21).

Usually my dreams don’t take on the ridiculous dream logic so many people tend to associate with dreams as a whole, like watching a monkey wheel on by on a unicycle while sucking on a slurpee through his ear as I wave to him with my foot or something. There are jump cuts and there may be odd elements here and there in the narrative, but otherwise my dreams typically mimic conventional reality fairly well.

This morning, however, my dream narrative took on some uncharacteristically strange elements I don’t often experience.

3/16/21

I was inside the restaurant I work at, staring out the doorway window. My plan was to walk outside to my truck, but I hesitated, as I suddenly realized that I didn’t have any pants on. At first my worry is that people would see me in the car-filled parking lot, but that concern evaporates when I realize that if my pants are in the truck and my keys are in my pockets, this may pose a bigger problem. At that exact moment I suddenly felt my keys in my back pocket, however — I suddenly have pants on now, and the inconsistency didn’t confuse me at all.

As I walked towards the truck, I saw a shadow cast on the ground from someone behind me, but before my eyes it transforms into the shadow of Darth Vader with a bird on his shoulder. I quickly turned around, but no one was there.

As I got up to the truck, I noticed a crack on the window of the side door, but eventually concluded that it had always been there. I then noticed something new, however: a tiny hole in the same window that looked as if someone were trying to screw into it. I interpreted this as evidence that someone was trying to break in and so resolved to park closer to the building from now on, just to keep a closer eye on it.

Cell Phone Guy & a Gifted Lighter (3/1/21 Dream).

Circa 7:30 AM.

I was in some gas station, with someone out in the car waiting for me with engine running, so I felt kind of pressed for time. I passed by a girl with shirt on that looked like it had a gray alien on it, and it looked pretty cool. I then saw a card table nearby with a few piles of folded shirts on it, and I found that while the one the girl was wearing was there, it wasn’t an alien one — but there was indeed cool-looking alien shirts in one of the piles that I considered purchasing. As is often the case, I decided I should be careful with money and so elected not to buy it, but thought that I may come back at some later date and get one.

I think I was primarily in there to buy a carton of cigarettes, but I also desperately needed a lighter, but couldn’t decide on one. Some were laying out, some were in bowls on shelves, and I kept picking one out, holding it, deciding against it, picking out another and putting it back again, frustrated by my own indecision, as I felt I really needed to hurry up.

I finally settle on one when this old guy, an old regular at the fast food joint I work at, comes up from behind me and slipped a lighter of his into the breast pocket of my shirt. When I turned around to see who it was, he was already looking dead at me with a warm, friendly smile and curious eyes. He seemed genuinely happy, perhaps happier and more at peace than I had ever seen him. I thank him, and he says something to me, but for the life of me I can’t remember what. I think it had something to do with the fact that he used to smoke but had to quit.

The dream ended there, but this was a guy that, in real life, I had nicknamed the Cell Phone Guy. He would come in frequently at night, always speaking to his wife on the phone because she didn’t trust him, always paranoid he was cheating on her. He was an elderly guy, very lively and personable, and he certainly did flirt with the girls a lot, so there may have been some justification for her paranoia. We always had kind exchanges, though our conversations never got too in depth. A regret of mine, to be honest. He always seemed like an interesting guy.

I didn’t see him for awhile until at some random point during this pandemic, when I had snuck out to the front of the building after dark to have a smoke one night. He came by in that same white van he always drove, but the van had seen better days.

So had he.

His age had certainly caught up with him. He had slowed considerably, had lost a lot of his characteristic spark and spunk. He spoke to me a bit. It seemed like he just really wanted to connect with someone. Evidently his wife had died and him and his new girlfriend, maybe his new wife — I can’t recall, exactly — who was on the seat beside him, they were leaving the state to start a new life together. He was leaving within a day or two and wanted to say goodbye to Marjie, one of the assistant managers he had taken a liking to, but she wasn’t there that night, so he asked me to bid her farewell for him, which I had forgotten to do.

I congratulated him and wished him good luck before my cigarette was gone and I had to get back inside. I was happy for him, but seeing what age had done to him — and seemed to do to him rather abruptly, it seemed to me — also depressed me. In the dream, however, he seemed back to being the lively, smiling, spunky, good-natured fellow I had come to know and looked forward to seeing for so long. It was nice to see him like that for one last time, even if it was in the context of a dream.

And it was a nice gesture he made, too, as I really do need to get a new lighter.

Late for Break (2/23/21 Dream).

