A Wasteland of Damaged Children.

Outside, I was sweeping the lot when a woman and a young girl exited the door.

“Its cold outside,” says the little girl. She was right, too.

“Shut up and get in the car,” barks back the woman at high volume. “This all turned into a shitshow because you don’t know how to be respectful in public.”

While there was clearly more to the story, I was astounded by the woman’s hypocrisy and her utter lack of self-awareness. I mean, barking at a kid like that in public doesn’t qualify as respectful in my book, at the very least, and this bitch had clearly been alive much longer than the child she was scolding for allegedly doing the same damn thing.

It made me think about the kids I work with — older kids, of course, anywhere from fifteen to seventeen — and how so many of them have parents that perhaps became parents too young or just should have never had been parents at all.

I’ve heard the hoops some couples have to jump through, the qualifications they have to meet in order to adopt a child — and yet any two idiots who can hardly take care of themselves, let alone another living being, can engage in some genital-mashing and produce one all by themselves, no qualifications necessary so long as the biological equipment is in working order.

There’s something incredibly fucked up about that, methinks.

Both Emory and Bonnie have a horrific home situation, making them the second young couple I’ve known in recent years that make me profoundly happy that they found and hang on to one another. They currently live with Emory’s mother, who certainly doesn’t sound like she’ll be getting the mother of the year award, but it sounds infinitely better than Bonnie’s home situation.

Her mother’s an addict, and her father had enough of it recently, left her, and moved out of state. Bonnie still speaks with them both, and seems to have a decent relationship with her father, but her mother constantly makes her feel like shit, belittles her, and never shows the slightest pride in her daughter’s accomplishments.

More than once a call or text from her has sent Bonnie bawling at work — where the girl honestly amazes me. There’s a little buildup, but the waterworks come on pretty quickly, full-scale, blubbering, ugly crying that breaks your heart, but then she’s done. She’s fine. Good to go. It blows my mind how quickly she bounces back. She doesn’t hold on to her emotions as I do, but rather lets them flow through her, lets herself feel them, and then they’re out of her system.

I could learn from this, for sure. She needs to teach me that trick.

No thanks to either of their parents, they’re preparing to go to college and find an apartment. It’ll honestly be a relief to me once they’re on their own, too. They’re both very grounded, both remarkably level-headed and mature. They should do fine once they’re freed from the shackles of being minors.

Then there’s Lydia.

She was one of those quiet, introverted people who seemed reluctant to speak when she first started working with us, and I always feel it my duty to get such people to open up a bit, maybe laugh, at least give them one person to have a verbal exchange with. I found I truly like the girl.

She’s pretty, petite and athletic, and from the very beginning she seemed to be one those people who are goth at heart, even if they didn’t always wear the external trappings. I like those people. A lot. They kind of feel like home to me, and this sense I had of her dark nature only grew as I got to know her.

I learned that she’d had two abusive boyfriends in the past, though her current one seems to be treating her well. Later I would learn that he started off as her drug dealer, then became a fuck buddy, and ultimately what they had evolved into a relationship. I liked that process. Aside from the drug dealer part of it, I have also been through that process. Ages ago, my ex-girlfriend Kate and I started off as fuck buddies and it seamlessly blossomed into the most intense relationship in my life, albeit a short-lived one. I sort of prefer that natural process to the more traditional one.

When she was about ten, her house burnt down and while the family made it out okay, she had some pets who died. Shortly thereafter, she lost her father, then her uncle. Understandably, she suffers from anxiety and depression, but also likely has bipolar disorder, which rather surprised me. I also learned that she’s attempted suicide twice — almost three times, counting the day before she revealed this to me — and that she’s a cutter as well.

Whatever inspired her recent descent and suicide attempt, it in turn inspired her mother to present her with three choices: she could sleep on her mother’s bedroom floor, sleep over with her friend, or stay at a mental institution, where she’d be on suicide watch. She couldn’t be alone, however. She elected to stay with her friend.

