Confessions, Pop Bottles, & Job Essentials.

I duck into the walk-in cooler to take a few swigs from my water bottle. Suddenly, I notice the door hasn’t closed. Through those foggy, plastic flaps that hang down from the top of the doorframe and hold in the cool air, I see a distorted silhouette holding the door open. It is, of course, the man that I’ve wanted to punch straight in the throat for the last two, enduring, rage-fueled hours.

You ever shake up a bottle of pop? I am that bottle, trying desperately to keep my cap on super-tight.

He walks in and starts spilling to me. The cooler, the confessional; I, the godless priest.

Aside from having pissed me off earlier, he’s clearly been angry himself since before he even got here, and his confession confirms what I already knew to be the reason: every day he works, they send him home an hour early. His mother is pissed, he tells me. And of course, of course, he’s being sent home early again tonight.

Some jobs, I tell him, have mandatory overtime. This job is the antithesis to those jobs. When labor is high, non-essential personnel get sent home early, and on this shift, only closers are essential.

This sucks, I know. This is just how shit works.

I also explain that when he’s done with dishes there’s really nothing left for him to do, so I offer the suggestion, as kindly as I can, that perhaps he should spend some more time scrubbing the dishes that need scrubbing in the future. If not for the fact that it’s basically his job — a job that serves as the epitome of unskilled labor, I fail to add — then maybe for the purpose of stretching out the time, you know?

As he insists that he already does this, you can almost choke on the putrid odor of utter horse shit in the air.

After he asks me if I think they’d just let him stand back in the dish room when he’s done until it’s his scheduled time to leave, evidently with his thumb plugging his rectum — the twenty-first and undoubtedly dumbest question of the night — I calmly explain why their answer would be a raging hard no. To provide context, I go over the essentials of what, like, constitutes a job.

I’m not kidding.

At the end of it all, he seemed calmer, happier, grateful for the talk, and in a brotherly fashion asked if I was working Thursday — the final question of the night.

Still angry at him, even I felt a little better. Until two hours later, that is, when the manager informed me the motherfucker had actually asked to go home early. And that pop bottle I mentioned earlier?

It fucking exploded.

I felt bad that my manager and two of my coworkers had to witness my rage-fueled, end-of-the-shift rant, but I figured it was more ethical than a throat-punch.

Floored.

“Put those on the floor,” he says to me in a commanding tone as I carry some things back to the dish room.

Look here, motherfucker.

If you’re not my boss, you don’t get to tell me what to do. Certainly not in that tone. See, I don’t want to send the wrong message, so I make sure not to reward behavior I don’t like. I’m not going to give you what you want, even if its what I was planning on doing to begin with.

Ride my ass on the road, I’ll drive slower. Flick me off, I’ll blow you a kiss.

So he had already pissed me off, and then, as I’m cleaning behind the machines, he comes back from the dish room holding big parts of the fry machine in his hands. The ones I had told him to put on the table — the one that is presently a foot away from him — when he asked me where to put them earlier.

“Where should I put these?”

A man of countless questions, yet incapable of retaining the answers.

“On the table, man.”

“Here?”

“No, not on the floor. You just cleaned them. Just put them anywhere. Anywhere that isn’t the floor.”

He then walks in deranged circles like a tweaking canine looking for the perfect spot to crouch down and pinch out some soft-serve butt-butter on the lawn.

“I’ll put them here,” he finally says under his breath, to himself, in defeat as he places them around the corner.

And on the fucking floor.

As he then proceeds to waddle back to the dish sink, I suddenly have another suggestion as to where he can put them, but it’s undoubtedly far filthier than the floor and will surely worsen his waddling.

Don’t Piss in my Goth Water.

I’m wiping down the tables, looking forward to the coffee and cigarette I’ll have before locking the doors for the night, when I see a figure approaching out of the corner of my eye.

I can identify who it is by the way he walks — that and the theme song from the movie Jaws speeding up in the background, steadily increasing in volume.

Then it happens. The sentient random question generator sinks in his razor sharp teeth, tearing away at my mind…

“You good? You good?”

I’ll collectively consider this double-shot question number 30 of my 32 of the night. Roland won with 35.

And no, I’m not good. I’m tired, sweaty, filthy, and some guy keeps following me around saying the same things to me over and over and asking pointless things like he’s dangerously allergic to silence.

“I’m good,” I tell him.

“I’m gonna pee real quick ”

Jesus fuck, man, seriously? You want a hall pass? I know you know where the goddamn restrooms are, you’ve fucking followed me in there while I was draining my dong just to ask me stupid questions.

And I’m not — I repeat, not — holding it for you.

Now I could ask him why the fuck he asks so many damn questions, this is true, but throughout my interactions with him it’s become abundantly clear that he takes the slightest suggestion that he’s doing something wrong as a devastating insult. From what I’ve gathered, his mother is quite critical and quick to anger, which would explain a lot in this respect. And as stupid as it might be, despite kind of wanting to baptize him in one of the fryer vats until the bubbles stop and he’s sufficiently crispy, I still don’t want to hurt his feelings.

