Category: work

The Good Father.

A sauce packet detonates, exploding like a BBQ firework as it’s thrown against the wall. Wrappers and stray chunks of food litter the tables and floor. They yell over one another, louder and louder, a positive feedback loop that can only end in the rupturing of eardrums. One kid walks across the seat cushions right in front of me, from one booth to the other, like the floor is fucking lava.

As I’m mopping up a large drink one of the kids spilled, just beneath another litter-filled table, one member of this gaggle of giggling idiots darts by at Mach 10. In the process of doing so, he catches the leg of his shorts on the mop handle, almost de-pantsing himself in the process.

I bark, “Hey!,” and after stopping a moment to apologize and catch a breath, the jacked-up poster-child for pro-choice just picks up where he left off.

Where are the parents, you ask?

Probably at home, their negligent fathers still convinced their pull-out game is strong despite evidence to the contrary, so both them and the wives consequently busy making more unsocialized crotch-goblins they’re not prepared to care for.

No matter, they’ll just send their little sociopaths to the local fast food joint, where a 45-year-old, childless bachelor with bleeding ears and rising blood pressure will be forced to clean up after them and carefully bottle up his rage so he doesn’t go ape-shit on the little spidermonkeys.

I should’ve been a fucking librarian.

After wheeling the mop bucket into the corner, I take a deep breath, averting eye contact with anyone, and approach the door at the front of the building. Slipping out, I proceed to smoke a cigarette and reconsider my life choices.

A few puffs in, a girl walking down the sidewalk turns her head towards me, makes an “o” face, smiles, and laughs in apparent lunacy. Even given the tell-tale signs, it takes a moment for me to realize who this is, as I’m not accustomed to seeing her in anything other than her fast food costume.

It’s Psycho.

A pretty girl of perhaps seventeen years of age, she’s been a coworker of mine for the last two months or so. She’s prone to dramatic outbursts of energy which marijuana either serves to quell or exacerbate, depending on the day. As she walks up to me, I ask her why on earth she’d elect to come here on her day off, and she doesn’t hesitate to tell me that she’d much rather be here than home.

Then she bears all. Cliff’s Notes of her life story comes rushing out in firehouse fashion.

She tells me how her father and step father have both raped her. How her step-father would frequently do so when she took a shower. How her father would hold her and her nearly half a dozen siblings at gunpoint when any of them left the house. She explained how he’d walk behind her, keeping the handgun under his shirt, pointed at her back.

One day, she finally called the cops on him, and that’s how she escaped that fucked up circumstance and the state of South Carolina and came to live with her mother and her mother’s wife here in Ohio. Her mother who, while not physically abusive, at the very least, isn’t much of a mother, either. Her wife? Evidently a total bitch.

I know she’s not lying about any if this, and so it blows me away how she tells me all of it so casually, without teeth clenching, devoid of teared-up eyes. She just says it matter of factly. As if to say, hey, this is just what happens, isn’t life crazy?

It fucking breaks my heart. I feel myself crumbling inside.

It’s no wonder she has issues with men. It’s no wonder she gravitated towards that negligent and selfish bitch, May, who takes delight in lying and excuses her habit of constantly cheating on her girlfriends and obsolving herself of guilt by referencing her “abandonment issues” and other psychological glitches.

Shitty relationships is all Psycho has ever seen, ever known, and the familiar provides comfort, which is a more reliable source of psychological security than the risk of the unfamiliar, however much higher the odds of attaining happiness might be.

I was again reminded how some parents just shouldn’t be parents, which immediately brought my mind back to the circus of amphatamine-fueled midgets occupying the dining room on the other side of the window to my back.

Had my assumptions been too harsh?

When I was a teenager, I suddenly reexperienced — as opposed to simply remembered — something that had occurred earlier in my youth. This kind of thing had happened before, but this particular instance was different.

I was at my friend’s house, in the bedroom he shared with his four other siblings. It was a rare instance in which they were left alone, unsupervised by their strict parents, and apparently all the energy they’d been forced to repress had built up a surplus so that when they were finally alone for a brief period, it all exploded.

They were running around like lunatics. The youngest, a boy, climbed atop the toy chest, wrapped a blanket around him and lifted a flashlight high into the air with one hand, pretending to be the Statue of Liberty, and began singing the Star-Spangled Banner at high volume.

Given I knew what was coming, this must have happened before. I dropped to my belly, scooted beneath one of the bunk beds, and awaited the inevitable. I didn’t have to wait long until the door burst open and in came the father with his belt.

For all I knew, maybe it was the same with these kids. Maybe their parents were as insanely violent as my friends father was, and now that they were unsupervised, the volcano of energy erupted.

When the cat is away, the mice will play.

Maybe I just don’t understand because, unlike them, I had loving and present parents. It’s true that my mother and I had serious issues up until maybe my mid-30s, but it’s clear as day to me how lucky I was — how lucky I am — and certainly in a relative sense.

Many boys have fathers that are abusive, negligent, or altogether absent. I can say without hesitation that my father is and has always been my favorite fucking human being ever. I could never hope to express how much I love the man.