The day she had told me about her suicide attempts, she had also gotten on new medication, which was making her feel nauseous, so they let her go home a little early. Her friend — a tall, slender girl — came up to the building riding a skateboard to pick her up.

After I thought they had both left, Lydia came up to me by the sink, where I had been doing dishes, asking me if I had a knife she could borrow. I jokingly asked her who she was going to stab, and she said no one, not yet, so I handed her my box cutter. Evidently her and her friend hadn’t even gotten out of the parking lot when a guy pulled in, passed by them, slammed the car in reverse, drove over the curb, and proceeded to hit on her.

Creepy guys are constantly trying to pick her up, usually through the drive-thru window, where she typically spends her shift.

She told him to just drive away. He said some bitter words and went on his merry way. As for the box cutter, she just wanted to have some means of defense if necessary on her and her friend’s walk home.

After she went back outside, my concern over the fact that I had just handed a girl who cuts herself a box cutter began to weigh heavily on me — that and the fact that my pathetic box cutter wouldn’t provide sufficient protection if indeed they did come across a creeper. So I went out the back door, where I saw Lydia and her friend talking to Diana, another girl I work with, and her mother.

Good, she was still here.

I went into my truck, grabbed my tire iron and handed it to her without saying anything and walked away.

I would never want to be a pretty girl, especially in a cesspool of a town like this.

For that matter, I wouldn’t want to be a kid in today’s world. There are too many parents that shouldn’t be parents, the schools seem more like a prison than anything else, and the planet they’re being left behind is going to be an epic shitstorm thanks to the climate change caused by generations of ignorance.

Hairless (11/11/21 Dream).

In the dream, I had gotten drunk and for some reason elected not only to shave my head, but shave my beard and eyebrows off as well. No stubble, either; it was a smooth shave all around.

I went to work like this, and though one person said they noticed something different about me, I don’t recall anyone else even referencing it. At some point, however, I remember seeing my face from an external vantage point as I was talking with someone and being utterly disgusted with how I looked. Pale, plastic, sickly.

When I finally woke up from the dream, I lifted my face up off the pillow and felt my eyebrows and beard.

“Thank god,” I said to myself before falling back asleep.

The Guardian of Souls Strikes Again.

Maybe a week ago, I walk into work, go to the restroom, and when I come back out, the managers are laughing their asses off. Clearly I missed something.

Evidently the customer who got kicked out of the store a year or two ago, the one who proclaimed to Dustin that he was the Guardian of Souls, the one who looks like the caveman off the Geico commercials and who I absolutely loathe and delighted in kicking out, had come inside, ordered food, and sat down in one of the booths. The managers were talking amongst themselves about how lucky he was that I wasn’t here, and apparently once I walked inside and turned to go to the bathroom he looked at one of the managers, looked back at the bathroom, quickly threw away his trash and then bolted out the door like his loincloth was on fire.

“I’ve never seen someone move so fast in my life,” one of the managers later told me.

I detest that guy to such an extreme degree its actually rather absurd. Yes, I know he has mental issues, nothing could be clearer to me, but as I believe that one guy from Saturday Night Live put it, “Being crazy is no excuse to be an asshole.”

For the last week, he’s been hanging outside the building, and if he sees me outside smoking, he turns the opposite direction. If I see him inside at the counter and he’s already in the process of having his order taken, he adverts his eyes and hangs his head, dreadlocks of unwashed hair hanging obscuring his face, evidently in hopes that I don’t recognize him.

For awhile, he began coming in mornings, ordering food and behaving himself, so the store manager said I shouldn’t kick him out anymore. That got to me. In every other case I’ve hated kicking people out; kicking out this bag of shit actually brought some joy to my life.

Today, one of the managers tell me, the other manager tells me, coworkers inform me, that he’s in the building — all of them within the space of about two minutes. Everyone seemed eager for me to kick this piece of shit out. I went up to the shift manager, Steve, and asked him if I even had the authority to kick him out anymore. He confirmed. Recently, unbeknownst to me, the morning manager had kicked him out for doing something — standing on the table, from what I understand. So he was officially banned from the store yet again.