On break from work, I walk through a bad area in town in order to try to find a gas station. I thought I knew where it was, but its nowhere to be found, and the looks I’m getting from people in the area are making me feel nervous.

I walk out of that area as quickly as I can and roam around for too long, hoping to come upon some gas station, eventually making my way inside of a large building and onto a high floor. Inside, I end up talking to a girl, I think a red-headed girl, on the top of a long stairway or escalator. We strike up a conversation, but then manager Steve from work and someone else casually walk up to me, as if they’d tracked me down, and both the way they talk and their body language conveys that they’re not-so-subtley suggesting their power over me. They imply that I’m late for clocking in and it makes me feel guilty, which I feel is something they were aiming for, but I can’t help but suspect that for whatever reason they also just didn’t want me talking to the girl.

So I go back to work, having never found the gas station, only to find, upon clocking in, that I’m only five minutes late for my half-hour break. It seemed as though it had taken a lot longer, and Steve and whoever had been with him had acted that way, too.

Slave to the End.

One of the few benefits of working this bullshit fast food job is that you get to meet a wide diversity of people — that and you learn, out of necessity, how to let people go.

In the too-many years I’ve been here, the perpetually revolving door and rather high turnover has made me realize that few relationships last forever and as sad as it is, that’s okay. You have to adapt. You have to learn to let go. People say they’ll keep in contact, that they’ll visit, and sometimes they do for awhile, but they inevitably move on.

So I guess what’s apparently on its way isn’t that much different.

Donny, the maintenance man for the morning shift, is eighty years old, I learned the other day. Granted, I’m bad at judging age, but I never would have guessed he was that high up there. For the years that I’ve worked with him, he’s always been an active guy. He’s never said it outright, but it seems clear to me he wouldn’t still be working if his wife wasn’t so restless and determined to keep a job herself. He enjoys being at home, in his garage, engaged in woodworking, pursuing his creative talents. And he is indeed talented — he’s shown me several things he’s done, and they all look fantastic.

It was a few months back that he told us at work that he had gotten diagnosed with colon cancer. Rather than going the radioactive route, he elected surgery, and initially it seemed to be going well. He’s been back in the hospital now three times. They fucked up the surgery and now he’s lost a tremendous amount of weight and is in a good degree of pain. No one wants to state it outright, but the looks on everyone’s faces conveys the same, dire expectation.

It feels unjustified, cruel that he never really got to enjoy retirement. Granted, I’m talking as if the guy is already gone, and he’s not, and as much as I’d miss him working here, I hope to fuck that if he makes it through this he finally quits this shit hole and can truly enjoy the time he has left.

No one deserves to be a slave to the end.

Nobody’s Fault but Mine.

It is utterly irrational to blame your parents for who you are.

If you do blame your parents for all your suffering, all your trials and tribulations, all you have to do is extend your logic to its ultimate conclusion to see its inherent absurdity. After all, if they are to blame for who you are, then they were just as predestined to be who they are because of your grandparents, and your great-grandparents are to blame for who your grandparents became — and so on and so forth, all the way back to the first form of life, or even the circumstances that brought life to be, or all the way back to the Big Bang, or the quantum fluctuations that made nothing belch up something to begin with.

Alternately, we’re all ultimately responsible for who we are. We may not be able to control what happens to us, we may always have influences of varying intensities, but we always have a choice in how we respond and what we make of ourselves — and please understand that this is coming from someone who has made a cascade of shitty choices.

Even so, I believe in free choice. In free will and personal responsibility.

As far as I can see, for each and every one of us every moment presents a vast spectrum of potential choices ranging from the path of greatest resistance to the path of least resistence, and I think most of us lean toward the path of least resistance on default, chronically overestimating the amount of free will we put forth.

Not everyone starts out from the same point of departure, however, which is precisely why those who echo that whole “just pull yourself up by your bootstraps” bullshit instantly inspire me to punch them in the dick.

Or give them a cunt-punt. I mean, I’m not trying to be sexist here.

We may not be able to manifest the perfect external circumstances, but in the end, its up to us to manage our damage and pursue our passions, refine our talents, find or plow our own paths, or at the very least fashion our perceptions and alter our attitudes.

I still have that child in me that angrily points the finger here or there — anywhere but the self. He arises during intense emotional states, rears his angry little head in dreams. He is a poison in my veins.

He needs to learn. The inner child deserves a better outer adult.

Intellectually, I know the truth, and I need to start taking advantage of it. I need to take responsibility for who I am and invest more of my will in my external life.

