Brad Pitt, Purses, & Fever Dreams.

This is when the day begins to go downhill, ultimately to meet it’s terminus in a surreal, comical sort of hell.

It begins when Marjie, one of the managers, comes back to the stock room to ask me if l want to kick someone out of the dining room. The frustrated sigh that erupts from me is involuntary. Save for rare, repeat, bat-shit crazy offenders like the Cave Man or the Alien Chicken Guy, kicking people out is always an awkward ordeal and I inevitably end up feeling like a total fucking asshole.

Can I, like, not?

Some new guy from the kitchen, though, his eyes light up like a pair of goddamn supernovas as he overhears our conversation and asks — all-too-eagerly, it seems to me — if he can do it. Marjie then gives the go-ahead, and boy, am I relieved, but I decide to observe nonetheless, just in case he needs back-up.

I’m not that much of a pussy, after all.

Evidently they’d kicked this homeless guy out twice during the morning shift, and now he’s back, laying down in one of the booths, lost in slumber.

From a distance, I watch as the new guy talks to him, from what I can tell in a kindly manner, and while the homeless guy takes his merry fucking time, he was reportedly polite about it. As he finally gets up and approaches the door, however, he suddenly locks eyes with one of my many coworkers behind the counter and wishes them — and them in particular; no one else — a good day, and then turns to leave.

Is there, perhaps, a backstory here that we’re all unaware of?

Motherfucking nope.

Judging from the vibe and body language of the particular coworker he targeted these seemingly kind words to, he is as confused as the rest of us as to why he was singled out.

An hour or two later, the tall, slender, bushy-bearded vagabond returns, and immediately starts exhibiting some utterly bizarre behavior.

He picks up one of the wet floor signs in the pathway along the booths and walks it up to the shelves where we place the Doordash orders, leaning it up against the wall. After that, he picks one of the empty brown trays up off of one of the tables and places it on one of the Doordash shelves.

But wait: that’s not all.

Then he moves towards the counter, where we have multiple stacks of those plastic, numbered tent signs we use for dining room orders, and he proceeds to rearrange them.

I hide around the corner, out of his sight, and stare intensely at Marjie until we meet eyes, and then point with dagger pupils towards the counter, returning to her own pupils for emphasis.

This? This works.

Approaching the counter, she politely says, all the while calling him “honey” in that sweet way, that if he doesn’t order something, well, honey, she’s sorry, but he needs to leave.

That’s all that I catch, though she subsequently informs me that he was rearranging the tent signs because “things like that bothered him.”

Ladies and gentlemen, it appears that we have ourselves an obsessive-compulsive vagrant on our hands.

Interesting, to say the least.

As I go on about my work duties, I can’t help but imagine what special type of personal hell it must be to be a homeless obsessive-compulsive, at least judging from the traditional depictions.

Washing hands. Locking doors. Creating and sustaining some semblance of strict, preordained order. Squeaky-clean sanitization. Perfectionism to a tee despite living on the streets.

Anal-retentive conscientiousness in tandem with the contrary conditions inherent in homelessness.

Sweet mother of fuck.

The notion of being plagued with this mental disorder coupled with his apparent circumstances, it sends me into an endless rabbit hole of utter horror. Visions of a prison of endless, self-inflicted, hypnotically-compelled torture.

By the time I make my way back out to the dining room to sweep and wipe down tables, however, he’s seemingly gone.

As I proceed to clean, I see a purse sitting on one of the seats at the tables. You’d be amazed what people leave at a fast food restaurant — phones, wallets, laptops, bicycles, a single shoe, plush animals, a full diaper forcibly wedged between the seats — so a purse isn’t out of the question.

There is one woman in the dining room, and she’s waiting at counter, and when I ask her if the purse is hers and she responds in the negative, I take it behind the counter, placed it in the storage area beneath the register, and tell Marjie what and where it is in case anyone comes looking.

You’d also be surprised how often no one comes looking, even when the item is seemingly important. Yeah, in such cases that might suggest it’s been stolen then abandoned, or at least you’d think so if we happened to live in a universe that operated in accordance with logic.

Unfortunately, we live in this one.

So anyway, I go on about my other work duties. In passing, Porky, a coworker, tells me that it belongs to the homeless guy, and I initially respond with a tilted head, quizzical look, and lifted brow.

