to scrabble through the office to find quarters until we had enough for a packet of cigarettes. Bob still calls me occasionally. Last time he called it was sometime after christmas and he was drunk and holed up in a motel with some woman called Shanice he'd just met. He seemed happy. Bob had a sweet deal running weed and mushrooms to Chicago and San Francisco. He grew them for some drug dealers in Sonoma County. Then he got caught with 20 grand of cash stinking of weed trying to board an Amtrak train in Union Station. The DEA confiscated the money and Bob was too scared to go back and tell the drug dealers he'd lost all the money so he joined the Clinton campaign, and then the Obama campaign. Bob was someone who was always fucking happy, you know those people? Always goddamn smiling away despite sitting in a pile of shit. I really wish I had that ability. Somedays it's OK and I accept there's nothing I can do except take the sofas people offer me, and the money, and keep writing the novel and hoping something will happen so I can go back to LA. But most of the time I'm anxious and pissed and I can't eat and there's nothing to do all day except stew in words and go to AA meetings with a bunch of tattooed, transgender hipsters, who are pretty awesome, but they'd be more awesome if they were in LA.

There's something to be said for not struggling against fate, but my question is, when is not struggling against what seems to be fate, instead simply giving the fuck up? It would be awesome to be happy like Bob, but I don't want to be happy with a bottle of Jack, a motel room and some chick I picked up that morning in the free clinic. I can't figure out if that's wrong or right.