So yeah, I’m lucky, so maybe I’m just being ignorant given my different, personal, historical context and I really shouldn’t be mad at those untamed circus monkey children that invaded our fast food dining room.

Later, I was talking with Brian, another maintenance guy, back in the stock room. In the midst of conversation, he tells me he thinks I’d make a good father. This is a strange coincidence, as I’ve told him nothing about what occurred that day or the shit that had been going on in my head as a consequence.

My immediate response was that he shouldn’t say that.

I tell him that I’ve finally settled into the thought of being alone, and that it probably suited me best. I need my alone time, and that never went iver well on the rare occasion I had a girlfriend — it sure as hell wouldn’t make me suitable for a wife and kids, and at 45, I’d dodged all that thus far.

Come August, I’d be quitting this job, hopefully landing in a better-paying one, and moving into a trailer close to my family where I’d likely live alone until I die. I was good with that.

Maybe I’d get a cat, that was it.

I calmed a bit and thanked him, and confessed I’d been told that before, but it always perplexed me. Plus, I’m not sure I’d want to bring a kid into this world, particularly given it’s trajectory, at least as I see it.

He tells me that this mentality is part of the reason I’d make a good father.

Then he jokingly says this conversation almost seems like a flashback sequence. That we’ll both be looking back on this moment sometime in the future and laugh at my reservations.

“Oh fuck no,” I tell him. “Please, please don’t say that.”

I’ll settle for a cat. I’m just fine with a cat.

(No) Help Wanted.

Some people will look upon your efforts to be polite, kind, and helpful as an act of empathy, and they appreciate it. Others? They see it as a sign of weakness and, devoid of guilt and drunk with power, they waste no time attempting to exploit it, to control you, to make you their servant, and I’ve found that its important to shut that shit down as soon as possible.

And then there is something in some people that makes them instinctively percieve your act of offering to help them as insulting, for they interpret that as you perceiving them as being incapable of doing it themselves, of being too ignorant to know this or that already.

Most of the people that have this within them recognize that this perception has more to do with them than the true perceptions or motivations of the other person, and while they can’t help how they feel, they realize their feelings don’t necessarily reflect reality. They’ll grin and bear you helping them or politely decline assistance. I respect that and once I sense this in them, I steer away from attempting to help them. Discomfort is contrary to my objectives here.

There was this regular we had who was in a motorized wheelchair. There was a sign taped to the back advertising items for sale, which I thought was unique, but nit as unique as the helmet he always wore. I quickly found he wore it so he could hit the button on the hand dryers in the rest room or help push open doors with his head without bruising his skull. He was a guy who wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible despite his handicap, and I admired that. He’d grin and bear it and give a warm thank you when you opened the door for him, but you could feel he hated it. That it hurt him.

Others who are like this aren’t so self aware, however. To the contrary, they become possessed by their overwhelming fears of feeling or being percieved as weak or ignorant about anything, and as a means of self defense convince themselves that they know all, can do all, and immediately go on the attack, responding to your attempt to be helpful with viscious bitterness. Often these same people also like to assert their dominance over others even in the absence of having any recognized authority over them. They don’t want anyone to offer help, no, they want to tell you what to do — not because they can’t do it, of course, but because they can do it better than you. Because they know better than you. Than everyone.

And these are one of a handful of personality types that in turn triggers something dark in me.

I feel myself shift from my painful default of hypersensitive to unbelievably insensitive in a flash. I feel a rush of insane rage and profound hatred that I try to hold inside myself with every ounce of effort I can fucking muster. I dig my nails into my palms, bite my tongue until it bleeds or my coffee-and-cigarette-stained, not-so-pearly whites shatter into countless pieces and I find myself compulsively, aggressively ranting to someone about it or bleeding it through my fingers just to relieve the unbearable inner pressure.

So yeah, I guess we’ve all got issues.

Of Anxiety, Shame & Windex.

So it’s the end of the workday. I’m feeling anxious and hypersensitive — a state not caused but no doubt exacerbated by having had too much coffee.

Shamefully typical.

I’ve just bought a six pack of Labatt Ice, a lighter, and another carton of smokes, damning myself for buying the cigarettes because I told myself, fucking told myself that after the previous carton I was going to focus on transitioning to vaping instead.

Still unhealthy: yes, admittedly. Nonetheless: relatively healthier, or so I’ve surmised.

Exiting Circle K, I walk stiffly between a big ass van that’s parked beside me and enter the truck. Just as I’m shutting the door, I hear a familiar, kind of sexy voice.

“Small world.”

“Hey,” I say, turning my head to my left, still caught up in my anxiety and self-loathing as I look towards the girl sitting in the passenger seat of the van.

That’s when terror strikes me.

I don’t know if it’s my anxiety-riddled brain, the darkness of her van, the darkness of the truck, the dirty, scummy, honestly revolting driver-side window of mine or some utterly catastrophic cocktail of all the aforementioned elements, but I can’t for the life of me make out her face.

