Another Ruined Break in Discount Gotham.

6/16/22

All I want to do on break is be alone and write, so I move the truck to a space in front of the building so I have some shade. I’m not there thirty seconds when I see a guy approaching. A big-bellied man in a red and blue, long-sleeve shirt, a blue hood over his head, and white Winter gloves.

In 80-plus fucking degree weather, mind you.

He wears a red Buckeye lanyard around his pasty white neck, where he’s hung his bright yellow sunglasses. He has a blue bookbag strapped to his back and two tote bags — one red, one blue — hanging around one arm.

It’s ‘Murica Man.

He asks for cigarette. I regretfully inform him I have a limited supply, which is technically true. Then he asks for a lighter because he had a half-smoked cigarette on him somewhere. I dumbly say sure and he spends the next eight minutes going through all his shit on the curb, holding an enduring coversation with himself as he does so. Loudly. And he references superheros more than once.

Finally, he finds it, approaches my driver side window, and I hand my lighter to him. As he unsuccessfully attempts to light his cigarette for the next five minutes, likely a challenge at least in part due to his fucking gloves, he tells me his name is Shawn something. He tells me this twice, just in case I ever “hear” of him. He tells me about how they discovered he has RH negative blood when he was a child, but he only started noticing changes a few months ago.

Eventually he gets bored talking at me and begins talking to the wall of the building.

So yeah. I guess I met a superhero today.
It makes me wonder if there are other wannabe-superheroes or supervillains in this shithole of a town — if this place could turn into a kind of discount Gotham.

Of Jabba the Hutt & McGruff the Crime Dog.

It’s roughly ten in the eve and I slip out the door for a smoke, having just gotten done mopping the dining room. I hear a noise in the parking lot. Looking up, over by the drive-thru I see a half-naked guy staring at the ground. Jabba the Hutt in human flesh. He’s kind of wobbling, unbalanced, undoubtedly fucked up on something.

I smoke faster.

By the time I get inside, Natalie, the manager, informs me that Jabba is reportedly making the woman who just pulled into drive-thru uncomfortable. I don’t see him out the window anymore, but one of the girls tell me he’s on the other side of the store.

I unlock the back drive-thru window and stick my head out. And standing in between cars, there he is: dirty man boobs, jiggly beer belly, and all. He’s wearing two different kind of shoes and has a cigarette butt burning passed the filter hanging out the side of his super-slug mouth.

“Hey man,” I ask him, “what are you doing?”

This seemed like a reasonable opener.

“I wanted some food,” he says, holding up his baggy, stained shorts with one hand.

“Well, the inside is closed and you need a car to go through drive-thru.”

On a side note, I hate that I’m forced to point this fact out so often. The very presence of the word “drive” in “drive-thru,” I feel, should make this a no-brainer, but alas…

“Can I talk to the manager?”

“She’s busy right now. Just give us a call.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

I shrug. “Sorry man.”

This, of course, is not the end of it. He keeps pressing to talk to the manager, so I ask him kindly to step aside, out of the line of cars, and I’d let her know. I close and lock the window, go back up to the active drive-thru window and give Natalie the run-down.

We look out the window and Jabba is now sitting on the curb, leaning, splaying his filthy tummy to the growing line of increasingly uncomfortable customers. She confesses to me that she hopes that if she only ignores him he’ll go away, but I just stare her dead in the eyes as I slowly shake my head from side to side for dramatic effect.

I’ve seen Return of the Jedi countless times since I was a kid. I know all to well that he is immune to our Jedi mind tricks.

A few cars pass and he approaches the window, evidently having grown impatient. Natalie approaches and I hang close by, trying to find out where the broom is so I have some object to use as a weapon, just in case shit goes south. I find one. He asks her for food, free food, and she apologizes, informing him that we can’t do that. She then politely asks him to back up so the next customer can pull up and slowly closes the window.

I’m sure this comes as a surprise, but he does not back up. He merely crouches down, picks up an old nugget off the ground, stands back up, pops it in his mouth without a moment’s hesitation, and starts chew-chew-chewing away at it like a cow to cud.