I saw him out in the dining room, sitting so his back faced me, and that’s when I saw he had ordered food. Frustrated, I walked away. The human potato, who was working register, had taken his order, apparently not informed that he should deny him. I was sure to clear that up.

As soon as caveman was done with his food, he promptly left. Inevitably, he’ll be back.

And now I’ll be ready. The war was officially back on and I’m ready to kick him out of the store and back into the Stone Age. No more Oogabooga bullshit.

This Yabbadabba dipshit is going down.

A Collection of Mundane Dream Pieces.

In line with my typical routine, I wake up, start the coffee machine, and go to the bathroom as I check my phone. I see the face of Kelly, my store manager, on Facebook and I laugh, because I just saw her. I was confused a moment, and then I remembered the dream I’d just awakened from.

10/17/21

I had been at work, approaching the stock room, and I notice a box back there that had been there for days. I squeezed between two people, approach Kelly, who was by the dish sink, and asked her if she wanted me to throw away the box. In the process of doing so, my eyes met hers and her eyes are red, and its clear that she had been crying. I felt horrible that I hadn’t noticed and apologized profusely. I looked away a moment, and when I looked back she had taken the soap suds atop the soapy sink water and entirely covered her face with them. I laughed and patted her on the shoulder.

As of late, my dream recall has entirely sucked. If I recall anything, they are quick flashes of scenes or lone images, and most of what I recalled are things that could have just as easily happened in real life.

Early in September, I believe, I recalled a brief image of my check engine light, which has been on since shortly after acquiring the truck, suddenly went off — interesting, as typically my dreams regarding vehicles depict rather concerning scenarios. This trend appeared to have confinued, too. On the 19th, for instance, I recalled a dream scene in which I was trying to pull into the parking lot of the apartment complex, but a person was parked on the right side of the entrance, facing the road. In response, I hesitated for a moment, uncertain if I should pass and try again, but then expertly turned and pulled my car around them.

9/30/21.

I had a dream image that bothered me, even given the largely forgotten context of the dream itself. I saw a hypodermic needle, but both its precise appearance and its location perplexed and worried me. For one thing, I found it in my apartment or a similar location, not at work, where I occasionally find them in the restroom or parking lot. I hate needles and don’t do hard drugs, so finding it in this personal location bothered me a great deal, both outside and within the context of the dream. For another thing, the syringe was metallic and futuristic-looking.

10/2/21.

I left the door to my apartment open and was shocked to find nothing was stolen.

10/11/21.

I walk into a crowded bar with two people, who both sit down promptly. There was nowhere for me to sit, however, nor was anyone talking to me, so I walked away. I meandered into large, dark, vacant room in the back of the bar, looking to go out for a smoke. I never made it out there before awakening, but I heard someone on,the distance say my name to someone, clearly wondering if I was who they suspected I was.

Save for the futuristic syringe, all dream recall as of late has dealt with rather mundane circumstances — though the part about the soap suds in the dream this morning was slightly odd. Even more curious, I discovered on Facebook that today is Kelly’s birthday.

Clash of the Talkers.

Some people, like these two guys I work with, just love to talk. Live to talk. I’m not judging, its just their nature to squawk your ear off, typically about nothing of real substance. And while I can find it irritating, of course, as I’m certainly of a more introverted nature, nothing is more agonizing than being around two talkers in a heated argument with one another.

Like feeling the angry vibes rising to a fever pitch isn’t bad enough, now I have to bear your incessant mouth noises competing with each other on top of it.

My kingdom of shit for some fucking earplugs.

Another Episode in the Life of a Guilty, Sore Thumb.

We needed a cleaning tool at work, so the manager gave me ten bucks from petty cash and I walked the short distance to the dollar store. As usual, I decided to get two cans of Monster Java Mean Bean while I was there. They didn’t have what we needed, so I just grabbed the Monsters and waited in line.

As I was waiting, a young, slender, mixed guy greeted me like I was an old friend. I smiled behind my mask and said hey, that it was good to see him. I asked him how he’s been, and he said much better, and I felt he meant his job here at the dollar store. He even walked up to me and gave me a fist bump. I didn’t have the foggiest fucking clue who he was.

