22).

11/6/22

All I recall is an image of my old friend, Angela, who I haven’t seen in a decade, with a face revealing uncharacteristic anger. She also has freckles, which I thought to be strange. I text her about it, and she texts back that she does indeed have freckles, and I found it strange that I hadn’t remembered that.

11/7/22.

I’m at work, nearby the fryer vats, on the side of back line opposite the kitchen. Natalie, one of the assistant managers, is working in the kitchen, talking with someone on my side of the table. I think it’s a girl, and there’s an argument. In response, the girl takes an object out of her pocket and swiftly and angrily slashes Natalie’s throat and then walks away, toward the front counter. Meanwhile, Natalie falls back as others catch her and surround her before she falls to the floor.

I’ve just been standing there the whole time, quiet, nearly motionless, stuck in observer mode, and I feel guilty for not knowing what to do or even trying to help in some way.

Some manager — I believe Kelly, the store manager — walks up from the back, looks into the kitchen and calmly asks the small crowd around Natalie what’s going on.

11/8/22

On the bridge of sleep, I keep waking up due to what sounded like bombs dropping and exploding in the distance. It’s clear to me that it’s entirely in my head, but as I slowly drift off to sleep, it keeps happening.

I wake up early the next morning to get ready to walk down to the municipal center to vote with part of a dream fresh in my mind.

I’m with someone down at end of my parents’ long driveway, which they had just gotten repaved, when I suddenly just noticed it: a huge, freshly-dug ditch along the side of the road that’s already cut the end of the driveway in half. And to top it all off, the construction crew wasn’t even finished.

I scream at one of them, “What the fuck?” Its a woman, and she calmly explains to me how they’re going to curve the driveway far to the right. All the while I’m thinking, Well, what if we have to leave right now?

I walk back to house, telling my mother that she might want to walk down there and take a look. Not seeming at all that upset, she tells me she already heard. I don’t understand. I’m furious. Why isn’t she bothered?

Don’t Talk Like That.

Heading towards the building after taking out the trash, I see a guy, maybe in his early-to-mid-fifties, supporting himself with a cane in one hand as he holds himself up against the wall with other. It’s abundantly clear that every excrusiating step delivers a shot of pure fucking agony that reverberates throughout his body.

I immediately felt guilty and pathetic for whining like a little bitch about how my leg hurt last week.

I hold the door open for him as he’s some distance away, and he thanks me and pushes himself to pick up speed. I tell him to take his time. As he struggles through the doorway, he tells me how they forgot his drink.

Half to me, half to himself, he then says, “If this keeps up, I’m going to end up in a nursing home.”

So I go into the men’s room, he goes toward counter. Staring at the wall above the urinal, I’m wondering how he plans on carrying the drink back to his truck. Though I’m often wary of offering too much help, as some feel it insulting — it communicates to them that you think they’re weak, incapable; that you’re above them, better than them somehow — I don’t feel that’s the case with him.

Once back in the dining room, I see him at the drink station, struggling to put the lid on his tea, sort of laughing at himself under his breath. I offer to carry it out for him, and he seems thankful — and thankfully, not reluctantly.

As we walk slowly towards his truck in the handicapped space, he tells me how he has ALS. How his brother had it, ultimately died of it. How he almost died earlier. Without putting his car in park, his brother leaned out of his car to pick up the mail he dropped in the driveway. He fell out, almost got ran over by the wheels, and it rolled out into the road. Thankfully, there was no traffic.

I could see he feared this sort of shit happening to him. Yet he’d also put his mother in a nursing home, which was horrible for her, so he fears that route, too.

Presently, he lives in the assisted living place behind Pizza Hut. The doctors don’t help, he says, just put him through pointless procedures to milk him for money.

“I keep praying I’ll fall asleep and not wake up,” he tells me in what I sense is honesty. “God’s not listening.”

By time we get to his truck, after I hand him his tea, after he thanks me, he goes, in a truly hopeful tone, “Maybe he’ll take me before Christmas.”

I don’t know what I should say, so naturally, what I know I shouldn’t comes barreling out my stupid fucking mouth to fill the vacuum, and I regret it in the process of saying it:

“Don’t talk like that, man.”

What a dumb thing to say. Really, why the fuck shouldn’t he? How could anyone blame him?

I really fucking wish I wouldn’t have said that.

When I posted this experience on social media, I was honestly taken aback by the response. People assured me that I was a good person, that I had done a good thing, that I was doing good work, even that I was “meant” to be there, and it felt good to read all of that. It did. I couldn’t respond to them, though — to any of it — because I still felt I’d failed somehow.

I don’t know why people have always trusted me. Why those I know well, know slightly, and even total strangers feel so comfortable with me that they can come up to me and spill to me their lives, their lives and pain, their secrets. I don’t know why, but I deeply value that. I value the insight they give me into their lives, their egos, their souls, and I would never intentionally betray them. I truly want the best for them.

Having said that, I feel that I should have grown more in this area. Mastered this art. Having empathy with others? I think I’ve got that down pat. Watching and listening to them, really taking them in, striving to understand? I’ve mastered it.

When it comes to what I should say, particularly at what I sense are pivotal points, however, I feel I fail miserably. I’ve stumbled and stammered and blathered out some stupid bullshit, for instance, when those I consider friends have told me a parent has died — an experience that I would find inconcievably horrifying and heartbreaking. And when this man mentioned, during our short exchange, how he truly wished for death so as to end his physical and emotional pain, all I had to offer was trite words, empty platitudes, standard fucking blather.

