Category: work

Dick (Do No Harm, Take No Shit).

6/18/20

After a week’s paid vacation, I felt better. I hadn’t wasted it this time at all, either, and when I went back on Monday, I was in a surprisingly good mood. By Wednesday, it declined a bit. Thursday started out well, but only for roughly half an hour. Then it took a sudden, sharp, and unexpected U-turn and it all went to shit.

I had just finished gathering the trash and taking it out to the dumpsters, ready to engage in cutting box tops in the stock room — all part of my daily routine. Then I saw Steve at the time clock, suggesting he was going to be the closing manager, which depleted my mood just a smidgen. While part of me likes Steve, there are elements in his character I entirely detest, to be honest.

Foremost on my mind was an incident, neither uncommon nor surprising, that had occurred a day or two ago. I had gone up front and him and Marjie were talking about how I was evidently going to be put on morning shift next week, as the morning maintenance guy was now going on vacation. I was more terrified than pissed, as I have difficulty sleeping at night. I typically need either a mixture of booze and weed or weed and sleeping pills to chill myself out and quiet my mind down enough to get on any sort of sleeping schedule, and even then I rarely get to bed before four or five in the morning. I just couldn’t hack morning shift. I had a difficult enough of a time managing the one to nine shift I had for awhile, and that only required me coming in two hours earlier than usual.

But this seemed to come from Steve, not Marjie, and Steve has a long history of telling lies. He’s gotten better over the decade and a half that I’ve worked with him, but that tendency still erupts from within him now and then and I try to keep it in mind so I don’t get too upset about the shit he says only to find out its total bunk later, leaving me angry at him — as well as myself, of course, for being an utter fool.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to trust people — that’s just another problem I have — its just that life experience has shown me that lies are far more prevalent than I’d like to believe. It disappoints and depresses me, but I desire the Buddhist approach, or at the very least the seeming approach of Gotama Siddhartha: face reality squarely, then adapt.

In any case, I checked the schedule that day. It hadn’t changed. No morning shifts.

No big reveal.

I spoke with Steve a bit, just kind chatter, and then forewarned him that I’d be boiling out the fryers that evening. This required me draining the vats of oil, filling them with a mixture of water and degreaser, draining them, scrubbing them out, and filling them with fresh oil. An irritating ordeal, to be certain, and it can take awhile and might complicate and get in the way of the work of those around me, but it has to be done. Whenever it comes to things like this, I always try to give the managers in question a heads-up.

He asked me why I was going to do it on a Thursday, as Kelly, the store manager, wanted me to do it on a Monday. I had talked with Kelly earlier in the week and asked if Thursday was okay, and she was fine with it. So as calmly as I could, I asked Steve if he was sure she had said that. After all, I told him, you claimed that I would be working morning shifts next week and my schedule’s the same.

Did I think he was pulling things directly out if his rectum like a magician pulls a rabbit out if his hat? Yes. Even so, I do my best to convey it all to him in such a way that implied that perhaps here, as had been the case with my schedule, he was mistaken.

Either he was through my presentation or simply decided to interpret what I said as the suggestion that he was a chronic liar. My sense is that the second was the case. In either case, he immediately exploded.

He barks and snarls. He didn’t say that, he told me. Don’t put words in his mouth, he says. Then he starts yelling about hoe that it was just what the morning maintenance guy told him — shifting blame and providing the excuse that he had told me what we both knew he had told me even though seconds ago he insisted he had never said it to me.

Rather than pointing out the contradiction, I told him to calm down, to chill out, to quit being such a dick. I was just asking him a question, not formally accusing him of lying. He asked me what I’d called him, and I knew that would be what he honed in on. I again,told him that he was being a dick and needed to chill out.

Unsurprisingly, he did not chill out.

He went into the office. I followed after him because I wanted this taken care of here and now. I didn’t want this hanging over our heads all day like some dark storm cloud.

“Dude, what is your problem?”

“Get out of here,” he says in that way that someone who truly thinks they have power over you speaks. “Get out if the office.”

I think that’s when the tides turned. It was no longer just dealing with someone who was pissed: it was now during with someone who has pissed me the bloody fuck off.

Calmly, I shrugged, and in a way that communicated, nonverbally, What are you going to do?, I said, also calmly:

“No.”

I think that’s when he gave me that look, and I could feel the energy in that office. I knew what he was feeling,,what he was thinking, and he wanted to punch me. And I suddenly felt that I was two parts of me at once. I was the me that had been engaging with him up till this point, but I was also that detached, witnessing, alien part of me looking at and through my ego, and from that safe distance of observation I thought to him,

“Do it. Hit me. I want to see what happens. I want to see what I’ll do.”

Well, he didn’t.

When he began ignoring me, I eventually just left the office, kind if laughing to myself at how absurd all this was, and went back to cutting box tops. Adrenaline surging through my veins, body trembling.

