Don’t Piss in my Goth Water.

I’m wiping down the tables, looking forward to the coffee and cigarette I’ll have before locking the doors for the night, when I see a figure approaching out of the corner of my eye.

I can identify who it is by the way he walks — that and the theme song from the movie Jaws speeding up in the background, steadily increasing in volume.

Then it happens. The sentient random question generator sinks in his razor sharp teeth, tearing away at my mind…

“You good? You good?”

I’ll collectively consider this double-shot question number 30 of my 32 of the night. Roland won with 35.

And no, I’m not good. I’m tired, sweaty, filthy, and some guy keeps following me around saying the same things to me over and over and asking pointless things like he’s dangerously allergic to silence.

“I’m good,” I tell him.

“I’m gonna pee real quick ”

Jesus fuck, man, seriously? You want a hall pass? I know you know where the goddamn restrooms are, you’ve fucking followed me in there while I was draining my dong just to ask me stupid questions.

And I’m not — I repeat, not — holding it for you.

Now I could ask him why the fuck he asks so many damn questions, this is true, but throughout my interactions with him it’s become abundantly clear that he takes the slightest suggestion that he’s doing something wrong as a devastating insult. From what I’ve gathered, his mother is quite critical and quick to anger, which would explain a lot in this respect. And as stupid as it might be, despite kind of wanting to baptize him in one of the fryer vats until the bubbles stop and he’s sufficiently crispy, I still don’t want to hurt his feelings.

Plus if he gets me to start asking stupid questions, he’s won. I can’t have that.

Later, I’m finally pouring myself a small cup of steaming hot goth water, and there he is once more. He is everywhere. There is no escape.

“Coffee again?” He says. “Coffee’s not good for you.”

Insult my beloved bean juice and our long-term, nurturing relationship? Now you’ve crossed the line, dish-boy.

“Telling people who drink coffee that ‘coffee’s not good for you’ isn’t good for you, either,” I warn him.

Maybe sipping java out of the skulls of my enemies would dissuade him from providing any further commentary on the matter in the future.

I might get on that.

Scrying & Sacrifices.

5/9/24

“Do you ever flood the floors?”

We’re in the dining room, and this is question number 26 during his three-hour shift. I stop what I’m doing, temporarily suspended in animation, gazing now at the flood of soapy water beneath my feet like I’m scrying a future far, far away from this utterly absurd point in spacetime.

Taking a deep breath, I stand up, holding the mop handle tightly, and look at him. I know he means flood mopping, but I ask anyway. One stupid question for another.

I point to the floor. “You mean this?”

“Yeah.”

“Once before every full moon just prior to calling up my dark goddess from the abyss. She prefers a clean floor for the ritual sacrifice. She also likes Andy’s Hot Fries,” I didn’t say, but should’ve.

New high score is 28.

Of Fossilized Bookworms.

6/19/24

“Who the fuck reads on their break for no reason?”

From where I sit in my truck, sweating like a nincompoop, I look up from my book, stare at her, and raise my hand.

“I do,” I openly confess. “And what do you mean ‘for no reason’? I find what I’m reading interesting.”

I mean, I find this to be a sufficient justification.

This time it feels even worse than it did a few months back, when a guy I worked with came up to me to inquire “why” I was reading. I felt like I was living in an old Bill Hicks bit. Is this really what it’s come to?

Look, reading isn’t for everybody, and I don’t look down on those who don’t enjoy it, but to regard those of us who do as bizarre is just fucking depressing. What’s wrong with it? Why is it so weird to them? I mean, what do they really think of me when they see a book in my hand? What goes on in their heads?

“You’re old,” she tells me, as if in answer to my thoughts.

And with that, I turned back to my book, having never felt happier to be considered a fucking fossil.

Different Flavors of Dystopia (Pages From My Drunk Diary, Part II).

6/12/24

Here’s the thing: over the years, even within my lifetime, the positions held by the Democratic and Republican parties have changed.

Despite this, people still seem to swallow the positions of whatever party they identify with as a whole — to the point that if you learn of a person’s position on one of the issues you can with a disturbingly high degree of certainty predict what their positions will be on all the rest.

Now, ask yourself: how likely would it be that the majority of the US population would carefully, thoughtfully consider all the political issues and independently arrive at all the same conclusions presently embraced by either Team Red or Team Blue?

I’m no statistician, but I reckon it’s highly fucking unlikely.

So the cause of this black/white, red/blue grouping is clearly that people are either unwilling or have become utterly incapable of truly thinking for themselves, but instead prefer to embrace groupthink or herd mentality.