For someone who desires to be not only a true visual artist but an effective wordsmith, I can’t help but he disappointed in myself.

A Trinity of Single-Serving Muses.

10/13/22

I’m about halfway done with mopping lobby when I got caught up in a conversation with Biff, in the midst of which I saw a group of people walk passed the windows on the way toward the locked door. I heard them try the handle, fail, and then one of them immediately turns to look at me. It’s dark, so I can see no features, though I know it’s a woman. I mouth the words, “Just drive thru,” but her body language conveys confusion.

I put down the mop and walk passed Biff to the door, where I open it to stick my head out. There’s three of them: a guy with a beard, a rather large girl, and the girl facing me, clearly the dominant one of the group and their unofficial spokesperson and negotiator. We immediately meet eyes when I open the door, and it was such an intense, tractor-beam locking of mutual gaze that for a moment I felt convonced I must know her. She had dark brown, shoulder-length hair, dark eyes, and a vibrant, expressive face. She looked vaguely like a girl I know, but it certainly wasn’t her. In any case, I was immediately taken by her. She seemed confident, warm, and was clearly good with people. She had that sort of high-frequency, disciplined kind of energy about her.

Apologizing, I inform her that lobby is closed, that just drive-thru is open. She explains that the problem is that they don’t have a car, so could she order through me? I again apologize, telling her that they won’t let me do that, but that if they ordered through the mobile app they’d bring their meal right out to them. They seemed more than happy about that, as the guy had the app on his phone.

“Thank you, sweetie,” she says to me, and I absolutely loved that.

“Not a problem,” I tell her. As soon as I close the door and turn away, I explain to Biff, “god damn is she hot.”

That was yesterday, and I’m still thinking about her today, fully realizing that the way things go, I’ll probably never see or talk to her again. She’ll just be another attractive girl that, despite meeting only once, I’ll find myself thinking of again from time to time for perhaps years to come.

Though less impactful, there was also a girl I had an encounter with about a week ago that I find myself reflecting on.

9/27/22

As I’m sweeping the lot at work, a woman and her son come by on their bikes. The kid is fishtailing, pretty close to hitting me, and so I constantly maneuver to ensure I stay out of his way so I don’t end up with a tire lodged in my rectum. His mother tells him to be careful before stopping her bike, looking at me, and taking a folded up flyer out of her pocket.

It turns out she’s looking for a missing cat, though I sense it’s not her own, as she honestly doesn’t seem too interested in the subject despite her telling me about it. That and she just shrugs and goes “two or three days” when I ask her how long it’s been missing.

It’s right before they go on their way that I get a good look at her. I love tattoos on a woman, though not typically when they’re on the face — though she is an exception. She’s pretty and has damn nice eyes. Good, steady eye contact. And a soft, warm, yet somehow devilish smile to boot.

It’s when the conversation is almost over that I realize she’s sort of checking me out, sort of flirting with me, but like usual — even after four decades in this life — I don’t know what to say, what to do with it, how to bring it to the next level. I just apologize and tell her that I haven’t seen her cat.

And as her and her boy pedaled away, I’m sure it struck her that I was the wrong guy to ask, anyway. Finding pussy clearly isn’t in my skill set.

Most insane of all such single-serving maidens, however, is a girl I saw once, either in 1999 or a year or two later, when I was living with my parents and working at another fast food place. The manager had me run up to a nearby convenience store to buy her cigarettes, and upon entering I was met with a slender, black-haired girl who projected confidence and playfulness, a sort of care-free soul. While I don’t recall specifically, she had moved here from out of state and had that nomadic kind of aura about her. We spoke a bit and I left, never to see her again.

It’s amazing how strangers you encounter only once can have such an effect on you, can become so easily branded in your memory, when they probably wouldn’t remember you at all after a week. I also often wonder if I’ve missed opportunities here, if we might have even dated for awhile had I known how to play whatever cards I have right.

Drugs, Missing Time, False Awakenings, & a Girl (8/19 & 8/23 Dreams).

8/19/22

I had hooked up with a girl. We were sitting in a yard with a crowd of other people, as if we were watching something, like a concert, but if we were, I cannot recall what it was. I remember I wanted to take her somewhere alone so we could make out, but I never did.

I also saw pills in the dream. They were Vicodin, and I’d forgotten I’d had them, but they had all melted together, along with something seemingly plastic. I broke off a piece and took it, and I recall at least once spitting out a peice of plastic.

8/23/22.

I’m temporarily living in a small house while I’m in town visiting, and it’s occupied by other people as well. I’m driving alone along a vacant road during the day when suddenly, everything goes dark. In what seems like an instant, I suddenly come to, only now it’s nighttime, the car is off and I’m no longer in the driver seat — instead, I’m in the back seat right behind it.

Somehow, I convince myself it’s all due to car issues, so I take it to a shop in town within walking distance of the house. When I walk back to the shop later to see if they’d fixed it, they aren’t there, so I walk into the garage and start cleaning out my car. Just as I’m finishing up and preparing to leave, the mechanics come in through the door and I explain the circumstance.

I then walk home, but as soon as I walk in the door I suddenly fear I’ve gone into the wrong one. It looks vacant, for one thing, and the neighboring houses looked the same as the one I’d been living in. So I start walking down the road, but then I see people I know walking towards me from that direction, at least one of which lived with me, and I follow them back to the house. It seemed to be the same one I entered earlier, but it’s no longer vacant of people and possessions. I’m confused.