Short thereafter, someone asked where Steve was. I pointed to the office.

“In there,” I replied, “but be careful, he’s being a dick.”

Of course, at just that moment he was coming out of the office.

“What’d you just call me?”

“Same as I said to you before,” I told him. “I said you were being a dick… because you’re being a dick.”

Just then, Tracy, another manager, came around the corner.

At just that moment, as Steve’s finally clocking in, he says: “Go home, I don’t need you.”

“Fine. I’m gone.”

I threw down my box cutter, walked passed him and Tracy, exited the doors, hopped in my Sunfire and made it to the exit. I was patiently waiting for traffic to slow so I could turn left. I waited for what seemed like forever. Irritation was building. Rage. In a burst, I turned right, tires squealing, and made it to the Circle K in that direction, where I parked and tried to chill out.

Despite the narrative as I’ve told it up to now, I wasn’t entirely clear at the time whether I had just walked out of my job or had been sent home. I messaged Kelly, apologized rather vaguely about “the drama had just transpired,” and asked that if I was fired, to just let me know. I also texted Tracy, politely asked her to clock me out, and said that while I hope I hadn’t just lost my job of 16 years, I just wasn’t going to take his shit.

Then I went inside Circle K, bought three 23rd of Labatt Ice, and went home.

I tried not to drink too fast. Multiple people messaged me. Two of the kids from work, asking first if I was all right, and then what happened. Marjie messaged me, and she wasn’t even there at the time. Steve’s wife messaged me and told me she knows her husband can be a duck. And Steve — even he finally messaged me — to tell me I’d forgotten to clock out.

What the fuck, dude.

“Slipped my mind,” was my response.

Over messenger, he also apologized and told me I could come back if I wanted to. He’d even offered to pay me gas money. I told him that I was already home and drinking, so that was a bad idea,but if I got fired over this, to just let me know. He assured me I wouldn’t be.

Kelly finally messaged back and asked for details, and I gave her the,mouse honest account I could — including the fact that I had called him a dick several times, and that while I thought he had sent me home, that I wasn’t sure, and that she should ask Tracy, as she caught the tail end. I admitted fault, and made it clear that all the blame couldn’t be laud upon him. I could have handled it all much better.

She assured me I wasn’t fired, that I should come back up,on Sunday, which was a load off my back. I then proceeded with smoking my weed and consuming too much alcohol.

I was more ashamed at my way of handling it all more than anything.

Apartment 311.

5/19/20

Turning left out my apartment door, I walk down the hallway, and just before I walk down the steps on my way to work, I pass by apartment 311.

Ordinarily, if any thought crosses my mind as I turn my back to that door in order to walk down the steps, its: whatever happened to that band?

Fuck, I’m old.

Not lately, however. For at least three days, perhaps longer, there has been an Amazon Prime package leaning against the door. It hasn’t budged. Clearly, this implies the door hasn’t been opened.

Whether I’m more worried or curious, I don’t know.

I keep thinking how someone could have died in there, someone without family or many friends, and until the smell of rotting flesh punched someone in the face as they walked by, no one would have the vaguest suspicion.

And after all, there are a lot of elderly in my apartment building.

Or, given the COVID plague, they could merely be a responsible individual self-quarenteening. They could be a shut-in and I might just be overreacting in my endless supply of paranoia.

So I walk down the steps, walk passed the vending machine and enter the vestibule. For roughly a week a UPS box has been resting atop the shelf just above where all the mailboxes are. I’ve been curious, but I’ve never connected the Amazon package or the box before today. I check the address on the box. Sure enough, its 311.

I wondered to myself: how long is it appropriate to wait before calling the apartment complex and asking them to look in on whoever is in there?

I could have knocked on the door myself, of course, but I’m more than slightly socially anxious. I could have called the office at my apartment complex or even the cops to check in on the person, but I kept telling myself I was just overreacting, just being paranoid.

So as I typically do in circumstances like this, I wrote about it. And then I posted it on a social media site; specifically, The Book of Faces. Replies came in rather quickly, with nearly everyone saying I should call the police or just knock on the door myself.

“Can you knock on the door?” Someone asked.

“I’m physically capable,” was my response.

When my mother commented and said to give her the landlords number and that she would call for me, I took out trash at work and finally called as I smoked a cigarette. I studdered. I stumbled. I fear I sounded frantic. The lady on the other end of the line sounded like she was just humoring me, probably thinking to herself: is this the same jackass that called us when he locked himself in his bathroom?

In any case, she said they’d have someone check, and upon arriving home both the UPS and Amazon packages were gone. Though many hours had passed between when I’d called and when I arrived home, I comforted myself thinking that no one had died and I had done little more than ask others to annoy a shut-in for me.

