How Did He Do It?

I don’t know how he did it.

My father’s retired now, but he worked at a factory up until around 88, when we moved from the suburbs to a more rural area where my parents still live. That’s when he became a postal worker. Even when we were at the first house, he was always taking overtime, trying to make life better for his wife and three kids. He didn’t really like the job, and you could tell.

At the second house, I often remember him coming home, greeting us all, and then going upstairs to take a shower. He would often be up there for awhile, so on occasion I’d go check on him. I almost always found him, still in uniform, laying on his back on the made bed, having fallen asleep. He was always so goddamned exhausted.

I’m sure he wasn’t entirely thrilled working at the factory, either.

Despite this, mom always gave him shit. He was working too much, she said. He needed to spend more time with the kids, she said. Even then, I felt defensive regarding him. He was doing the best he could, giving it all he had, pushing himself to provide for us, and then he came home to a wife that tried to instill guilt in him over it. It infuriated me.

I work an hour or two overtime, I pick up an extra day at my shit job, and I feel miserable and raped of my free time, my freedom in general — yet I get to come home to a quiet, third-story, one-bedroom apartment where I live alone, no one there to nag me or kick me when I’m down, no one to guilt trip me — and still I find myself utterly loathing society and hating my life. I find myself needing to be alone, isolated from the world, to engage in my true passions.

So how the fuck did he do it?

The mindless minutae, the meaningless patterns, the mind-numbing redundancy: how did he survive psychologically all those years, all the way to retirement?

Poverty & a Big, Fat, Humbug.

“So you call this your free country. Tell me why it costs so much to live…”
— Duck and Run, Three Doors Down.

In fast food and other such shit jobs, you don’t necessarily get paid vacations, sick days or personal days. On top of that, you often have to work holidays. No extra pay, either. Yes, to be fair, you occasionally get holidays off, like perhaps Thanksgiving and Christmas, as is the case in the grease-laminated fat factory I have been employed at for over a decade and a half. When you get that holiday off, however, it isn’t paid, and you don’t get anything like a Christmas bonus, either. Which means instead of getting extra cash to invest in gifts so you can respect our stupid, consumeristic traditions and buy family and friends gufts, you lose a day of pay and get further behind on rent, bills, gas and food than you were before.

Not to mention the drugs you need to purchase in order to maintain your sanity in the rat race, hamster wheel, shit-show we call modern society. My choice is just weed, but whatever floats your boat.

I have 20 dollars in my bank account at present. And I think I have 40 left on my Wal-Mart gift card. I had to borrow a hundred bucks from Gus, who had kept telling me that he’d lend me money if I ever needed it. I tried my damnedest not to ask anyone, but I need gas. Food. Cigarettes.

My next check is due December 25th. Until then, I can’t even afford Christmas cards. This despite the additional hours I’ve managed to pick up throughout the workweek and having worked a sixth day the last two weeks. Between rent, gas, bills, groceries and cigarettes, my last check went rather quickly.

I need a side hustle. Maybe get a PayPal account, buy these blogs of mine already, whore myself out, and put up some ads — once I figure out how all that works. Maybe find some of my best artwork and try to sell shirts online, too, all so I can at least make a little money off of doing shit I’m actually passionate about.

And, yeah, keep looking for a better job I’m at least reasonably confident I can handle.

Bah humbug and shit.

Of the Dangerous Duet of Thumper & Pumper.

12/14/20

Shortly after awakening, the scene replayed in my mind vividly, insanely vividly, but I was still groggy. I at first assumed it was a dream, though it soon dawned on me that, no, this was a memory of something that had actually happened, and it had happened yesterday at work.

It was the end of the night and I was up front, having a brief exchange with Anthony, a guy who started maybe two, three weeks ago. He’s a broad-shouldered machinist, maybe it his late twenties, who works with us only part time. He has a young son he sees weekly, I believe, and he currently lives with his parents. I find him to be an incredibly likable guy, typically upbeat, kind, and reasonably social. He’s also forged a bond with Paula, a sixteen-year-old that works with us, as well as Gillian, an 18-year-old girl who started about a week ago that has been referring to both him and I as “daddy.”