Oh no. Oh fuck.

“I see you everywhere now,” she says.

I know that voice. Even the bit of body language I can pick up. She’s attractive, I ascertain that much, but that’s the length of it. How can I be so blind?

Is it my anxiety? The dirty window? Or is the dirty window just a metaphor?

I don’t want to ask her who she is, though, as that would make me seem like a total asshole. So I struggle. Juggling other potential responses and trying to see her face simultaneously.

Times passes. In retrospect, I realize: too much time.

That’s when I realize I’ve just been staring at her for an uncomfortably long time like a dumb-ass deer hypnotized by the headlights of a semi speeding towards my pathetic, utterly alien self — inviting an impact destined to decimate anything left of my fragile self-image.

“Have a good night,” she says, sweetly, and I somehow sense mercifully.

“You too,” I say, slowly and cautiously backing up the truck, leaving, and all the way home beating myself up for being an awkward little shit less than half a decade away from being half a century old and still not having managed to adapt properly to social situations.

I mean, what is wrong with me?

Really, man, I hate being so fucking awkward. If I can’t change it, one would have expected me to just have embraced it by now.

In retrospect, I think I might have known who she was. Maybe.

In any case, in the end, the awkward reaction was what it was: pathetic.

Far more within the realm of my control, though: I really, really do need to clean that window already.

Honestly, it’s fucking gross.

The deeper issue would seem to require deep-seated psychological reconditioning, sure, but the other? A roll of paper towels and some goddamn Windex.

I have those ingredients, in the very least. I can do that.

So first thing tomorrow…

Of Hearts & Farts.

For the last week or two, I’ve noticed it. Driving to and from work, to and from my parent’s house, all across the road is splattered the punchline to that age-old, eternally stupid joke: what’s black and white and red all over?

Fuzzy little puddles of stink, that’s what.

According to social media, February is their annual fuck-fest, but that doesn’t help explain the roadkill.

Unless, for whatever reason, many skunks are unable to find true love this season and, weighed down by profound loneliness and depression (and taking a cue from deer) they stand on the roadside, Goodbye-Cruel-World-style, and elect to end their horribly odorous life sentences by means of vehicular suicide.

If so, my heart goes out to those poor, little stinkers, truly.

I must confess to having something akin to a phobia regarding skunks, however, that began when I was a Little Ben and we still lived in our suburban home.

A small distance behind our garage was a chain link fence separating our backyard from a field. Beside our garage, an identical fence separating our property from the neighbor’s. At the intersection of those fences, there was a woodpile.

I was in the backyard one fine day when my mother came up to me. She guided me to the opening of the sort of alleyway between the neighbor-fence and the garage and told me to stay there. She and Dad were going to poke around and rustle the woodpile in the back and I was to keep an eye on it and yell to them if I saw anything. Without further explanation, she left.

I stood there, watching as the whole woodpile jostled, as foretold. Watching as the skunk slipped out from the woodpile and pranced one, two, three times down the alley, stopped, and stood up on its hind legs.

He froze. I froze. We both held eye contact for what seemed like forever. After that, the only thing I remember is finally summoning up the courage, despite my simultaneous paralysis, to yell:

“Moooooooommm….?”

Previously, I had only known of these creatures through Pepe Le Pew of Looney Tunes fame, whose sexually aggressive affection towards that female black cartoon pussy undoubtedly led to him being targeted during 2017’s Me Too movement.

This was the first time I’d seen such a stinker in real life, though it was by no means the last.

In my 20s or 30s, I was strolling along on a sidewalk in a nearby college town one night, passing by a fence, and when it ended, I saw movement in the grass to my left. So I turned my head. There stood a skunk on its hind legs, just as in my childhood experience.

We met eyes, my adrenaline surged, and I kept walking — and didn’t look back.

Again, I saw one when taking the trash out to the dumpster corral at work one evening, though it only turned the corner as I was smoking and swiftly darted in the other direction.

I have nothing against the Oreo-colored bastards themselves, mind you, but I’m utterly terrified of getting skunked. I remember it happening to the dogs we had after we moved into our rural home in 1988, after I turned ten.

It was horrible.

If it ever happened to me, I’d feel like the olfactory equivalent of a leper.

It would likely happen back by the dumpsters at work. I’d have to call the store, inform the closing manager, remotely clock out, and go home. And I currently live in a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor, so I couldn’t walk inside. My putrid perfume wouldn’t be effectively camouflaged by the perpetual weed smell in the hallway, not by a long shot.

What would I do?

As I drove home from work the eve before Valentine’s Day, I wondered. As I anxiously gripped the wheel, stared at the road, I imagined. I tried to think strategically.

I’d have to park at an isolated distance in the lot, that much was clear.

Then I’d have to break into one of the neighbor’s garages and hopefully find a kiddie pool I could “borrow” and then drag it to an isolated area nearby, most likely be the cemetery across the street.