Natalie’s anger finally overcomes her uneasiness. She opens up the window again, and this time firmly says, “You’re in the way. If you don’t move, I’m going to have to call the cops.”

“Call them then!”

And with Jabba’s blessing, she does, and she asks me to lock the drive-thru window as she holds the land line to her ear. Broom close by, I latch and lock the window, avoiding eye contact with the angry, bloated slug-man as I do so. He backs up to let the next car pull up, but stares back at me from beyond the car, yelling shit at me that I couldn’t hear. The guy in the car looks nervous but understanding and says he’ll pull around the building for his food.

After that, Jabba seems to vanish. Once I see the three police cruisers pull in from the other side of the store, I feel it’s safe to take the trash out the stock room door, and so promptly do so.

Back in the dark corral that houses the dumpsters, I hear defiant though indecipherable yelling through shaky, rhythmic gurgling. I imagine this is him getting tazed. Once back inside, I learn I’m right. At some point he was evidently also lying flat on the ground. The cops tried to pick him up by his hands and feet, at which point he bit one of the officers.

Sometimes, McGruff, crime takes a bite out of you.

I mean, I guess it makes sense. He did say he was hungry, after all, and almost anything — even raw bacon — had to taste better than that fucking filthy ground-nugget.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate this town?

Two Moons Beneath the Arches.

6/3/11

I was greeted by my first surprise of the workday when I meandered out of the fast food joint for a cigarette while they were in the midst of a rush. I went to the blind spot over by the curb in the parking lot, free from all windows. They probably wouldn’t have cared that I was running outside for a puff, but as I said, they were busy, and I felt guilty about enjoying a peaceful moment of blackening my lungs as they were stuck running around trying to satisfy a relentless herd of indecisive, unsatisfiable, lard-thirsty humanimals.

Anyway, as I sat there puffing on my cancer stick, this car drives passed; a mother dressed all nice with her three children in the car with her. I smile. Too soon. She drives passed drive through and parks, car still running, back by the corral, where the dumpsters are. She gets out in a rush and looks around, this sneaky, suspicious, nervous look blossoming on her face that sent alarms off in my cranium. Whatever happens next might be interesting, I thought to myself, so I kept watching.

For some stupid reason I figured she was going to steal boxes out of one of the two cardboard-only dumpsters that are positioned right next to each other to the side of the corral, between the parking lot and the lot for the semi-trucks. Maybe she’s moving and needs the boxes. Maybe one of the kids whipped a rock at her car window, smashing the glass to miniscule, razor-edged shards and she needs to duct-tape cardboard over the frame so that the thigh-high sociopath doesn’t leap to his death on the freeway. Maybe she has a cardboard fetish and her bum boyfriend’s last home got all soggy during the rain a few days back and a misshapen, oversize spit-wad of a cave isn’t quite enough for her to get her rocks off. Whatever. Who knows. For whatever reason, that was my stupid theory: she wanted boxes. Why she would feel sneaky doing such a thing was beyond me, but that was the only thing I could imagine she was planning on doing.

That’s not what she did, of course.

Instead, she gets between the two dumpsters and wiggles her pants down passed her knees while simultaneously crouching down. She then proceeds to piddle a puddle on the parking lot concrete in fashionable, fire-hose fashion.

Her kids in the car, watching; cars lined up in drive-thru, certainly able to see; truckers in their trucks just behind her, eyes no doubt fixed on the full moon aimed in their direction. And she could have just as easily parked, went inside and used the damned bathroom. I just didn’t get it.

Strangely enough, my second surprise of the day also involved a woman’s super-duper pooper-pillows.

Just after nine o’clock, when the playroom in the restaurant always closes, I’m wiping down tables, hoping my act of cleaning the area will inspire the couple still lingering in there to grab their two toddlers, get their shit together and leave. For some reason, the mother (who, I might add, had a look and vibe about her that suggested she was once of sound mind and very attractive but had collapsed altogether under the stress and depression of premature parenthood and can now only find some transient solace in the very activity that got her into the damned mess in the first place) was intent on taking the kids into the playroom restroom and changing them into their pajamas before bringing them home.