I forget why exactly I referred to myself as “a dirty old man” in his presence, but as soon as I said that, his floodgates opened.

Out of nowhere, he confessed to having feelings for Paula, who also has feelings for him, too, he said, despite her having a boyfriend and being underage. As I cringed inside, I told him I had put that one together myself. He drives her home, hangs out with her, spends money on her — shit I feel she wanted me to engage in months back, though I thought that to be an epically bad idea, given our age difference. I also suspect that some part of her delights in manipulating men simply so they do things for her, which is precisely why I started putting my foot down with respect to letting her bum cigarettes and letting her take hits off my vape pen.

I will not be controlled, goddamn it.

He also confessed that Gillian had been sending him boob pics and so on since he flirted with her that one day — though I seem to remember him mentioning to someone else how he had sent her a dick pic that day as well, which seems to go beyond casual flirting, despite his failure to mention it in this context. I mean, to me that sounds more like a blatant advertisement, one that nonverbally announced his intent and desire, so it would seem he was literally asking for it.

Gillian had also been telling him how she always wanted a kid, which he openly declared was a red flag as he went on to tell me he needed to stop thinking with his dick.

I concur.

Unlike the case with Gillian, he feels connected to Paula, he tells me. He’s had a lot of girlfriends and he’s never introduced his son to any of them. I didn’t immediately get the connection, but he seemed to feel bad about this for some reason, so I quickly did my best to assure him that this was, in fact, a sign that he was being a responsible parent.

He wasn’t finished, though. He then added that he did introduce his son to Paula, however — clearly his way of conveying to me how much she meant to him.

Again, I like this guy, but he needs to be careful. The age issue between him and Paula is by no means a minor one (pun not intended, believe it or not), and thinking solely with his evidently photogenic Johnson is certainly not to be recommended.

Its not just him and her and her, either. To the contrary, every time I see the struggles and complications people deal with, the webs they get wound in when it comes to sex and relationships, I begin to remember why I’m an isolationist bachelor that keeps people at an arm’s distance at best.

I get lonely. I’d like to feel that connection with a woman again, to trust someone, to realize in the midst of fucking her that no matter how hard, how aggressively I thrust, I could never get as close to her as I yearned for.

But then I remember how shit ended. How it always ends. How all is transient. How the nature of the universe is entropy. How the only constant is change, and of all things, the experience of that kind of joy, connection, trust, and meaning has been most fleeting. And how in the end it seems as if the universe tricked you into trusting someone enough to let them lift you up from the muck and the bottom of life and help you ascend to the skies — just so that it could drop you. Just so it could abandon you to gravity, cast you towards impact, and reinforce those negative, pessimistic, cynical, fatalistic, perhaps nihilistic notions regarding existence, thereby justifying your act of staying close to the ground, swimming through the muck.

The lesson?

Allow yourself to be vulnerable and the best you can ask for is that you’ll be stabbed from the front.

Though most frequently I have been the one to end things, in which the lesson would be:

Believe you have the courage to make it work only to find yourself giving up and walking away a short time later, as if some part of you was determined to fuck things up all along.

I took at him and them. I look back. I look around and within and I tell myself that its not worth the effort. Even aside from the particularly dangerous elements in his specific circumstance, the cost is too much. Perhaps I should cast this lingering dream aside altogether, aspire to be a self-sufficient monad without all this perpetual second-guessing. Yet I still find myself looking for The Girl — in girls I’ve pushed away and passed by in my life, girls around me, girls I may have yet to meet.

I keep looking like I expect to find someone, but maybe this is just a stupid game instinct tricks us into playing.

Listening to your heart may be no more wise than listening to your dick. And being hypnotized by the duet may be the most foolish path of all.

Return of the Thanksgiving Curse.

