Pointless Resolutions for Another Revolution.

I bought two 24 ounce beers on the way home from work last might after we closed the place early at ten, but I wasn’t in the mood to drink by the time I got home. So I put in a pizza, got mildly high and watched the last few episodes of the second season of Lost in Space.

Aside from work, this wasn’t a bad New Years. Not in the least.

I still find it interesting that on the night when everyone drinks I elect not to participate despite the fact that I’ve been drinking frequently as of late. I think I just like to bite my thumb at tradition. Any time a large group of people are really into something it immediately becomes suspect and any appeal it had tends to evaporate.

Its like when I’m planning on doing something out of my own volition and then someone tells me I have to do it or really should do it. My desire withdraws.

Earlier in the day, I was thinkimg on how New Years resolutions seem to be a pointless practice, as no one ever seems to follow through with them. That fact kind of takes the pressure off of making such resolutions, though. And since I’ve been trying to write every day, I forced myself to make some with the full awareness that I will not, in all likelihood, live up to them and they’ll probably roll over into 2021:

1) Stop drinking. Or at the very least slow the fuck down. At this point, I would really like to just stick to smoking weed. Weed hangovers are comforting, like someone wrapped you in a fluffy, warm blanket. Booze hangovers make you feel sick, and sometimes they can even make you feel like a raw nerve, hypersensitive to everything. And I clearly have enough of that naturally. I’m nearly always self-loathing when I wake up after drinking, too, and this is never the case with cannabis.

I’ve continued drinking because it allows me escape from my emotions, from giving a shit at all. Its also a convenient way to shift gears and not take the fucking bull shit work packs into me home with me. No wage slave hangover.

I’m a very happy drunk — and another word that begins with an “h” and ends in a “y” — and so its much like having a button I can press to make myself happy whenever I wish. I have also told myself that it helps with writing, but it does only up to drinking, say, a 24 ounce beer. After that, only poetry seems possible unless I want to write something I’ll find stupid and horrible upon sobering up. And while pot may not be the best sleep aid, experience suggests its infinitely better than booze.

2) Draw every day. Even if its just a few little sketches on a single page of my sketchbook, I need to get the artistic juices flowing again on a daily basis. Not drinking may help with this process, as booze and art do not typically go together in my experience. Cannabis, however, is perfect for the practice.

3) Get laid. Not drinking may make any attempt to get laid even more difficult than it already is. The longer its been, the more anxious I am when I sense that a golden opportunity is in close proximity. The more I need it, the more difficult it is to obtain.

Drinking at a bar, which I rarely do anymore, would provide a potential way to circumvent this not-getting-laid problem, but clearly not if I quit drinking altogether.

Though it’s probably not the time to rant about this, I really wish they’d legalize prostitution. It could be regulated if brought into the light, the women would be safer all around, and schmucks like me would certainly invest. I think I’d be happier and more relaxed. Probably more confident as well.

4) Get a better job that’s closer to home. This would either require getting a job closer to where I live now or securing a job elsewhere and finding a new residence in close proximity. In any case, I could watch this shithole town I work shrink in my rearview mirror for the last time and it would be beautiful.

Art, Writing, & Other Release Valves.

Back in high school, I’d stay after school and, alone in the art room, I’d do my pen drawings or, more often, engage in my chalk pastel works. I’d do this at home in my bedroom, too.

This was my psychic bloodletting.

After I took apart my old art desk for some reason and could not, for the life of me, put it back together, I’d use the wall behind my door. I’d place a huge piece of paper there, masking tape at the edges and the sides, and then I’d put a CD in my old boom box. Usually, I’d listen to Tool’s Aenema album, or at least that’s how I remember it. I’d grab my chalk pastels and just let my emotions guide my hands, sometimes caught in some insane frenzy, intensely drawing and smearing the colors.

High on the catharsis. Empowered and actively nurturing the connection I had with some deep, dark, utterly alien part of me.

I always felt cleansed at the end, exorcised, often satisfied with the end product and quite proud of it. I just needed to get the seemingly endless within me out of me, expel it meaningfully, trap it in amber upon the page like an insect, take a Kodak moment of my soul.

Parting with my pieces, selling my shit, it wasn’t a concern, even a thought. These were pieces of my fucking soul, after all. This was my personal art therapy, and that’s what mattered most.