I didn’t understand this at all. Especially since it required planning, unless she always kept a spare pair of jammies in her purse. But then again, women do appear to be able to fit a whole load of interesting things in their purses.

Regardless, as she bent over, the bottom of her yellow shirt lifted, the waist of her faded jeans descended, and between those lips of blue and yellow cloth pale mounds of pasty white flesh, like nipple-free breasts of the back-end, burst out from either side of the tightly-viced, poop-shooting schism. There they bathed in the florescent glow of the world beyond that oppressive, narrow limbo-land in which they had been imprisoned; that claustrophobic kingdom betwixt the flesh and the form-fitting hip-huggers. It wasn’t a shy two-cheek peek-a-boo, either; this was a bold, confident Hello. Like the Kool-Aid guy slamming through a wall and screaming “Oh yeah!” in a thunderous, reverberating, megaphone-like voice.

As I tried to pretend like I didn’t notice the full moon before me, I began thinking about those tattoos girls get on their lower back that everyone calls “tramp stamps” and how fitting it would be if plumbers began a trend of getting tattoos on their posteriors. Then I asked myself, What kind of tattoos might one get on one’s rumpus? An eyeball on each cheek? A spanking-suggestive hand-print of one’s significant other? Full-color jean ink all over the caboose, complete with tattooed pockets and Levi insignia so that someone might stare at their bear derriere unawares?

And then I began wondering what catchy name we might give for these tattoos. Plumber-bum bumper sticker, ass art, butt badge, gluteus graffiti, heinieglyph, ink-’round-the-stink? Asstoos? Tatooshies? Tats on the tuckus?

This kind of thing could really catch on, methinks.

Of Broken Smoke Breaks & Acid Trips.

Out the front doors at work, crouched down with my back against the wall, I light a smoke. The street is quiet, the town is dark, and it just stopped raining. No one is likely to even see me, much less bother me. Now I can just enjoy my cigarette and commune with my thoughts for a few moments, uninterrupted.

“Havin’ fun,” I hear someone yell half a moment in, “sittin’ on the wet ground?”

Motherfucker.

Its some guy way down the sidewalk on the other end of the street. Some evidently eagle-eyed bastard. I tell him I’m just hiding. He laughs, tells me that if he worked here, he’d be hiding behind the counter inside, eating cheeseburgers.

He crosses the street as he continues talking with me. Like a moth to a porch light. Like a fly to a pile of shit that only wished to pollute its blackened lungs and collect its shitty thoughts in private for maybe ten minutes.

Now its story time, and I am the captive listener.

His father went to Cleveland to get his mother — rescue her, he makes it sound — who was doing coke with some guy at a bar. Before his father left, he had some LSD in the house, and allegedly in fear that his two sisters would take it while he was gone, he gave it to him, his son, and dropped him off downtown.

“If you can make it home without getting arrested,” he told him, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”

Top tier parenting, right there.

He tells me how he’s glad his father went to get his mother, because if he went, he’d hunt down and kill the guy that got his mother doing coke, and he can’t end up in jail, not now, as he just managed to get his kids back. I had the burning impulse to add that this probably made walking around town with a head full of acid an even worse idea than it already clearly was, but I let it go.

Different strokes for different folks, and all that rot.

On his way home, he went on to tell me, he planned on stopping by his “baby mama’s house” to “bang the shit out of her,” but apparently he collapsed when he saw the steps to her place turn to lava before his very eyes. And, I mean, I empathized with him quite easily here. I haven’t had sex in an excruciatingly long time, but if spontaneously manifesting liquid rock suddenly presented itself as a barrier between me and a desirable woman’s lovely lower lips, it would undoubtedly serve to dissuade me as well.

If the pathway to pussy is obstructed by lava, just go home and rub one out, you know?

Safety first.

On his way passed the bar, where a guy he didn’t know tried to fight him because he didn’t like the way he looked, he also saw a police cruiser — and saw it melt into the road, he told me.

I find myself silently confused, for while I have had limited (and safely-controlled) experiences with psychadelics, I’ve never before had the high caliber of hallucinations he was allegedly experiencing. When he goes on to explain how he’d done shrooms before, but never acid, and then explained that he had not only been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and ADHD but schizophrenia as well, things suddenly became a bit more clear.

