Darkening Dreams of June & July.

6/9/23

Another person is moving into an apartment that I have to share with others, so I’ll have no privacy, no room to sleep. I look for a stash of pills I remembered having, but I’m not sure if it was in my old apartment, where I lived by myself, or this one. I look in the bookcases, everywhere I could think of.

In the midst of looking, I notice a box high up by television set that hangs from the ceiling, and its marked with masking tape on which is written “Goth Girl 1.” My friend Mitch had evidently made a deal with some creepy guy so we could get free internet. No one had asked what the deal entailed, but now I wondered if the deal was that we’d get free internet if the guy could use it to spy on a goth girl.

6/12/23

I’m marching down an endless series of hallways occupying people, gun in my hand, shooting every time I turn a corner. At some point in the process I wondered how I was managing to shoot the targets and never any innocent bystanders, as I was turning and shooting so fast its difficult to understand how I’d have time to discern which was which, but apparently, I was managing it just fine.

Store manager Kelly was talking to the former store manager, Connie, when I tell Kelly I tried clocking back in from break on the monitors several times, but it wouldn’t let me for some reason. I also recieve a text from my friend, Moe, referencing it had been nearly a year since we’ve spoken (in reality, it’s been longer).

6/13/23

I discovered there was a flat tire on my truck, someone had stolen the sand bags out of the bed, and behind the glass of either my gas gage or speedometer, there was a little gear.

Back in dumpster corrall at work, I watch as a grasshopper about as big as a Bic lighter hop frantically at about chest level. It was slightly frightening and I had the impulse to kick it away, but I didn’t want to be an asshole. Just after I awoke, it bothered me that I couldn’t discern whether this really happened yesterday or was a dream.

6/14/23

I dream about Maria Cox again, but the details elude me.

6/15/23

In a very realistic dream that was more tactile than visual, I bend down for some reason and find myself amazed at my flexibility. My head now right before my crotch, I can feel my dick through my pants — either pajama pants or sweat pants — and build up the courage to wrap my lips around the fabric covering the head.

6/16/23

I hide beneath and around a small table as at least two people are shot and killed and somehow manage to survive without being seen.

7/6/23

A guy kills two people in my room and then leaves, and after some time goes buy I realize I haven’t called the police. Later, I look and the bodies are gone and the mess is cleaned up.

It’s dark outside and raining. I was supposed to watch over my parents’ house and care for the animals, but my mother’s parrot escapes. As I’m outside, frantically searching in the darkness and rain, the parrot begins to run toward me.

7/8/23

Despite the fact that it wasn’t the end of the world, different groups had formed, all of whom were living life in their own way. At my parents’ house, we were meeting a group that seemed Native American in ethnicity. I told my friend Elizabeth that I liked it this way; if living with my current group didn’t work out, I’d simply leave and come find her.

7/9/23

It’s night and I’m in a suburban neighborhood akin to the one I grew up in until I was roughly ten years of age, and I’m walking down a tree-lined sidewalk searching for the house I had previously been in. Suddenly I watch as an obese woman in black leather clothing with a black leather fetish pig mask covering the top half of her face dramatically marches down the sidewalk, a line of people marching behind her. Eventually, I make it back to the house where my friends are at and I find that all I want to do — and desperately — is eat and sleep.

7/11/23

Through the gap at the base of my apartment door, I see movement out in the hallway. Gazing out the peep hole, I see what seems to be another door in front of my door, obscuring my field of vision. After awhile, I drift from the door, but then hear the sound of a door closing in the hallway. I then get down on the carpet, on my belly, and peek through the aforementioned gap. I see toys out there in the hallway, with one toy, maybe a car, very close to my door. I push it with finger, it rolls, and then a cat immedeately comes up to the gap. I coax her into squeezing through the gap and entering my apartment, where I rub her belly and she proceeds to meow in a very peculiar manner.

Then, in a blink of an eye, the cat is now a toy car — like a remote controlled car, but this one appears to move of its own volition. It moves around a bit beside my kitchen then seems to want out, so I open door, but as I do, a dog, maybe a weiner dog, tries to come in. I then tell both the dog and car that they’re not mine, that they don’t belong in here.

7/17/23

I’m sitting down at a table, talking with my mother, who tells me about a photo she took of her doctor’s blackboard. The doctor won’t tell her something and I get the sense that she’s trying to ascertain what it was through what was written on the blackboard. She makes some reference to parsimory.