Ultimately, I am free. In the end, I am responsible.

Anne at the Gathering (2/5/21 Dream).

During the early evening today, at the tail end of a wicked hangover, I lay down on my bed and finally got some sleep, during which I had a dream.

I’m inside what seems to be a massive building, making my way towards a huge room where people are assembling for what appears to be a gathering or party of sorts. While I don’t know why I was invited, I find that Anne, my exgirlfriend from years ago, is here, and that at least some of them are evidently her friends and family. Anne hardly acknowledges my existence, which has been a feature of her in my dreams since we stopped talking shortly after the breakup a decade and a half or so ago. Her daughter, Allie, and I speak a little, however, and she seems like a cool kid. I accidentally call her by my little niece’s name at one point, I remember, then laughed, shook my head and corrected myself. Given I last saw Allie when she was five years old, I’m not confident she remembers me — she gives me no indication that she does and I don’t feel its right for me to bring it up.

Despite having little to no contact with Anne, I appear to be getting along fine with friends and family members of hers, none of which I remember having met within the context of the dream, and none of whom exist in real life. We’re talking and eating and I’m amazed at how well I’m getting along. At some point, someone walks out of a closet door with a plastic Trump mask on, evidently in an attempt to scare me.

At some later point, there was what seemed to be a murder somewhere in the building, perhaps in the same room as the party, though I couldn’t get the details through the crowd outside the door in the hallway.

I recall trying to get my cell phone where some of us left them, in the party room just beyond the door, and mistakenly grabbing the wrong one, and at least for a time utterly unable to find my own. It was during this period of looking for my phone when I came upon one guy who I think I also saw at the party. I don’t know if he took my phone or I accidentally took his and tried to return it, but in my interaction with him — if you could call it that, as he wouldn’t look at me, his head always hanging down, and seemed reluctant to say anything to me — it became abundantly clear that he was determined to be a total asshole.

All of a sudden we’re both at the fast food joint where I work. There are managers at the fryers up front and I’m walking away from them, alongside the tables that separate me from the kitchen, where I’m taking something which I think is a small table with wheels. I see the asshole in the kitchen, his head down like before, cleaning the area around the backline fryers with a rag. I say something to him and he offers another response, or perhaps a lack of one, that pisses me off.

“I don’t like you much, man,” I tell him.

“Well, I don’t like you, either,” he needlessly informs me, never glancing up or turning around as he continues cleaning with the rag.

“What’s your problem?”

“My uncle died,” he says.

“I feel sorry for you, man,” I say to him, “but I didn’t do it.” I look up at the managers around then, and one of them communicates with mouthed words and hand signals that I should drop whatever I need to off in kitchen and then get out of there.

So I do, and then I wake up.

All She Was Convinced You Were Not (The Worst Kind of Asshole).

1/1/21

Today’s incident made me think of when I first met Anne, back when we were still young teenagers. My cousins (particularly Maddy), who lived some distance away, wanted to get together with me outside of the holidays, which was really the only time I ever saw them. They were planning on bringing me and their Taekwondo teacher, if I remember correctly, to a waterpark, but the teacher fell through at the last minute. Instead, they brought their neighbor, this interesting and hot girl with auburn hair. For some time that day, as we all meandered around the park, it seemed as if the girl hated me, but all of a sudden something clicked. All I remember is that by the end of the day, we were laughing and hanging on each other, truly enjoying each other’s company. I couldn’t get over how much I liked this girl.

It didn’t take me long to sense Maddy’s jealousy, however: the attention Anne and I were giving each other made her feel as though we had betrayed her in some way, though she seemed to blame Anne more than I. The vibe of the day changed drastically, and rather abruptly, and Maddy is not one to bottle up her emotions for long before the inevitable explosion. The end result was a very emotional end to our water park excursion, one that made me feel incredibly guilty. On the way home, Maddy and Anne talked it out in the car. There were tears and apologies.

Maddy then changed her tune entirely. She wanted to set me up with her, so there was more of her jealousy and my resulting pangs of guilt when she discovered that Anne and I were already two steps ahead of her. Anne and I had began exchanging letters through the mail, though I was pretty bad about writing back at the same frequency. We spoke on the phone, too, and then we decided to go on a date. We hung out at the house, mostly in my room, and climbed a tree together out in the woods. There was a lot of nervous gazing on my part, from what I remember. Then we went to go see a movie.