I suggested that he be careful. Psychedelics have been known to trigger a latent psychosis, after all — even marajuana — and his psychosis evidently wasn’t so latent to begin with, so this might be the equivalent of throwing gasoline on an already-blazing fire. He then goes on to explain some disturbing behavior of his while on weed when he was younger that seemed to reinforce my point, but my point had clearly grown wings and flew right passed the poor guy, or so it seemed. Even after he tells me about a friend of his that went on his first acid trip and never came back. A friend that took a tab that ended up lasting a lifetime.

Finally, my smoke is down to the filter, so after I let him bum a smoke I tell him I had to be getting back to work, and that he should be careful. He assures me he will be and that he’s on his way home.

In both senses, I sincerely hope he makes it back safely from his trip.

Warm Greetings from the Denizens of Munchkinland.

5/10-11/22

I wake up feeling an awesome dread.

Its too intense to ignore completely, though easy enough to distract myself from as it stubbornly looms in the background of my thoughts. It seems attached to nothing specifically, though I figure it probably has something to do with the ever-lengthening list of shit I should get done but don’t have the motivation to do — either that or its anxiety holding me back. Its always difficult to discern which.

I knew I wouldn’t be good at this. Adulting, I mean. I was just explaining to my mother how I knew this from a young age.

It was before I turned ten, as we were still living at the old house. There was a hallway that stretched from the bedrooms and bathrooms to the kitchen, and along the wall of the hallway there were hooks for our coats and bookbags. Despite the fact that only Eve and I were going to school at the time, as Linda was still young, Linda got her own bookbag, loaded it with shit, and hug it beside our own.

She was always eager to grow up and the years that followed didn’t dampen that desire at all. She has proven she is adept at this. Eve wasn’t bad, either. But even then, as a young little shit, I stared at that bookbag and realized how different I was in that respect.

Since as far back as I can remember, I knew I would have a rough time of it, and my life since that point has shown how right I was. When I was a bit younger, adulthood was far down the road, so I could ignore it, but now it began to sink in: before I knew it, I would be on my own, and I had no idea what to do or how to go about doing it. Getting a job, getting a place to live, getting a car, driving a car, paying my bills, being a responsible human in modern society. It suddenly struck me how much I was fucked.

Now, as it turned out, I exceeded my expectations, though given I expected myself to be homeless or dead far before this point in my life, I suppose I didn’t set the bar very high. Still, I’m 43 and I feel I’ve been largely carried or hitched a ride on the coattails of others to get even this far. And its not like my ambitions are huge, either, at least not on the mundane side of things.

I still don’t think adults exist, but there are certainly those who put their all into the role and act it out quite well.

I am not one of those people.

Just one more way in which I feel out of place in a world I don’t belong.

Later in the day, as I’m sweeping the patio at work, sinking into the shitty mood I woke up in, I look up and see a small boy on the other side of the window, staring dead at me, smiling and waving. I wave back and can’t help but smile in return.

Later, I’m sort of enveloped by the mood again as I walk to the dollar store for cleaning supplies. As I’m standing outside, finishing my cigarette, I see a mother with her two young boys. I keep my distance, as I’m smoking, but one of them runs up to me within a few feet. He’s wearing a badge and a plastic fireman’s hat. He looks up at me, smiles, and waves.

I look at him, crack a smile, and wave back, but the mood’s got me, so I sort of stare at the ground as I take another drag. I can still feel his eyes, however. I look back up to find he’s still staring at me, almost like he’s trying to figure something out. He looks rather sad and concerned now, maybe a little hurt.

I feel kind of bad. Like he was trying to cheer me up and I infected him with my mood instead.

Sorry, kid.

Later, back at work. as I’m coming in the doors after having another smoke, there are two kids sitting at a table. As I walk past, one of the kids — a boy who is, at best, in his early teens — held out his hands for a high five. Without stopping, I obliged.

I think to myself how that high five from an older child was sort of a fitting end to the child synchronicity, but then it happens again the following day, and again it seems to be triggered by a bad mood.