I’ve gone through periods where I felt like that channel between me and Me was constipated, of course. Where the art I produced wasn’t nearly as satisfying, where all the shit looked the same and lacked soul. There are always those dry periods.

And then there were periods in which I just fell out of it, as has happened again — though its slowly working its way back in.

Usually when this happens, nearly always, I find my focus has merely shifted. My avenue of exorcism had changed. My catharsis found an alternative outlet: writing.

And it wasn’t always an either/or kind of circumstance, either.

I would let my fingers tap madly on the keyboard, let them hunt and peck at high speed until they ached and I feared they might bleed. Driven by emotion, I was like a stenographer for my spontaneous thoughts. Not to share, not to impress people, not to post it on social media to get likes that would deliver a fucking dopamine hit, but because I had to get this out, and some parts of myself could be better expressed through writing than artwork.

And I remember constantly thinking back then that I needed yet another outlet, and my constant interest was music. I wanted to sing. To play guitar. I needed another way to scratch the itch. I needed another release valve.

I never pursued music, not really. I took piano lessons at school for awhile, though that was earlier, during middle school, I think, and I didn’t follow through for too long. I was asked to be the lead singer for a developing band, but I was too nervous about singing, which I had never tried. Even earlier, when I was a teen, I took gutair lessons, but the class, despite me squeezing it for all it was worth, kind of sucked. I used my mother’s acoustic for awhile, then a twelve-string I borrowed from a friend, and eventually a series of electric gutairs.

Presently, I have an electric tuner. A little, glitchy amp. Plenty of books from those lessons long ago and ones I’ve collected since I was a teen. Tabliture for Metallica songs, Creedence Clearwater Revival sings.

Those books remain in my large, walk-in closet as my electric guitar collects dust in a corner in my apartment.

Maybe if I survive another two decades or so. Maybe if I manage to make money off my artwork and writing I’ll be able to quit my shit job, and I’ll feel I have the time to develop this new outlet.

I’m not holding my breath, though. I’ve just started drawing again, after all.

Currently, writing is my major outlet. I write on my phone here and there throughout the workday. When I get home, if I’m drinking — which, let’s face it, is usually the fucking case — I’ll write a bit of prose, perhaps, but once I have some cannabis on top of that and I suddenly shift into poetry mode. So much so, in fact, that I ultimately decided to make a separate blog dedicated to it.

What has been lacking as of late is my artwork, and its pathetic how often I plan to do it and fail. Afterwards, I almost always feel so cleansed and charged. This last weekend, I spent some time doodling in my sketchbook while mildly high, and I’m slowly falling into the groove again. I certainly don’t wish to quit writing, but I need the visual arts as well. I need both release valves.

Sometimes I wish I could just go hide somewhere for awhile, somewhere that was my own and where I had minimal human contact, and focus on art and writing exclusively. I’d live in a sort of vaccum and nurture my only avenues towards true liberty in life without distraction.

That’s not likely to happen, of course, so I really need to find the motivation to make use of what time I have to pursue my passions. To spill my fucking soul through imagery bled onto the page.

I’ve got to pull out of this rut. Its not like getting laid, after all — I can do this on my own. What the hell is the problem?

On Shit Moods, Chuck Palahnuik, & Cognitive Reframing.

All weekend, which is to say Friday and Saturday, I kept my phone on silent and largely ignored Facebook. Save for a quick journey to the grocery store yesterday, I stayed in my apartment, avoiding social contact and doing next to nothing — and I felt better for it.

Then I left for work today. I knew this to be a bad move, but it was a move I had to make. I need to pay for rent and food and stuff.

Anyway, my mind had been engulfed in this controlled anger since my way to work, where the dumb person in the van in front of me stopped in the middle of the lane to let out an old woman with a walker.

They didn’t turn into a parking space or try to make room for whoever was behind them, just abruptly stopped without warning and took their sweet ass time. They showed no sign of hearing me honking, either.

Shortly thereafter my anger inverted, aimed toward a myself, and most of the day — until the incident with the Polite Puppeteer I spoke of in my former post — my angry mind has defaulted to the usual:

“What’s wrong with me? I’m potentially insane, stuck in a job I loathe, and I’m not in a relationship or even getting laid.”

So let me take a moment to tackle just why mulling over this shit is a pointless practice. Just to remind myself.