I’d then have to DoorDash a couple gallons of tomato juice, select the “no contact” delivery option, and have them leave it in the vestibule of my apartment building, wait until they deliver and leave, and then sneak my hell-scent-neutralizing tomater sauce back to the stone-labeled corpse-garden, empty it into the pool, strip myself of my second skins, jump in, and frantically slather it over my pasty, hairy corporeal form.

I’d then have to exit the cemetery gates in the dead of night, naked and dripping red, hoping no one saw me and mistakenly assumed I was a bloody zombie or had just finished conducting some violent, sacrificial, graveyard ritual, all the while striving to locate a garden hose hooked up in someone’s backyard so I could pressure-wash myself clean of veggie-guts.

Or fruit-guts. Whichever category you think a tomato ascribes to. Hell, for all I know tomatoes are non-binary now. It’s hard to keep up nowadays.

In any case, then I got home, and that vivid scenario went to shit. I Googled the fuck out of it and discovered, to my dismay, that tomato juice doesn’t really kill the smell. That it’s all a myth.

Well, fuck, I thought to myself. All that time, all that energy, all that creative thought invested in such an utterly paranoid scenario, now revealed to be based on a lie. All of it shot to shit.

What now?

Rerouting…

I’d have to DoorDash de-skunk solution with no-contact delivery, strip to pastey skin in the truck, slather that neutralizing lotion all over myself. Then I’d have to high-tail streak the way to my apartment before anyone saw me or I became a Ben-cicle in the frigid fucking February weather that these jet-black, white-backed, squirrel-tailed fart-cats idiotically elected as their goddamn mating season.

Still a dilemma. Still an inconvenience. And I’d have to de-skunk the goddamn truck, at least the following morning, too. Or hitch a ride.

I mean, fuck.

As if the Puxatony Phil Groundhog weather forecast on the second and the Valentine’s Hallmark Holiday today didn’t make this month, however short in comparison to the eleven fucking others, unnecessarily absurd and loathsome enough, it has to be the season where these fluffy, sentient stink bombs like to engage in their ol’ in-out, jackhammering festivities.

Or apparently go full-fledged, wrist-slitting emo and dart in despair into oncoming traffic.

Appropriate enough, I guess.

I mean, this wretched February holiday stinks so bad the wretched ass-gas of it has you holding back tears, am I right?

On How the Reasonably Empathic Can Rule Like Psychopaths.

When I first started working here in this fast food shit show of a job, we had six-month reviews and raises based on merit. We had picnics and parties at some fucking park every year where all crew members from every store in the franchise would be invited. Where you’d get free food and enter your name in a raffle to get prizes. Then, over the years, that shit started going away. Slowly but surely, until it was entirely flushed down the drain.

Though I only saw him on the rarest of occasions, I began to think of the franchise owner, who I’ll call Bob, as a psychopathic tyrant who cared not the least bit for those beneath him – those workers in each of his stores who made this shit happen, that made all of this possible for him.

I remembered reading at some point in the late aughts or early teens that according to studies, just 1% of the general population had psychopathic traits compared to 15% percent of the prison population. These were power-hungry, control-thirsty assholes devoid of empathy and compassion who were often able to utilize their charm to disguise their true nature to achieve dominance, profit from their manipulation, and elude capture when they committed crimes. Compared with the 15% of psychopaths that comprised the prison population, however, it was found that up to 12% of CEOs had such psychopathic traits as well. They were just the more intelligent psychopaths who learned how to play society’s game and used it to climb up the corporate ladder.

This, I thought, must surely be the nature of Bob.

Then maybe a decade ago they tore down our store and initiated a rebuild. During that process, there was a day when another guy and I were supposed to help out Bob. He drove us around, got us a meal, and we all talked. It blew my mind that he turned out to be such a warm, reasonably empathic, even funny guy.

He wasn’t a psychopath. Not. At fucking. All.

I say this with reasonable confidence because I’m convinced that I’d know a true psychopath if I were around one for long enough, as I feel I was with Bob. I say this with reasonable confidence because I feel that I’ve met roughly half a dozen people in my life who I’m convinced were full-blown psychopaths, and two stand out, at least with respect to the road I wish to go down and explore here.

One was an Uncle of mine, the other a girl I worked with. Concerning these two, while every red flag and alarm bell went off in me regarding their nature, I found it utterly amazing how calm I felt when in their presence. With most people, the “energy” or “vibes” on the surface are often in a state of chaotic flux, with the core rather complex but consistent, but with these two, who I presumed to be psychopaths, there was a dark, angry, ambitious core, but the surface “vibes” were eerily still, disturbingly quiet. Given my hypersensitivity to the emotions of others, however, as disturbing as I knew it was given my intellectual understanding of what it signified, the surface experience itself was calming.

Bob? He was a perfectly normal guy in terms of emotion. Not a psychopath in the least. This confused me greatly. After all, how could someone like that run a business the way he did? I kind of felt the same way recently when watching some clips of the Lex Fridman Podcast where Lex was talking with Jeff Bezos. To me, Bezos has been the real-life embodiment of Lex Luther. While the portions of the interview I watched didn’t sway me from that perception entirely, he didn’t exactly resonate with the stereotypical supervillain I’d made him out to be.