When Maddy called a short time thereafter, she did so to give me Anne’s review of our date. According to Maddy, Anne, to my surprise, had actually had a good time, and said I acted “like a gentleman.” It was apparently unheard of in Anne’s life that she would go with a boy into his bedroom and he didn’t jump on her the moment the door behind them was closed.

Despite this five-star review — or rather because of it, strangely enough — I was a mess inside. She seemed to interpret my good behavior as meaning that I was a good person, but I knew the truth: I wanted to make out with her and so on, I was just too damned anxious to make a move, too fucking worried that I might feel those emotions of violation from her. I had to wonder: if it weren’t for my anxiety, would she have seen me as the typical male asshole? And more importantly, perhaps: would that assessment have been accurate?

Granted, I am nervous and withdrawn, and I always have been, but that’s not my central issue when it comes to women. My greatest fear is saying something or making a move on the Her in Question that ends up making her feel uncomfortable, even violated, particularly in the sexual way. That’s the last thing I would ever want to do, as I’ve always said and to this day stand by, and if I ever did so, I don’t know that I’d be able to live with myself. I would be, not just feel like, the worst kind of asshole.

So there’s this girl at work. Legal, but young, and she’s a flirt. Always waving. Getting my attention and then grabbing her boobs or slapping her ass. Giving me the sign for a blowjob. Saying dirty things to me. Always asking for hugs. Pinching or slapping my ass. At one point, as I was cleaning dining room and she was on register, she was constantly saying dirty things, so I stuck my face between the two, large sneeze guards and said, “You’ve got to quit teasing me.”

“Or what?” She said, teasingly. I sighed in frustration and walked away.

Within the week, as I was giving her a hug, she said something dirty to me. It turned me on and I instinctively grabbed an area at her side, sort of at her back, along her pantline. It was all I could do to stop myself from grabbing her ass.

“If you’re going for my ass,” she said all too eagerly, clearly anticipating my intent, “you’ll have to go lower.”

It should be known — and this doesn’t make me look better, I realize, but in fact far, far fucking worse — I’m not at all attracted to the girl. The attention she was giving me, the way she was teasing me, however, seemed like an advertizement, an open invitation I kept declining. But its been a long fucking time since I’ve experienced anything beyond a hug in terms of physical contact with a girl, and she kept advertising, kept suggesting that open invitation.

This isn’t an excuse, let me be clear, but it is a reason.

All of this culminated today. Today, New Years Eve of 2020, a shithole of a year that I hope ends at midnight, bringing the bright, new dawn of a new and far better year — but I’m sure as fuck not holding my breath. As the ball drops, as the clock turns, I’ll instead be in my third-story, one-bedroom apartment holding a cigarette instead, sipping from my can of Labatt Ice, hitting my vape pen or hitting my bowl, perhaps as I’m still writing this shitty fucking blog post about my stupid, mindless, perverse and unforgivable fucking behavior.

Our fast food joint was going to close at nine instead of eleven in the evening. As detail maintenance man, I have specific duties on particular days throughout the week, and on Thursdays, my duties are to clean the dining room. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, lobby has been either open for a few hours or, as it stands now, entirely closed to the public. Only drive-thru, curbside orders, or doordasholes. In short, there’s not much to do in lobby. So I’ve been trying to help my coworkers out the best I can by sweeping, taking out trash, and doing dishes.

Trying to inspire empathy and teamwork — two things I deeply feel this society so very desperately needs, and now more than ever in my current lifetime — by means of leading by example.

So I was doing dishes. She, the girl in question, came back to the dish-room and stockroom to gather sauce packets to feed the chicken nugget purchasers. She asked me for help and I obliged. I wish I could remember what she said specifically, but I can’t remember, but she said it after she asked for a hug and I obliged. And in response, I grabbed her ass. I grabbed two cheeks with both hands. She giggled and said, “stop,” though playfully, and I stopped immedeately.

Partially during that and partially afterward I felt from her the feeling I loathe, the feeling that is utter horror to me: that feeling of discomfort, violation. Following was that definite sense of having done something wrong. i exited the situation and resumed doing dishes. I still felt wrong. Had I done wrong? She came up to me once, twice more, asking for help with respect to where she could find things in the stock room, and I obliged. I made no further moves.

After sensing that from her, though, I should have asked if it made her feel uncomfortable. Violated. But I did not. She seemed different afterward, and that should have prompted me. I don’t think that would have excused my behavior in my eyes, and by no means am I proclaiming it should have, but its nonetheless an impulse I should have acted upon — particularly given the former, utterly insipid impulse I acted upon.