Though I may have changed in the last decade and a half since I last tried to be part of a two-person unit, it never takes me long until I have the desire to end it and just be alone. So there’s a good chance that even if I got in a relationship I wouldn’t be any happier — after the initial, honeymoon, puppy-love portion of the experience ended, that is, and those endogenous chemicals left my system.

In the meantime, I might knock up the girl, and how better would I be then? Raising a kid on a fast food wage? Passing on whatever the fuck is wrong with me? Bringing a child into what increasingly looks to be an irreversibly doomed world (climate change, “Feminist” man hate, corporations and Big Brother watching in increasingly intrusive ways, groups held over the individual, growing lack of empathy, the potentially devastating mess that is artificial intelligence, narcissistic authoritarian shit-stains like Trump being given positions of power, and so on).

I should appreciate my bachelorhood and circumstantial abstinence more, in other words, as things could be considerably worse.

And while I am indeed stuck in a job I loathe and which bears not the vaguest relation to my true passions, I do have a job — and a stable job I’ve managed to keep for over a decade and a half, no less. I also happen like nearly everyone I work with — as unique individuals if not as coworkers — and that has certainly not always been the case.

I could have a worse job. I could be homeless or be entirely reliant on the state or on my family, both of which would be considerably worse scenarios in my opinion. So again, things could be so, so much worse.

Then there is that ever-looming fear for my sanity. If I’m truly bat-shit, than at least I’m moderately functional, and given what passes for normalcy, is it really something one should aspire for, that one should feel shameful and guilty and self-loathing for lacking?

Certainly fucking not.

I need to remember there is always a glass-half-full perspective in reach. That I need not exacerbate life’s apparently inherent state of dissatisfaction by fixating in the negative and beating myself up inside for every fucking conceivable thing.

Wise words were spoken by Chuck Palahnuik, author of one of my favorite books and man who loves sitting on chairs backwards during interviews, and he said it on The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast #1158. I transcribed what he said and kept it in a file on my phone, wanting to explore the concept further, and it seems so appropriate for me to offer it now:

“It’s always about what they call cognitive reframing… Whatever happens, you reframe it in such a way that you recognize the value of it, regardless of what happens. You know, before my father got murdered, he had been asking me for an introduction to Winona Ryder in 1998. And I kept on thinking, I am not going to introduce my father to Winona Ryder because I know he’s gonna hit on her. And I’m just going to be mortified to have my dad hitting on Winona Ryder. And he’d always talk about how pretty she was, ‘Any chance I can meet her?’ And to tell the truth, when I got the word that my father had been murdered by a white supremacist in the mountains of Idaho, one of my first thoughts was: I’m off the hook with that Winona Ryder thing. And that’s cognitive reframing.”

Of Polite Puppeteers & Angry Empaths.

She’s short, somewhere just passed the point where she might get away with calling herself “thick,” and has dark, curly hair. While not a regular, she has come in here periodically over the years and she irritates the living hell out of me every time she emerges once again.

She uses the same strategy, without fail, every time I see her. She’ll say hi, ask you how you’re doing, and if she’s patient enough she’ll wait for a pleasant response from you before coming at you with the question.

“Any way I could have a cigarette?”

“I hope I’m not bothering you, but could I bum a ride?”

“I hate to ask, but do you have two dollars?”

“This is embarassing, but I need a kidney…”

You know, shit like that.

And if you say no, even politely with a legitimate excuse, she’ll apologize profusely, as if she just asked a simple question she truly hated asking and you lashed out at her unempathically in response.

This? This is her way of trying to instill guilt in you for denying her.

She never seems to remember who she asks, either, for whenever I see her — at work or elsewhere in this cesspool of a town — she approaches me, executes her strategy, and I’ve never, ever said yes to her.

Why? Because I hate when people elicit targeted emotional states in you strictly for the purposes of manipulating you. It doesn’t matter if they’re trying to control you through guilt or use your empathy against you. I find all of it intolerable.

Its one of those circumstances where I’m not certain what pisses me off more: the fact that she’s trying to manipulate me or the fact that she thinks I’m weak-willed and dumb enough to fall for it.

The insult to my intelligence, come to think of it, gets deeper under my skin than her attempt to play me like a marionette.