Perhaps it has been this way all along and the political polarization that seems to be becoming increasingly intensified today is just due to the change in news media.

I mean, we now largely get our news via the net, after all, which due to internet algorithms suggest content based on our viewing of previous content, thereby creating an informational echo-chamber that only serves to reinforce and elaborate upon pre-established “data” we’ve consumed and simultaneously blind us all to all else.

While this certainly seems to play a major role, perhaps there are other factors. I am, after all, a dumb fuck.

Even so, what is clear as fucking day is the core issue: people are unable or unwilling to think for themselves.

They identify with and worship groups; they identify with and worship “leaders,” investing faith (in the sense of uncritical certitude) in the beliefs of those groups out of a need for belonging, investing faith (in the sense of uncritical trust) in the proclamations of their leaders.

All of which certainly stems from our nature as a social species.

These inclinations are rooted in our genes, after all. They push and pull at us with the awesome weight and attraction of our shared, evolutionary history, like ghosts haunting us, guiding us, possessing us.

Even though this legion of the dead only applies to contexts and circumstances that we’ve left behind, they’re with us still.

Even though they apply to how we lived for nearly 99% percent of our history, they do not fit within the context and circumstances of today – for our biology is subject to evolution by means of natural selection deep beneath, on a long time-scale, and our culture is subject to revolutions by means of collective election on the surface, on an increasingly shorter one, striving to sublimate those naturally-born, evolutionary instincts so that they can assert themselves into the context of our current environmental pressures.

Old ghosts, newly enfleshed in a modern context, with the ghosts effectively static as the current context undergoes exponential and utterly unpredictable development.

We’re children in an ever-changing, exponentially-advancing playground operating on the same ol’, ancient rules.

Survival depends on one of two avenues: returning to the way things were, the way our context was for 99% of our history, or changing ourselves so that we more effectively adapt to the presently ever-changing context.

The realization that neither option seems any more preferable than they seem probable to me is haunting, daunting, taunting, as the only alternative – which in my pessimism, my cynicism, seems infinitely more likely – is our extinction by our own hand.

This is not the future I want to see, not by a long shot, but it is the inevitable result I can’t help but see given the conditions and our present trajectory.

So if we are to survive, I fear, either of the two other alternatives must occur, either by our own hand or that of others, and in any case, the scenarios I’m presently capable of imagining only offer different flavors of dystopia.

There is a distinct difference between believing what you want to believe and believing what the available evidence seems to suggest, and that apparent fact, while I’ve long been aware of it, has never been as potent as it is in this particular and unfortunately broad circumstance.

Never in my fucking life have I hoped so much that I might be so bloody wrong.

Sequel, Not a Reload (Page From My Drunk Diary, Part I).

6/5/24

The biggest threat to democracy, to our country, to the world?

It isn’t Trump – that neurologically-glitching, narcissistic convict. It’s not Biden – that neurologically-glitching step away from a political rendition of Weekend at Bernies.

Or even Harris, as Biden would almost inevitably bite the dust and be buried beneath six feet of dirt at best two years into his second term, leaving that unconvincing semblance of a human at the helm.

No. Severe as these threats may seem, a still greater horror looms. I speak of the political polarization in the ol’ US of fuckin’ A. The greatest threat of all.

Since before Trump was elected, I felt it. The faultline growing into a gap evolving into a yawning fucking chasm where those at either side couldn’t hear each other despite screaming at each other across the gulf, much less hope to understand one another and begin mending this ever-gaping wound in our culture.

This wound that has fucking become our culture.

Even now, this void persists in widening.
And this central chasm? Make no mistake: it is only that.

Given the spotlight by the media, by social media, algorithms that only serve to feed the dismal, core dissociation, it’s clearly just the core, the poisoned heart of this issue, and by no means the whole.

From that hub, the strands of further fracturing can be found, after all. Blind feminists, alpha male fucks, and weak little incels. Extreme trans activists – who I am yet to be convinced represent the core and authentic trans community – and the predictable pushback from the far, extreme, not nearly right, right. MAGA Trump cultists and what I once would have called the Woke cultists, in other words.

I’ve become a bit wary of the word Woke, however. I mean, it’s clearly been subject to such a cultural gang-bang now it’s difficult to discern how one might even hope to define it, so I can’t help but feel dirty (in the bad way) even using the term.