“The principle of parsimony?” I ask her. “Occams razor? The simplest explanation that fits all the available evidence?”

She seems happy and surprised I know about it. Instead of then showing me the photo, however, she instead lets me listen to her voice messages, but I have to put my ear real close. I can barely hear anything at first, and when I finally can, I hear what at first sounds like demonic mumbling. The second message sounds like a disappointed friend of mine, an old friend, who tells me about a party on the lake I was invited to but predictably wouldn’t attend. Then my alarm goes off.

7/18/19

I left a party in an apartment that was being thrown by Elizabeth and step out into hallway, where a group of people are walking by — among them, a guy I immedeately recognize as Nathan, an old friend from high school. He seems disturbed to find that Elizabeth and I know each other, and Elizabeth is disturbed to find I know Nathan. Something happened between them or Nathan and one of her friends, and while I try not to be nosey, I am curious and try to smooth the way and ensure them I won’t judge. Nathan insists that I wouldn’t want to know.

I then try to leave. I’m carrying at least three things, but somehow lose them in my unsucessful, repeated attempts to get out of the building. Most of the dream deals with me trying to find a way downstairs and to the exit, but it seems like I just keep going in circles.

7/23/23

I’m sitting on a big bed with Bella, a redheaded girl with a tragic life that I first met when we worked together years ago. There was someone else there, too. It seemed like an enduring dream involving a lot of conversation, but all I remember talking about is how I liked sex jokes and liked poop jokes, but not jokes combining both subjects. I’d said this to the other person, and Bella laughed and seemed to agree.

7/29/23

I come into work and while changing the trash I see Kara in a tight, black dress. In the bathroom, there’s a friend of hers — a guy — who has a horse, and he brings it into a bathroom stall.

7/31/23

It was one of those dreams where everything takes place in the dark of night, where the emotions and scenery seem enveloped in shadows. I lived at my parent’s house, and though my father was the same as he is in my real lifee, I didn’t feel as though I was the same character. I had killed multiple people, perhaps even a family member, and my father, whom I loved dearly, seemed to start suspecting I was lying about where I was going at night and what I was doing, though didn’t seem to have the vaguest sense about how horrible the truth really was. As always, he wanted to believe in me, think the best of me, and my greatest fear was that he would discover, in the end, all the reprehensible things I’d done. How much it would hurt him, how he would perceive me, what position he’d be forced into given that knowledge — it was unspeakably horrifying to me.

He asked me where I’d been at night, and I lied, saying I was with a guy and a girl (who were brother and sister) that I may have killed, but I made up their names because I couldn’t remember their real ones. When he asked me to call them on their phone, I was stuck. My structure of lies was about to collapse all around me. I remember pulling myself out of the dream, it was so uncomfortable. I then fell back into the dream, or something like it, but I was no longer the character in question.

Again, Not Open.

Just outside the door, there is a large dumpster. Inside, passed the sign that reads Lobby Closed for Construction, tables are dismantled and the walls are gutted, revealing their fiberglass innards, and a large area of the ceiling is exposed as well. A thick coat of dust and a vast array of broken pieces of tile and other shit litter the floor.

Throughout the catastrophic scene you’ll find hammers, crowbars, ladders, a wheel barrow, and other equipment. A tangled mess of wires reach out from the ground in one area like the thin tentacles of some hungry creature emerging from beneath the floor tiles. As for the front counter, it’s entirely gone, with the thick sheets of plastic hanging from the ceiling serving as the only barrier between the back of the restaraunt and the post-apocalyptic state of the dining room.

Yet even while the construction workers are still present, deafening us with the relentless cacophony of their destruction, people stroll inside, passing by the sign on the door, eager to know:

“Are you guys open inside?”

Dreams of Darkness & Light (5/16 & 5/20/23).

5/16/23.

As of late, my dreams have been getting increasingly darker — literally and figuratively. From what little I recall of last night’s nocturnal, otherworldly meandering, the theme continued. It involved Damion, an ex-coworker, who had taken a job that involved living alone in huge house — maybe calling it a mansion woukd be more accurate– in a dark, cold region, and I think there was some consideration that I might take on that job or one like it myself.