At some point in my twenties, I came to detest Christmas, but it was never really a Grinch or Scrooge mentality. For one thing, I always have barely enough money to scrape through myself; I simply couldn’t afford gifts. Even when I could, I never knew what to get anyone. I also hate driving, particularly in the ice and snow, and that anxiety was always amplified due to consistent car issues.

The last three years, Thankgiving has come in at a close second with respect to my most dreaded of holidays. And again, it’s not because of family — I love my family. Its not because I’m opposed to delicious food, either, I assure you. Its just that for the last three fucking years now I have come to have car issues.

The first Thanksgiving, the engine in my car seized the day prior. The second Thanksgiving, I was preparing to leave my apartment for my parents house when I noticed something hanging beneath my car. It turned out to be my exhaust pipe. The night prior, some asshole had sawed off my catalytic converter.

That brings us to this year.

Sometime last week I was driving home from work in the truck more or less gifted to me by my parents a month or two back when I heard a screech or squeal. The smell of burning rubber then filled the car. I tried not to freak out. A few days later, it did it again. I tried to pop the hood the next day, but couldn’t find the lever to open it, so I drive to work. At work, I finally got it open and saw that a belt had snapped, which was better than the diagnosis my friend Jerry had given the issue as I described it to him — a failing wheel bearing.

Jerry took a look at it and recommended that I didn’t drive it home. My plan became to leave the truck at work, get someone to take me home, and then get someone to pick me up early Wednesday so I could drive the truck a short distance to a shop, where hopefully it would get done by the time I started work at 3:00. I got a ride home and secured a ride for the following day, which is today. My hopes were that my direct despoit would go through by today, assuming they were going to give us our money early. They did not. And my ride to work fell through, I couldn’t find another, and so I had to call off two hours before my shift lest I get written up.

Given the holidays and weekend, the shop won’t be open until Monday. So now I have to get a ride to and from work on Sunday and a ride to work, at the very least, on Monday. And go without a vehicle for five fucking days.

Quaranteen of a different kind, I guess.

I spent some time today setting up an Indeed account and looking at potential jobs closer to my house and better paying. I need to get on with this. I’ve been broke as shit. I was looking forward to using this check to buy more groceries and maybe getting a descent cushion of cash in my bank account again so that I’m not just barely living from paycheck to paycheck. That may be shot to hell now, and the fact that I had to go home early last night because it was the only ride I could find, that I had to call off today, and that we get our typical, unpaid holiday off tomorrow… none of that is going to help.

And who knows how much this might cost? I hope its just the belt, but who knows? I’ve learned not to assume the best.

As for Thanksgiving, we’re practicing social distancing this year. My parents are cooking up the food and driving it out to my sisters and I. So at least I don’t have to ask my parents to come pick me up three Thanksgivings in a row.

The cup’s not half full, clearly, but its not entirely empty, either, and I’m doing my very best to focus on the puddle thinly coating the bottom of the glass here.

And, of course, do my best to ignore the fact that its piss.

Disappointed.

“I. Am. Very disappointed.”
— Zorg, The Fifth Element.

It was Tuesday.

Back by the dish sink, a young manager and I were briefly discussing the spike in Covid cases when he tells me, with confidence, that he thinks the real problem is that there’s “too much testing.” That stopped me in my tracks. I looked at him to make sure he was serious, and he was.

“Do me a favor,” I said to him as calmly as I could. “Stop what you’re doing and think about what you just said for a moment.”

Just then others came to the sink area, interrupting our exchange.

Then, right before I clock out for the night, a few of us are in a discussion about Covid again and one of the managers informs me that the new girl standing right beside him, who I had taken to be a rather intelligent girl, thinks the whole thing is a hoax. I look at her. “Really?” And she just shrugs, confirming the allegation with some obvious embarrassment.