As I did after I called and even before I arrived home, I kept beating myself up inside. I overreact. Make too big of a deal over everything. And I made this far more fucking complicated than it had to be, as I could have, should have just knocked on the door before I left for work.

Thing is, this has sort of happened before.

Before moving to my present, one-bedroom apartment, I lived in a considerably shitty area of a college town for maybe five years. Prior to that, I lived in the same apartment complex I live in now, only I had an efficiency apartment in another building. While there, I happened to have a rather interesting neighbor right across the hall.

I first met him one evening right after I had gotten home from work. He stood beside the porch light at the entrance to the building. He was an awkward-looking fellow — tall, with his long, gray hair tied back, wearing red plaid and sporting a pair of those tiny, round glasses that perch on the bridge of your nose. He was warm and polite, almost absurdly happy.

Spoiler alert: this would not last.

It turned out that he lived in the apartment right across the hall from mine, and there were a few incidents that may have triggered his descent.

At the time, kids would occasionally bolt down the hallway like stampeding elephant, and I heard the approaching sound one day. Peeking out the peep hole in my door, I saw this young kid zoom into view from the left, put a 24 pack of Natural Light right outside his door, knock on his door violently a few times in rapid succession, and bolt just as swiftly back in the direction from which he came. I was curious enough this time to actually open my door, and just as I did, the neighbor opened his.

“That yours?” he asked.

“No,” I said, making a face and shaking my head.

“Well, it ain’t mine,” he barked, and then slammed shut his door.

That beer remained on the hallway for perhaps a week and a half before someone, likely maintenance, removed it.

As happened occasionally around that time, my friends Eva and Abbey had come over to visit. We were laughing and having a good time, but we were, admittedly, getting a bit loud. Then we heard a knock on my door and we all immediately shut up. After a short while, we heard some mumbling — without doubt, the neighbor — and heard him walk towards his door and slam it shut. We spoke in whispers for awhile until they quietly left.

Time went on. As he passed me in the hall, he would walk around me in a wide, exaggerated manner, looking at me suspiciously. He came to leave his apartment with declining frequency. Most extreme, however, was a new routine he developed: locked in his apartment, alone, you would hear him yelling things difficult to make out. You would hear him making wild, utterly insane sounding primal noises. You would hear what sounded like him violently shoving something against the wall over and over.

It was as if I were suddenly provided the all-natural soundtrack of an old man going insane, alone inside his apartment.

Inevitably, the cops were called on him a few times, though not nearly as often as one might suspect. On at least one occasion nearing the end, I heard, through my door, the conversation two cops had with him. He was explaining, and rather loudly and defensively, that people were antagonizing him and his wife and he wasn’t taking it anymore. He just wanted them to leave him alone.

The guy lived alone.

Then one day, I heard commotion in hallway. There was a lot of movement, my neighbors voice, sounding even more insane than usual, and maybe other voices. I didn’t peak out to investigate, but the next day, there was a huge wet spot in the hallway a short distance from both of our doors.

Did he piss on the carpet? I never did find out, but for a week afterward, something was undoubtedly amiss. It was silent. Deafening silence. No screaming, no slamming sounds. Nothing.

I began to fear he might be dead in there, but there wasn’t the slightest chance in hell that I was going to knock on his door in an effort to find out. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I actually had a dream about him and the inside of his apartmemt, which was huge in comparison to mine. He sat on a chair in the dream looking sad, nearly catatonic.

After maybe a week, I built up the courage to call the office, and of course the cranky woman with the face of death is the one who picked up. I told her there was a neighbor I was worried about and feared may have died. I forgot how I described him, but it was sufficient enough to make a light bulb go off in her head.

“Oh, I know who you’re talking about,” she said. “He’s in jail.”

It was a relief, in a way. I don’t know if he died shortly thereafter, got put into a psyche ward, or what, but maybe a week later there were people cleaning out his apartment, boxing things up.

At least there was a presumably happy ending to my concerns regarding apartment 311, even if I made too big a deal about it. As for my old neighbor, I felt that perhaps the night with Eva and Abbey had helped to trigger his decline. I certainly felt guilty about that possibility. I don’t know if he was entirely sane up to that point, but I couldn’t help but think how sad the small portion of his life that I witnessed was and how frightening a prospect it is to be, nearing the end of your life, sitting alone in an apartment, slowly growing insane, believing you and your presumably dead wife were under attack by nonexistent enemies.

Outsiders & Attention Whores.

5/20/20

Just go away. I thought I finally had a handle on this, but I can’t fucking deal with you today. I’m pissed at my emotions and my inability to control them — my infantile, entirely unjustified jealousy; my sexual desire; my interest in who you are; my hurt and raging anger.

My inner child is, among other things, a metamorph. It can be an animal. And its emotions have been so high as of late that I’m frighteningly uncertain as to how much longer I can contain it.

So keep away right now.