There was no reference in the dream as to what the job actually entailed, at least not that I can recall, but maybe its irrelevant anyway. New jobs in dreams are supposed to represent a desire to change something in your waking life, to transform some current situation, and that seems fitting enough.

I have been silently juggling the desire to isolate myself further or make more of an effort to nurture social connections as of late, so the isolation of the dream made sense, too.

5/20/23.

Under the pretense of practicing some technique or testing out a hypothesis, a girl I’m close to invites me to kiss her, and I do. We both seem to like it, so we kept making out after short breaks in between. It was very nice, and I’d missed moments like this — being so close to a girl in general, of course, but making out most of all. Her kissing technique and how she used her tongue I found to be incredibly impressive as well.

In retrospect, I’m not entirely certain who this girl was, but she seems to have been a mixture of three short brunettes I have been close to at different points in my life which I suppose took on similar roles during the aforementioned periods. I was friends with all three, and in all cases there were accusations from others of a sexual tension between us, but in all but one case — the second girl in the timeline — there was never so much as a kiss between us. Though I’m still convinced the girl in the dream was some mash-up of all three, I do recall while kissing her in the dream that I thought to myself how much better she kissed now.

In another scene, I’m running down a curving highway devoid of traffic in the pouring rain. While it feels like I’m in a car, I’m certainly not, but there’s a disturbing amount of water on the road and I’m incredibly anxious about potentially hydroplaning. I’m going so fast I miss a turn and it takes me awhile to slow myself down. When I finally do, the rain has stopped and I’m standing on a structure, maybe a wooden structure, atop which an extension of the highway will ultimately be built. Deep down below there are people working on machines that for some reason will be buried beneath the road in the future.

In yet another scene, I’m sleeping in bed with the lights on — or perhaps light is just coming in through the windows — covered in a white sheet. I soon feel some creature moving beneath the sheets, feeling soft as it rubs against my leg. I initially assume it’s a bunny, because evidently in the dream I had in this dream I had dreamed about having a pet bunny, but it actually turns out to be my pet chicken.

Elsewhere in the dream, I’m cleaning the bathroom at work, first successfully unclogging a drain and then seeing the feet of someone in a nearby stall. I felt bad, feeling I shouldn’t have been in here if it was occupied. I also remember that I’m not wearing pants, though I have two pairs of jeans in there with me, but only one has a belt.

Someone I work with comes in to talk with me, and while I’m not embarrassed regarding the fact that I’m not wearing any pants, I do feel embarrassed that there is no doorknob on the side of the door facing inside and that I should have fixed that for the inspection we’d just had. I then proceed to take out the trash, and as I do so I realize my pants are around my ankles. Despite there being cars in drive-thru, the occupants of which could clearly see me, it doesn’t really bother me.

When I come back and I’m near the back door, somebody asks me about the door knob, and while I initially felt responsible for not having fixed it I suddenly recalled having mentioned it to manager Steve just before the inspection. It wasn’t my fault after all, as it had been his responsibility to tell the proper authorities to get a doorknob for me to put on.

Connie pokes her head out the door, complaining because we didn’t get 100% on the inspection, but I immedeately counter with the fact that we did, after all, achieve the high 90s. She asks if that’s really good enough in my eyes, and I immedeately answer, yes. She then disappears and the store manager, Kelly, is preparing to leave. I ask her if she had to pass a certain test to pass her Junior year of high school and her grade was in the high 90s, would she be satisfied? She laughed and said she most certainly would.

At some point before I woke up, an off-screen voice tells me to not forget to record the dream I’d had regarding having sex with Connie, a thought which disgusted me as much in the dream as it does now, writing it. As I woke up, I considered not recording this recommendation and just letting myself forget it, but — obviously — decided otherwise. More disturbing is that I vaguely recalled a dream in which I had sex with Connie as well as someone I’m actually attracted to, though I couldn’t remember who she was.

Yara’s Proposal.

It’s maybe the first, second week of May.

At work, I ask for assistance from Marjie, an old manager that has recently returned to this cess-pool, run-down town in Ohio from her two-year departure to Buffallo, New York, where she lived with her boyfriend, homeless, and slipped back into her coke habit.

While it takes some effort to confess, I like Marjie as a person, and really enjoy working with her. Our dynamic is ripe with sarcasm, risky jokes, and mild flirtation, and she tends to bring out the deep well of spontaneous, biting one-liners in me. Our banter is rather cathartic, I’ve found. And when we have a serious conversation, it’s untainted, likely due to the fact that we’ve purged Anything But from our system.