I exit stage left abruptly, telling everyone I would see them tomorrow.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: so much of what I detest about religion has come to infect politics as well. Unquestioning devotion to narcissistic leaders, for instance, and blind, uncritical faith in what they say. And while Trump is merely a symptom, a manifestation of an underlying disease in our global culture that will not be going away, his, specifically his general, narcissistic philosophy and dumbfuck ideas are beginning to be adopted even by those who aren’t necessarily members of his cult. Things such as:

– Anything I don’t believe in is a hoax.
– Any game I don’t win is rigged.
– Anyone with loyalty to reason and democracy rather than loyalty to me must be banished.
– Its always somebody else’s fault.
– Truth is born by saying a lie often enough, loud enough, and with enough confidence that others jump on your bamdwagon of bullshit.
– The real way to defeat this pandemic until we have a vaccine isn’t social isolation, mask-wearing, and quarantine, but to simply stop testing, because if we stop testing people for coronavirus, the number of cases will go down.

Years ago, I lived with a girl named Rena, who told me more than once that when she did something she thought would inspire her father’s anger, he tended to claim otherwise.

“I’m not angry,” he would say to her, “I’m just disappointed.”

And that hit her so much harder, the stinger went deeper and stung more than anything.

Shit like what I heard yesterday from my two coworkers makes me understand her father’s perspective, though. I don’t hate them, I’m not even angry at them, really, its just that I had hoped that they would think for themselves and reason it all out in their own minds, not follow the spray-tan so-called leader of the supposed free world.

So, yeah, I’m fucking disappointed.

North Node in Virgo in the Eleventh House.

I’ve always daydreamed. My mother explained me as one of those kids always bored in class, staring out the window, lost in my own world, and age has not led me to shed that tendency in the least. Even now, I spend a good percentage of my day invested in that which is going on inside my own mind, playing back moments that have occurred, running potential future scenarios, engaging in imagined interactions, or engaging in internal monologues and dialogues as I try to understand a concept, take a different angle on something, or flesh out my own ideas.

The visual arts and writing have been my core passions, my defaults and go-tos, and they both have provided for me a means of catharsis and internal alchemy. And yes, as with daydreaming, they serve as an escape.

I must say, however, that I find it suspicious that daydreaming, much like drug use, is often perceived as an escape. After all, any escapism suggests there is something to escape from — mundane reality, I presume — and to my ear, that only seems to frame mundane reality as a sort of prison, the body our personal cell. And if that’s the case, could one honesty blame anyone for taking advantage of escape routes and jailbreaks?

Is this a novel adaptation, or is it maladaptive? I can never be sure, though I do suspect that regardless as to the nature of this tendency, its just the way I am. I don’t need to bury or overcome this tendency, I’ve come to believe, I merely need to find some practical way that I can apply it in such a way that it serves to support me in life — financially and otherwise.

I have consistently failed at this endeavor. I need to blend my artistic tendencies with the practical, and I wish astrology didn’t resonate with these facts, but they do. Does that mean anything? The rational, skeptical side of me is eager, itching for that to not mean a goddamn thing, but in looking at my natal chart, I feel myself conceding…

Perhaps it was the approaching and passing of my birthday on November 12th, the shit that has gone down in my life this year and my burning desire to get my shit in order. In any case, I feel like I know what I have to shoot for, I’ve got the bullets and the gun, but im,far too ignorant to load it and use it correctly, much less hit in so much as the proximity of the target.

To the contrary, I feel myself falling backward.

It just feels that as of late I’ve been getting sucked into my head again like a scared turtle, reluctant to poke my head out of my shell, almost resentful of the external world and its constant demand for my attention. I realized it yesterday once or twice while talking to someone at work: I felt cornered and sensed myself instinctively pulling away, running away, despite the fact that my feet remained in place.

I’ve passed up so many opportunities out of fear and frustration — romantically, creatively, and so on — what are the odds that I’ll get my shit together and truly evolve before I die?

Its getting painful, holding my breath.

I wish I was confident I could pull out of this, to find a way to advance, evolve — but at my age? 42? What are the goddamn chances?

Crisis, Averted (Hopefully a Good Omen).

On November 3rd, 2020, I awoke with a song by Alter Bridge in my head. I hadn’t listened to it the night before as I was drunk and high, so naturally I wondered why my mind had selected it to be the soundtrack to my morning and, as it turned out, to my entire damn day.