I’m too hypersensitive, and that often leads to anger — which can make me incredibly insensitive. And I have no right to be. None of this is my business.

A day ago, I thought I had it all under control. I pulled into a parking space right outside the entrance to work and started reading my book or fiddling on my phone before my shift started. My usual routine. Then you came out for a cigarette.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw you exit the door, place the wet floor sign in between the door and the door frame so you wouldn’t lock yourself out, and then come bolting towards my car door, slapping your hand on the window, trying to scare me. And despite having seen you coming, I jumped anyway, because I’m an easily startled fuck for whatever reason. You said something about not having seen me in awhile, and I opened the door and you fucking freaked out over a bumble bee. Squealing, arms flailing.

When you finally calmed down, I sat beside you on the curb, both of us suckling the butts of our cancer sticks, and you ignored me for what seemed to be an awkward eternity as you diddled away on your phone. This is like a small-scale rendition of that week of tension and hope. You lour me out of my shell and then cut me off. Like I always said of my friend Terra back in the day, you’re like a cat. You come up to me, rub yourself against my leg, purring, looking up at me with those eyes, and you’ve finally got me. I reach down and then you bolt off into the blue.

Its a tease.

Finally, we started talking. You need an apartment and a car and I suggest taking a look at the classifieds in the newspaper. You make the newspaper sound like a relic from a former era, telling me how some male figure in your life — your father, or grandfather perhaps — used to collect old newspapers. Like on the JFK assassination. I said that my uncle did that, too; he had one on the first Apollo moon landing.

“You mean the FAKE moon landing?” you immediately responded. And then I went on a mocking spiel.

“Yeah,” I said sarcastically, “and we’re living on a flat earth. And space is fake. Those aren’t stars, they’re just light bleeding in through the holes they punched in the lid of the mason jar we’re all trapped inside.”

Laughing all the while, you break in: “Space isn’t fake, we just haven’t been there yet.”

We’ve fucking been there, my dear.

I just shook my head, laughing. Finally. Fucking finally. When you’re attracted to a beautiful, maddening, gothy, delightfully devilish, complex, strange and endlessly intriguing female of the species and have been struggling to get over the impossibility of meaning something to her, of getting inside of her — struggling to at least take her down a peg or two in your mind — hearing bat-shit insane shit like that truly helps, I thought to myself.

Half the night, I even contemplated posting that as a status on The Book of Faces, but ultimately thought the better of it. In either case, I felt confident I was finally on my way out of this hellacious emotional torture. And for the rest of the shift, for once, you weren’t at the forefront of my mind, as is nearly always the case when I work with you. (I was busy being concerned over a neighbor, but that’s sort of a story unto itself.) In any case, I thought to myself: finally, I’m getting over this.

But I was fucking wrong, and today showed me just how wrong I was. I’m not even sure how it fucking started — and that’s a little bothersome. In many ways, it seems like emotional intensity can have the same effects as being drunk: there are gaps in memory and I always feel guilty or stupid or embarrassed after the emotion or booze has worn off.

For the last few days, I kept seeing you pop up in my “suggested friends” and saw you add people from work, one by one, yet I was still blocked. I was pissed off that this depressed me so, and, on top of that, pissed off about being so pissed off. That may have been a vital ingredient to my mood.

Kelly, the store manager, and Tracy, the newest shift manager, were hanging out after their shift, talking by their vehicles in the lot, and its always a bit awkward when I go out for a smoke and they’re still there. I figure they’re having a private conversation and I don’t want to overhear anything or constipate their talk by being there. You were out there with them, too, however. I think Kelly was taking you home.

Tracy wants you. You want Kelly — for the moment, anyway. And you all seemed to be having a blast.

I went out to have a smoke, all of you were still there. After my smoke, I was happy to be inside and away from you, but then you came in wearing that pink, button-down shirt, a tie, and a pair of sunglasses — Kelly’s manager’s uniform. And, of course, you looked damn good.

Later, I went to take trash out, and you were all still there. Upon coming in, I was talking to Steve and you walked toward me on the sidewalk from where you all were, still wearing the manager get-up, and I felt I made it fairly obvious I was trying to ignore you. I mean-mugged you by means of side-eye.

That’s when I first realized I was angry, depressed, and jealous.

I remember going into breakroom in exasperation, asking no one in particular, “When are they going to fucking leave?” I think it was Steve’s son, Anton, who is also a manager, who said, “I know,” in a way meant to convey he shared my irritation, but I know he thought I meant Kelly and Tracy and felt compelled to make myself clear. “I don’t care about them being here,” I said, “I just want Kara gone.”

I just couldn’t deal with you anymore that day.

Its then between six and six-thirty, when I typically take my break, and so as usual, I clocked out and then went and hid in my car. Shortly thereafter, Paula came out. She had been in the breakroom when I had my little angsty moment, and if other emotions weren’t so amped up in intensity within me and hogging the spotlight, I would have felt ashamed before her. As it was, I just wanted to be left the fuck alone to write, to vent silently for my thirty minutes.