Plus, I think we work well together as a team. She’s fun, and when we work together, we get shit done.

So naturally, given the inspection coming up on the 10th, I requested her help when I felt another individual was required. And it was required. I had to clean the light fixtures outside of the building, which would have been easy enough a task if not for how high up they were, and how high up the ladder was that I needed to use. I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of heights, but this height and the unlevel ground, it made me feel more than a bit uneasy.

I asked if she could help me out by holding the ladder. I trusted her enough to do so. Plus I knew if I asked, she would.

And she did.

She did for a short while, anyway, but then we got busy and, given her responsibilities, she had to go up front for a bit. I decided to tell her, when she returned, that we’d just do it later, maybe after my break. Maybe another day.

So much for all of that.

I went out front, lit a cigarette, and crouched down. Eh, I’d tried.

A hit or two in, I turn my head to the right and I see Yara approaching the building. She sees me. I wave. She smiles. She waves.

Eventually, I go back inside, carrying that absurdly long ladder with me. With business still hopping, I come to the conclusion that my greatest contribution right now would be to clean the lobby, the dining room, or whatever you wish to call it, and so that’s what my dumbass does.

And as I proceed to do so, I hear my name being called. It’s unmistakable. I look up, to the source of the attention, and I meet her eyes. She’s standing at the counter. It’s Yara.

I walk up to her, our eyes still locked. She extends her hand, and I almost instinctively extend my own so as to hold her own. Touching the soft, radiating, probably-too-young ethically-speaking, but fuck-it-she’s-legal skin. Mingling, flirting with the energy she’s giving off like a radiant, rogue star passing by — a star having decided, for whatever fucked-up reason, to let herself be caught in my gravity, and revolve around me for what will certaintly turn out to be but a limited time only.

And I, a rouge planet, spinning helplessly around the dining room in the wake, cleaning tables, sweeping the floor, and an eternity later going behind the counter, where I look up only to see her staring back at me from across the boundary.

Unlike other customers, she doesn’t seem annoyed in the eternal wait. Still meeting my gaze — forever calm, confident, and deeply thirsty — she lifts up her hand to obscure the side of her mouth, asking something I’m sure I heard right, though it’s a question I’m somehow conditioned to doubt.

I have to pass by counter, walk up to her in the ill-defined line, all to ask her what she said, ask her to repeat it, to lean my ear just to take it all in, just to ensure I hear her right.

She asks it again.

“Wanna fuck?”

I’d heard her right?

Fuck.

“Yes,” I tell her, instinct overwhelming me, dominating reason. After a moment, with the boundary of the counter still between us, I find myself adding:

“I admire how direct you are.”

And I do. I so fucking do. Yet in my mind, it’s all too, too fucking good to be true. so much so that later, doubt intervenes, and as is my chronic tendency, I need to reinforce the truth.

So later, I text her.

“Did I hear you right?”

And I did. Over a decade dry, maybe twelve years in this agonizing, sexless desert of a decaying, dying body, and at last: an offering.

At last: an oasis.

And I could run, yet given my deeply-embedded trust issues, I crawl.

I crawl towards…

Not That Old.

I. Baphomet.

I think it was the last Thursday in April.

I’m walking up to the side doors after taking out trash and I hear a car honk from behind me. I turn around and a nearby car rolls down the driver-side window, and from inside I see a cute, familiar face. It’s Baphomet, as I’ve come to call her — a former coworker who often, and without reason, would make the noise of a goat at an incredibly high volume.

In the course of our typical, sarcastic exchange, my age is brought up, and it comes to my attention that she thought I was well into my fifties. When I tell her I’m only 44, she seems legitimately surprised. She tells me it’s the gray beard.

I shake my head in disbelief and sigh to myself. I’ve had some version of this conversation on at least two other occasions in the last week or two, and it’s not as if I’m seeking it out.

II. Twelve.

As I’m walking by up front, a coworker playfully puts up her fists. I don’t blink.

“Bring it,” I dare her.

“I’d never beat up an old man.”

“I’m not that old.”

“How old are you?”

I’m not going to make it easy for her. Anyway, I’m curious how old she thinks I am.

“Guess.”

She shrugs. “53.”

“Jesus Christ, I’m not that fucking old,” I bark back in disbelief. “So what are you, 12?”