She said nothing. I went on my half-hour break, smoked a cigarette, and decided to call my parents. I wanted to call them on break as I didn’t know if they’d be awake at midnight and I didn’t want to disturb their sleep if that happened to be the case. Amidst my phone call, I see manager Steve walking from the building toward my truck, which was parked out by the dumpsters. Once he saw I was on the phone, he said he would talk to me later. That aroused my curiosity — and in the pit of my stomach, some concern, though I don’t believe I was connecting the dots at that point.

So I came back, clocked in, and started gathering trash — but then stopped for a moment as I walked passed the office. I needed to transfer my eight bucks in quarters and two dollars to a ten dollar bill. I wanted to buy beer on my way home and not use the twenty I had and I hate being one of those assholes that stands at the counter of a convenience store like Circle-K (or a fast food reseraunt, for that matter) who tries to buy something with change that the already stressed-out cashier has to take her or his time to count, holding up a potential line of people behind him. Steve’s son, the closing manager, said he was more than willing to exchange my change and two bucks for me, so I made the pit stop. Steve was also in the office, so I took the time to ask him what he had wanted from me on break.

Then he said her name. The girl in question. He said she came up to him and he didn’t believe her, he said, because he knows how I am with girls.

Had what I not known full fucking well what was coming, I certainly would have asked him: “What do you mean, exactly, ‘how I am with girls’?”

The way he phrased it hurt, but essentially he said that she said that I touched her. That it made her feel uncomfortable. That she might have provoked it, though he didn’t use those exact words, but that she was afraid to confront me because she thought I might get angry at her.

What the fuck.

“I did it,” I told him.

He seemed to shrug it off and then immediately told me how she had come up and grabbed his son’s dick one day recently. It was like nothing to him, and I’m fucking dying inside. Drowning.

I tried to ignore, bury, all I was feeling. I asked Steve if it was okay if I could go talk with her, and he said fine, that he told her I’d probably do so. I left the office and shortly thereafter asked if Steve could cover for her, as they were busy up front and I didn’t want to fuck them over in the process. He was cool with it. As cool and casual as I could, I went up front and asked her if she’d come with me for a minute, that Steve would cover for her. I was shaking, walking in that manner I walk when I’m anxious, and she followed me to the back of the store, into the break room. As soon as we were both in that doorless booth of a breakroom, I turned to her.

“Look, I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable. Honestly, that’s the last thing I wanted to do, and I’m sorry. I will never do that again.”

This is, I confess, a summary. I said “I’m sorry” at least three times. At the end, I asked if she accepted my apology. She seemed surprised, sympathetic, almost perplexed by the intensity of my reaction, which in turn confused the ever-living fuck out of me.

“Its okay,” she said.”You’re good.”

My next question felt deeply important, and I needed to ask it. “Do you accept my apology?”

“Yes,” she said, and I believed her, but to he honest, that didn’t make it all better. She didn’t want to confront me about the incident out of fear of angering me, so how more fearful might she be when put on the spot about accepting my pathetic apology?

We parted ways. She went back up front, I went back to do dishes, were my mind ate me whole, breaking me down, digesting me via guilt.

Dishes, dishes, I told myself: fixate on cleaning dishes. My external focus fell on cleaning the dishes, but my internal focus was absorbed in emotions. There are times when you invest your conscious mind in defeating those automatic negative thoughts, and there are times when you find yourself siding with the inner demons who utter those self-flagelating whispers into your inner ear. I was siding with my inner demons, but then a contrary voice erupted. There’s always a contrary voice.

“Relax,” it told me. “Stop thinking you’re a bad person, a pervert: the worst, worst kind of asshole. You’re just too sensitive. You take shit too seriously. This isn’t a big deal.”

“But it is a big deal,” I said more than once to myself. “You violated. This is the worst of the worst.”

Since my issues with Effexor XR, namely the withdrawal symptoms I experienced when I ran out of money and consequently had to stop taking it, I’ve had periods where suicide has come to mind. Not to the point that I feel confident I would go through with it, mind you, but certainly more intense that I had ever felt beforehand. Its been awhile since that self-destructive impulse has hit me so strong, but my period at the sink was intense.

I tried to pace the cigarette smoking. I have been doing so, as its going to be tough making it to the paycheck unless that measly $600 stimulus check kicks in. But I kept needing to go out to smoke, to stare at something on the pavement outside, to stare into nothing as my inner eyes gazed, scrutinized myself for his epic fucking stupidity. Letting the inner torture me.