I saw her around earlier, and as I’m sitting in my car having a smoke toward the end of the shift I see her come out the side door of the restaurant. I can feel her eyes on me, smell her intent like a horrific fart, but I don’t look up. Refuse to look up.

Inside my head, I’m begging her: don’t. Don’t do it. Its so inauthentic. So slimey. And its so predictable, too, and that pisses me off. Don’t prove me right, goddamn it, pleasantly surprise me.

“Hi,” I hear her say.

Damn it.

“Hey,” I manage to squeeze out.

I can hear her about to proceed with her regularly scheduled programming, but it’s interrupted as Jed opens the back door to light up a cigarette himself. He’s an easier target, as he’s closer and not hiding in a Sunfire, so she course-corrects.

Even so, it all unfolds as I anticipated.

He gives her the cigarette, unfortunately, which she smokes by the side door. My rage builds as I hear her now talking to some guy on his way into the restaurant using the same technique.

She asks him for two dollars, though. He says no, offers an excuse, she guilt-trip apologizes for asking him and bothering him, and he goes inside. Inside my mind, I cheer.

The bastard got away. Good for him.

After a moment, she then turns back to Jed, who also denies her before he retreats back in the back door.

My smoke is done, too, so I try to avoid eye contact with her, even in the periphery, as I lock my car door and proceed to the back door.

I’m halfway in when she approaches and asks me for two dollars.

Fuck. Fuckity-fuck. So close.

I want to call her out. To be mean. Make her remember me so she never tries to manipulate me again.

“No,” is what I go with, though, still avoiding eye contact, and I shut the door before she can guilt trip me.

Perspectives.

After two years or so, Rose and I finally met up Saturday at Starbucks, her old place of employment. She brought me a plate of cookies and we sat outside, engaging in conversation the best we could given the constant distraction of her adorable but considerably hyperactive child.

After quitting Starbucks, she’d worked for Apple for awhile before being fired for a considerably stupid reason, and it was then that she decided it was the universe’s way of telling her: if there’s any time to chase your dream, its now. So she cashed in her 401K and started her own business. She’s a photographer, and a damned good one.

Her husband works a few days a week at a deli and spends most of his time in their basement. She doesn’t seem at all happy in her marriage; it seems more like an annoyance she’s just come to accept. He didn’t support her starting the photography thing, but thankfully, she didn’t let that stop her. When I asked if, at the very least, he supports her pursuing her passion now, she told me that at least once he expressed some semblance of support. He had taken a look at her photos and paid her a rather backhanded complimentl, essentially confessing that she was better than he had thought she’d be.

Apparently he suffers from depression. Both her children, I also discovered, are also on the autism spectrum. Given they both have different fathers, I assumed this had to come from her side of the family. She mentioned no one else being diagnosed within her family but has said that since she’s learned about her boys, she’s seen aspects of it in herself, and it does make some sense. Though I may have known this in the past and forgotten, I was surprised to hear she suffers from anxiety. She’ll have panic attacks and start ripping off her cloths because she feels constricted, claustrophobic. That’s why she prefers to be naked when she can and wear baggy cloths when that would be socially unacceptable.

I’ve never had the urge to rip off my second skins during the experience, but I know anxiety attacks all to well. Learning we shared this psychological glitch made me feel all the more close to her. I asked her how she dealt with it, and she said she smoked a lot of pot.

Sweet mother of fuck, I thought to her. Why can’t you be single?

Broadly speaking, her attitude towards life appears to be a rather wise one. In her eyes, regret is percieved as a sort of poision. After all, if things had not unfolded in the fashion in which they did, she might not be where she is today — with two children whom she loves dearly, with a life that allows her to profit from the pursuit of her passions. The kind of appreciation for her life that this allows her is inspiring. Everyone would be better off adopting this healthy perspective of hers.

When she texted me the following day to say how good it was to see me, she again touched on the fact that she couldn’t believe I hadn’t had sex with anyone since her. During our meet-up, she had asked me about my love life (which is nonexistent) and blatantly asked me if she had been the last.

I nodded.

In her message, she said she had fond memories of experience. I’m glad, its a relief, as I don’t feel I was at my best during that period despite how very much I was and still am into her.

As do I, I told her. Which is most certainly true.