She looks offended. “I’m 18. So really,” Twelve asks. “How old are you?”

“You’re nine years off,” I confess. “And if you’re thinking in the wrong direction, I’ll punch you.”

She’s trying to do the math. I decide to take mercy on her and make it easy for her after all.

“44,” I tell her. She looks shocked, and now this is really beginning to hurt my feelings “What, is it the gray in the beard?”

She nods.

“Well, that’s why you don’t work here for 19 fucking years.”

She shakes her head, jaw still hamging open.”You’re old enough to be my grandpa.”

“I’m not that fucking old, damn it.”

“Well,” she says, reconsidering, “you’re old enough to be my mom’s boyfriend.”

“Is she hot?”

Finally, I felt satisfied. The look on her face told me I’d won.

III. Yara.

The week previous is when it all began.

I’m cleaning the dining room when my name is called out. I follow the source and arrive at a table with familiar eyes staring out at me from a familiar face.

It’s Yara. Her hair is different, like every time I see her, and we get into a short conversation when she asks another question people have been chronically asking me as of late: how long I’ve worked here.

“Nineteen years,” I confess.

Then it comes: “How old are you?”

“Fourty-four,” I confess.

Her eyes bludge. Her mouth drops open. Rather skeptical, clearly cconfused at first, she finally accepts my sincerity. As she’s at the booth, I watch her do the math.

“When I worked here,” she tells herself, she tells me, “I was eighteen.”

She’s quietly laughing now, covering her mouth.

“I totally would’ve fucked you.”

I have to look away.

Through covert laughter, aided by the hands covering most of her face now, she adds, “I still would.”

I pretend not to hear that, though I did, and she clearly knows I did. I continue wiping tables, cleaning lobby, trying to work it out in my head.

Before I depart to the back, I tell her it was nice seeing her. That it was good to see her again.

My Three-Legged Trigger For Transcendence.

5/7/23

Often when I’m outside for a smoke or taking out trash at work I see one of two people out walking their dogs. There is the big, bald, black man who walks a small, fluffy, white dog about the size of a football, but he basically just walks the fluffy little guy back and fourth on the sidewalk in the front of the building. Then there is the white lady, maybe in her late fifties, who walks around a three-legged white dog — and she takes her fucking everywhere.

This adorable, sentient tripod is so energetic, so full of enthusiasm for life, so intent on bolting around, exploring, and stretching the leash to its limits, it almost seems as if it’s the dog who’s walking the woman.

Today was the second time I’d gotten to pet her — the dog, to be clear; not the woman — and just as was the case the first time, as soon as I began to do so she instantly calmed, soothing my soul in return as she stared back up at me with her big, bright, entranced and entrancing eyes, as if she wanted nothing more in the world.

Just by petting her, she seemed to cleanse my dark, weird little soul. All those plaguing sources of anxiety and depression as of late — the haunting dreams, the widening cultural divisions, my mid-life self-loathing, people with perceptions poisoned by the extreme, ideological nonsense they’ve adopted, political nitwits that have or had no business being in power, climate change, insane rent increases, the price of eggs — all of it, once my drowning-in-shit world, suddenly shrank to an infinitesimal size and was blown away by the wind, leaving me buzzing as I floated freely on a happy little Bob Ross cloud.

Maybe I need more three-legged dogs in my life.

Maybe that’s the answer.

Your God is Poison, Cuz.

In the arena of the intellect, there are undoubtedly a great many reasons not to believe in the existence of a god, so far as I have found, and no good reasons to believe — particularly with respect to the Biblically-based concepts. But why stop there?

After all, there are damn good moral or ethical reasons to think it’s all bullshit, too.

Someone who I care about very much once told me that she should’ve died in that car crash she’d been in, and that someone was clearly watching over her, and when I asked her who specifically that someone she referred to was, her answer was: god.

(Relax. Stay calm. Take a deep, deep breath. Now exhale: completely).

So let me get this straight, I wanted to say.

All of those dehumanized and oppressed under slavery? All the victims of the Holocaust? Each and every child dying from cancer or AIDS? All the African girls who have had to endure female genital mutilation between infancy and their teens?

All the casualties of war? Torture of every fucked up form and flavor? Kids raped and physically abused and neglected and utterly abandoned by their parents?