I woke up, intending to write the dream down, but instead walked out my bedroom door. I didn’t get far, however, until I realized I was dizzy and hallucinating people that weren’t there. It was as if part of me was still in the dream.

In reality, this was a false awakening.

I think it was then that I fell into another dream, which partially took place at work. There I’m working with a new girl that shows all the signs of actually being interested in me. At one point we were looking out the drive through window and she leaned on me, putting her arm around me. While we were unsuccessfully trying to fix one of the machines on front counter, she stands incredibly close to me, and Kelly, the store manager, squeezes between us to tend to the machine herself.

Later, we’re outside, and she seems to be covertly trying to videotape me with her phone. She immediately notices I notice and then moves the phone all around, as if I were just caught in the crossfire. When the camera hits me again, I sort of lean in, showing I don’t mind, and then she puts the camera ridiculously close to my face and starts moving it all around.

At some point in one of these dreams — it may have been before the blackout at the opening of the first dream — I’m gazing at the sun and it seems to be too bright and it keeps getting brighter. I feared that something horrible was happening.

Earthquakes, Haunted Places, & Leaky Ceilings (8/3/22 Dream).

A group of us are upstairs. I walk into a dark area alone, though not far from the group, when I feel a strange vibration in the floor. I ask if anyone else felt that, and while I think at least the girl I was with — presumably my girlfriend — confirmed that she had, this was soon forgotten, as the entire upper floor started shaking violently, the ground moving like ocean waves.

At some point — I believe while we were upstairs — the group is all around and someone puts a heap of pills in one hand, and then another heap of pills in the other. Both hands can’t hold them all and some of them spill to the ground. All of them are different colors, though the pills in one hand are bigger than the other. Someone tells me the big pills are double-strength, and I should take one or two of those, and double as many smaller ones. Rather than wash them down with the smaller water bottle I stole from work and had already drank out of, I get one of the bigger, unopened bottles from the pack I bought myself.

Suddenly I’m downstairs, alone, in what appears to be the stock room at work, only all the lights are off. Our stock shelves are on tracks so you can roll them and only go down one isle at a time. The second or third isle from the back of the room is exposed, and right above it is a missing or moved ceiling panel from which water is leaking. On top of the shelf right below it is a carboard box with cross-hatch inserts placed in such a way that it catches the leaking water and directs the flow — yet it only directs it to the floor of the isle.

So what might this dream mean?

To start with the leak: water symbolizes emotions and the unconscious, which would seem to imply intense emotions from the past are leaking into consciousness, interfering in my present. This interpretation seems to be reinforced when one considers the previous scene upstairs (remembering that attics, like basements, represent the unconscious) which in retrospect reminds me of a large room my family and I were in when we took the Haunted Flashlight tours at the Madison Cemenary, particularly upstairs, a supposedly haunted area. Aside from the haunted aspect — the past “haunting” the present, that is — we experienced an earthquake up there in the dream, which is said to symbolize intense moods and emotional instability.

The box atop the shelf in the stock room, a kind of jerryrigged means of catching and directing the flow of the water leaking from the ceiling, still confuses me a bit. It’s meaning may derive from the fact that it’s a temporary fix for catching and releasing the water — in other words, the aforementioned intense emotions — in a controlled manner. The fact that it had cross-hatch inserts, as one would expect of a box designed to hold bottles, perhaps indicates it represents my drinking habit and the fact that, while drunk (and high) I engage in writing, artwork, and relentless masturbation.

While I don’t play around with pills nowadays, that scene in the dream may reinforce the drinking part of the interpretation, as alcohol is, of course, a drug. The fact that my hands were overflowing with pills may suggest that I’m doing it too much, too often, which falls in line with the fact that I had to call off yesterday due to being hung over, which is when I had the dream.

Shadows of Connecticut.

1/13/13

Poverty sucks, especially when you’ve been smoking marijuana every evening after work in a crude attempt to relax and maintain your sanity and suddenly have to stop cold turkey for three days until you get your paycheck, during which you’re going through something that feels like withdrawal in tandem with a nervous breakdown. So I was quite happy when I had taken the opportunity to go home after work early, hoping to just hide in my room and write.

Opening the door to the apartment, pissed from all the shit at work, I’m surprised to find Nick sitting on the couch with Sherri. Both are holding drinks. The air carries the sweet odor of alcohol. Strange, whoopee cushion looking balloons litter the floor along with tiny canisters. Nick’s huge flat screen is on the pool table playing Donnie Darko.

Sherri seems excited to see me for some reason. She explains how they were doing whippets and drinking, and we talk a bit about the sequel to Donnie Darko. Eventually I escape to my room, where I change out of my work cloths, but within moments I hear the knock at the door, just as I’m buckling my pants. I opened it and the two of them, with her in the lead, nearly fell into my room, which I tried to hide from her because it was an unconventional mess. She had something for me, she told me, which is something any guy is perfectly willing to hear from a hot girl, but it makes things rather uncomfortable when the girl says it to you right in front of your roommate, who really wants her in the complete cock and cockles fashion no matter how much he plays it down.

Granted, the girl was drunk, but I’ve seen women do this all too often in the sober state and I’ve been both of the guys in question. It certainly seems to me that in most cases they are diverting their attention to one guy in an overly friendly or heavily flirtatious manner in order to produce jealousy in the other, perhaps in hopes that the jealousy fuels the jealous guy into action, specifically in the forms of, a, increased intensity, frequency and swift evolution of his attentions in an attempt to win her over or solidify her desire for him, or, b, she sends him into an overt rage and he starts a fight with the guy, which will not only serve to inflate her ego a bit (two guys, after all, are fighting over her) but give her full justification for being angry at them for treating her like a possession when they aren’t even dating, which will in turn inspire within him the most persistent and passionate attentions to date in an effort to sway her back towards him.