Originally deriving from a song that hoped to remind the black community to remain ever-vigilant with respect to the prejudice waged against them, it was thereafter appropriated by the far left and expanded in definition, used to refer to all minorities and their alleged similar circumstances, and was then ultimately commandeered by the right to refer to whatever it was they perceived as despicable when it came to the left.

This word, Woke: it has been fucked so much, from so many angles, that it has become a whore of a word, dripping, oozing with the differing meaning pounded into it by so many, from so many countless angles, that in the end it means nothing.

Yet still, still it burns bright, shining like a neon-blazing sign, like a torch newly forged from the fires of our collective ignorance, slicing through our collective skin from countless dimensions, severing, dividing, fracturing, further serving to crack the ground we jointly stand on all the fucking more.

I so want to be done with your bullshit. My bullshit. Our bullshit.

I want to look away, walk away, leave this all behind me for the betterment of my mental health, and damned be the rest of you. The rest of us.

Yet I’m a part of you. You’re a part of me. Like it or not.

A wise woman once told me that there is a web that stretches across the universe, interconnecting all souls, and while I can’t be sure exactly what she meant by that, I’ve contemplated it often since I was a child. However pathetic and miniscule we might think our individual words or actions might be, it’s like plucking a strand on that cosmic spider-web: the entire web vibrates as a consequence.

Like throwing a stone into a pond, the impact sends ripples that travel out from the point of impact to all edges of the body of water — and so, I guess, inject the notion of the “butterfly effect” here and all that fucking rot…

At any rate, that divine, unearthly teacher of mine believed in me, for whatever reason – believed in us, or so my unsupported memories and current working hypothesis goes – and so despite my cynicism, pessimism, and loathing for not only myself, but the species to which I belong as a whole, I hold onto all that she, my self-described Teacher, told me, who she described as an Artist.

There is a dark cloud suffocating our world, she told me during this same conversation.

And I don’t want to contribute to that dark cloud. I really don’t. I want to believe in the web of souls. I want to believe that each of us can pluck the strands that intersect the luminous beings she claimed we all are and consequently send our positive vibrations across the entirety of the webwork, to cure the disease that plagues us all and plow our way towards collective health.

As pathetic as it may be – and I know, I fucking know it is – I’m doing by best. So I beg of you, at least join me and try. And Nimi, if by some chance you’re listening, reading, scanning my inebriated thoughts, know that I – or less egotistically, we – could use some fucking help. Not dictation, mind you. Like Johnny Five, I only require more input. Some merciful illumination.

I only need to remember.

I’ve never been one for uncritical allegiance or blind faith, but something tells me you know this story, understand my position. Something tells me, my blessed bitch, that you’ve been down this treacherous road before us before, and maybe I have, too. Let me know, at the very least, the details regarding how, where, and why we went wrong.

I’d much fucking prefer a decent sequel to the same ol’ shitty reload.

I Hate It Here.

I go out in front of the building to have a smoke and briefly write about the high point of the day in my cell phone. For the last two weeks or so, this job, this town, has upped the ante on its usual bullshit and I want to capture some positive inspiration for once. As I should’ve expected, I only get in a puff or two and manage to type out a single, solitary, fucking letter when I hear someone yell, “Hey!”

Though the vibe I sense makes me feel certain this was directed towards me, I don’t look up. Maybe if I ignore this, I tell myself, it’ll go away. This is always a hopeful thought, though it never works out in practice.

Then they say it again. Louder.

“HEY!”

So I finally look up, and at the sidewalk a short distance away I see a guy in a white shirt aggressively extending a middle finger at me. I am certain I don’t know this man. I am certain I did not earn half a peace sign.

I shrug, then casually look back down at my phone.

Seconds later, I feel alarm bells go off within. I look back up. The angry man in the white shirt is approaching me, and his manner of doing so clearly communicates he is shitfaced. I casually put out my smoke, go in the door, and don’t look behind me.

I now exit out the side door.

“I don’t know why it takes so long to make two goddamn McChickens,” says the short, scruffy-looking guy I talked to half an hour ago and didn’t know was still out here. “I don’t even want it anymore.”

I don’t engage. I just take a few drags, flick the cigarette, go inside and proceed to mop the floor.

By the time I’m done and go out the side door again, it’s finally quiet. I’m finally alone. I light up.

Then people keep parking, walking towards the building, and I inform them we’re closed. One guy is bitching to me about his gift card, and how this and that is stupid. Do you see the red hair, red shoes, and make-up on my face, I want to say?

No? That’s because I’m not the fucking clown in charge of this fast food joint. I don’t make the rules.