Starvation and suffering and disease and devastation and agonizing death in a quadrillion-plus different ways all throughout human history?

And that’s just our species. That’s only on our Island Earth. Pains beyond our imagining may be hidden from us, horrors we could barely conceive of, histories of terror spread throughout the cosmos.

In any case, you mean to tell me that your god — your omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving, Jesus’s-mother-fucking god — he sleeps through all these local and universal alarms on his cosmic fucking cell phone, snoozing away peacefully, but you, you get in a car wreck, and he jumps into action immediately, in an abrupt sense of urgency, without so much as a stretch and a yawn and a sip from his morning coffee, and saves you from corporeal expiration?

Really? Fucking really?

Do you realize how arrogant one has to be to swallow that line of self-aggrandizing bullshit and believe you rank as so insanely special in his infinite, all-seeing eye? The eye of the supposed creator of this goddamn universe?

If your god exists, fuck him. He’s an asshole of truly epic proportions.

And furthermore, fuck you for pledging allegiance to such a cosmic-scale monster. For reals.

And anyway, if what you believe is true, wasn’t it your god that made you get in that car wreck in the first place? Wasn’t it your god who orchestrated the whole shit-show to begin with?

Given “his” only limitations would necessarily be self-imposed, couldn’t that blessed being that spared you from the tragedy “he” created have simply not created that tragic fucking circumstance to begin with?

Look, I know you told me this between three and four decades ago, but your insipid belief bothers me as much now as it did then, and perhaps even more so.

After all, I’m an avid people-watcher. People-listener, people-feeler. My involuntary empathy is not badge of honor, either, please understand; to be honest is sucks big, floppy, dirty donkey dick, because I’m nearly always left hopelessly caring, worrying too much and being utterly powerless to do anything to actually help matters but can only listen like a useless fucking ear and draw it all in and stew over it like an incompetent fucking fool.

Having said that, I’ve met some good fucking people in my time. Good people who, like you, have had hard lives they didn’t deserve. Negligent and/or abusive parents which ultimately lead – coincidence? I think not – to negligent and/or abusive relationships later in life, on towards their deaths.

Some crumble beneath the weight of their lives. Others grow strong, yet still have to constantly bear the weight of their past and at the same time endure the relentless onslaught of tragedy after tragedy, horror after horror, misfortune after misfortune, no matter how strong they remain, no matter how hard they try, no matter how determined they are to overcome.

I can’t imagine what they could have done in this life or a past one – and I know you don’t believe in past lives, but I remember at least three of my own (fragmented, puzzle-piece memories, but they’re there nonetheless), so you can spare me your fucking bullshit religious Christian garbage – that could have earned them this heartache, this emotional torture, this ongoing circumstantial and physical trauma.

So spare me. Knock it off. Fuck the fuck off.

Just today, a young, teenage girl I know who has a negligent and addicted mother, and a father addicted to the aforementioned negligent and addicted mother, she spoke to me again. Recently, she had her tax refund stolen – her identity stolen – from what, I gather, is most likely “family friends” (from her mothers side), possibly the mother herself, and to top it all off this wonderful, strong girl now has a disturbing cough and a pain in her chest that I (and her, at some level) fears may be serious.

I worry for her at multiple angles. Its fucking killing me.

Just today, a manager at work and friend of mine I’ve called Marjie, she had a great outing with her father, they went to the bars in town and had a great time, but her father got black-out drunk and started insulting her for liking men who bear a particular skin pigmentation, and using a historically emotionally-charged word to express that prejudice of his, which prompted her to fling at him some aggressive words, which in turn inspired his drunk, blackout self to start swinging at her face, leading to a wound just above her eye that she came in to work today, on her day off, just to see if she could find butterfly stitches in our first aid kit because there wasn’t any at the local fucking dollar store.

Evidently, when he saw her face after he sobered up, he realized what he had done, cried, and hugged her, which at least at some surface level she accepted as a sincere and heartfelt apology, but still.

Really? This is your god’s plan, cuz?

I love you. I truly do. But fuck your god.

Fuck that fictitious bastard hard, in the ass, without lube, and into the depths of your mythological hell, with a hearty slap on the ass for good measure.

By using this illusion to make yourself feel special, your implying so many others are less so, and I can’t accept that.

Your insipid fucking belief is poison.

Your god is poison.

Alien Chicken Man & the Abandoned Milkshake.