In any case this, it would seem, is just another subtle manipulative technique aimed at acquiring the fullest range of control available — techniques, I might add, that are certainly not exclusive to the female of the species, nor to romantic or intimate relationships. It’s difficult for me to tell whether these efforts are conscious or unconscious ones, or whether or not, in the end, I have as clear a picture as to what is going on here than seems to be the case to me.

I follow them the short distance down the hall to the kitchen, where she pulls a bottle out of the fridge and makes a horrible attempt at hiding it behind her back. Nick’s sister, Sandra, had bought me that bottle of Starbucks-flavored liquor for my twenty-third birthday. I am a certified coffee fiend, so it made sense, and the thought was sweet, but I had taken a shot of it once and nearly vomited it tasted so horrible. It has remained in the fridge of every place I’ve been in for the last decade or so, caked in dust. I don’t imagine it aged like wine. When she poured it into my mug, I thought something more akin to diarrhea might spurt out and plop into the cup with a distinctly wet fart sound. Or maybe what came out of it might make it more appropriate in use as a topping over your morning waffles.

In reality, it looked safe enough. Sherri pours some into my mug and then pours some of the coffee I just made in with it. She hands it to me and tells me that I’m going to drink with them, talk and watch Donnie Darko instead of escaping to my room as I always did. At some point in the midst of us talking she noticed my coffee travel mug, which depicted Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. I made reference to the fact that he had hacked off his ear and sent it to his girlfriend, and she went on to explain that this painting was inspired by the view van Gogh had from the window of his room at the sanitarium where he ended up. Expressing this story, she seemed to feel a sort of dark romance towards it which struck me as curious.

When we sit down, she tells me she used Donnie Darko in a college class assignment. I knew what college class and what assignment because I had also had that class, and that very assignment, only instead of choosing Donnie Darko I had chosen The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. It was the old fate and free will debate. She wrote a paper that favored fate, though she said she didn’t necessarily believe it. I had done my own paper in favor of free will, and I did that the only way I could have: my understanding had brought be to favor the notion of free will.

I’m not sure that my side of the conversation got through to her, however, for as many people do with increasing frequency, she insisted on talking over me, unable to delay anything she has to say any longer than it takes her mind to push out her mouth, and when I speak her speaking speeds and the volume of her voice gets louder, as if she is literally speeding up and running over the speed bump anything I might have to say serves as for her. One could interpret this as not an opressive act at all, of course. For instance, perhaps she only wants me to understand what she says clearly and completely before I say something in response, either because she is afraid she is going to forget these vital elements, what I say next might take the conversation in a direction too far for you to add an addendum to the statements made at your previous turn at the mic. Then again — and this I fear the most — perhaps she doesn’t want to know what I think because she thinks she already knows what I think or she doesn’t really care to know to begin with. and this is how I’ve been feeling lately.

Listen to: Just, by Mudvayne.
Listen to: All About Me, by Drowning Pool.

If I’m an ear, you want feedback. If I’m a wall born to bear the mighty machine-gun fire words, endure the lashings of Logos, then I am a subject being transferred into an object here, dehumanized to the status of a communal psychic commode, a confessional with a pulse, the beats of which go unheard over the roar of the babble from the rabble.

After she had gone to the bathroom, I waited to hear the door close down the hall before getting up, dumping the coffee she had spiked for me, and filling it back up with good old straight blacker-than-death regular fucking capital-C Coffee. I then silently sat back down and tried to seem as if I had never moved an inch. I did not, after all, wish to hurt the girl’s feelings. Nick responded with laughter, but he soon fell silent as she approached. somehow her and I got to talking. I’m sitting on the couch normally and she end up with her hands at either side of me, holding the back-end of couch for support, her face inches from my own, eyes bearing into my own. Around my own eyes, actually: for some reason, she never looked directly into my pupils at any point. She was considerably fucked up, so that’s likely the reason. Regardless, her face being this close to mine with Nick being right there brought me right back to my previous speculations. Is she using me as a tool to control Nick, or is there something else to this?

She thinks I’m interesting, she tells me. She thinks I’m intelligent.

I thank her, as awkward as hearing all that makes me feel. This isn’t right, this isn’t feeling safe. She’s hot enough, drunk enough, I’m horny enough and as much as I wouldn’t mind given different social circumstances, especially given the current context here there is no way in hell I could ever allow myself to do this, your attempt at fucking with me to fuck with him suggests something frigid beneath your skin, running like ice water in your reptile veins, and your just building up a fire I cannot diffuse, building up a rhythm that I could not ethically allow to climax, so knock it off.

Knock it the fuck off.

The pain these instinctual false alarms for my submersible custard cannon cause me is excruciating, but the potential fallout would be a selfish and ultimately emotionally costly slaughter, one too close in friendship to consider mere collateral damage. We’re slaves to instinct. We’re a slave to unconscious forces from sources both in and around us. It only makes sense that we would become enslaved by our ethical valuations of potential behaviors in light of the consequences foreseeable within the range of our awareness as well.

Nick gets up, and I know he isn’t leaving because he is hurt or angry. He is either going to pass out, piss or puke, and given the veiled urgency with which he made his way from the couch, I imagined puking was most likely.