I’m on break, in my truck, and get maybe a few lines into the book I’m reading before a kid I work with walks up to my driver side window. What proceeds immediately reminds me of a Bill Hicks bit I haven’t heard in ages.

“You read on break?” He says it with a voice and a scrunched-up face that seems to convey disgust. “Why?”

Not what I’m reading, mind you, but why I’m reading.

He follows this up by saying how he always wondered what I did on break. Rather than be satisfied with having finally solved the mystery and leaving me the fuck alone so I can continue enjoying my free time of thirty minutes, he continues babbling to me for the duration. Blind to my body language, minimalist verbal responses, or the dozens of other factors all pointing towards the clear message of: go the bloody fuck away.

At the end of my not-a-break, I clock in, firmly rooted in a bad fucking mood, and proceed to gather trash from around the store. Out in dining room, I notice there are two occupied tables. At the table in the middle of the dining room is an elderly couple, likely the grandparents of the hyperactive little girl at the table with them.

As I’m changing the trash in the far corner, I hear the kid start yelling in a manner that clearly conveys she’s desperate for the immediate attention of someone.

“Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!”

Its like she’s stuck in a loop, delivering a rapid-fire greeting, and I look up as it continues and she’s hanging off her grandmother, looking right at me. I smile and wave, then she stops and giggles. Through the giggling, she explains to her grandmother, “He’s funny!”

I’m not at all sure why Munchkinland elected to send these three children via synchronicity in an attempt to lift my spirits, but I certainly appreciate the attempt.

Spiders & Insecurity (4/21/22 Dream).

In an earlier part of the dream, I have two pet spiders in a glass tank in a dark room. One of them managed to get loose and scurried under the small table the tank rested upon. I try desperately to find it, mildly worried that it may be poisonous and either bite me or someone else. I appear more concerned that this isn’t its native habitat, however, that it may constitute an invasive species, and that my small error of letting in loose may have grand, far-reaching consequences.

Later, I’m in some building where I apparently work and I see someone come into the vestibule from one of the two doors that lead to the outside. Its Chad, an old coworker, and I find myself focusing on his ear — or rather where his ear should be. In its place is a hole with what appears to be something like a curled up ear inside of it. It makes me think of a Gray alien for some reason.

Chad seems insulted and resistant when I tell him he has to leave. He ignores me, exits the vestibule, and enters the building. I finally grab him, I think by the shirt sleeve, at which point he starts acting weird and dramatic. He falls to the floor, and with my grip still on his sleeve, I drag him across the floor. Hardly any effort on my part is necessary, however, as he uses one hand to slide himself along towards the doors, where I’m taking him, while remaining otherwise motionless.

Once he’s outside, I try to lock both doors in the vestibule that lead outside, but neither will. You could basically push them open with ease. Inside, I ask whether or not those doors ever close and I’m told that they don’t. At that point Connie (an old store manager who I absolutely loathe in real life, and who loathes me just as much) appears at my side, and I lean in as she whispers into my ear, talking shit about someone who works with me, a woman who doesn’t watch over her children, and how it was her children that ruined the doors. At that point, the alarm wakes me up.

Of Anxiety Attacks, Snowdays, & Eternal Dissatisfaction.

Winter was coming.

And predictions were that it was going to blow an epic, frosty load all over the face of Ohio, so I was psychologically prepared. In a way.

As it kept coming to mind Friday and Saturday, my weekend, I comforted myself by telling myself that if my omnipresent anxiety was too high, I could just call off work. I really didn’t want to lose out on the money, but I didn’t want to drive in unsafe conditions or fight off an intense anxiety attack, either.

Sunday came and I awoke and proceeded with my routine, reminding myself all throughout that I only had the option to call off two hours before my shift was scheduled to begin. After that, I was committed to going to work — and to driving home in the snowstorm.

And I kept telling myself to just endure the plaguing fear. Running away, avoiding it, that bullshit just feeds it strength. So just face it, endure it, manage it, plow yourself through it.

That last part, likely literally.