Towards the end of my smoke, which I did not get to enjoy, another car pulls up to the door, close to where I’m crouching. A woman’s voice asked if we were open, and I tell her just drive thru is open, that the dining room closes at nine. This woman speaks to her passenger as she backs put of the space, and just as she’s pulling away does that pouty, dramatic, fake crying, and in the same vein goes, “I hate it here.”

“Me, too,” I instinctively said aloud.

She repeated what I said to her passenger as she laughed her ass off on her way towards drive thru.

And that made me smile, at the very least.

The Good Father.

A sauce packet detonates, exploding like a BBQ firework as it’s thrown against the wall. Wrappers and stray chunks of food litter the tables and floor. They yell over one another, louder and louder, a positive feedback loop that can only end in the rupturing of eardrums. One kid walks across the seat cushions right in front of me, from one booth to the other, like the floor is fucking lava.

As I’m mopping up a large drink one of the kids spilled, just beneath another litter-filled table, one member of this gaggle of giggling idiots darts by at Mach 10. In the process of doing so, he catches the leg of his shorts on the mop handle, almost de-pantsing himself in the process.

I bark, “Hey!,” and after stopping a moment to apologize and catch a breath, the jacked-up poster-child for pro-choice just picks up where he left off.

Where are the parents, you ask?

Probably at home, their negligent fathers still convinced their pull-out game is strong despite evidence to the contrary, so both them and the wives consequently busy making more unsocialized crotch-goblins they’re not prepared to care for.

No matter, they’ll just send their little sociopaths to the local fast food joint, where a 45-year-old, childless bachelor with bleeding ears and rising blood pressure will be forced to clean up after them and carefully bottle up his rage so he doesn’t go ape-shit on the little spidermonkeys.

I should’ve been a fucking librarian.

After wheeling the mop bucket into the corner, I take a deep breath, averting eye contact with anyone, and approach the door at the front of the building. Slipping out, I proceed to smoke a cigarette and reconsider my life choices.

A few puffs in, a girl walking down the sidewalk turns her head towards me, makes an “o” face, smiles, and laughs in apparent lunacy. Even given the tell-tale signs, it takes a moment for me to realize who this is, as I’m not accustomed to seeing her in anything other than her fast food costume.

It’s Psycho.

A pretty girl of perhaps seventeen years of age, she’s been a coworker of mine for the last two months or so. She’s prone to dramatic outbursts of energy which marijuana either serves to quell or exacerbate, depending on the day. As she walks up to me, I ask her why on earth she’d elect to come here on her day off, and she doesn’t hesitate to tell me that she’d much rather be here than home.

Then she bears all. Cliff’s Notes of her life story comes rushing out in firehouse fashion.

She tells me how her father and step father have both raped her. How her step-father would frequently do so when she took a shower. How her father would hold her and her nearly half a dozen siblings at gunpoint when any of them left the house. She explained how he’d walk behind her, keeping the handgun under his shirt, pointed at her back.

One day, she finally called the cops on him, and that’s how she escaped that fucked up circumstance and the state of South Carolina and came to live with her mother and her mother’s wife here in Ohio. Her mother who, while not physically abusive, at the very least, isn’t much of a mother, either. Her wife? Evidently a total bitch.

I know she’s not lying about any if this, and so it blows me away how she tells me all of it so casually, without teeth clenching, devoid of teared-up eyes. She just says it matter of factly. As if to say, hey, this is just what happens, isn’t life crazy?

It fucking breaks my heart. I feel myself crumbling inside.

It’s no wonder she has issues with men. It’s no wonder she gravitated towards that negligent and selfish bitch, May, who takes delight in lying and excuses her habit of constantly cheating on her girlfriends and obsolving herself of guilt by referencing her “abandonment issues” and other psychological glitches.

Shitty relationships is all Psycho has ever seen, ever known, and the familiar provides comfort, which is a more reliable source of psychological security than the risk of the unfamiliar, however much higher the odds of attaining happiness might be.

I was again reminded how some parents just shouldn’t be parents, which immediately brought my mind back to the circus of amphatamine-fueled midgets occupying the dining room on the other side of the window to my back.

Had my assumptions been too harsh?

When I was a teenager, I suddenly reexperienced — as opposed to simply remembered — something that had occurred earlier in my youth. This kind of thing had happened before, but this particular instance was different.

I was at my friend’s house, in the bedroom he shared with his four other siblings. It was a rare instance in which they were left alone, unsupervised by their strict parents, and apparently all the energy they’d been forced to repress had built up a surplus so that when they were finally alone for a brief period, it all exploded.