Plus if he gets me to start asking stupid questions, he’s won. I can’t have that.

Later, I’m finally pouring myself a small cup of steaming hot goth water, and there he is once more. He is everywhere. There is no escape.

“Coffee again?” He says. “Coffee’s not good for you.”

Insult my beloved bean juice and our long-term, nurturing relationship? Now you’ve crossed the line, dish-boy.

“Telling people who drink coffee that ‘coffee’s not good for you’ isn’t good for you, either,” I warn him.

Maybe sipping java out of the skulls of my enemies would dissuade him from providing any further commentary on the matter in the future.

I might get on that.

Weenie-Beanie Sunday.

6/2/24

Maybe a quarter of the way through mopping the stock room, I hear her way-too-happy voice from behind me. Turning around, I find her smiling with lips as well as eyes, body language unable to conceal her excitement. And she’s holding a small bag. In a giddy manner, she tells me to stop what I’m doing, to follow her. She’s got a mess for me to clean up.

None of this bodes well.

As she almost skips along, I follow slowly behind her, and she keeps stopping, turning around, urging me to catch up. Laughing, she tells me I might want to grab gloves.

Once we get to the dining room, she points to the area where I’d seen those kids sitting earlier, finger aimed towards the floor.

And there it is, like a small snake had shed its skin. A discarded shroud for the ol’ domed flesh-spout.

While the sight of the salami-sock enrages me, at the very least it presents suggestive evidence that those idiot kids were taking measures to ensure they didn’t produce more of themselves. If nothing else, I could be thankful for that.

Walking up to it, crouching down and angling her head in such a way to examine the weenie-beanie more closely, she says, “It looks used.”

And so the work week begins.

Scrying & Sacrifices.

5/9/24

“Do you ever flood the floors?”

We’re in the dining room, and this is question number 26 during his three-hour shift. I stop what I’m doing, temporarily suspended in animation, gazing now at the flood of soapy water beneath my feet like I’m scrying a future far, far away from this utterly absurd point in spacetime.

Taking a deep breath, I stand up, holding the mop handle tightly, and look at him. I know he means flood mopping, but I ask anyway. One stupid question for another.

I point to the floor. “You mean this?”

“Yeah.”

“Once before every full moon just prior to calling up my dark goddess from the abyss. She prefers a clean floor for the ritual sacrifice. She also likes Andy’s Hot Fries,” I didn’t say, but should’ve.

New high score is 28.

Of Fossilized Bookworms.

6/19/24

“Who the fuck reads on their break for no reason?”

From where I sit in my truck, sweating like a nincompoop, I look up from my book, stare at her, and raise my hand.

“I do,” I openly confess. “And what do you mean ‘for no reason’? I find what I’m reading interesting.”

I mean, I find this to be a sufficient justification.

This time it feels even worse than it did a few months back, when a guy I worked with came up to me to inquire “why” I was reading. I felt like I was living in an old Bill Hicks bit. Is this really what it’s come to?

Look, reading isn’t for everybody, and I don’t look down on those who don’t enjoy it, but to regard those of us who do as bizarre is just fucking depressing. What’s wrong with it? Why is it so weird to them? I mean, what do they really think of me when they see a book in my hand? What goes on in their heads?

“You’re old,” she tells me, as if in answer to my thoughts.

And with that, I turned back to my book, having never felt happier to be considered a fucking fossil.

Mufflers for the Miffed.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve appreciated some of her music. And I confess, especially when she’s clad in black leather and she wears those knee-high or thigh-high black goth boots, I desperately want Avril Lavigne to sit on my face.

It’s just the honest truth.

I’d go to town. I’d tongue-twist, tongue-punch her one-eyed skin clam, lapping away in, on, and around those lovely lower lips and the man in the boat like a thirsty dog at a water bowl till my dying day.

But I’m so, so sick of that fucking song of hers. The one that they play fifty times a day on the radio station at work.

“Don’t call me baby.
I love it when you hate me.”

Look, woman, I call no one baby, for one thing; for another, consider your goal achieved.

Now if you insist on still singing that song, have some mercy and ensure you clamp your thighs tightly around my ears when you plant your pussy on my puss.

Much obliged.

Different Flavors of Dystopia (Pages From My Drunk Diary, Part II).

6/12/24

Here’s the thing: over the years, even within my lifetime, the positions held by the Democratic and Republican parties have changed.

Despite this, people still seem to swallow the positions of whatever party they identify with as a whole — to the point that if you learn of a person’s position on one of the issues you can with a disturbingly high degree of certainty predict what their positions will be on all the rest.

Now, ask yourself: how likely would it be that the majority of the US population would carefully, thoughtfully consider all the political issues and independently arrive at all the same conclusions presently embraced by either Team Red or Team Blue?

I’m no statistician, but I reckon it’s highly fucking unlikely.