Assuming Bezos is not a mustache-twirling, villainous psychopath, the same question I had after meeting Bob is also true in his case: how can he run his business as if he is?

As far as I can tell, at least in Bob’s case, it’s for no less than two reasons: isolation and delegation.

The higher you are on the corporate ladder, the less likely you are to develop an understanding and empathy with the workers at the bottom. You’re isolated, insulated from those social ties because you don’t work with those people daily, week after week, sometimes year in and year out.

The higher up the corporate ladder you are, the more you can delegate, and the more you can have those just below you do your dirty work for you.

If you need to lay people off or fire them, it doesn’t hurt you, at least as much, because you haven’t developed ties with them, and on top of that, you don’t have to be the one doing the laying off or firing — you have the store managers do that for you. You don’t have to slowly get to know people, empathize with them, and then look those same people in the eye and tell them they no longer work here.

A lot of people might look at the up to 12% of CEOs who show signs of psychopathy and wonder how it could be so high, but honestly, I’ve looked at that percentage for years upon years and wondered how on earth it could be so low, given how those in power tend to treat those below them. Given the perspective granted to me by Bob, however, I feel I’ve come to understand the remaining 88%, and that’s the understanding I’ve attempted to articulate here: they’re not psychopathic. They might even be exceptionally empathic, for all I know. It’s just that the system allows for a perfectly empathic person to rule over a hierarchy of underlings in a psychopathic manner because it allows them to be cut off, and isolated by the masses over which they rule through isolation, through delegation.

Given that those capable of exhibiting psychopathic tendencies – whether or not they are themselves truly psychopathic – are at the top in our society, this means that they constitute the equivalent of apex predators in the natural environment.

In others words, we have built a social system in which psychopathic tendencies serve as the optimal means of survival. We’ve constructed a culture in which psychopaths, or those who can operate in a psychopathic manner while not being psychopaths, constitute the most successful mutation, bear the greatest survival advantage.

Humans have managed to construct an inhumane society.

We’ve self-domesticated ourselves into believing that becoming narcissistic assholes with a tunnel-vision aiming for the greatest conceivable manifestation of dominance is the way to our rendition of the promised land.

In conclusion, this seeming revelation makes me sick and I don’t want to be a part of it. Furthermore, I don’t think I serve as a suitable member of a social species and I’d like a lawyer who can provide suitable divorce papers for me to sign.

That is all.

On the Sloth & the Dynamics of Mutual Paranoia.

It’s an all-too-common workday. Outside, probably around four or four-thirty in the afternoon, I’m sweeping the lot — my usual routine at about this point in the work shift — and this older woman comes out for a smoke. Skinny, skin wrinkled and sagging over her boney frame, in between siphoning the life out of her cigarette, fumes seemingly bellowing out of every orifice above her neck, she asks me about that bicycle parked way out there, in far the corner of the lot.

I tell her it belongs to the Sloth. I don’t say that, of course, I give her his real name, but even so, she doesn’t know who I’m talking about at first.

I first saw the guy when he worked behind the register at the Circle K I often stop at on my way home from work. He was overweight, low-energy, and moved at a snail’s pace. Aside from his apparent lack of happiness, he both looked and moved like a Sloth.

Anyway, I describe him to her and a little light bulb flickers on just above her disturbingly skeletal cranium, and this in turn sets off highly-pressurized diarrhea of the mouth.

Oh, him. That guy. He’s disgusting, she tells me, blowing a thick stream of pollutants into the dying sky above her. He wipes his face, doesn’t wash his hands, and he gives her the creeps. She’s told him constantly, wash your hands. And the looks he gives her, she says, it’s like he wants to kill her. Something’s not right about him, she can tell.

And she kind of smiles.

Between you and me, she says, blowing out another puff, he won’t be around for much longer. Margie, a shift manager, she already got permission from Kelly, the boss, the store manager, to fire him.

I don’t tell her that I already know this. Even so, I do tell her what I had guessed was common knowledge. How he had worked here before, months upon momths ago, and did a no-call, no-show, and was subsequently fired.

Then, given the fact that we had such a low number of employees — that too many people were leaving, essentially, and we were too selective in who we hired — one of the high-ranking members of the franchise was called to step in. Sarah, a wonderful woman with an awesome stoner daughter we used to work with. Anyway, she was brought in to hire people en masse. Unaware Sloth had worked here before, she rehired him.

Unaware he had worked here before — which to my mind was totally understandable, given our truly epic turnover rate as of late — one of the assistant managers subsequently put him on the schedule. And now he was here on most nights I worked.

She was amazed at all of this, and I was amazed that she was amazed, and upon recognition of that fact I instantly felt guilty for being an unintentional rat and further feeding her clear loathing for the guy. I try and be a polite guy, force myself to engage in small talk with a creepy woman, and this is the result. I felt so ashamed of myself.

Time goes on. The night proceeds.