Paula’s a very young girl that seems like she’s had a fucked up life and who reminds me a lot of Anne, an ex-girlfriend from long ago. She’s looking at me with a cigarette in her hands and motions in such a way that suggests she wants to sit in the passenger seat beside me. After a moment of consideration, I wave her over and unlock the door.

We don’t speak for long until you came around the two cars obscuring mine, and since my drivers side window stopped opening a week or two ago, I opened the door. The darkness I felt as you hung there by my open door was overwhelming. Why the fuck to I have to be so intensely attracted to you?

You asked if either of us had a cigarette, and I gave you one. You then asked me for a lighter and joked if I wanted to smoke it for you, too. You then looked at my lighter, adorned with my astrological sign, Scorpio, and told me how your boyfriend and girlfriend had that very same lighter.

You say a few things, though the chronology of what you said is lost to me. My emotions were too fucking intense. You mentioned that you finally broke up with your boyfriend and girlfriend. They’d gotten in a car wreck and when you broke up with them they asked, “Why, don’t you don’t like us anymore?”

Clearly, your interest — is it only sexual interest, or romantic as well? Who can tell? — can be quite fleeting, so if they know you as well as they should, this should come as no surprise. You have ADHD of the heart and pussy.

In any case, I immediately doubted you were through with them. If you were, I wanted to ask, why not unblock me? I didn’t, though, as that would reveal the very heights of my childishness, my hypersensitivity. I didn’t say much throughout all of this. I could hardly hear myself think, my boiling mood was so loud.

You also said something about how you didn’t really think people liked you, which sounded like bullshit you didn’t really believe. Tracy has fallen for you. I have as well. And while Kelly has a boyfriend (who is also her former girlfriend), she’s expressed no intention in getting down and dirty with you, but the attraction is clearly there. So what the fuck were you talking about?

You also said, perhaps pertaining to why people “don’t like you,” that you were an “outsider.” Outsider my ass, I thought. We can smell our own, my dear, and you simply don’t carry the scent.

Guys want you. Women want you. Even if they detest that fact. And I want to believe you’re more than an attention whore, I really do, but you have yet to provide sufficient suggestive evidence.

The Confessional & a Member of the Minority (a Flashback Sequence).

4/16/14

“Ben, are you gay?”

Leave it to a ten year old.

“Nope,” I said with a laugh. “Why?”

I forget her reason for asking that question specifically, or even if she gave me one, but the usual question came up: why I don’t have a girlfriend. After all, girls are always talking to me, she seemed to be suggesting.

“I’m sort of like an atheistic priest,” I tried to explain to her. “A sort of confessional with a pulse.”

Guys, girls, friends, strangers: people have always spilled to me, telling me their secrets, confiding in me, and unless I’m at my occasional point of overload I enjoy it and the insight into their character that it offers me. Over time I have learned not to leap to the assumption that simply because a girl talks to me, or even likes me, it implies she’s interested in me in any additional way.

She seemed to ignore that, electing instead to latch onto my atheism. This, she told me, was why I didn’t have a girlfriend: I don’t believe in a god. An interesting allegation, but one I’ve heard before. I tried to dodge it, I swear, but she somehow cornered me into a theological discussion.

In her eyes god exists, as does the devil, and everyone has a guardian angel or a guardian demon. She detailed it all. Curious. I told her it was her right to believe all that, but I just wasn’t convinced. She asserted it was just true.

“You have every right to feel that way,” I told her, adding as playfully as I could, “but personally, I think its crap.”

Since she asked, I told her my current viewpoint on the matter of the paranormal: reincarnation I find a likelihood, apparitions and out of body experiences come along with the package, but I see no suggestion of Good, Evil, god or devil, angels or demons. Its too black and white for such a Technicolor world.

The conversation made me feel incredibly awkward at first because the last thing I wanted to do was seem like I was trying to push any viewpoint on her. I wasn’t. Never would. That isn’t my place. It isn’t anyone’s place, in my opinion, but perhaps least of all some weirdo, balding maintenance man her mother works with. Without doubt she’s a bright kid, though, quite capable of holding her own in an argument and certainly mentally equipped enough to handle foreign viewpoints. But still. I felt like this conversation was somehow crossing a line. I wanted to talk with her about it and she wouldn’t let me exit the conversation, but I had that lingering fear that I nonetheless should not be having this conversation.

Maybe I just worry too much about doing or saying the wrong thing. I hope that’s all it is, but it never seems to make me worry any less. Kids are people, too, of course, and in my eyes they are without doubt the most oppressed and misunderstood “minority” on our blue-green Island Earth. I like talking to them most of all, I’ve noticed, because their minds are still open. They aren’t afraid to ask questions and are the most likely to actually explore possibilities. That’s why I wanted to be a teacher.