So the cause of this black/white, red/blue grouping is clearly that people are either unwilling or have become utterly incapable of truly thinking for themselves, but instead prefer to embrace groupthink or herd mentality.

Perhaps it has been this way all along and the political polarization that seems to be becoming increasingly intensified today is just due to the change in news media.

I mean, we now largely get our news via the net, after all, which due to internet algorithms suggest content based on our viewing of previous content, thereby creating an informational echo-chamber that only serves to reinforce and elaborate upon pre-established “data” we’ve consumed and simultaneously blind us all to all else.

While this certainly seems to play a major role, perhaps there are other factors. I am, after all, a dumb fuck.

Even so, what is clear as fucking day is the core issue: people are unable or unwilling to think for themselves.

They identify with and worship groups; they identify with and worship “leaders,” investing faith (in the sense of uncritical certitude) in the beliefs of those groups out of a need for belonging, investing faith (in the sense of uncritical trust) in the proclamations of their leaders.

All of which certainly stems from our nature as a social species.

These inclinations are rooted in our genes, after all. They push and pull at us with the awesome weight and attraction of our shared, evolutionary history, like ghosts haunting us, guiding us, possessing us.

Even though this legion of the dead only applies to contexts and circumstances that we’ve left behind, they’re with us still.

Even though they apply to how we lived for nearly 99% percent of our history, they do not fit within the context and circumstances of today – for our biology is subject to evolution by means of natural selection deep beneath, on a long time-scale, and our culture is subject to revolutions by means of collective election on the surface, on an increasingly shorter one, striving to sublimate those naturally-born, evolutionary instincts so that they can assert themselves into the context of our current environmental pressures.

Old ghosts, newly enfleshed in a modern context, with the ghosts effectively static as the current context undergoes exponential and utterly unpredictable development.

We’re children in an ever-changing, exponentially-advancing playground operating on the same ol’, ancient rules.

Survival depends on one of two avenues: returning to the way things were, the way our context was for 99% of our history, or changing ourselves so that we more effectively adapt to the presently ever-changing context.

The realization that neither option seems any more preferable than they seem probable to me is haunting, daunting, taunting, as the only alternative – which in my pessimism, my cynicism, seems infinitely more likely – is our extinction by our own hand.

This is not the future I want to see, not by a long shot, but it is the inevitable result I can’t help but see given the conditions and our present trajectory.

So if we are to survive, I fear, either of the two other alternatives must occur, either by our own hand or that of others, and in any case, the scenarios I’m presently capable of imagining only offer different flavors of dystopia.

There is a distinct difference between believing what you want to believe and believing what the available evidence seems to suggest, and that apparent fact, while I’ve long been aware of it, has never been as potent as it is in this particular and unfortunately broad circumstance.

Never in my fucking life have I hoped so much that I might be so bloody wrong.

I Hate It Here.

I go out in front of the building to have a smoke and briefly write about the high point of the day in my cell phone. For the last two weeks or so, this job, this town, has upped the ante on its usual bullshit and I want to capture some positive inspiration for once. As I should’ve expected, I only get in a puff or two and manage to type out a single, solitary, fucking letter when I hear someone yell, “Hey!”

Though the vibe I sense makes me feel certain this was directed towards me, I don’t look up. Maybe if I ignore this, I tell myself, it’ll go away. This is always a hopeful thought, though it never works out in practice.

Then they say it again. Louder.

“HEY!”

So I finally look up, and at the sidewalk a short distance away I see a guy in a white shirt aggressively extending a middle finger at me. I am certain I don’t know this man. I am certain I did not earn half a peace sign.

I shrug, then casually look back down at my phone.

Seconds later, I feel alarm bells go off within. I look back up. The angry man in the white shirt is approaching me, and his manner of doing so clearly communicates he is shitfaced. I casually put out my smoke, go in the door, and don’t look behind me.

I now exit out the side door.

“I don’t know why it takes so long to make two goddamn McChickens,” says the short, scruffy-looking guy I talked to half an hour ago and didn’t know was still out here. “I don’t even want it anymore.”

I don’t engage. I just take a few drags, flick the cigarette, go inside and proceed to mop the floor.

By the time I’m done and go out the side door again, it’s finally quiet. I’m finally alone. I light up.

Then people keep parking, walking towards the building, and I inform them we’re closed. One guy is bitching to me about his gift card, and how this and that is stupid. Do you see the red hair, red shoes, and make-up on my face, I want to say?

No? That’s because I’m not the fucking clown in charge of this fast food joint. I don’t make the rules.

Towards the end of my smoke, which I did not get to enjoy, another car pulls up to the door, close to where I’m crouching. A woman’s voice asked if we were open, and I tell her just drive thru is open, that the dining room closes at nine. This woman speaks to her passenger as she backs put of the space, and just as she’s pulling away does that pouty, dramatic, fake crying, and in the same vein goes, “I hate it here.”

“Me, too,” I instinctively said aloud.

She repeated what I said to her passenger as she laughed her ass off on her way towards drive thru.

And that made me smile, at the very least.