Between ten and ten-thirty in the evening, I go out back door, broom and dustpan in hand, my intent being to give the parking lot a final sweep before I leave at eleven. As a slither out the back door, I see the Sloth, holding a clipboard by the side door — the main entrance — with a cop just behind him, his cruiser in the parking space just behind him.

This is unexpected. I’m curious, and my body language, my facial expression, evidently conveys that with crystalline clarity, as after I greet him, the Sloth proceeds to fill me in.

Someone has stolen his bike, he tells me, and the minute he does, my face falls. I felt bad for him, but really, how didn’t he see this coming? Parking it way out there was stupid. He could’ve hid it behind the storage shed, like that skinny old guy with the mustache, or hid it back in the corral that contained the dumpsters, or even — hey, here’s a radical idea — gotten a chain and locked it to the gate in front of the building.

I hate to be a dick, but you must know the town you live in. Come on, man, it was only a matter of time.

Anyway, he just wanted to come into dining room to sit and write out his report. I tell them to give me a minute, and I go back inside and ask Sean, the closing manager. He seems annoyed — evidently the police already spoke with him, I’m assuming through drive-thru, wanting to see the camera footage he didn’t have the authority to access — but in any case, he said yes. Sure. Whatever.

So I let him in through the main entrance. I talked with him a bit, sensing he needed that. I confessed that I’d just been saying that I was surprised it hadn’t gotten stolen yet, given where he put it, and he more or less agreed. His justification for putting it there struck me as surprisingly stupid, however. Essentially his logic, as he explained it — and admittedly, I’m summarizing in my own words here — is that if the bike was chained, it probably wouldn’t stop someone who realky wanted to steal it, anyway, so fuck it.

But leave it far out there, in the corner of the lot? No offense, I thought, but that just seemed stupid.

As to his prospects of ever getting it back or identifying the perpetrator, I only hoped he realized how unlikely it was. I kept remembering that scene from The Big Lebowski when The Dude’s car was stolen, he spoke to the cop, and the officer mocked him and laughed in his face uncontrollably.

That bicycle of yours? It’s gone, man, I wanted to say. I’m truly sorry, my Sloth-like, apparently only temporary coworker, but it’s just fucking gone.

I then went out the door to tell the cop Sean couldn’t access the footage, but added I didn’t think it woukd show that corner of the lot, anyway. He said it was a pretty unique bike, so it should be easy to identify.

The following day, towards the end of the night, I pass by the Sloth and say, I don’t imagine there was any luck regarding your bike. He said no, but that he’s been checking Craig’s list and Facebook marketplace — and I smiled and laughed, because I was just going to recommend he do so. He said they probably wouldn’t try to sell it online for a week or two, and I said, yes, if they’re smart, but this us Ravenna. You might even see them biking it around town. He seemed to concede this was true.

There’s something fishy, though, he said, about how they can’t access the footage.

At this point I assumed he’d spoken to Kelly, the store manager, and based on this assumption, I said that it was possible that the camera doesn’t record, and if it doesn’t, they don’t want us to know it doesn’t record, and confessing that would blow their cover. He seemed to get that look on his face that conveyed, good point, I should have thought of that.

Then I asked him the question I should have asked him to begin with, which was whether he’d spoken to Kelly. He said he hadn’t had the opportunity to yet. That may change things, I told him.

After I smoked and locked the doors, I found there was a customer inside, still waiting on his order. I recognized him immediately. He was a great guy and used to be a regular back in the day, but now frequented the local GetGo, where a fellow employee of mine often saw him. They had talked about me the other day, and he brought up what was said. It regarded by 200$ rent increase, how I could barely afford it, and how by August my plan was to move into a trailer near my family and get a job nearby.

He left and a while later, as I was cleaning the dining room, Birdie, a young, short-haired, bone-thin girl I work with leaned on the counter and wagged me over with her finger. Curious, I walked over and leaned in as she whispered to me what had been going on beyond my eyes and ears.

Sloth thinks someone that works here stole his bike, she says, and that’s why Kelly won’t show him the footage — she’s covering up for them. Then Sean evidently said to Sloth, in jest, that I’d stolen the bike because I needed the parts.

I laughed. Really? I confessed to her that aside from “stealing” food from this place, I think I stole one thing in my life — a candy bar when I was a small child, and when my mother realized what I’d done he’d scolded me, made me return it, and I’d never done it again.

My conscience just wouldn’t allow it. I’m so sensitive the guilt would kill me.

Now I felt bad, though, that he might actually think I took his bike. It would be an illogical conclusion, of course, as I was working at the time of its disappearance, but if he was so paranoid as to concoct the Kelly conspiracy on the basis of such meager suggestive evidence, he might believe I’d somehow pulled it off, or got someone to do it on my behalf.

He’d also heard my conversation with the ex-regular, I soon realized, and so would know I was short on money, so stealing and selling a bike would fit right in to that sort of paranoid suspicion, too.

Now I was paranoid he was paranoid about me. His paranoia, it was contagious.