She responded again right before my shift ended and I was about to drive home, and I don’t text while driving, which was frustrating given the nature of her response. She did the emoji thing: one shocked face and then a long line of laughing faces. I was instantly confused and paranoid and I obsessed and catastrophized about it all the way home.

I finally read her response upon making it to my apartment. She said that this was her typical reaction when she found anyone thought of her in a sexual context.

That kind of threw me for a loop.

She doesn’t know how interesting and awesome she is, nor how beautiful. I guess that’s not an entirely bad thing — it prevents her from having an ego about it, after all — but it also kind of amazed me and saddened me.

Fate, Free Will, & Bathroom-Centric Entropy.

Yesterday, after trimming the wild beard and shaving the ever-balding gourd, I grabbed the toilet brush, brushed the inside of the bowl once, and the handle snapped off.

Fuck.

Before leaving to do some shopping today for groceries (and a toilet brush), I proceed to brush the mouth-stones and hop in the shower. As I went to close the bathroom door, I ended up with a plastic doorknob in my hands, entirely divorced from the door to which it belongs.

Double-fuck.

Two cheers for bathroom-centric entropy, I guess.

And now, finally, I’m doing this fucking laundry, which I’ve put off for an embarrassingly long period of time. I don’t know how the uber-ambitious can get themselves motivated to get such major shit done and deal with truly awesome and potentially catastrophic problems when I’m struggling, at 41, with door handles and laundry.

Elon Musk I am most certainly not.

But why?

Many, at least in this country, would say that someone such as myself should just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” but I think that’s just the American myth of the self-made, self-reliant, and entirely free individual; a process many perceive as the sole, real, however difficult, avenue towards a successful, satisfying life.

I, for one, smell a steaming pile of donkey shit.

It stems from or at least relates to a much deeper myth which I have despised for as long as I can remember, which is that we’re all the same inside.

We’re not.

Each of us is distinct. Unique. Yes, like a goddamned snowflake or whatever.

We all had different points of departure — we were born with different genetic predispositions to different parents and develop in and through different environments and circumstances. What is easy for one may be difficult or impossible for another. This we could call fate — the hand we’re dealt in the card game of life.

That doesn’t mean free will is a myth, just that we aren’t entirely free, just that it’s far more complicated than the bootstrap people would bother to consider.

I believe in individual freedom, in personal liberty, in what has been called free will, but every opportunity to make a choice presents a highly personalized spectrum of probabilities dictated by the aforementioned point of departure and subsequent choices. This probability spectrum ranges from the path of least resistance to the path of greatest resistance. But again, the pathway of least resistance for one may be of greatest resistance for another.

That doesn’t mean we all shouldn’t try, that personal freedom and responsibility doesn’t exist and we’re all slaves of fate — quite the contrary. It only means that not everyone has the same ambition, the same ability to focus, structure and follow through.

I struggle with laundry. With remembering to pay my cable bill. With dealing with my anxiety over driving on a daily basis. Musk? He struggles with Tesla, Space X, and countless other things that would each individually make my head spin. He was born with great intelligence, for sure. Was he simply born with more ambition and multitasking abilities, though, or was it cultivated? And if it was cultivated, was it a pathway of greater or lesser resistance for him?

To make matters worse, as a species it appears we greatly overestimate the amount of will we exercise in making our choices. Most of the time, particularly as we get older, we’re kind of asleep at the wheel of our brains, relying heavily on autopilot — on the deeply ingrained habit patterns we’ve developed through that interplay between free will and fate, particularly from our formative years.

It gets increasingly more difficult to change as we get older unless a great tragedy knocks us out of orbit or we have a life-changing transformative experience: something intense, something incredibly emotionally impacting. And what serves as a transformative experience for one might slide off another like rain. It could also happen to you or you could seek out such a powerful, transformative experience: again, always, it differs with each, unique individual.

So while I would applaud anyone who reminds us to keep doing our best, to keep trying, keep at it, I think its rather narrow-minded to spew out the whole “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” bullshit.

Though for all I know, maybe empathy and understanding is one of their paths of greatest resistance.

Need Me Some Body Knobs.

Today, I thought to myself: I wish I had four knobs on my body somewhere, or perhaps a remote control, all for adjusting the volume on seemingly hardwired aspects of this meat sheath, this flesh vessel, this corporeal container that my consciousness is temporarily housed in.