Never would I tell a kid what to believe, but if they ask, I’ll tell them what I believe without hesitation, and I always hope that doesn’t cross some line.

Does it, though?

Not a Leaf.

On my way out of my apartment complex yesterday, I turned the corner on the sidewalk and a bird, who apparently didn’t notice me at first, suddenly did and frantically flew away. That didn’t scare me. What did make me jump, however, was the leaf blowing in the wind that I mistakenly thought was a second bird. I laughed at my own anxiety, shook my head, and proceeded to my car.

So when I was finally at work, had taken out the trash, and was enjoying a cigarette out by the dumpster, I thought that what I initially thought was a mouse was in fact a leaf. After all, why would a mouse just hang out in front of the dumpster — unless it was dead? I looked again, though, and it was indeed a mouse. He was alive, too, with his head down, eyes mostly closed, unmoving, unaware or unconcerned regarding my presence. He didn’t seem hurt. He seemed to be breathing rapidly, but usually mice are moving around too swiftly, so I realized I didn’t exactly have a baseline to compare his breathing too.

I decided not to bother him.

I finished my smoke, took another look at him, and went inside. When I next came out to the dumpsters, he had moved a short distance, but was doing the same thing: head down as if he were only half-awake or in some meditative trance.

Was the weather confusing him here in Ohio? Was his little body confused as to what season it was? Was he slipping in and out of hibernation? It took me a bit to realize that couldn’t be it, as mice don’t hibernate. Did the fuzzy littlefucker just have a hard night? I mean, I’ve certainly had mornings like that.

I checked on him again when I took out some more trash, he had moved a bit but was back in mouse meditation. As I was by the dumpster, I heard a guy come by walking his dog, and he was trying to pull back the dog from something — hopefully trying to get the pooch to leave the mouse alone. The mouse survived. I checked on him once or twice more before break. Ultimately, he was just gone.

Maybe in his meditation he achieved enlightenment and transcended this plane of existence. I like to think so.

Noodles & Manliness.

Sometimes its hard to tell if something someone says is a compliment, a put-down, or just an innocent observation.

A few days back, as I’m getting my wakey-wakey bean juice, Kara tells me I smell like Ramen noodles. Though I’m uncertain at first as to whether that constitutes a compliment, she later tells me, “I like noodles.”

Good. No one likes a pastaphobic.

Today, as I’m again getting some java, she says, “You smell like a man.”

So: progress, I guess. Unless she’s a feminist, in which case a noodley aura would be more optimal.

Aliens, Doomsday, Zombies, & Why I Like The Walking Dead.

I began watching The Walking Dead (TWD) towards the end of the first season or the dawn of the second, if I remember correctly. Though I may have known about the show beforehand, it didn’t spark my interest, and it wasn’t until a friend strongly recommended that I take a looksie that I paid it any mind at all. I don’t recall who that person was, but I do know why it took such a strong recommendation: I’ve always found the mere thought of zombies as highly improbable and incredibly lame. In fact, I still do.

They aren’t the lamest monsters in the cultural mythos — vampires and mummies push them, at the very least, to second place (and really, aside from their characteristic apparel, how distinct are mummies from zombies, anyway?) — but they are pretty damned lame nonetheless. Granted, my judgement stems from the kind of zombies one finds, for instance, in TWD and Night of the Living Dead, mostly because I don’t have a hard-on for the genre and these are the zombie sources I’m most familiar with. These types of zombies, at the very least, travel in herds, which can be a threat, but they’re generally slow-moving and operate not on intelligence, but base instincts, and so are more easily thwarted than an intelligent creature, even if one gets into a sticky situation.

As I’ve said before, just think of this type of zombie trying to ride a bicycle. If you have vivid enough of an imagination, you’ll soon be giggling like an idiot and see my point. By and large, they aren’t that frightening.

There are, I have since learned, other types of zombies — ones that can run, for instance, or can infect animals other than human beings, some of whom are potentially frightening even if devoid of a zombie virus — so perhaps my judgement of their lameness was premature and based on my lack of a broader, more thorough understanding of just what a zombie constitutes.

In any case, zombies were not what got me interested in TWD and has kept me a steady, unwavering fan all throughout the years, even as twists and turns in the series have apparently alienated others along the way. I like the show because, in my humble opinion, it basically follows a logical process with respect to how shit would go down if such a doomsday scenario — or any number of doomsday scenarios, actually — befell us as a species and civilization.