Maintaining her position, she goes on to tell me several times how I’m intelligent, emphasizing it like a well-spaced mantra. That I am so good at reading people. I could meet someone and have them figured out in minutes. She tells me that I’m a good person. That I have a way with words, that I can express a viewpoint in such a way that convinces people of my point of view. Tone not altering at all as she does so, she then comments that I remind her of Hitler.

“What?”

She had caught me off guard, and I had to laugh. She offered this as a compliment and I was curious what she meant exactly. Her and Nick had spoken about this the other day, she went on to explain, how Hitler, with his words, with his speeches, manipulated the masses to adopt his point of view.

“So you mean to say that I am adept at manipulating people?”

“Yes,” she told me. “You just don’t like to.”

There is the distinct sound of vomiting in the distance, and my concern over it catches her attention, and she tells me she’s going to go check on Nick. I follow her to the bathroom, where Nick’s shirt is off and he is nearly baptizing himself in the toilet water. Watching him there, staring into the gaping mouth of the porcelain goddess as if waiting for her to conjure up the relentless cyclone in his guts, I remind myself why I have all but given up on drinking. Above him she hovers, albeit in an off-balance manner, and asks him if he trusts her. Asks him this again and again. Each time, he says yes in a voice that clearly conveys sincerity. She then asks him if this is his toothbrush. He says yes. And she promises him this will make him feel better, and she rams the toothbrush down his throat. It worked. Hard love, perhaps. But that was definitely my fucking toothbrush, damn it.

The high point of the evening was the uncomfortable flattery she had delivered, and from the point of the toothbrush inward it all went downhill. By the time Nick was emptying his guts into the gaping orifice of the porcelain goddess, my patience had already grown thin with her. She is drunk, constantly repeating herself, I’m stuck driving her home and she refuses to take any subtle or direct suggestions that I should drive her ass home before it gets too late. I have a nervous breakdown to work on averting through relieving pressure through writing, and its impossible to attend to while you’re still in my presence.

I’m on overload here.

I take it all in. She graduated with a major in psychology and seems to be inexplicably drawn to the “crazy,” as she is always careful to put it. Already she had told me of her interest in van Gough, particularly his work The Starry Night, which she had seen on my coffee travel mug. With passionate absorption in the story, she had told Nick and I, as she poured decade-old Starbucks liquor from a dust-caked bottle from the back of the fridge into my coffee, how one-eared van Gough had painted the work, inspired by the night scene he could see through his sanitarium window. She is also evidently even more enthralled with the television show Dexter than I am.

She’s ashamed of her belief in fate and an arrogant voice in my head suggests that this might be because I brought up my belief in free will in a recent post I had made about a recent tragedy exploited by the media. This notion was reinforced when she then brought up the whole Connecticut tragedy with me. My head fell at her mention of it. No matter what I do, I cannot seem to escape this topic with people, and my viewpoint becomes more forceful, more rage-fueled every time the subject is brought up.

I can’t say why this is bothering me so much. Why it hit me so hard this time.

When will we wake up and recognize that these tragedies, however inhumane and gruesome when taken in isolation, collectively constitute symptoms of a sick culture? Incidents such as this, which happen with increasing frequency, call for a wider focus, a broader circumstantial and psychological investigation, a deeper contemplation with respect to the causes. I support free will and personal responsibility. I am never one in support of the notion that the individual is merely the product of their respective culture or personal upbringing, as there is always a spectrum of choice, but the cultural factors underlying these tragic symptoms DO serve to dictate the ease of certain choices. Increasingly, individuals in our culture seem to find their path of least resistance in committing these heinous acts, and that much is clear at this point, at least in my tainted inner eye. In light of that, it seems equally clear here that we should take serious and enduring pause before the media serves to distract us with something else to ask why that is, as there are clearly deeper forces at work here.

I still believe that given the right context, everything makes sense.

The motives? Perhaps to shift the power. To gain attention. Why? They feel powerless and unappreciated. Maybe they want a sense of personal significance and individual power and it can only be completed with feedback from the masses, an acknowledgement by the herd.

Why would they be under the impression that they must go to such extremes to get people to pay attention and listen to them?

Since 9/11, just think of the stream of words your constantly subjected to across the bottom of the screen. Other little nuggets of data popping up here and there while a news broadcast is going on. Just think of how nowadays you just cannot escape from everyone, how in some cases the cell phone becomes more akin to an electric leash. Consider how we are being subjected to too many meaningless choices. Recieving too much data at once. Expected to multitask as fast as we can, staying tuned to every relentless channel.

Think of Attention Deficit Disorder, which could be the logical end-result of a mind striving to adapt to the culture in which it finds itself. Given the multiple data-streams that must be juggled and multitasking that this culture demands it’s no surprise at all that so many minds and finding themselves incapable of concentrating too long on any one given thing.

On earth, there have never before been so many humans with so many different connections and so many different ways of connecting. When everyone has their proverbial fifteen minutes more or less at once, its easy for your voice to get lost in the crowd, and so the chatter becomes an ever-escalating shouting match.

People keep upping the ante because people keep getting desensitized. The Tool song Stinkfist conveys this in a most graphic and effective manner as the law of ever-diminishing returns leads him to go deeper and deeper from finger to fist to elbow into a bodily orifice in order to procure the same required level of satisfaction. It seems it is as Kevin Spacey said it was in the movie Seven.

“You can’t just tap people on the shoulder anymore,” he said. “You have to hit them with a sledgehammer. Then you notice you have their strict attention.”