One knob would enable me to turn the volume up and down on my senses. That way I wouldn’t have to hear the machines beeping at work, or the ghastly country music playing on the store radio, or the current Christmas music. Or the jackass that pulls into the space beside me while I’m on break, trying to read a book, with his bass cranked to the max so it sounds like a goddamn T-Rex is tap-dancing right beside me.

So I wouldn’t have to bear the smell when I clean the restrooms. Or stand close to Gus.

So I wouldn’t have to feel the texture of the new rags when I’m cleaning something like the tables in the dining room, or the sound that results when the tag on a new mop head rubs against the tiles, or the bitter fucking cold when I mosey on into the walk-in freezer for something.

I could even turn down my senses to a reality-canceling zero in toto, thereby escaping into my mind completely whenever I desired.

Another knob would enable me to control the volume of my thoughts, though there appear to be multiple layers of thoughts, so maybe I need multiple knobs. At least two: the fully conscious and seemingly deliberate ones and the involuntary and automatic ones, and I’d mostly aim at the second set with respect to conscious adjustments. Specifically, the target would be what are known as Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs), the intrusive “Flashback Bitchslap” memories (unless they constitute ANTs themselves; I am a bit perplexed on that point), and that bad music that plays on repeat.

When alone and prepared, I’d turn up the volume and in so doing hopefully banish their spell, take away their semiconscious and no doubt subliminal influence on not only my conscious thoughts, but my emotions (though it could function the other way around, too — or perhaps both, in a feedback loop. I’m not at all clear on that point, either).

I would write them down like a stenographer of the self so that I’d know all the shit I’m saying to myself, whispering to mysekf, and then practice on defeating them. Not through “thought stopping,” as that infernal technique just results in an emotionally intensified and painfully loud rebound, but rather via techniques that actually seem to work, like objectifying the thoughts and bathing in the realization that you are, after all, not at all synonymous with them — like in mindfulness meditation.

Don’t push them away, don’t grab a hold of them, just witness them dispassionately. Let them arise and pass away.

Until I got the hang of it, I’d spend the rest of my time with the semiconscious and subliminal automatic thoughts cranked down to zero. Life is bad enough without exacerbating the issue by compulsively, obsessively kicking myself in the ass from the inside and sucker-punching myself within the confines of my own sacred psyche.

Still another knob would enable me to control the volume of my emotions — and, if I’m not bat-shit insane, the emotions I absorb like a fucking sponge when around other people and sometimes mistake for my own.

Much as I just said about the thought-knob, two knobs might be a better fit here, too. Not because that some emotions are liminal and others semiconscious or subliminal, however, but because some emotions are my own and other emotions seem to come from other people, and I’m sick of feeling them and reacting to them as if they were my own. Empathy is by no means horrible, its just that my empathy is lacking discipline, healthy boundaries, and doesn’t often if ever submit itself to voluntary control. I’d work on this shit like the ANTs — put aside some window of time to practice managing them and effectively mute them when they become overwhelming in the day-two-day and night-to-night.

Last but not least, I’d like a knob for instinctual drives — at least the drive to have sex, as that desire can be quite distracting, particularly when you’ve gone a considerable length of time without scratching that itch.

The consequences are ridiculous. Truly. Everything is sexualized. You feel like you’ve come to share the humor of Beavis and Butthead, as sex becomes your default context for everything. You hear someone say something superficially innocent and giggle like an idiot because in your deprived mind it sounds sexual, like a “that’s what she said” joke, and next to orgasm, laughter spawned from comments twisted into naughty things is the best transient fix available.

While I don’t mind that too much, and for all I know I might have a perverted sense of humor even if I regularly got my rocks off with a preferable member of the opposite sex, the intensity of the drive is agonizing, the need to take matters into my own hands bare minimum once or twice a day lest I be incredibly tense and likely an asshole is frustrating, irritating and, when intixucated, often time-consuming — and needlessly so: why hold off until I can find that “perfect” porn to unload to when it could be done and over with in record time if I wished?

No, having the capacity to turn it off when it’s not seving me or when I can’t manage to serve and/or get served would be wonderful.