Initially, after civilization fell or even as the collapse was taking place, there would be isolated individuals and small groups such as families who would be left to fend for themselves in locations such as their homes or, if they were so lucky (as Sasha and Tyreese) in bomb shelters. After they exhausted the resources available at their locations, they might keep their home base while making supply runs to neighboring areas and then moving increasingly further out as food becomes more scarce. Conversely, they may immediately — and in either case, ultimately — become a sort of nomadic tribe moving from area to area, hunting and gathering food and supplies, much like our nomadic, hunting, gathering, and fishing ancestors. Along the way they would likely lose members of their tribe and potentially gain members — lone individuals or small groups of people. In fact, the turnover rate might be mind-blowing.

To pause for a moment, this is another thing I kind of respect about TWD, even if it is a central reason why so many ultimately came to abandon the show, most notably with the introduction of the ever-narcissistic and potentially-psychopathic Negan and his merry band of sycophant Saviors: characters will die, even if you like them. Cases in point: Glenn and Abraham. Other characters survive, even if you initially hate them. Case in point: Gabriel, who failed to close the gate to Alexandria, letting Walkers in, and much later failed to lock the prison door, letting Negan out. The character has come a long way, and I no longer wish to baptize him in a deep fryer, but he seriously has a fucking issue with locking doors that must be addressed.

Characters will also change: there is character growth and decline, and often enough it’s pretty damned difficult to ascertain which it is — whether they are ascending or descending, given their ever-changing circumstances. As Rick (who stands as a prime example himself) said right before they entered Alexandria for the first time, if I remember correctly: “the rules keep changing.” On a level, they most certainly do. With respect to life’s constant flux, at the very least in the post-apocalypse, however, the overarching rule is clear: adapt or perish.

To continue: these tribes will also undoubtedly encounter other such tribes, some of whom are held together by vastly different value systems (Woodbury, Terminus, The Saviors, The Whisperers), in some cases leading to small-scale wars between them. Eventually various groups with resonant ideals and value systems will come together in the attempt to establish stable settlements and communities, much as in the case of the Alexandria Safe Zone, Hilltop, and Oceanside in TWD. Those communities will later come together in order to establish alliances, probably for the purpose of trade and to build up a collective force against the contrary forces represented by other communities and alliances, much as was the case when Alexandria, Hilltop, The Kingdom, and Oceanside ultimately worked together in order to defeat first The Saviors and then The Whisperers.

Simultaneously, there may have been groups that were prepared for such an event, notably those of high status in the former society — the rich, for instance, and those in government — who may have managed to sustain a smaller representation of that former society in isolated locations or underground installations. They may try to guide the re-emergence of human civilization from the ashes, much as The Commonwealth appears to be trying to do in the show so far, providing information on agriculture, building houses, generating electricity, and so on. The Commonwealth, so far as I am familiar with it through the show, seems to resonate quite strongly with how Graham Hancock believes civilization was gifted upon surviving groups of people by some surviving faction of a former civilization after a cataclysm, possibly caused by fragments of a comet, that wiped them out some 12,000 years ago.

And this is kind of where I think TWD television show and its offshoots are aiming to journey and explore, particularly in the interactions between such stable, surviving factions and those who have endured yet managed to survive through the collapse to the point where they can begin to rebuild civilization. As with the Saviors and Whisperers, there will be a clash of value systems and ideals.

Or at least I hope this is where it’s going, as this has been one of my main complaints regarding such stories, too, I might add: there always seems to be an effort on the part of survivors to get things back to the way they used to be, clearly ignoring all the issues inherent in the way things used to be — which is to say, of course, all the issues inherent in the way things currently are. They never seem to consider or deliberately organize a better version of society. They never stop and think, “Our old society led to its inevitable downfall. Now here we are, about to rise from it’s ashes: shouldn’t we be more fixated on not repeating the same mistakes, on trying to make a better world rather than just rehash the inevitably catastrophic pathway provided by the past?”

Yet if we can take a minute to rewind and hone in on TWD solely and specifically, the aching, underlying question has always been: what started the zombie virus? Some naively thought that Fear of the Walking Dead might answer this question or, at the very least, provide some hints, but no: answers were not forthcoming. All this despite Robert Kirkman’s voiced disinterest from the motherfucking get-go in providing data on the origins of the virus. Still, I thought, even if it was not a consideration of his own at the dawn of the comic — and I find it hard to believe that it wasn’t — he certainly must have considered it since.

Kirkman, who wrote the comic and then guided the series, confessed early on (once the comic and the show had gained widespread appeal) that he sold the idea in the form of a comic by telling a lie. The lie was that aliens had released the zombie virus so that it would be easier for them to invade afterward. Finally, after the comic ended, he gave the alleged source of the virus: it was from outer space, but not seeded here by an alien intelligence. Rather, it was a “space spore.”

This might seem anticlimactic, but consider what potential relevance this might have for the Fermi Paradox. There are many hypotheses regarding the origin of life, but one involves what is known as Panspermia. It can be directed or undirected, and what Kirkman suggests is that, at least in the case of the zombie virus, it was undirected. This means that a comet hit a planet harboring life — specifically, the zombie virus — and as a consequence flug material from that planet into space. This material housed life: specifically, the zombie virus. And this material ultimately served as comets that crashed onto other planets, impregnating the native life with the zombie virus.