I fought with myself until it was too late, passed the two-hour limit, and my fate was sealed. I knew I’d have to deal with the drive home that night. That’s when the anxiety I felt infecting me as soon as I woke up achieved a new level of intensity. Observing this in myself, I got rather pissed off.

It kept hitting me how stupid this was, how utterly nonsensical. The anxiety I was destined to have flooding me tonight would be bad enough, why was I compounding it with anxiety over my coming anxiety? If “fear is the mindkiller,” I thought to myself, than fear of fear is overkill.

So as I often do when somethings bothering me, I wrote about it on the word processor app on my phone. How anxiety attacks felt to me. How I felt so anxious about my anxiety attacks. How I felt about how anxious I felt over my anxiety attacks.

Mouth as dry as the Sahara, skin laminated in cold sweat. Throat as narrow as a straw with a massive lump inside you can’t swallow down. Eyeballs stuck on high-beams. Your entire body, feeling like a fist so tense the knuckles are white and your fingernails are digging into your bloody, fucking palm.

Teeth clenched like a vice. Movements jerky, breathing choppy, voice flailing and failing like its regressed back to puberty.

I boldly pronounced that anxiety sucked. How fear over a present circumstance was plenty enough, and how unnecessary it felt for my mind to subject me to additional torture by anticipating that anxiety and delivering nauseous, psychic gunshots of pre-anxiety anxiety.

Yes, I confessed, I’ll feel like I’m dying as I drive home tonight from work in the midst of a snow storm, where the relentless sky dandruff will obscure my vision and the frosty, white death blanketing the ground will render me incapable of discerning where the road begins and ends, but does it have to ruin my entire day?

I hemmed and hawed, but ultimately posted it on social media. I got an all-around sympathetic response, and in a way it felt good. That people got it, even understood it through personal experience.

All throughout the night at work, though, I kept coming back to it in my mind and feeling that what I wrote and displayed to the world wide webworks just made me look weak, pathetic, childish, unmasculine, and attention-seeking, and that in turn fed my self-loathing. At the same time I realized that if the responses had not been kind, supportive, and sympathetic but rather brutal, mocking, and downgrading, I would have felt even worse.

This reinforced my suspicion that nothing can ever satisfy me. And that, in turn, fed my self-loathing, who had hardly had time to digest its former feast.

So closing time came. The filthy, icy, sky jism had already rained down several coats across everything in sight by that time, a sight that was in part obscured by the relentless snow that continued to fall. I warmed up the truck, brushed it off, clocked out, put it in four-wheel-drive, got gas, beer and cigarettes at the Circle K, and proceeded down that long, dark road towards my one-bedroom apartment.

My dreaded journey.

Quite often when I’m wrong, I’m rather embarrassed about it, but I accept it as necessary suffering given my desire to grow my body of knowledge, to increase my overall understanding. Quite often when I’m proven right, I’m disappointed and pissed off.

Nothing can ever satisfy me.

I was right. The drive was horrid. My speed rarely climbed above 30 miles per hour, never above 40. Gripping the steering wheel so fucking tight my fingertips went numb. Forehead way too close to the windshield as my unblinking eyes fought to maintain concentration on the road.

Trying to relax my breathing. Fighting back against, talking back to the violent mob of automatic negative thoughts.

Striving to see through the slush that my shitty windshield wipers increasingly failed to wipe away.

And finally parking in what I could ascertain by the unblanketed landmarks was my usual parking space, and then carefully making my way across the winter tundra to the security door of my apartment complex.

Once inside, I responded to all the comments I’d recieved on social media. Then I drank and smoked and smoked myself out of the tension that may have otherwise imprisoned me all night long and on into the early morning.

I awoke happy that it was all finally over, as anxiety is so exhausting and time-consuming. If only I could harness the energy expended in my states of anxiety, I truly believe I could get this civilization off its reliance on fossil fuels, I swear.

From beyond my third-story window, I could hear the whirring of angry tires spinning against snow, vehicles aggressively striving to free themselves of the wintery graves Old Man Winter had fashioned for them the evening before. That dick. Parting the curtains, I looked outside and below and knew I’d have to get out there early to excavate the truck.