They were running around like lunatics. The youngest, a boy, climbed atop the toy chest, wrapped a blanket around him and lifted a flashlight high into the air with one hand, pretending to be the Statue of Liberty, and began singing the Star-Spangled Banner at high volume.

Given I knew what was coming, this must have happened before. I dropped to my belly, scooted beneath one of the bunk beds, and awaited the inevitable. I didn’t have to wait long until the door burst open and in came the father with his belt.

For all I knew, maybe it was the same with these kids. Maybe their parents were as insanely violent as my friends father was, and now that they were unsupervised, the volcano of energy erupted.

When the cat is away, the mice will play.

Maybe I just don’t understand because, unlike them, I had loving and present parents. It’s true that my mother and I had serious issues up until maybe my mid-30s, but it’s clear as day to me how lucky I was — how lucky I am — and certainly in a relative sense.

Many boys have fathers that are abusive, negligent, or altogether absent. I can say without hesitation that my father is and has always been my favorite fucking human being ever. I could never hope to express how much I love the man.

So yeah, I’m lucky, so maybe I’m just being ignorant given my different, personal, historical context and I really shouldn’t be mad at those untamed circus monkey children that invaded our fast food dining room.

Later, I was talking with Brian, another maintenance guy, back in the stock room. In the midst of conversation, he tells me he thinks I’d make a good father. This is a strange coincidence, as I’ve told him nothing about what occurred that day or the shit that had been going on in my head as a consequence.

My immediate response was that he shouldn’t say that.

I tell him that I’ve finally settled into the thought of being alone, and that it probably suited me best. I need my alone time, and that never went iver well on the rare occasion I had a girlfriend — it sure as hell wouldn’t make me suitable for a wife and kids, and at 45, I’d dodged all that thus far.

Come August, I’d be quitting this job, hopefully landing in a better-paying one, and moving into a trailer close to my family where I’d likely live alone until I die. I was good with that.

Maybe I’d get a cat, that was it.

I calmed a bit and thanked him, and confessed I’d been told that before, but it always perplexed me. Plus, I’m not sure I’d want to bring a kid into this world, particularly given it’s trajectory, at least as I see it.

He tells me that this mentality is part of the reason I’d make a good father.

Then he jokingly says this conversation almost seems like a flashback sequence. That we’ll both be looking back on this moment sometime in the future and laugh at my reservations.

“Oh fuck no,” I tell him. “Please, please don’t say that.”

I’ll settle for a cat. I’m just fine with a cat.

Claire & My Chinese Box of a Mind (5/23/23 Dream).

I’ve met up with my family at a gathering in some large, densely-packed room at a house in Pennsylvania. At some point, I notice Claire is there, too, standing against the wall. I haven’t seen or spoken to her in years. So I walk up to her, and as we talk and interact, her state of body and mind concerns me.

She is incredibly skinny, very frail-looking, and speaks in this sort of baby voice. She doesn’t seem to be all there mentally, either. As we speak, she mostly whispers in my ear to talk. She tells me she’s an alcoholic. That she came down here to get into a program, to go to a special school.

She begins kissing me on the lips, which eventually prompts me to deeply kiss her. This surprises her and she pulls back after a moment, seemingly embarrassed. Behind me, I see some woman, maybe in her 50s, looking in our direction in a very disapproving manner, and I suddenly feel guilty over the public display of affection.

There’s some other guy we both know with us now and suddenly, without warning, Claire tries to reach her hand down his pants, but we both stop her.

“We used to date,” she says, suggesting that, to her mind, this made it okay. I try to make her understand that if she did this, it would be bad, and that it would perhaps me many years before she could look back on it and see it as funny in retrospect.

Then I wake up.

I grab the yellow notebook nearby, and try to commit the dream to writing before the details fade. I get distracted by the actual party, however, and after it’s over and everyone leaves, I leave to walk home. I kept getting lost and trapped, however. I was trapped in a pit surrounded by garbage at some point, trying to get out, and then found myself trapped in fenced-off areas in what seemed to be backyards.

I finally got out my cell and called my dad, but failed the first time. The second time, he picked up, but he speaks in an ominous tone and in a cryptic way that seems to suggest he’s angry that I’ve forgotten something, or have failed to realize something.

I asked if they could pick me up. He asked if it was Wednesday, and then said that maybe we should wait until midnight. As I wake up — again — I’m uttering aloud a perplexed and frustrated, “What?”

A dream within a dream. Again.

I grab the yellow notebook — again.

My mind is a fucking Chinese Box.