This kind of shit has happened to me constantly since I left high school. People would walk up to me at work or on the street, even pull over in their car and seem so happy to see me, would seem to remember me perfectly from school, but I couldn’t recall them at all. Since then, it has continued to happen, though now typically they turn out to be former regulars or former fellow employees. When I can identify them or at least discern where I knew them from, anyway.

This guy came up to the counter when it was my turn, took out his card from his wallet, and told his coworker at the register that he was going to pay for my Monsters. He explained to him that he used to work with me and made some comment regarding his shitty conduct while we were working together.

I asked him if he was sure, and he said he was, and I thanked him and left.

I don’t know why people often seem to like me, or why they’re so nice to me. I’m certainly not complaining, but it always makes me feel a bit guilty — particularly in circumstances like this, when I at best only vaguely recall having known them and I apparently stick out like a sore thumb in their memory.

Customers of Confusion.

We close the dining room of our fast food palace of misery and chaos every day at nine o’clock, and on Sundays the entire store closes at that time. Its been this way since the dawn of the pandemic, and since shortly after Covid hit we’ve also had signs up on both drive-thru speakers informing anyone who pulls up that we close up early on Sundays.

Sometimes, due to being perpetually shorthanded, they’ll close up dining room early throughout the week, so early that the doors are locked when I arrive for my shift at three in the evening. When I go out for a smoke during my shift I used to tell people before they walk all the way up to the door or before they climb out of the car that we’re closed inside just to save them some time. Some are thankful, but most scowl and cuss at or in response to me as if I not only locked the doors myself but that I did it strictly for the purposes of ruining their day. As a consequence, I now do this selectively.

On Sundays, the situation is even worse after we close the entire store at nine. People will park at the drive-thru speaker for ten minutes, blind to the sign announcing we’re closed, waiting for someone to take their order. Vehicles will line up behind them, awaiting their turn to ignore the sign hanging in clear view before their selectively-ignorant faces before they finally, finally grow tired of waiting and then — not always, of course, but bloody often enough — cuss and scream and damn the place as a whole to hell before peeling off to put their low degree of maturity on full display.

This Sunday was no different in that respect, though it was a wee bit heavier on the weirdness and confusion.

As I was leaving last night and driving around the building towards the exit, I saw a pretty black lady in a dress with some beehive hairdo walk along the drive-thru pad. I decided when I drive by her I’d inform her we were closed. I watched as she put her purse down on the drive through pad and then walked toward the speaker, leaving it behind her without glancing back. That was only the first peculiar observation.

Within moments, I stopped right beside her just as she got to the speaker, hung my head out the window, and said, “Sorry, ma’am, we closed at nine.”

Unless she’s partially deaf, she had to have heard me; if by chance she couldn’t make out what I said, at the very least the sound of my voice certainly should have alerted her to my presence. It did not. She didn’t turn her head at all. Didn’t budge.

I then repeated myself, this time even louder, at which point she actually became alerted to my presence. Very casually, she then turned her head towards me and began placing her order, just as if she were talking to the drive-thru speaker to the other side of her.

“Hi,” she said in a voice that, while extremely polite, seemed unnaturally high-pitched, “can I get one of those frozen Cokes?”

I looked at her in a way that I feared betrayed my confusion and, as politely as I could manage, I repeated myself yet again.

“Ma’am, we closed at nine.”

“Oh,” she said, “you close at nine. Thank you.”

And then she continued walking on passed the speaker, her purse still on the drive-thru pad behind her, where she’d left it.

I’ve pretty much given up on people making any sense to me.

The Gray Alien Girl (8/19/21 Dream).

The dream was strangely realistic, the environment just as it would have been had it happened in waking life, and when it first came to mind upon awakening I at first, in my confused, still half-asleep mind, assumed it was an authentic memory.