This had happened before, mind you. Back in the early oughts, they were typically songs from the 70s. Free Will by Rush I remember specifically. I didn’t know which song this was, though, so I searched the lyrics. Initially, I thought it was Come to Life, but that was only after reading the lyrics — after listening to it, it was clear this wasn’t the melody. I eventually found it, though. The song is entitled, Metalingus, and I remembered having listened to it days ago — initially engaged, but ultimately turned off to the lyrics given what I interpreted to be religious overtones. In any case, it was the chorus playing in my head upon awakening:

On this day,
I see clearly
everything has come to life.

A bitter place
and a broken dream
and we’ll leave it all,
leave it all behind.

After I listened to the lyrics, I sincerely hoped this was some premonition regarding the election delivered to me by some precognative aspect of my unconscious.

I awoke that morning with a sense of determination, too. With a plan. One that went beyond my typical, mundane aims of: get to work, get through work, get home.

Relatively-speaking, I’ve had a productive last few days. I got my vehicle registration renewed, got the title taken care of, switched the plates from the Cursed Car to the truck essentially and graciously gifted to me by my all-too-awesome parental units, and that morning I would finally switch my insurance over as well — just after I voted.

I had been kind of beating myself up inside over not having taken advantage of the mail-in ballots and early voting, so I had to make sure I got my ass in gear early enough before work. Amazingly, I did. I walked down to The First Church of God, wondering on my way whether there was ever a church called The Second Church of God, and upon my arrival I was pleased to find that my atheist self did not burst into flames upon walking through the door. Given all the early voting, there was no line to speak of, either — I was in and out.

For a short period, the fact that I voted, that I did my part, no matter how pathetic and miniscule, was enough — and this despite the fact that I’ve embraced pessimism with respect to the election. I have, in other words, let myself become rather confident that the coppertone shit-stain that has been the bane of my existence for the last four years would get yet another term: sad as it is, that is where my faith in my fellow American has left me. I justified my pessimism with the logic inherent in the pessimistic philosophy once explained to me by a wise man, a man I shall call Channing, back in high school.

Pessimism, as he explained it, is a sort of win-win situation: ultimately you either find some form of joy in being right about your pessimistic predictions (which you must admit, is something) or you’re pleasantly surprised.

I really, really want to be pleasantly surprised.

It was around six or seven that data regarding the election started coming in through Google, and I kept checking it at least every half hour through my phone like a maniac. Though I’m not the biggest fan of Biden (Andrew Yang was my man), he is infinitely more preferable than the authoritarian, narcissistic twat allergic to truth, and I’m not confident I can take four more fucking years of this. You can’t imagine how bloody much I detest adopting this “lesser of two evils” mentality, but until I’m given better choices, this is the goddamned game I’m forced to play. If I must vote against rather than vote for, so be it. For as much as I respect the late George Carlin, I cannot adopt his approach toward voting — which is not to vote. It may not make that much of a difference, or even a difference at all, but — and this is the point, this is key — it COULD to some small yet nonetheless significant degree, and on top of that, it doesn’t hurt.

Only the results of the election can do that.

Looking at the numbers before all the votes are in, though, listening to these jackasses of the media spout predictions like they can fortell the future, its just a good way to conjure up anxiety and depression or fill yourself up to the brim with false hope so that when the dismal results of reality are finally provided the anxiety and depression are exacerbated, volume cranked to the max.

As with my predilection for spicy foods, I can’t help but wonder if looking at the numbers before all the votes are counted in tandem with listening to these dipshits pull projections out of their asses constitutes some form of masochism. I also wonder if scrolling through Facebook, particularly in times like these, also constitutes a form of masochism. Its like watching a cultural decline one meme, one post at a time. Though I value the diversity on my friend’s list, I find myself longing for the days in which, though we might have stark differences in our opinions, it at least seemed like we all agreed on the same, fundamental reality, and the general notion that an objective truth exists.

Make America Sane Again.