4/24/23

Wavering from side to side, leaning on one foot, now the other, the guy is clearly whacked out on some hard drug. His eyes are glazed over with lids evidently as heavy as lead, and while he’s looking in my general direction, he shows not the faintest glimmer of awareness regarding my presence or my increasingly persistent voice.

“Sir,” I say again, “this is your drink.”

Back and forth, back and forth, hardly capable of maintaining dimly-lit awareness yet paradoxically maintaining his grip on his plastic grocery bag of beer, which is swinging like a pendulum at his side. He’s standing a few feet away, and I echo my line again, like I’m stuck in a goddamn time loop, speaking louder — though careful at the same time to not sound impatient or angry — as I try in vain to break through his drug-addled trance state, yet he remains unaffected.

Turning around, I walk towards Marjie, who’s putting together orders behind me, and speak to her in a low voice.

“I’d call the cops,” I recommend. “He’s not going to leave.”

She had alerted me to his presence a seeming lifetime ago, telling me in a similarly low voice how she’d informed him his order was waiting for him on counter, but he said it wasn’t his and continued to wait. Although she had referred to him at the time as “the drunk guy in lobby, just standing there,” this clearly wasn’t alcohol at work here, and what he was doing was far more akin to rhythmically waddling in place like a lobotomized penguin than “standing there.”

I try again to get his attention, and eventually he walks in a meandering fashion towards me, just the counter between us now, only to mumble something entirely incomprehensible. I inform him as politely as I can that I can’t understand what he’s saying, but that this chocolate milkshake between us? It’s his.

He mumbles a bit more, and I can make out that he thinks he ordered a sandwich, maybe a meal. I ask to see his receipt, that crumbled wad of paper he’s been stress-balling in his hands. He hands it to me. I smooth it out a bit and read it.

One chocolate milkshake. That’s all.

“This is all you ordered man,” I say. “Do you still want it?”

More incomprehensible gibberish, and then he abruptly loses interest and turns his gaze away, proceeding to waddle to and fro at the counter now, booze bag in his grip still following his swinging lead.

Now frustrated to high hell, I walk into the dining room to go clean a table with a mostly-empty fry carton and two straw wrappers on it, because human beings have evidently lost the capacity to clean up after themselves. The lady in the next booth, she comes in nearly every day with a guy who could be her husband, could be her brother for all I know. He’s quiet and shy and she is everything but. They’re both kind people, though, and know me by name.

She asks me about him. He’s another one of the homeless guys around town with severe mental issues, I tell her. He’s been in here before and I don’t like the way he talks to my fellow coworkers. One day, maybe a year ago now, he had an outburst where he accused the girl at the register for selling him, and I quote, an “alien chicken” sandwich.

Like me, her concern was focused on the two young girls who had been at the register earlier and seemed understandably unnerved by him. She asks me if I think he’s drunk, and I tell her it’s not alcohol. He’s clearly whacked out on a drug of some kind. She said she didn’t think it was booze, either.

“That’s fentanyl,” she tells me confidently. “Did you guys call the police?”

I wasn’t sure, so I went to ask Marjie. She said hadn’t yet, but picked up her phone and began to just then.

I go back up to him, ask him again if he still wants the milkshake, and he mumbles about his order he never ordered. I sigh. He mumbles to me, go ahead, call the cops.

“They’re on the way,” I assure him.

Within moments, he walks out the door, hangs outside by the window for a moment, walks back in, wobbles at the register like he’s about to order something, and then exits the door again, doing his waddling-in-place act by the window.

Shortly thereafter, through the window, I watch as the police cruiser pulls up. The cops never waste time getting here, it’s like a second home to them. The guy with black hair steps out of the driver seat, straight posture, and familiar to me from the overdoses we’ve had in the bathroom. He immedeately starts talking to Alien Chicken Guy.

The other cop comes in through the door, same posture, but much younger, and with blond hair. Clearly wet behind the ears, as he doesn’t seem cynical enough yet. He asks Marjie what happened, she talks for a bit and then motions towards me, and I talk for a bit, and he says what he can do is essentially ban the guy from here. If he comes back, he goes to jail.

I stop leaning and walk away, as I’m no longer needed, and proceed to take out the trash.

Years of working in this town serves the same purpose as those “scared straight” programs they used to run, where they would take troubled youth to jails and prisons and the prisoners would scare the living hell out of the kids to put them on a more law-abiding path.