Not wanting to further reinforce his paranoia, I found myself instinctively avoiding any opportunity to do so. If I tried to blatantly tell him, convince him it wasn’t me, that might just amplify his suspicion it was me — or plant the seed if no paranoid flower was already sprouting.

So I said no more to him. Avoided eye contact with him. Deliberately tried to not make it look deliberate. Which I realized, in the process, was also likely to increase his suspicion of me if he already had it and generate it if it wasn’t already there.

I felt trapped. There was no way out.

This was worse than when I found myself driving behind someone who for whatever reason was taking the same, often long and elaborate route somewhere as myself and I became paranoid that they were paranoid I was deliberately following them for some reason, rather than just incidentally following them.

This circumstance, it was almost exactly like the positive feedback loop you find in the area of racism paranoia.

Here in the US, the history between blacks and whites is ever-looming, and both black people and white people are acutely aware of it. This generates a fucked up psychological dynamic between blacks and whites — mutual paranoias that feed off of one another in a horribly negative cycle.

If you’re a pastey fuck like me, try and put yourself into the mind of a black person — not just their shoes, mind you, but their minds.

You walk into a convenience store one night. No one else inside, just you and an old white guy at the register — an old white guy who, for the sake of argument, let’s say isn’t racist, but fears being labeled as such. Even so, shoplifting is frequent in this area, and so he’s on the lookout for anyone who looks suspicious.

As the black guy, you fear potential racism and you don’t want to just assume anyone’s racist, but if the white guy is racist, you don’t want to feed it, either. So you deliberately try to act calm. But trying to act calm typically doesn’t look calm. You also don’t make eye contact for awhile, but you’re curious if you’re being watched with a suspicious eye, so you involuntarily look towards the old white cashier — and that look conveys your anxiety. This, in turn, makes you look suspicious to the clerk, who happens to catch your eye, sense your anxiety, and so he gets anxious as well. Sensing his anxiety, fearing you’re being discriminated against, you avert eyes and try not to meet his eyes again, but your anxiety is elevated now, and on top of that you’re angry due to the indications of what you fear is racism. He interprets your anxiety and act of averting your gaze to mean you’re going to shoplift.

And so on. And so on.

You can see how these paranoid perceptions — mutually paranoid, yes, however distinct their sources given the individuals involved — seemingly reinforce the paranoid suspicions of the other.

I fear I am the innocent black guy here to the whitey honkey cracker Sloth, and that only feeds this horrible cycle and I don’t know how to break out of it.

Once finished cleaning the dining room, acutely, painfully aware now of this potential dynamic betwixt our mutual paranoias and the dire positive feedback loop that could be at play, I roll the mop bucket, wash cloth, broom and dustpan through the door separating the dining room and the area behind counter all at once, because I’m no two-trip bitch.

Once I make it to the back, far away from the Sloth up front, the circumstance becomes even more dire. I am accosted by at least half of the remaining employees in the store before I even unload by cleaning supplies. They want to share with me how weird his conspiracy theory regarding Kelly and the mysterious bike-napping coworker is, they want tp tell me how he thinks there’s “something fishy,” how he’s been texting with the police all night, and they all tell me it in whispers. None mention the joke Sean told, but that is to be expected, but everything else is downloaded into me from countless directions.

This is not uncommon. I am a walking confessional with a pulse. People spill things to me.

But I suddenly see what it might look like from the Sloth’s eyes up front. While I can’t confirm he’s looking, as I refuse to look in that direction, my paranoia regarding his paranoia is still there. To him, people are whispering things to me like they’ve been dying to tell me. To him, they’re likely telling me he’s onto me, that he’s onto the conspiracy. The jig is up. Disclosure is imminent.

To him, this only reinforces his paranoid, erroneous conspiracy theory — or so my paranoia tells me.

Deer in Headlights.

So I walk into the building, having just finished sweeping the parking lot, when a beautiful, slender, well-tatted woman with long, dark hair meets my eyes with her dark and beautiful own, smiles, and waves. I wave back, but with a tilt of the head and a look on my face that apparently clearly betrays the fact that I haven’t the foggiest fucking clue who she is — and she calls me on it.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

I shamefully confess that I do not. As soon as she mentions she used to date one of the guys that used to work here, and that she’s now his baby-mama, I suddenly recalled her. Due to how unbearably sexy she was (and is) and the fact that she was dating a guy I knew, I always had to be careful not to gaze at her for too long, just out of respect, and it was a constant struggle.

Now she’s smiling, making great eye contact, and clearly wants a bit more conversation in the least, but I’m so anxious all I can think about is escaping the situation. So I politely say it was nice to see her and go to the restroom before heading behind counter.

I’ve just gotten used to laughing at myself over this kind of shit.

I honestly don’t know how I ever got laid.

More Violent Dreams.

8/26/23

While I was busy doing something else, someone — I think it turned out to be dad — took my car in and got it fixed. Under the hood, it looked too clean and spacious, which made me nervous. When I put the key into the ignition, the truck sounded too quiet, and it drove perfectly. There were huge holes in the pavement right before I got onto the road — more like huge, gaping cracks in the pavement than potholes — and I almost fell in one but got to the road okay.