You are a shallow fuck. You did wrong. You are the worst of the worst.

Why, for a solitary moment, would you think that that kind of thing was all right; that doing That was okay? Have you learned nothing? Are you this goddamn naive?

So just: go.

Go home, celebrate the new year. Drink your drink, smoke your smoke, increase your longstanding practice, your perfected art of punishing yourself. Contemplate and write your heart out: it doesn’t change what you did. It doesn’t hide who, what you are.

You fucking pig.

And she told Steve, who is traditionally both a liar and a motor mouth. He’s got something real to chew and spew: you don’t think this will get around? You could loose your job.

You’re already in a state of financial fuckery, struggling to get by: imagine, just imagine you lose your job over this, which is conceivably possible if it gets to the store manager.

Suicide. Dead inside. Make it so the outer matches the inner.

You’re a piece of shit. So fuck suicide. That’s mercy, and you deserve pain.

Live on, wayward wanderer. Suffer on.

You’re not who Anne thought you were. You’re no goddamn saint, not by far. You are the worst kind of asshole.

All she was convinced you were not.

No Setup for a Potential Letdown.

I think it was last week sometime that they held a few interviews at work in the lobby. Two of the girls, who’s faces I never saw that day, registered as potentially attractive, and one almost looked like Kara. The other, taller and skinnier, looked appealing as well.

I came in at some point thereafter and saw a girl being trained on back booth. I,immedeately recognized her as the aforementioned taller and skinnier girl. As I was collecting trash just after clocking in, I said hello to her quite blatantly and directly as I also said hello to her trainer. She looked at me directly in the eyes. Attractive eyes. I warned myself not to get too excited, as for all I know she may not be age-appropriate. Until I saw her later, without the mask, I didn’t realize she was older — which is to say around my age, even older than me.

For awhile that day, being the pervert I am, I occasionally looked her way, studying her like a goddamned creeper. The pigtails were cute and she had this curious habit of placing one hand behind her back. She had a cute butt, too; the kind that plumps out and down and under a bit at the bottom of the bottom, as if chiseled in such a way that instinctively inspires the hand to grab it.

And no, I did not, would not, as I am not that bold. Even if I was, I am too aware that this post-#metoo culture is not at all forgiving in this area.

And it is, after all, not my booty. If it were, I would not have developed the habit of simply putting one hand behind my back, but positioning that hand lower, below the base of my spine, where it would grip my own cheeks as a default mode.

Yes, I have problems.

It was Christmas Eve, and we were busy as hell, and when I knew I had to go passed the area of the back drive-thru booth, were she was being trained, I made an effort to say something to her in the hopes that it would open the lines of communication between us.

“You picked a hell of a day to start working here,” is what I went with, and we exchanged some friendly words, so it appeared to have worked.

I then did whatever it was I had to do or got whatever it was that I needed and had to go passed that area again. In doing so, I inadvertently brushed against one of the women training her. This was an elderly, obsese woman who I don’t know too well, though we’ve exchanged friendly words and she’s spilled to me more than once. I felt bad about it, so was quick to apologize.

“Sorry if I brushed passed you,” I said.

“That’s okay, I liked it,” she responded in what I took to be an only half-joking manner.

“All right,” I said in intentionally-exaggerated enthusiasm as I exited the area, “now we’re talkin’.” Laughter from her and the rest ensued.

For the rest of the day, there was murmerung, glances in my direction when I went by back booth. I felt the vibe of attention. Something secret, covert. Good, bad: I couldn’t tell. When I looked to see if anyone was looking at me from that area or attempted to subject the new girl to further analysis, I always found the big lady looking my way.

My sudden fear, from out of nowhere, was that the big lady took that as me flirting with her, that maybe I had misread the situation and had sent her the wrong signals given what I said. As a consequence, I avoided that area until I realized I was avoiding it out of fear of being awkward, which was itself making me feel awkward, so I faced that fear by deliberately walking passed them again — this time, making certain there was a clear, unobstructed path of entry and exit.

Sometime thereafter, I snuck out the back door in the stock room, crouched down against the wall, and lit a cigarette. In the process, I saw the side door to lobby open and the new girl step out. I didn’t want to overdo it by calling her out or approaching her, and anyway, I was feeling rather anxious at the moment. Best to avoid looking in that direction and pretend I didn’t notice her.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her approaching my direction, and she said hey. Her mask was around her chin, but I can’t remember if she was smoking. In any case, I stood up and we began talking.