It reminds you of the neighbors of the killer explaining him as always being so quiet and kind. It makes you wonder if maybe he was talking all along and they simply never thought to lend the ears to hear. If you aren’t being heard, the gun can be a more effective megaphone, either directly or through the massive, hollow shell that serves as phantom ricochet-chamber, and which we call the media. You always listen to the one with the gun, right? And sometimes the message is louder when you simply shoot or blow up an enormous amount of people and wait for the media to arrive. You become a celebrity. A dark, transient, cultural god. Antihero of the week. All brought to you by the media. Bred by the media for our money. For the investment of our attention. These antiheros achieve their status through the media providing the spotlight and holding them up for the world to see. All this attention, a media-made antihero, so many eyes watching and listening and taking in all the news stories, people talking about it at work, outside the bars, on talk radio.

“Monkey see, monkey do” is a skill also present in the domesticated primates known as humans, as incidents such as this clearly exemplify. The media exploits these tragedies, not out of some sense of moral obligation to provide the masses with the facts but to increasing ratings through sensationalism and relentless, 24-7 coverage of the killer and the bloody mark he made. They are not blind to the effects of this kind of coverage, either, as forensic psychologist Dr. Park Dietz so wonderfully expresses in a rare interview:

“We’ve had twenty years of mass murderers throughout which I have repeatedly told CNN and our other media if you don’t want to propagate more mass murders, don’t start the story with sirens blaring, don’t have photographs of the killer, don’t make this 24-7 coverage. Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story, not to make the killer some kind of antihero. Do localize this story to the effected community and make it as boring as possible in every other market. Because every time we have intense saturation coverage of a mass murder, we expect to see one or two more within a week.”

Might may not mean right, though it certainly proves useful. This is especially the case in the eyes of those who could never hope to gain the upper hand in hand-to-hand combat; those always stuck on the chewed-up underdog end of the dog-eat-dog world. The physically weak win over the physically strong by using intelligence and technology: guns, bombs and well-executed plans, for instance. This does not merely serve to level the playing field, but rather swings the teeter-totter of power in the diametrically opposing direction. There is always a bigger fish, but sometimes there is a minnow with superior firepower. Suddenly size doesn’t matter. Muscle is no match for the bullet.

Not to imply a connection — as that would surely paint the mainstream media as some fourth, “propagandizing” branch of government — but just a bit too often it has seemed suspiciously as if the government is channeling acute collective outrage and fear generated by tragedies to fuel support for policies they’ve been itching to implement for some time and which in reality have little if anything to do with the tragedy in question. Take 9/11, and the Iraq war. Or the Patriot Act. Take the recent tragedy and the push for gun control. Unfortunate, as clearly the masses have been fine countless times in the past with trading in freedoms for a greater illusion of security. The deeper things at work here are things that treatments such as home-schooling, I’m afraid, will not uproot or even protect you.

Mere laws or regulations on weapons won’t put a dent in this fucking issue, either. I’m not a card-carrying NRA member, but stricter gun control is not the solution. Stop looking at the damn gun and start looking at the broken mind that pulled the trigger and the social context that nurtured that psychology. This must start with defeat of the knee-jerk thought-stoppers. People fear empathizing with what is regarded as crazy, evil or insane as they fear that others will consider them guilty by means of association. So instead they build up a thick wall between themselves and the person in question by use of these dismissive words, which act as thought-stoppers and empathic-barriers. This Wall of Logos designates the solid boundary where our empathy ends, where our desire to understand is snuffed out by the darkness at the very edges of our personal identifications. The more eager people are to throw out those words, the more emotionally-fueled they are, the more I feel that they’re not just cutting off their attempts to empathize with that person but denying the presence of similar feelings within themselves. They’re repressing and projecting aspects of themselves that their ego is loath to accept consciously and identify as qualities of the self-concept.

I turned to Sherri and asked her if she knew why it was that she was so fascinated with the subject of those “crazies” and “evil” ones. This is the only time in the conversation that I recall not only successfully getting in more than a word in edgewise, but managed to get her to listen to it and contemplate it. Her head fell as if in confusion, and she was silent a moment.

“I don’t know,” she said, as if perplexed to find her mental hands brushing up against a wall in her mind.

Analysis of others is fine and good, I wanted to tell her, but every sword should be double-edged. Always turn back to look in the mirror, and look deep into the abyss of those pupils, my dear. It helps to keep you in check.

Death, Discrimination, Hot Cops, & Other Things.

7/7/14

Dear Specific Grouping of Fossils Who Shall Remain Nameless:

Age clearly does not equal wisdom.

Explain dementia. Explain your own mind, fully capable yet stubbornly ignorant.

Days ago you guys said it all and your simple comments still eat away at me. What’s your beef with the skin on those kids, or the sexual persuasion of others?

We are not all one, nor should we aspire to be. Each should be an individual and raise a one-finger-passed-the-pointer salut to the mentality of the flock if you ask me. You didn’t, but screw you.

Variety is important genetically, culturally, individually. Diversity is not only beautiful, it has survival value. So the way I see it if you judge people by gentiles, color-code, or sexual persuasion you’re not just a run-of-the-mill asshole, you’re an enemy of life.

And I don’t care if that’s how you grew up. It was no more justified then than it is now. I don’t give a ragged rat’s left butt cheek if “that’s just the way the world was” back when you were a lad or a lassie. Life is not static. We made it out of the Dark Ages; evolve out of your medieval mentality.