I needed to stop by Circle K on the way home for a carton of Red Traffic 100s, and I had already decided to buy a three-pack of 24 ounce cans of Labatt Ice and some chips as well. Whether it was for a celebration or for the wake of hope, I did not know. I still do not know, yet I perpetually take breaks from writing this to check the results on Google, because: masochism.

So anyway, I got my shit and began driving down that long, dark road between work and home. Briefly, I found my attention fixing on a morbid scenario blossoming in my pessimistic mind: finally, tonight, after the truck was officially mine, the day that all the paperwork was done and the thing was insured, I would drive home and something bad would happen.

That rhythmic vibrating noise — though more of a sensation than a noise — which I had been feeling and hearing since the day my father initially lent it to me, and which he had not heard when he drove it during my parents’ last visit to see me a week or two ago, would prove to be a sign of an issue of legitimate concern and my tire would fly off or something. Or a car would hit me. Or I would hit a car. Or I would collide with a goddamned deer. Something horrible that would reinforce if not confirm my fear that it was not my former car that was cursed so much as its driver.

As I drove, I cursed at the drivers that blinded me with their brights, or those blue lights some vehicles have that are technically dims but are nonethless a real, physical pain for me to see coming soaring towards me from the other side of the road.

At some point, probably about half the way home, there’s another driver. His dims are on. He seems to he slowing down. Curious. My eyes instictively swerve towards the car lights for a moment before the silhoutlette just in front of me on the road gains some clarity.

Oh. That’s why he slowed. Ah-fucking-ha! A deer. A dumbstruck, wide-eyed, stupid fucking deer. The hooved, coat-rack-headed dipshits of the forest and the roads that slice through them.

Even before I moved back to that college town for the last time, I began driving down there to drink and ultimately bar-hop with some friends of mine. Though I was less engaged with it than most of my friends, we often played billiards, and I became fascinated with this particular state of mind that could be achieved in the midst of playing the game. You had to drink enough, it seemed, but not too much. In any case, you could achieve this zone, this headspace, where you didn’t only make the shot, but you knew you would. It was born of some cocktail of confidence and determination.

You would suceed. There was simply no other option.

It was free will comandeering fate, choice dominating destiny and making it his little blessed bitch: this had to happen, would happen, I would make it happen, damn it, for there was no other choice. No alternative outcome was conceivable. And you would make shot after shot.

And I slammed on my breaks. Heard the squeal of tires against blacktop. I veered into the oncoming lane, the stopped car’s lights burning my eyes for a moment before I swerved back, around the dumb deer that, less than halfway through my swerve, manages to frolic off into the woods to my right.

I got back in my lane and continued driving as usual.

I wasn’t shaking. Never once felt the surge of adrenaline. Didn’t stop or break a sweat or pull out a smoke and light it in the feeble attempts to calm my nerves. Not even as the potential alternate outcomes of that circumstance played out in my mind — though I did have brief periods where I winced in the face of them.

Had I not sweved, or even if I had swerved but the deer had not promptly departed in the right direction, I could have hit the deer. As I swerved, I could have hit the car.

Right now, I thought to myself, as I’m driving all too calmly in an intact truck on my way to the comfort of my third-floor, one-bedroom, bachelor abode, some Other Me in an alternate universe could be in a world of shit. Repairs he can’t afford. Again. Begrudgingly and shamefully relying upon others — or likely just fucked — again.

So close. And yet somehow the potential disaster was averted.

I felt especially lucky the following morning. I went on Facebook and discovered that both my brother-in-law and the son of a woman I went to high school with had both hit deer the previous evening.

I hope my dodging of the deer bullet serves as an omen for the ultimate election results: potential catastrophe, averted.

I just can’t, can’t fucking take another four years of this.

Of the Godless & the Theological Salesman.

10/18/17

Before I get so much as a hit off my cigarette some guy in a nearby car catches me in his ocular tractor beams. I’m just not in the mood, but it’s too late to pretend I didn’t see him. As he continued to engage me in polite conversation, I feel bad for suspecting that he’s either going to ask me for a cigarette or try and sell me something.