I’m at work, and earlier in the dream I had seen a depiction of the face of a Gray alien somewhere. Due to that, I was surprised when, upon passing by front drive thru, I had caught a glimpse of a tattoo of Gray aliens on the arm of some new girl at work whom I’d never seen before. She was skinny with long hair. Unaware that I was in a dream, I immedeately became intrigued by what I took to be synchronicity, but being shy, I didn’t say anything to her regarding the tattoo.

Later, as I went into the front drive-thru area to get a cup of coffee, it comes to my attention that the girl’s shirt also featured Gray aliens. Standing with my back to the drive-thru window, as I got my small coffee, I laughed, looked at her, and said something like, “So what’s with you and the little guys?” As I said it, I held out my hand, indicating their short stature.

She was standing a short distance away, near the cart where we put all the sauce packets, facing me, smiling. Though I can’t recall what she said, she seemed to be dodging the subject entirely, acting cagey, but in the most polite manner conceivable. I felt saddened by this, because I was hoping she would reveal that, like me, she had actually seen them.

Chaotic Cycle of the Fast Food Industry.

Imagine you work with me at a fast food restaurant. We’re constantly busy, shorthanded, and all the employees are overstressed and underpaid. As a consequence, the food doesn’t get out quickly enough to satisfy the customers and their orders are often enough made wrong, so they’re pissed and take it out on the employees. As a result, some employees decide they’ve had enough, so they quit and get better-paying, less-stressful jobs.

So now we’re just as busy, even more shorthanded, and the remaining employees are even more stressed, orders take longer to get out and are even more likely to be made wrong, and so customers are even more pissed and take it out on the employees with increased viciousness.

Finally, we get in new employees, but after a short period of time — anywhere from half a work-shift to a week — they are understandably unwilling to put up with this bullshit for the meager hourly wage they make, so they quit.

And the cycle continues.

Customers either don’t get it or just don’t care and treat us like disobedient or dispassionate slaves, which I suppose in a way we are — but their act of treating us like shit is not an effective technique if their aim is truly to get what they ordered with speed and smiling faces.

I’m just throwing this out there, but a bigger paycheck, paid holidays, vacations, personal days, affordable insurance, and getting treated like fellow human beings by the people we serve — that might just be more effective.

Fear & Self-Loathing (Despite the Human Potato).

“Did you clean the bathrooms?”

“No,” Lenny informed me, “I accidentally already dumped the mop bucket.”

What a curious sentence.

With his round head, lack of a neck, and his oval body, Lenny looks like a cartoon character. I’m not trying to be cruel, but I can’t help but think of it when I look at him.

He looks kind of like a sentient potato, come to think of it.

He’s worked here before, and while he immediately knew me upon his rehiring, it took some time before I recalled who he was. I tried to be nice to the guy, but little things began to build up and Thursday, it all came crashing down.

“Well, you have to clean the bathrooms,” I told him, trying my damnest to constrain my irritation. “Just clean the mirrors, sink, toilet, and then sweep and mop.”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t have a lot of time…”

I look at the clock not a foot away. He has twenty minutes. I just gave him a look, held my tongue, looked away, shook my head and shrugged. He walked away and I continued doing dishes.

Over the last day or two I learned that Lenny, who is allegedly gay, had said some incredibly uncomfortable and dirty things to one of manager Steve’s sons last time he worked here. I’m not sure if that was what got him fired — for all I know, he may have quit — but his unwanted advances have apparently continued, this time exclusively with women. More than one girl working here has told me how he stares at them, has absolutely no respect for personal space (something I have noticed myself), and has said some considerably creepy, sexual things to them as well. I had just heard another story that very evening, as a matter of fact, and it made my blood pressure rise.

To top it all off, during that conversation we had at the dish sink, I had the distinct impression that he was trying to elicit sympathy from me in order to manipulate me into cleaning the dining room for him, which sent me fuming inside. I do my best to help those I work with — this was, in fact, mostly the reason I was doing dishes. And despite the fact that he is supposed to clean the dining room, I typically do it for him, tonight being the only evening I asked him to do it himself.