You developed in the womb and escaped, after all: it is presently well within your capability to free your cranium from your anus.

Idiots.

7/8/21

Never in my life have I had issues with the law. Not once have I been put behind bars. I’m certainly not boasting or complaining here, either. If it ever comes to pass that I am thrown in jail, however, I only ask that the smoking hot, jaw-dropping, gothy-vibing, bad-ass lady-cop with the sleeve of elaborate tattoos that just walked into the dining room at work is the one to put the cuffs on me and take me away.

Please?

7/9/19

We hear stories about human ghosts, even the ghosts of animals, such as dogs. Never do we hear stories about insect apparitions.

Why?

Imagine you’re a moth, flapping about happily until one evening you fly a bit too close to a porch light and meet your crispy demise — only to awaken in that stereotypical tunnel with an even more brilliant light at the end. Unlike the hesitant disembodied humans scattered along the length of the tunnel or the eternally immobilized deer stuck forever at the mouth of it, you, as a moth? You’d have no tendency to linger, certainly no tendency to turn around and head back to haunt the living. No, you’d waste no time flying frantically straight toward the light.

You were frigging made for this. This is kind of your thing.

And it was this stupid, half-baked thought that kept distracting me during meditation this morning.

7/9/15

The first words someone offers me upon coming into work for my third shift:

“I had a dream last night that you died,” she told me. “You came back to life, though, so it’s all good.”

Evidently her and a coworker had come to my grave and I emerged from the fresh soil covering it — a little off-color, yes, but it was no zombie, I was still me, complete with a mug of coffee and a cigarette.

I’ll take that as a happy ending.

Getting Over Old.

6/22/22

Everything lately seems to revolve around old age and death.

Last week, a guy I didn’t initially recognize came up to me while I was sweeping the parking lot at work. Only in the midst of our conversation did I come to realize he was part of a group of kids that used to frequent here back in the day. They would talk to me, and I’d do my best to keep them out of trouble. They were troubled kids from broken homes and it killed me seeing what their childhoods were doing to them.

Now in his twenties, he told me how he’d just gotten custody of his kids and was trying to get his life in order. He seemed authentically happy to see me and it was nice talking to him, but I couldn’t get over how quickly time had gone by, how much he had matured, and how fucking old I was.

Last weekend, on Saturday, I went to see my parents, who decided to celebrate Father’s Day, my sister, Linda’s birthday, and my nephew’s birthday all at once. It was hard to believe he was turning five. It made me think how I hated it when adults used to say to me as a kid, “You’re getting so big. I remember when you were knee high…”

Now I get it. Now I am that adult.

I was playing with the dogs outside, my mother and sisters were talking, and dad was running around with my nephew. Suddenly someone asked, “Are you all right?” I look up and from behind one of the cars I saw the legs of my father, who had tripped and fell. Mom and I helped him up, and he said he was okay, but the horror that filled me in those few moments was indescribable. Given the look on my mother’s face, she felt the same way.

My parents age and the fact that they won’t be around forever is entirely impossible to ignore anymore. I was quite happy when they picked me up on their way to get their new puppy, a fluffy German Shepherd that looked more akin to a baby bear. I sat in the back seat and held him all the way home. At some point that day, my parents referred to the little guy, who they named Tank, would be their “last puppy.” My heart sank. They’ve entirely made peace with their lives, it seems, and their approaching, inevitable end. The thought of losing either of them utterly terrifies me.

Sunday, a lot more happened to remind me how time is flying by. Within an hour of coming into work, I learn that the youngest child of a girl that used to work here — who was literally just as high as my knee the last I saw him — was now working with us.

Later, I was cleaning up lobby when I passed a girl. We both glanced at each other while passing before we both stopped, backed up, and met each others eyes again. It was Heidi, who worked here years ago. She used to be heavy into drugs, hard and soft, and with her sunken, racoon eyes back then, she looked it, but there was always something about her I found strangely attractive. She was always sweet to me, always seemed a rather happy person in general, and she always had sinister and sexy facial expressions. Behind her eyes there always seemed to be something dirty, something kinky hiding.

That part clearly hadn’t changed.

She had gone into rehab years back and gained a fuckload of weight, but she had lost quite a bit since then. Eyes no longer sunken, she looked healthy, clear-headed.

The first thing she says to me once we meet eyes the second time is, “You got old.”

It was so unexpected I burst out laughing, as did she, and we hugged. She had just gotten out of jail again, she told me, and had gotten a job at a hotel in Kent. It was her first day. In response to her calling me old and my hair having gone gray, I blamed working here all these years. She asked if I’d been here twenty years. She was close enough.

Later in the evening, I was doing something up by front drive thru when I saw another guy that used to be part of another group of kids that used to hang out here. They were skateboarders and I got to know them pretty well. This was the kid they used to call Tackle Box on account of all the piercings on his face.

Some time ago, that group started working somewhere where they were being taught to be welders and making good money and they always urged me to come work with them, to get the hell out of McDonald’s. We didn’t speak when I saw him at the drive thru window, but through glances it was like he was sad to see that, years later, I was still working here, rotting away in this shit fucking job, and I fear the look on my face clearly communicated, however nonverbal, how ashamed I was that this was the case.

It’s almost as if the universe is trying to communicate to me that I’m old and I’ve pretty much been running in place since my teens. Time is speeding up and before I know it I’ll be dead, so I should really work on finding my place in this shitstorm of a world. I need to get another job, maybe try to make some consistent cash over some creative pursuit on the side as well, and move closer to my parents. I’ve said this for years, of course, but I really need to get my ass in gear. I see my parents fairly frequently, but I’m still my distant self, and I know I’ll regret not being around as much once they’re gone.