It was a pain in the ass, but I finally brushed off the truck sufficiently and, after some four-wheel, drive-and-reverse struggling, managed to free the Tacoma. The parking lot was barely plowed, which was also the case with the road I live on, though I had anticipated both. It’s just a left onto that road and then a left at the intersection, though, which should be plowed and cleared by now.

In my anxious pessimism, even I had confidence in this the previous evening, confidence that was reinforced by my coworkers, who freely offered up the same prediction.

“At least by tomorrow,” Jerry had said to me, “the roads will be clear.”

The roads? They were not clear.

It was akin to the terror of the former evening, only with daylight. I arrived at work, where the parking lot was also not plowed, and planted myself next to two vehicles I knew to be Kelly’s, the store manager, and Marcy’s, one of the assistant managers. These were the only two vehicles in the lot.

I tried to relax for about ten minutes, after which I planned to do my usual: enter the doors, go to the restroom, and stare at the time clock for a few minutes before I clocked in and my miserable Monday shift began.

At least by the time I leave, I told myself, the roads should be cleared.

I got to the doors of the building. They were locked. This isn’t too unusual. Since the pandemic, we frequently close lobby due to being short-staffed. I pounded on the doors for what seemed like forever before Marcy answered, and she did so with that smile that prepared me for news that I would not like that would subsequently be coming out of her mouth in that sarcastically sweet voice. I was not to be disappointed in this respect.

“Don’t be mad,” she said, hanging out the doorway, “but we’re closed.”

Wait, what?

“Everybody on night shift called off except the new guy.”

You didn’t think to tell me?

“I figured you’d call off like everybody else,” she said, “because of the snow.”

So I forced myself to come here despite my agonizing fears and I didn’t fucking have to? And now I have to turn around and do it all again?

Fuck. Fuckity-fuck.

So, yes, I had to endure the drive again, though in reverse this time. And the roads were slightly better. I decided to stop and get beer. And then, since there were still no cleared parking spaces, I had to plant the Tacoma right back into its former grave of death.

So I’m home now. On a fast food snow day. Drinking beer, smoking weed, writing all the fuck about it. Still kind of frustrated.

Really, dude: nothing will ever satisfy me.

Haunting Alien Faces.

Stuck in traffic, waiting for the light to change behind the second (count ’em: second) slow motherfucker I’ve gotten stuck behind on my commute to work today, my eyes catch a parked U-Haul truck a short distance ahead of me and to the left. And on the side of the truck I see one of Their faces.

This happens often. I’m not sure if its because I’m of that artistic mindset that tends to make an everlasting Rorschach test out of the external world as a whole or because I’m simply bat-shit insane, but this happens all the time.

I think I see the face of a Gray alien on someone’s t-shirt and it turns out to be the Punisher logo. I see a Gray alien face in the reflections in the chrome pipes above the urinal every day at work — and I drink java, so I’m there quite often. I see their faces and figures in spills, stains, and shadows, day and night. I meditate in the morning, I see their faces, their eyes, staring back at me too, too close behind my eyes as I strive to maintain focus on the breath.

This time, though, it’s a bit extreme. I can’t un-see it. I keep calling myself crazy, that its not really there, that it makes no sense to be there, but this doesn’t help at all.

Once traffic starts moving, I’m actually thankful for the slow-ass in front of me, and I try to be careful as I go forward so I don’t get too distracted when I take a closer look.

And I look. Closely.

And it is, it actually is a Gray alien displayed on the side of the truck after all. It would appear that I’m no more insane than usual today. Which is nice and all, but why have an alien displayed on the side of a U-Haul? What is the meaning of this?

Better to move your own shit than have aliens abduct them? Return the vehicle in the allotted time or you’ll be caught, probed, prodded, and released?

Desire to move off-planet? Enjoy our new trucks, complete with warp-drive.

Catharsis (Ashamed to be Human).

There are days you’re ashamed to be human and whatever hope you had for your species has worn down to a fucking thread.

The girl working the back drive-thru window tells you how her mother kicked her out of the house, so now she has to live with her abusive father — the one who beat her so badly a short time ago she could hardly get herself out of bed — and work as much as she can so she can hopefully get emancipated.