In the midst of our conversation, I learned that she has kids and had formerly worked at Gabes. She had to quit when her and her boyfriend didn’t work out, so she moved back in with her brother in town and picked up the job here. She had worked here before, she told me — 2016, she thinks — but she can’t remember how she left, which is to say if she put in her two weeks or walked out. At least, that was the story she was going with, but I sensed that she did indeed remember, and she knows she had walked out. Admitting that may gave prevented her from getting hired, that’s all. In the effort to make her feel better, assuming I was right, I told her I had essentially walked out of every job I’d ever had before managing to stay at this place for over a decade and a half.

At end of night, she came up to me and said she thought she remembered me from last time she worked here. She explained she had worked mornings doing prep, clearly trying to trigger some recollection, and I felt bad that I didn’t remember her. She seemed very happy, almost excited to be talking with me, and made some references to things that she said she’d tell me about some other time.

Maybe that vibe I’d felt earlier on in the day wasn’t from the big lady after all.

Even so, I’m not jumping to conclusions here. For some reason, people seem to enjoy talking to me, trusting me with things they have told few others, perhaps no one else at all — and this has happened with total strangers, too. I used to joke that I was a walking confessional with a pulse. People also tend to remember me when I can’t recall meeting them at all, despite having been told more than once that I have a fairly good memory. So I’m well aware that just because an attractive girl remembers me and likes talking with me does not mean she has any sexual or romantic interest in me.

Even if she does, I don’t know the girl yet. Maybe I’ll find I’m not interested in her, or that she’s not interested in me. So there’s no certainty here, just like everywhere else in my life. And I have no interest in setting myself up for another epic letdown.

Highs & Lows of an Isolationist Bastard.

I have had an extremely low people tolerance since as far back as I can remember, and I’ve always felt guilty about it. It doesn’t matter who the people in question are, either; if I’m around anyone long enough, I begin to feel drained. Not only that, but I feel a sensation akin to someone who is claustrophobic being pushed impossibly hard into a corner. The pressure is unbearable; the sense of discomfort, relentless. It’s like my soul is being crushed, like I’m suffocating, and if I don’t run away to the freedom of silence and solitude I might lose myself.

I need to reserve space and time when and where there is no need to attend to the needs of others or serve the interests of a person or a place I’m employed at. I need to be left alone in an environment that I control. An environment that is mine.

This is how I recharge my social batteries.

I’ve always been rather nocturnal, too, enjoying the alone time that comes when darkness falls. Before I began engaging in what I call “active insomnia” in my teens, where I would get up and do things until exhaustion hit, I was constantly a practitioner of “passive insomnia.” Though in bed with the lights off, with eyes open or closed, I was awake, thinking or daydreaming as a kid until I tired myself out. In my teens and twenties, I’d have the lights on and I’d read a book, watch a movie, write, engage in artwork, or just stare into space and think, think, think without interruption or distraction. Often I’d listen to some music, look at myself in the mirror, and lip sync, pretending I was the lead singer in a band.

Now? Now I either drink and smoke pot or vegitate before YouTube or Netflix. I used to be so much more productive in my solitude and I enjoyed it so much more. Of course, I was consistently thoroughly caffeinated, too, which probably, at least in part, explains that increased productivity.

In any case, this people-tolerance means that after an average work shift, I’m pretty much done with people. It sucks that I’ll refuse to hang out with friends I truly value or cancel plans I naively made with friends because, when the time comes, it turns out that I’d been around people in general too much and simply couldn’t take it anymore. And I know how impossible it is to get my frkends to understand this about me and to not take it personally. And I know it sounds like a lame excuse, but I honestly feel as though this is simply how I am, how I’m wired, and there’s not much I can do about it.

I’m introverted. I’m hypersensitive as hell. This is simply how I operate.

When I’ve tried to battle against this and hang out with friends anyway, I’ve been irritable, angry, downright ragey — that, or I just shut down, withdraw, inevitably leaving early or pressuring whoever took me there to take me the fuck home. On weekends, I’m always reluctant to go out as well, as I won’t have an opportunity to be alone for such a wonderful stretch of time for another week.

This has irritated friends, ruined friendships, and has certainly played a role in fucking up the rare intimate relations I might have with a girl. Anne understood this about me, anticipated and accepted when I wished to be alone, but I could feel it bothered her, and that made me feel guilty as fuck. It wasn’t her fault, of course; she was just doing her best to make us work. When she tossed around the idea of eventually moving in together, she said she knew we’d have to have a room or place I could have all too myself. Perhaps yet another reason I should have fought to hold onto her.