Just Another Overdose.

6/20/22

I go to sweep the bathroom at work and, opening the door, I almost walk into manager Steve. He’s holding back laughter, and it’s not due to him nearly making me shit my pants, either. He scoots passed me to let his laughter go as I lean in the door, and quickly discern the origin of the giggles: some guy in the men’s room stall is moaning, grunting to a steady beat.

Steve suspects he’s humming while pooping, maybe even sleeping. Despite hearing no wet, meat-slapping sounds, my immediate assumption is that he’s masturbating, and instantly I’m irritated about what I might have to clean up after the presumed potty-jacker is done with his deed. So I go to sweep the rest of dining room, hoping the guy exits the shitter soon.

Spoiler alert: he does not.

Maybe ten minutes later, I go back into the restroom to find the moaning has ceased, and this disturbs me more than the initial moaning. The silence is penetrating. And that’s when I begin to suspect what my dumbass brain should have initially suspected on default.

I leave the restroom and walk a short distance, step outside the front doors and hail Steve, as I want someone there to share in my horror, whatever it is that might be awaiting me beyond that stall door.

A corpse, perhaps. Maybe a half-naked guy taking a post-masturbatory snooze with his strangled dong now held loosely in his hands.

We walk into the men’s room and I knock on the stall door, yelling, “Is anyone in there?” No answer. I ask it louder. No answer. Steve asks if he should call 911. I tell him I don’t know. I announce, yelling again, that I’m coming in as I unlock the door.

I push it open.

On the ground, lying on his side, is a tall, lanky guy, his long, brown hair tied back in a ponytail. His face is a deep red fading into purple.

“Yup,” I say. “Call 911.”

One of the girls behind the counter called 911, as it turns out, and whoever she is talking to on the other end is asking her if anyone is administering CPR. No one is, as no one knew how, and I have that overwhelming feeling that I should be fucking doing something but didn’t have the vaguest fucking clue as to what.

I’ve never had this feeling before: that given I work in a fast food restaurant in this fucking town, I should probably be trained in CPR.

Props to the cops. They reacted as my dumb, idealistic ass believed they should have — they promptly arrived, and in numbers (in the end there were four or five cruisers), and wasted no time bolting through the doors Steve and I held open for them and directly into the bathroom to do all they could to revive the overdosing numbskull turning purple as Grimace on the restroom floor.

The firefighters that arrived with the ambulance, on the other hand, immediately pissed my likely overly-judgmental ass off. They arrive some time after the cops, pull in to the lot comparatively slowly, take what seems like a goddamn eternity getting out of the vehicle with their equipment, and when they finally do so they both move in a slow, lethargic, almost reluctant manner.

I realize I’m being a judgmental asshole here — please keep that in mind. As much as I feel goddamn certain I know how a long, bad day at work is, I could never imagine the shit they have to deal with on a daily basis, particularly in a drug-addled, cesspool of a town such as this. After long enough, you’ve got to become desensitized, just as a psychological survival strategy. You have to get tired given the frequency of overdoses in your active area, and perhaps today was a rather straining fucking day, at least for the two of them.

Maybe they are grossly underpaid and under-laid: again, I deeply sympathize, as I know the state that breeds all too non-fucking well. But damn it, chug an expresso, take your job seriously and execute it to the best of your ability. Lives are on the line.

You could argue this guy lying on our floor tiles asked for it, that he was flirting with death by sticking that shit in his veins, but this isn’t some convenient, no-skill job you picked up because you’re a deadbeat like me who, despite being unfit for the world in which he was born had to find some way to pay the rent and food and so on. No, you trained for this. You specialize in this. Do what you chose to do with your life and do it the best you can.

The cops did it. You can do it.

Assholes.

Peering from some distance at the open door of the men’s room, I see more occupants than I have ever seen, and ever wish to see in there. I then proceed to go outside, light a smoke, and suck down passionately on the butt of my cancer stick, staring off into space, trying to mend together coherent, rational thoughts in the midst of the hyper-violent, emotional maelstrom wreaking havok within my dismal fucking soul.

I’m right where I often find myself — stuck between wanting to help, wanting to play a more meaningful role in the world around me, and wanting to distance myself from this endless chaos, run away and hide in peace, in nature, in two parts solitude and one part among family and close friends, feeding and brightening the dimming glow within and around me as I strive to find some deeper meaning in this ever-chaotic bullshit world we humans have — in our niavette if not in our irreversible idiocy — built for ourselves on this otherwise-beautiful biosphere.

Crouching down, smoking my smoke, I feel sad and angry. Hopeless yet defiant against that hopelessness. I feel disgusted with the world yet determined to ease and overcome this existential nausea.

Cigarette extinguished, I proceed to the door to find the man who had been dying on the floor seemingly miraculously on his feet again, though just barely, standing on the opposite side of the glass door, which I subsequently opened for him. The cops proceeded to guide the guy out, who was a little wary on his feet and seemed like he’d just been prematurely awakened from a deep sleep as he held some clear tube up his nose with one, unsteady hand.

In the parking lot, in the booths in the dining room, and yes, in the bathroom, this has happened before — countless times before. And I’ve often seen the aftermath of ODs, or at least heard of it, but I’ve never been party to the discovery, to the whole of the process. This is a new experience. This burst my goddamn cherry.

I’ve already had enough of it.