Oh, and she’s been raped by her brother and her father’s friend.

Oh, and the nineteen-year-old manager that just got fired, last time she worked here he forced a kiss on her and tried to convince her to get into a relationship with him.

A hellscape of a life and she’s only fifteen.

The mother of the aforementioned manager spoke to you outside earlier, telling you how the whole meeting went between her, her husband — also a manager — and the higher-ups, and how when they informed her they were firing their son because of the shouting match he got in with another manager her husband walked out only to beg for the job back later in the day, and how they probably only let him come back because we’re perpetually shortstaffed and if he left, the assistant manager wouldn’t be able to go on vacation.

And then the girl in front drive-thru half-jokingly asks if you and the girl in back drive-thru were talking about her, as evidently they got into it the other day, and once you sincerely tell her no, she tells you how her meth-head mother is going back to court this week.

You don’t bother looking at the news, don’t bother contemplating issues like climate change and the ongoing pandemic and the growing political divide or the crackdown on the freedom of expression, because there’s enough just in front of you that makes you want to go hide under a rock for the remainder of your days and divorce yourself from the human species.

So you make a latte, hide in your car for your thirty-minute break, try to read your book but just end up ranting through your thumb into the word processor app on your dollar store cell phone about all this shit as you chain-smoke your cigarettes, hoping for some sense of catharsis.

A Kelly Dream & The Shirt (11/3/21 Dream).

In the dream, we’re in some crowded stadium, it seems, sitting beside the bleachers, which we’re separated from by a fence or something. In the crowd, some guy, apparently horrifically drunk, is making a scene when Kelly, the store manager at work, appears from the crowd of people and begins dealing with him in a fearless manner. We’re a short distance away, but she seems to look right towards us, so I wave, but get no response. I then feel the kind of embarrassment I typically feel when that happens.

Upon awakening and remembering the dream scene, I’m rather curious, as this is the second dream she’s featured in as of late.

When I arrive at work, I find that Kelly is there. Though I can’t be certain when, exactly, it came to my attention, shortly after clocking in I realized that she was wearing The Shirt.

That’s when shit got a little awkward.

I respect Kelly as both a boss and an individual, at least from what little I’ve discerned with respect to her personality and personal life. She’s strong with respect to character, as was expertly displayed on a video taken at our fast food joint that went viral. In dealing with an insane customer who stepped behind counter, screamed at her, even ripped her mask off her face, she remained calm and controlled.

She possesses physical strength as well, however. Steve has her on SnapChat, and he’s shown me several photos and videos she’s sent out, one of which depicted her expertly wailing her fists onto the skin of a punching bag.

She’s cross-eyed and has Crones Disease, as well as a host of other medical problems, and despite frequent sick-days in which she’s essentially incapacitated, she managed to climb up the ladder to become store manager. She’s bought a house and despite her salary struggles with her bills, but she’s been making it so far.

She has also endured a lot of pain in her life. To start with, she is a lesbian with a trans boyfriend for whom she apparently feels great love — and this despite the fact that he has frequently been verbally and physically abusive towards her. She has gone out of her way to make it work, and consistently, and so far as I know that struggle is ongoing. I will never say such a relationship is healthy, but it clearly requires a lot of willpower on her part to not only endure that emotional and physical pain but to see beyond it and strive to soar to that beyond on the wings of hope, patience, and enormous effort.

And she’s hot.

I can ignore the fact that she’s so fucking attractive most of the time, however. Until she takes off her work shirt in the summer right as her shift ends and sports her tank top, top half of her figure revealing itself, sleeves of tattoos exposed. Or until she wears that fucking shirt.

The Shirt.

Jet-black, button-down, smooth-looking, hugging her figure perfectly, almost like yoga pants for the wonderful world above the equator. Revealing yet concealing her breasts, her waist. Its painfully hot, and the effort I invest in averting my eyes whenever she wears it is almost exhausting despite the surge of energy summoned when my eyes inevitably rebel.

At one point I feared I looked at her too long and from then on tried to keep my distance from her. I’m certainly not put to make the woman uncomfortable.

I really, really need to get laid.