Any long-term, live-in relationship would require me having a study. That’s right: a study. Fuck the “man cave” bullshit.

I often wonder if I could ever make a true relationship work, being how I am, who I am, particularly given how long its been since I’ve actually tried. I’ve tried to write off the possibility entirely, but dreams and the unprompted meanderings of my waking mind seem persistent that the desire for intimacy with a woman is there, that its something I need, whether I like it or not.

Is it just my nature to constantly wage war with myself, are these extreme contradictions within me as immortal as they are persistent in their nagging, or could these opposing forces within me actually be reconciled?

Perils of Snowses.

On my way to work, it was about 50 degrees outside with heavy cloud cover, but there was good visibility, good road conditions. On my way home? It was in the mid-20s with relentless flurries of sky dandruf obscuring my vision as I treaded home along a long, dark stretch of road coated with a thick layer of slush and snow.

Fucking Ohio.

A white Christmas? Didn’t ask for it, didn’t want it. Anyway, that’s kind of Christmas-racist. A Winter wonderland? Nay, you snow-loving knaves, ’tis a frosty hellscape.

Despite driving in a truck with four-wheel drive, I didn’t exceed thirty miles an hour all the way home, trying to focus on the road and to keep breathing deeply and slowly in the attempt to keep the anxiety attack creeping up inside of me at bay. As is typical, I was also involuntarily thrust into the role of Snowses — a knock-off Moses of the slushy tundra, leading all the cars behind him all the not-at-all-merry way.

In the past, it has come down so hard that the snow was hypnotizing, akin to how it looked out the window of the Millinium Falcon when Han Solo made the jump to light speed in Star Wars. Even when I could see through the chaotic and entrancing mess of flakey white shit, the snow coated the ground so thick I couldn’t tell where the road ended and the land began — particularly given there were no tracks in front of me. I was plowing the path for those lined up behind me.

This time, at the very least, it wasn’t that extreme.

I was so focused on the road, so fixated on driving with extreme caution, however, that I didn’t even notice passing the two major roads that typically serve as signposts for my progress on my way home. Time seemed to disappear. When I saw myself approaching the bridge I drive under shortly before arriving home, I was honestly amazed.

When I finally got into my third-story, one-bedroon apartment, closed the door behind me, locked and bolted it, took of my shoes and grabbed a beer from the six pack I bought, I sat down and let myself exhale a profound sigh of relief. Like, yay. I didn’t die and stuff. Its Christmas Eve and I’m off for two days for the first time in two or three weeks.

And while it saddens me that I won’t see my family this year, at least I didn’t have to drive all the way to my parents house tonight. The distance between work and the apartment generated anxiety that exhausted me enough.

As was the case with Thanksgiving, my family is social distancing this year due to the virus that the majority, at least in my country of birth and current residence, don’t seem to be taking seriously enough and some epic dingbats continue to believe is as benign as the flu, or even a hoax. I’m not naming names — like, for instance, the name of a narcissistic douchebag that still thinks he’s going to serve a second term as the supposed leader of the allegedly free world — but I assure you, fine reader, such ignorant, unempathic, self-serving and delusional fuckfaces most certainly exist.

In any case, my parents are making food and generously bringing it to my two sisters and I, but given the weather, I won’t be seeing them until Saturday. I miss them and my sisters terribly, and I feel like dog shit that I haven’t bought any gifts or cards due to lack of money — despite my overtime.

I thought I’d be in the clear after this check, but I have increased insurance for the truck, I have to pay my phone bill, I have to pay my rent (since a new company took over my apartment complex and we no longer have the ten-day grace period we used to have, starting this fucking month) and I have a delinquent cable bill of two hundred bucks or so that I can’t pay with this check, either, because, well, rent and food and phone and insurance and gas to get to work to make more money that will vanish the moment I get it is higher on the hierarchy of importance.

Of course, I also just bought beer and cigarettes on my way home, but I need to try to enjoy my life to some degree lest I go utterly mad, and enjoyment has been a depleting element in my life as of late. Does this make Snowses a piece of shit?

This may indeed make Snowses a piece of shit.

In any case, he wishes the readers — or reader, or the nonexistent audience — a happy holiday, a happy zombie Jesus day, a happy whatever, nonetheless.