Its not too much to ask, either. I mean, why has evolution not granted us this blessed reprieve? After all, there’s even a point where, after you’ve starved for some time, you no longer desire food. Its like your body realizes that you’re at the end, that you cannot acquire the required sustenence, and seeing as the body is probably going to die, it has some mercy on the inhabiting consciousness. But when it comes to fucking, for some reason, the body evidently feels the need to conjure up its capacity for ruthless persistence.

It holds the species above itself, sky-high above the individual organism. It holds the herd above the individual. The troop over the singular, sexually frustrated, domesticated ape caught in the grips of circumstantial abstinence — the circumstance involving fear, lack of confidence, and so on.

Fuck that. I’m starving.

So give me a knob I can turn to take away the pointless agony.

Low Moods, Attorneys & Gizmos.

As soon as I clocked in, I was told they needed to throw me in kitchen, but “only for a half hour,” which I rolled my eyes at. They always say that and nine times out of ten this alleged “half hour” is sixty minutes or more. Today it was roughly sixty minutes, this time because Gus hadn’t shown up yet.

I woke up in a low mood and now, aside from that and being irritated about being in kitchen again, I find myself worrying about Gus. Every time that man is late for work I can’t help but wonder if he’s dead, and its always a relief when his grumpy ass walks in the door.

Until he opens his mouth, anyway.

Finally, he arrived and I just tried to avoid him when he started bitching to me about the same old shit again. I can’t be his confessional with a pulse today, I tell myself. My own shit mood is enough to deal with right now.

By the time I start cleaning the fryers up front, business is in high gear, and they keep dropping fries in the last vat I have to clean. Tired of waiting, I decide to sweep the parking lot until its calmed down some, maybe smoke a cigarette, too, and so I sneak out the back door.

I’m out there maybe two minutes when a car pulls into a spot a short distance from the patio, where I’m launching cigarette butts into the dustpan with my broom. The old man in the driver seat rolls down his window and politely asks me if I work here.

“I do indeed,” I tell him as I approach.

It seems he can’t hook up his iPhone to his car through bluetooth. He had it working before, he said, but someone messed with it and he can’t figure out what they did. After seeing him fiddle with it for a few moments, I asked him if I might take a look myself. I quickly found the problem somehow, and it was only a matter of pressing a button. He thanked me and told me he had been planning on going inside, assuming kids worked here and that they’d be able to figure it out better than himself.

He’s an attorney and he’s taken classes on this stuff, he told me, but in six months you simply forget. I told him that makes sense, as unless you’re utilizing the knowledge on a daily basis, your mind’s likely to just let go of it.

Kids today are learning how to utilize this tech when they’re in their formative years, so their brain better adapts to the technological environment and the increasing speed of technological advancement. Better than their elders, anyway.

While it comes easier to them because they’re born into it, however, they’re going to suffer more because of it, too. For instance, from day one their brains are trained by the quick fix offered by our devices, struggling to juggle simultaneous streams of data. Its no fucking surprise everyone’s got ADD, that no one can focus on anything for very long, that we find wisdom only in bite-size memes and one-minute read articles, that we have such little patience for anything less than immediate gratification.

Our minds are struggling to adapt to the technological landscape and are unable to push passed its natural limitations. It has ill enough effects on the elder generations, on the attorney and myself, but kids today? They have it so, so much fucking worse.

More to the point, though, I don’t know whether it was the fact that he was so kind, that he needed help and I was able to assist him, or what, but I felt better after talking with the guy and helping him.

Of Boxes & Bomb Threats.

After collecting and taking out trash every day, I go to organize and cut box tops in the stock room, and it never fails. No matter how little my hope for us as a species may be on any given day, this activity sends it plummeting to depths that make the Mariana Trench look like a quarter-filled kiddie pool.

Its particularly the case on Sundays, when I’ve been off for two days. Sauces smeared on the ground. Product on the wrong shelf. Boxes torn open like a wild animal attacked the damned thing in an insane frenzy. And my absolute favorite: two boxes of the same product, placed side by side, both opened.

“They’re so lazy,” some have said when I’ve bitched about that last one.

“No,” I always tell them. “I could understand laziness. It would piss me off, but I could understand it. We’re all lazy sometimes. But to be lazy would be to take from the box already open. It takes more energy to open another box, so its not an effort to conserve energy. This? Sadly, this has to be sheer stupidity, nothing less.”