8/30/23

Dad had wrapped up a dead body in white sheets, put it in a wheelbarrow, and asked me to put the corpse in the shed. Out there by the shed, I decided to have a cigarette before moving the body. As I smoked, I wondered how it made him feel, wrapping up the body — if it disturbed him. I wondered if he was traumatized by it or was okay with it. I knew he hadn’t killed the person himself. I think it may have been me. I also wondered about it stinking up the barn, and knew that putting it in there couldn’t be the final solution. Eventually, I ended back at house only to realize I’d forgotten to put the body in the shed. I had just left it in the wheel barrow by the shed door and realized I should take care of that before someone sees it and starts asking questions.

Evidently, dreaming of hiding a dead body may suggest you’re attempting to hide something — potentially aspects of yourself — from others in response to overwhelming guilt and you’re terrified of being found out. In general, it’s thought to represent fears of criticism and judgment.

In general, fathers represent wisdom, and we often dream of them when feeling lost. This may suggest I don’t know how to handle these aspects of myself. Wheelbarrows represent hard work, which perhaps suggests the degree of effort I put into hiding aspects of myself, and sheds represent shelter and protection — though the dream suggests I nonetheless failed to accomplish sheltering and protecting these aspects.

9/1/23

The cute, red-headed twins from work were going to a place they called by name, though I can’t remember the name, and asked the manager if I could come along with them and the others. They got permission and began walking down the sidewalk, with the others and I following behind. We came to the place, which turned out to be a restaraunt inside a larger building. As they went to sit down, I decided to go out to smoke, as the urge was intense, but I realized I couldn’t smoke just outside the restaraunt, but had to go outside the larger building it was within. It was difficult pushing the doors open, as there were things pushed against it from the outside.

Also, maybe in the same dream, I was inside a boat on land that was attached to a building in such a way that it constituted a singular structure, though not an entirely stable one.

Buildings are supposed to represent some aspect of the self; our inner architecture. Public buildings specifically reference social aspects of ourselves and our social relations, perhaps as it pertains to our job. The Russian Doll theme of a building within a building could reference how I compartmentalize myself, and my desire to relax and enjoy myself requires effort in escaping the social situation. As for the boat attached to a building, it may suggest my attempt to bring my intellectual inclinations to explore and grow into the social sphere and my external life in general and how unstable that feels.

9/2/23

I think others and I were on the run from someone. We visited a house with multiple stories, on big plot of land, owned by an old lady and occupied by her and others. She was very protective of her land. I had gone there for third time with friends of mine for a specific purpose, hoping she wouldn’t remember me, and trying to elicit sympathy in an effort to manipulate her for what we believed to be a good cause. She acted as though she didn’t recognize me at first, then ultimately surprised us all by shooting at us. I felt a rain of bullets pierce my skin but somehow survived. I briefly woke up in bed out of the dream and I could still feel where I had been shot in my side. Elsewhere in dream, after recovering, I was graduating in some way and moving away, secretly gathering up things — documents, I think — that I had hidden so as to take them with me.

9/3/23

I don’t know if I got in a fight or what exactly happened, but my face was banged up and swollen when I looked in the mirror.

Moths & Rats.

At the sight of that big, yellow, lowercase “m” stretching into the beautiful blue sky, they can’t resist the Pavlovian response. Like frantic moths to a porchlight, they are drawn to the parking lot entrance, and with gurgling tummies and drooling face-holes they approach the door, blankly staring at the sign, struggling to understand that simple word, “closed.”

Others attempt to pull into the drive-thru, ignorant of what the orange road cones blocking their path might mean.

“Gasp! What is this, an obstacle course placed before me on the pathway to my artery-clogging consumables?”

Like rats in a maze, they accept the challenge, drive through them, around them, even over them to place their order at the speaker. No response from the magic box they bark at is forthcoming.

No.

No cheese for you, mousey motherfucker. Not tonight.

Take your bloated ass home and stick a burrito in the microwave or something.

Show, Don’t Tell (Real World Edition).

In a conversation with the new maintenance guy today, a stream of thoughts popped up in my head that have emerged from the dark of my mind before: I like when people tell me about themselves, I really do, but I’ve grown very suspicious of people who tell me “who” they are with beaming self-confidence.

“I’m a good person.”

“I’m not an asshole, I’m just being honest.”

“I’m not an ass-kisser.”

I suck at writing fiction, but I read and watch a ton of videos on the art. While it doesn’t always seem to apply, one of the typical things they explain is how to show rather than tell. Don’t tell someone about a character, in other words, but rather have that character reveal her or himself in a natural manner.

This suggestion should extend to the real world, too, though perhaps for different reasons.

I mean, inevitably they’ll show me who they are if they stick around long enough, and they must know that, so the only reason I can imagine they’re telling me who they are is that they think that what they’ll ultimately and involuntarily show me will lead me to a contrary conclusion — and often enough, that’s proven to be the case. It’s almost as if they’re trying to convince themselves through convincing me.