My head had been in a dark place all week, as I’ve been beating myself up inside for how far I haven’t come in my life by 42 years of age. I’ve been drinking too much and sleeping too little and whether its been depression or lack if sleep to blame, I felt as if I wasn’t getting shit done as quickly as usual at work, so I finally decided to just have him do dining room for once.

Having felt guilty over being what I considered lazy, my conversation with him made me feel so much better about myself. I mean, at least I wasn’t as lazy as this guy, and I sure as hell wasn’t trying to manipulate anyone, and his feeble attempts to manipulate me served to spawn a redirection of the anger I had been focusing inward, at myself, externally, at him.

So amidst all that, I was almost thankful for the perverted potato. Maybe I wasn’t such a piece of shit. Maybe I wasn’t as ill-suited to live in the world as I’d been thinking. At the very least, I wasn’t as pathetic as this little worm, right?

Then the night ended and I got in my truck, eager to start enjoying my two days off, but the truck felt wrong as I began backing up.

Fuck.

I got out. It was a flat tire. My reaction should have been one of relief considering the issues I had with my last car, but I instantly felt fear and shame.

My truck had one of those spares that were beneath the car and I hadn’t the foggiest fucking clue how to get it out, so I had to go back inside and ask Emory, a seventeen year old, to help me. I felt it made sense to ask him as he used to work at his father’s shop. Between him and his friend, with the manager, Emory’s girlfriend and I trying to “help” but mostly watching, they got the spare down, the truck jacked up and the bolts off the flat, but none if us could get the tire off and we were afraid of jostling the truck too much because the jack was small and we feared it unstable. I finally did what I probably should have done to begin with and called AAA for road side service.

I know it’s all cultural stereotypes and shit, but these car issues tend to make me feel like less of a man each and every time. The guy finally came and Emory and the crew, who were kind enough to hang around with me in our dark parking lot, finally,got to go home. I stuttered like a maniac when he asked me for the mileage on my car, which I had to check, as I was clueless, and in the end the guy seemed to,uunderstand not only my utter incompetence in this area but my heightened state of anxiety and showed some sympathy. The rim was rusted, so he said he might not be able to tighten the bolts completely, so I should probably check them on the way home.

I got so drunk when I got home I woke up on the floor of the bathroom,staring at the base of the toilet around noon on Friday and didn’t feel I was safe to drive until all of the shops were closed. Nothing close was open until Monday, when I ended up sleeping in too late. Hopefully I can get two new front tires and an oil change tomorrow before my second Moderna shot and before work.

My mood was still low and internal self-flaggelation highly active yesterday, though I feel much better today — so far, anyway. I only wish I could manage this shit better. The smallest things become the biggest fucking ordeals, at least within the confines of my warped cranium.

The rational part of me believes in an indifferent universe, but it embarrasses me to confess that the emotional part of me is convinced I live in an actively hostile one that’s always out to get me. In the rare periods in which I finally feel some self-confidence and a sense of security in my life, it feels as though some force in the universe finds it necessary to knock me down a few pegs just to remind me of what a piece of shit I am and reintroduce me to the perpetual state of fear and insecurity where I evidently belong. The first time I felt this was in my relationship with Kate, or rather how it ended — the only relationship of the three that I didn’t carpet-bomb myself. Had things gone on, I’m sure the surreal high of the honeymoon phase we were in would have ended, but the floor dropped as I felt we were still blissfully building up towards the climax. I felt as if I’d been tricked into trust and, once it was finally secured, betrayed — not so much by her, but by circumstances. By the universe.

It was, for whatever reason, the only relationship where I was all in, where I felt confident and secure, and I had the grand illusion that I was finally, finally turning a new leaf in my life, starting a new chapter rather than living the miserable, run-on life sentence I’d grown so miserably accustomed to. And I learned the hard way that the cosmos, well, it apparently just can’t let that happen for me.

And between the humanoid tater being inadvertently making me feel better about myself and the flat tire I was too incompetent to change myself, which sent me right back into self-loathing after the shortest reprieve, it would seem the cosmic bitchslap process is accelerating.

If I can’t overcome this, I certainly hope that over time I become desensitized to it.