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.

Weenie-Beanie Sunday.

6/2/24

Maybe a quarter of the way through mopping the stock room, I hear her way-too-happy voice from behind me. Turning around, I find her smiling with lips as well as eyes, body language unable to conceal her excitement. And she’s holding a small bag. In a giddy manner, she tells me to stop what I’m doing, to follow her. She’s got a mess for me to clean up.

None of this bodes well.

As she almost skips along, I follow slowly behind her, and she keeps stopping, turning around, urging me to catch up. Laughing, she tells me I might want to grab gloves.

Once we get to the dining room, she points to the area where I’d seen those kids sitting earlier, finger aimed towards the floor.

And there it is, like a small snake had shed its skin. A discarded shroud for the ol’ domed flesh-spout.

While the sight of the salami-sock enrages me, at the very least it presents suggestive evidence that those idiot kids were taking measures to ensure they didn’t produce more of themselves. If nothing else, I could be thankful for that.

Walking up to it, crouching down and angling her head in such a way to examine the weenie-beanie more closely, she says, “It looks used.”

And so the work week begins.

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.

Mufflers for the Miffed.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve appreciated some of her music. And I confess, especially when she’s clad in black leather and she wears those knee-high or thigh-high black goth boots, I desperately want Avril Lavigne to sit on my face.

It’s just the honest truth.

I’d go to town. I’d tongue-twist, tongue-punch her one-eyed skin clam, lapping away in, on, and around those lovely lower lips and the man in the boat like a thirsty dog at a water bowl till my dying day.

But I’m so, so sick of that fucking song of hers. The one that they play fifty times a day on the radio station at work.

“Don’t call me baby.
I love it when you hate me.”

Look, woman, I call no one baby, for one thing; for another, consider your goal achieved.

Now if you insist on still singing that song, have some mercy and ensure you clamp your thighs tightly around my ears when you plant your pussy on my puss.

Much obliged.

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.