A dire kind of cosmic spitting and swallowing where one planet’s ejection becomes another’s infection. This could be one of the leading reasons why we haven’t (officially) detected advanced, technologically-quipped, extraterrestrial intelligence.

While Kirkman’s ultimate answer with respect to the source of the Zombie virus captured my interest and spawned considerations, the comic’s inseminating lie has proven to be far more impactful in my case. The bigger question in my mind here, as a consequence, is this: realistically-speaking, would aliens intending to invade earth for the purposes of colonization do something like spread a zombie virus?

Other sources, which I tend to read and watch during my more paranoid moments, when I feel sure the end is nearing, have already largely answered this question. One doomsday video, if I remember correctly, said that if aliens wanted to colonize and rid the earth of humanity or at least reduce our population, releasing a virus first might make the most sense, and I can see the logic. One might wonder why, if they were more intelligent than us and possessed superior technology, they would even be worried about such a resistance, but the answer it quite simple: if their objective is to colonize the planet, they certainly wouldn’t want us trying to defeat them with nuclear weapons, for instance, which would have dire consequences for the cosmic real estate they wished to plant their flag in and designate their own. On the other hand, a lethal virus would be a nice, clean way to eliminate us without such a potentially devastating response.

They could engineer a virus to only infect human beings. If this virus was engineered to kill humans, the vast majority of human beings may die out, leaving behind only a small human population that would have a difficult time putting up a resistance to the colonization of high-tech extraterrestrial intelligence. There’d perhaps be viruses with other consequences that might work just as well and perhaps better, but the zombie scenario doesn’t really seem so out of the question. It may, in fact, be optimal. There may be survivors of any such virus, but there’s an added benefit when it comes to a zombie virus: whereas the zombie virus may have not gotten you, the zombies themselves might, so as a consequence it increases the rate of infection.

That alone would provide a legitimate reason to engineer such a zombie virus. And if it was like the virus in TWD, where everyone is infected but remains asymptomatic unless you’re bitten or die, even better. Over the course of the seasons, we have seen how the Walkers in TWD have decayed. How long could a Walker live, though? They only reproduce by biting, and the human population is both limited and increasingly better at fighting off the zombies. Since all humans are infected, however, once any human dies — through disease, old age, heart attack, whatever — they’ll become a zombie. If nothing else, such a zombie virus would both immediately lesson the human population and leave the remainder a threat to themselves.

Kirkman’s lie could make a good deal of sense.

Puppies, Gus & Coughing Customers.

3/25/20

I’m changing trash out in the lot, not in a particularly great mood, when this guy starts talking to me. We have a short but sweet conversation, and as he begins walking down the sidewalk his dog, Harley, is pulling at his leash, trying to get to me. Not aggressively, just eager to be petted, if I interpreted the canine vibe correctly. And I didn’t want to pet him because of, you know, the plague and stuff. So that sucked. But just seeing a dog? My mood is all better.

Puppies are my antidepressant. I wish seeing people made me feel that way.

3/26/20

There are times when I think I’ve hit emotional bottom. I feel full of anxiety, depression, rage. I feel entirely out of place in the world and feel worried about us as a species. It couldn’t be a worse time in my head, I’m almost sure.

Then I go to work, Gus talks to me and I realize how much further down the spiral goes.

Relatively speaking, I guess I’m doing okay.

3/26/20

We have new speakers at work that allow us to hear the customers from the kitchen as they place their order. A woman just came through who was hacking up a lung so badly she was struggling to articulate what she wanted. You could feel the terror in the air rise just a bit with every cough. When she finished it was as if, in the distance, I could hear the Jaws theme as she approached the window.

So I went on break a little early. And yeah, I know, like that’s going to help if she’s really got the plague.

Look, if you’re sick, just stay home, you assholes. This isn’t difficult.

Brodie’s Bloody Nose.

I walk into the restroom at work and, peering beneath the sink, see the trash can filled with bloody paper towels. Later I ask Steve if Brodie worked today, and he said he did, but not for long.

“Was his nose bleeding again?”

Evidently, it was. Steve tells me his wife still isn’t concerned. Steve hasn’t seemed so concerned about it, either, though.

I know they can’t take the kid to the hospital now, with the plague and all, but I still can’t crawl into the heads of these two parents deeply enough to understand why they didn’t take him to the fucking hospital in the first place, when it first started happening. Maybe I’m just being a judgemental ass because I’m not a parent myself, but I’m concerned, and I’m just some guy he knows. If he was my kid I can’t imagine I’d care less — hell, I would have taken him a long time ago.

All around, this really hasn’t been a good time for restoring any degree of hope for humanity.