It doesn’t get better as the day goes on, either. Today was a special day in this regard, however, as I received word from two fellow employees early on in my shift about a bomb threat that had been called into the local Walmart. Though it should not have been my first thought, I immediately found myself thinking how a smarter person wouldn’t have done it today, on a random Sunday in December, but rather on fucking Black Friday.

If its a disgruntled ex-employee, forcing them to shut down the store on the busiest day of the year would have gotten them where it hurts them: namely, the wallet.

And if you truly had a bomb in there, being a homicidal maniac and all, you’re probably, a, not going to call in a bomb threat anyway, and, b, aim for the highest potential body count — so again, two weeks ago would have been a more sensible choice.

By no means am I condoning this behavior, but if you’re going to do something unethical, at least be clever about it so I can have some respect for some aspect of you.

Spankbanks & Dreams of Life & Death.

Upon waking up today, my first day off of the week, I found a message on my phone from Rose. This is a girl that I met through my friend, Moe, who had been longtime friends with her until they made the catastrophic choice to get into what turned out to be an ill-fated relationship. By the time it ended, I’d already established my own friendship with her, and though I harbored a lot of guilty feelings with respect to it despite Moe’s blessing, her and I also had sex for a brief period — though only once or twice.

I had been occasionally popping muscle relaxers at the time, which certainly had some consequences on at least one of those occasions.

She is, in fact, the last girl I had sex with — some nine years ago. If that turns out to be the last time I ever have sex in this goddamn body, I’ll surely be disappointed, though this certainly has nothing to do with her (quite honestly, I would be proud for her to be my last), only that I certainly wasn’t at my best on that occasion, and I can’t express enough how very much I would have liked to have given it to her.

And now, after a year shy of a decade of not having sex, of my mind being twisted by porn, the things I would like to do…

Despite what I regard as my piss-poor sexual performance, despite her abruptly getting in a relationship with the man to whom she is currently married, thereby eliminating any ethical means of me ever making up for it, it doesn’t appear to have damaged our friendship in the least, for which I am eternally grateful.

She’s intelligent, interesting, and at least slightly weird. And it feels good just being around her.

Like many people, for whatever reason, she has also periodically told me about her dreams — typically those in which I feature, as was evidently the case this morning. Her message involved a dream she had in which she had learned, through watching the news, that Moe and I had been in a kayaking accident and drowned. She messaged not only to tell me this, but to confirm I was okay in this world, and feeling it best to break my rule regarding not answering any messages or engaging in any form of human contact after awakening until I’ve had sufficient caffeine and nicotine, I promptly responded that I was indeed okay. I told her that I was happy I was periodically part of her dream life. She told me that she dreamt of me quite often, in fact.

Then, rather than merely saying we should hang out, as we have so often done in the past, we actually made plans to get together at her former place of employment — Starbucks — on December 21st. The day of the Winter Solstice, as it turns out.

Though I’ve had an undeniable attraction to Rose since first meeting her, my admiration for her has grown since then, to the point that its become a sort of envy. I’m sure there was more of a build up than I was aware of, but to me it seemed as if one day she simply decided to quit her job and chase her dream — one which I had been previously unaware she had even had — to become a photographer, specifically photographing births, though much of what she currently shares on her studio page involves beautiful photos of women, including herself. And she is very good at what she does.

Though I appreciate the art, there is, I must confess, another level of interest in the photos she has shared of herself online and to me personally on messenger, and it helps that she is well aware and seemingly entirely comfortable with the fact that she has high status in my spank bank, though the frequency of my deposits into her account are nonetheless rather embarrassing.

In any case, its difficult for me to imagine the motivation, confidence and discipline it would take to start your own business, to put your all into pursuing your own passion. Despite the simultaneous stress, the sense of liberty and power that must come with being your own boss is attractive, to say the least. It seems something far more akin to living that what I’m presently doing, at the very least within the largely uninformed simulation of it that I cradle within my mind.

She’s alive. Pursuing passions like a boss.

I wish I were capable of such a thing. Doing what you love for a living, it’s something I’ve always dreamt of. My job remains as unrelated to who I am as could be. Its more like a prison sentence, and I certainly hope I manage to escape and find greener pastures some day soon. I don’t want to die scraping mystery substances off the bathroom wall of a fast food restaurant.

I’d prefer the kayak-drowning dream scenario to that, for sure.