The process in this town is more enduring, and though I’ve never done coke, meth, heroine, or fentanyl, nor had any interest in doing any of them, putting a gun to my head in the attempts to make me try them wouldn’t be enough to move me at this point.

Furry Sex Parties & Other Flavors of Weird.

4/24/23

On Saturday, my parents came down for a visit, and while we were waiting on our order at Chili’s, I enlightened my mother to the existence of the ‘furries’ subculture and their sex parties. Thankfully, this seemed to amuse her greatly. My father made the comment that it probably wouldn’t surprise me to see something like that in the town I live in.

Thing is, I actually have. Or close enough.

One time a guy with a choke-collar came in with a huge briefcase and sat in the back. As I was cleaning, he went to the bathroom and the suitcase fell open. From inside, out from a diverse collection of kinky items, a wolf’s mask stared back at me.

I also told them about a girl I worked with who came to her interview wearing a clip-on tail. Despite the repeated protests of the managers, she continued to wear it to work until she quit, was fired, they called animal control — I can’t quite remember.

Then I told them about the time I was outside smoking before work and saw two guys in ape costumes coming up the sidewalk, slowly followed by a police cruiser, and then proceeded to order food inside. I had to ask them. Apparently it was a sociological experiment for college.

What I forgot to mention, however, was an incident a few weeks back when, right before we closed, a door dasher came in the door. It was a cute girl, maybe in her twenties, probably more than a little stoned, and she was wearing an Eeore onesie.

And while it’s not entirely related, just today two kids casually walked in and ordered food while wearing bright red clown noses. No one stared. No one behind the counter or in the dining room even seemed surprised.

This town, it has a way of acclimating you to the strange.

I often think: a saucer could land in the parking lot and a herd of Gray aliens and their Mantis overlords could march out of a hatch, through our doors, and order a large vat of liquid nutrients at the counter, and you know what? I’m not sure I’d bat an eyelash.

Point is, dad’s right. I’m not sure much at all would surprise me anymore. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. It’s as if the universe is saying:

“Sure, you’re weird, Tim, but there’s many flavors of weird here. Maybe even weirder than you. So no need to feel weird about it.”

Evil Yoda Lives.

4/11/23

T’was a long time ago, back in the days when I had significantly more hair on my head and significantly less on my face. In period of my life where I rarely slept, subsisted on a strict diet of coffee and Ritz crackers, and my hygeine, to put it mildly, left a lot to be desired.

It was an era in which I was occasionally dating a girl from California with pink hair who looked remarkably like Claire Danes off the show My So-Called Life. When I drove a Chevrolet Celebrity, a massive vehicle that my friends affectionately and appropriately referred to as The Boat.

That was when I worked at a convenience store in a small town not twenty minutes from my parents’ house, where I lived at the time. It was the second job I ever had. I was the stock boy, janitor, and general bitch of the place, and the boss was a vile, vertically-challenged corpse of a lady. A mean-spirited, narcissistic, power-hungry and tabloid-reading twat I came to refer to as Evil Yoda.

Amazingly, her rather quiet husband was the kindest old man you’d ever hope to meet, and her daughter and her husband were also pleasant and easy-going.

I came to detest Evil Yoda more and more, however, and when she demanded that I stay after my scheduled work hours one evening for no other reason than that she wanted to assert her power over me and make my life miserable, I just up and left.

I had just walked in the door of my parents’ house, where dad was busy working on the door to the food closet, when the phone rang. I knew who it was before I picked up.

The angry gremlin on the other end told me that this was important work, and that I shouldn’t bother coming in tomorrow.

Pompous bitch fired me less than half an hour after I quit.

Interestingly, the poofy-haired gargoyle of a woman crossed my mind a few days ago while driving home from work, and I thought to myself: That bitch, she’s got to be dead by now.

Fast forward to this morning. I awaken from a dream and find a text from my mother on my phone.

Did I remember that old lady I used to work for? She’s still alive, mom told me. Still driving.

There’s been a lot of odd “coincidences” again the last few weeks, but I could’ve gone without this one. I don’t know how she could still be breathing. She looked like she had a foot and four toes in the grave last I saw her, and that was over two decades ago.

In any case, if you needed further evidence there’s no justice in the universe, there you go, my friends: Evil Yoda lives.