In the midst of our talk he motions me over to his window. He doesn’t have the vibe of some maniac about to pull a gun on me or some pervert about to whip out the pistol that came with the corporeal package, so to speak, so I feel comfortable enough to approach him. As soon as I saw the pamphlet in his hands I knew I was about to be Jesused.

Damn it.

I hold up my hands politely, shaking my head at the same time, but I don’t back up as if he’s some threat. I tell him I appreciate it, but no thanks. Not my thing. He of course looks hurt, as the theological salesmen often does when confronted with the godless.

You have to have faith in something, he says. Some higher power must have put this all together, he says.

Nope. Not at all, I think to myself. I explain to him as kindly as I can that I see no evidence for a creator being. And he goes on to explain to me why there is one.

Because: The Bible.

In a matter of fact way, he tells me how dinosaurs and man lived side by side. How the earth is only six thousand years old. How he thinks (and I quote) “Hell is the sun.”

A little atheistic asshole in my head is chattering away mockingly, the bitter homunculus tearing him apart with a thousand angles of logic, but I muffle it before it escapes my mouth.

I mean, he’s not a dick. He thinks he’s doing the right thing.

He tries to tell me how nice the church community is, how they help one another, “teach” kids about sex and drugs. How he gives the church ten percent of every paycheck. How the Bible is the word of (his) god, all the contradictions were because man actually penned it, and how scientists are just myth-makers out to make money.

Look, man: we did indeed evolve from apes. Flintstones is not an accurate depiction of our history. The sun isn’t hell, just one of many stars, and without them life as we know it could not exist. And the universe? Current estimations place it closer to 14 billion years old.

Just once, for fuckity-fuck’s sake, give me a Pagan. Give me a Buddhist. Their core philosophies seem to be: honor the earth and discipline the mind. I can, without effort, respect that. It is far less likely that while talking with them I will have to hold my tongue and choke back my fucking frustration.

He wrote his number on the pamphlet and handed it to me again. I finally took it, stuck it in my back pocket. I told him, just for a counter-view, that he should watch the television series, Cosmos, sometime.

Bask in the godless beauty of the universe and stuff.

Oh, the Way She Walks.

10/20/20

On front counter, I was changing trash after I first clocked in and it seemed this one girl, a new, redheaded girl who was working drive thru along with some others, kept looking my way. Its the kind of look you can feel and I find my immediate interpretation of it laughable: they felt to me like gazes of interest.

I had seen her before, though only in passing, and I don’t even know her name. She was one of those women I find myself instantly attracted to but then immediately start trying to talk myself out of it: its just that she’s a new female coworker, I told myself, and she probably has a boyfriend anyway, and even if she doesn’t, she wouldn’t fuck you in a million years, and she’s probably not your type anyway, and you’re just trying to distract yourself by finding a new girl to fixate on.

Its wariness borne of the past. It takes me forever to let go of shit, to get over shit. I find I feel about women the way I’ve come to feel about vehicles: I don’t want to like them too much, that way when things inevitably go to shit with respect to them I won’t be crushed and reinforce my paralyzing paranoia of it happening again.

Once or twice today, in the short time she was there during my shift, we nearly bumped into each other. On one such occasion I ended up walking behind her. I tried not to look, tried not to be a pervy fuck, but when a woman already has a nice body, a nice, hourglass figure, and in addition to that she’s wearing yoga pants, there’s just no way around it.

That wasn’t all, either.

She has The Walk.

The way in which some women move is erotic. Damn near hypnotic. It is a walk that I see only rarely, and certainly not often enough. Its smooth, fluid, rhythmic, seductive: they sway back and fourth, almost serpentlike, and its one ass cheek up, one down, smoothly alternating with every step.

At some point when I passed her, I think it was when she was leaving, she gave me what seemed like a shy glance, and it gave me the same kind of feeling I had gotten earlier in the day, when I caught her looking at me.

The walk and general vibe of the girl brought to mind two women I know: one, Lilly, who I consider a good friend, and another, Anne, who was my last exgirlfriend from over a decade ago, and who I also dreamed of recently.

This is, in all liklihood, all in my head. I’m not confident the girl has any interest in me. Just after I got home, however, I began writing about it and was curious enough about the walk to look it up on Google. Turns out that studies suggest women unconsciously use a sexier, slower gait as bait during the heights of fertility and that a fluid, sensual gait may suggest orgasmic ability. That last part makes sense with respect to Anne and (presumably) Lilly, both of whom were incredibly sexual women.

On another note, I wish I’d just get laid already or find a way to turn my sexual urges off. I think the tension of this limbo is beginning to get to me.

Anxiously Driving in the Rain.

After I try to manage my anxiety all the way to work, driving in the rain, I think to myself:

I drive every day. To work five days out of the week, and on my days off I typically force myself to go grocery shopping or drive to Circle K. Despite driving every day, the terror of driving remains. It’s there when road conditions are top notch and intensifies if its raining or snowing.

Shouldn’t constant exposure result in a reduction and eventual extinction of this response?

As has been the case lately, I’d also been thinking how I really need to get a better-paying job, hopefully one closer to my apartment and which does not require driving down a long, dark, deer-infested stretch of road every workday.

I’m usually reactive, not proactive, so this is not going well for me. I feel the anxiety swelling in me. Which does not make me eager to stop smoking weed, which would be a good idea as many if not most decent jobs are going to require a drug screening.

Which, I must say, is not only fucking stupid, but unethical in my view. This is my body, what business is it of yours what I do with it? Judge me on my behavior, on my work ethic, not my body chemistry.

I’ve considered (as I do chronically) getting back on antidepressants again so the anxiety doesn’t triple upon stopping the weed, as prescription pharmaceuticals should get a pass on such tests.

I also wondered if I might be able to get prescribed marijuana for my anxiety and depression. Though this seems incredibly unlikely, it would solve at least one potential problem.

Especially after my withdrawal symptoms from hell when I tried to ween myself off of Effexor XR some years back, I certainly trust weed more than the aforementioned prescription pharmaceuticals.

But its just a comforting fucking fantasy.

And why is it that every time you take an illicit drug, or the legal drug alcohol, people say you’re masking the problem, but every time a psychiatrist gives you a prescription for a drug its considered treatment?

And why are psychiatrists the only legal drug dealers?

I was also feeling bad because I’d failed to respond to Moe’s texts this morning. He had gotten a job at Amazon and wanted me to get a job there, too, as you start out making four dollars more an hour than I’m making at my present job after sixteen years of service. The issue is that I wanted to find a job that was closer and better paying, and while this job was clearly better paying, it was about double the distance I took to work every day, and just as the Winter season is approaching, no less.

Despite the money, I just can’t bear that anxiety every day. Particularly if I have to stop smoking pot, which would be a necessity for this job.

Hating my emotions, loathing the fear standing in my way, angry at the anxiety over driving to work in the rain, I clock in and go about changing the trash. As I make my way to the break room I see Dustin sitting down at the table. Casually, I say hey to him, and after he responds, that’s when I realize my ginger coworker is redder in the face than usual, tears running down his freckled features, voice flailing.

I ask him what’s wrong. I ask if he’s okay.

The fifteen-year-old son of a friend of his, a woman who he had only seen yesterday, had just called and informed him that she had died in a car crash after driving her mother to work.

“That was her greatest fear,” he sobbed. “She was always afraid of driving in the rain.”

I failed to add that I shared that terror, failed to report that it had been occupying my mind as well. That certainly wouldn’t help him. I honestly don’t know what would. I just touched his shoulder and spoke with him a bit, though there’s really never much one can say at times such as these.

What, It’ll all be okay? Cheer up? Death is an integral part of life?

I got him some more napkins from up front as he did his damnest to pull himself together so he could go back to work.

I was even more anxious tonight as I drove down that dark, rainy road between my fast food place of employment and my one-bedroom apartment. But I made it home.

It could be worse.