“You mean the purse?”

“Yeah,” he confirms. “He was carrying it with him when he came in.”

I immediately flash back to the movie The Hangover, where they tease Zach Galifianakis’ character for having what they refer to as a purse, though he’s adamant it’s a sachel.

This, though? This is a purse.

The homeless guy is seemingly absent from the dining room after my smoke, though, so there’s shit I can do about it, so work continues.

At some point I’m coming in the doors from outside, on my way to do something, when I see the homeless guy in the dining room, clearly looking for his purse. He’s apparently even acquired help from some random customer to assist in the search.

And yes.

Yes, I could stop and inform them that it’s behind the counter, explain to them why it’s there. And yes, later I’ll feel incredibly guilty for not having done so, but I feel confident that they’ll eventually come to the counter and ask if anyone brought it there, okay?

And as I said, I’m in the middle of something.

So now I’m on break, sitting in the truck, trying to read a book as I sip from my java and chain-smoke cigarettes, when I can’t help but hear some girl just beyond some cars to my left, by the side door, sitting on her bicycle and talking on her phone.

The voice, the vibe, it all conveys that she’s one of those bouncy, energetic people that are so open, honest, and unfiltered — of such a wild, innocent, and carefree spirit — that one can’t help but be attracted to them, even if that energy swiftly becomes unbearably overwhelming, at least for types such as myself.

In any case, she’s grabbed my attention.

After break, I’m changing trash in the dining room when I notice that Free Spirit and the OCD Vagabond are sharing the booth right by the side door. On the table, amidst food and drinks, are two purses. One of them is a purse made entirely of transparent plastic; the other, well, it’s the purse I put behind the counter earlier.

The fact he got it back strangely put me at ease. The job is done. All has been put right. I could have made it easier, sure, but forgive me. I’m off the fucking hook.

After I gather all the trash and take it out to the dumpster, I do some dishes and decide to clean the dining room again. As I wipe down the second booth from the door, the Free Spirit at the first booth is talking with OCD Vagabond about exchanging purses. He temporarily gets up and walks away from the table, however, so, lacking any other target, she turns her energy towards me.

She likes her transparent purse because she used to date this guy who shoplifted, she tells me — he’s gone now, she assures me — and she’d gone into this store one day and on her way out, the alarms had gone off. Though they didn’t search her, it made her nervous and self-conscious, so she’d dumped out all the contents, purged her purse.

This see-through purse? She likes it because at a single glance they can tell she hasn’t stolen anything.

Judging from this, I surmise, her purse serves as an accurate reflection of her clearly transparent soul. However envious in a way, the thought of being like her, given the truly alien nature of my own soul, delivers unto me spasms of utter terror.

Some of us, my dear, are better left opaque.

Later, out the front door, I’m speaking with Porky when I reference the OCD Vagabond sitting with “that cute girl.”

His eyes bulge in alarm.

“Don’t,” he says, and when I ask him why, he only says that “she’s a crackhead,” though he never details how he came upon this information.

I’m inclined to believe this is just the nature of her personality, but I confess this is due to my naive reaction to the coupling of how she acts and how she looks, and how she looks physically, at the very least, does not at all resonate with the appearance of those that I’ve encountered in this town who were clearly on some sort of speed.

Maybe he was prejudging.

Maybe he was right, and she was just a newbie, and I, ever-shallow and shamefully superficial, was just failing to accurately judge her based on her presently pristine physical appearance.

I didn’t question him further on the matter, so fucked if I know. Figuratively-speaking, of course.

Which brings me to what I impulsively and under some consideration still choose to interpret as a compliment. His reactionary response of “don’t,” the broader context of which I confirmed in the course of our conversation, went far beyond merely suggesting that I’d have a chance with this girl.

I’m honestly delighted that he so confidently overestimates my capacity to get laid.

If only, dude.

This was undoubtedly the highlight of what turned out to be an incredibly surreal evening.

Later, as I’m smoking out front again, the OCD Vagabond appears out of the ether, approaches me, and asks if he can pay me fifty cents for a cigarette. With him being this close, I can feel his present vibe, and he seems forlorn and contemplative. I take out a smoke from my pack and tell him he can just take it, but he hands me the fifty cents anyway.

“I’ve been to jail a few times,” he says, after lighting it up. “I’m trying to help people out.”

The vibe I sense from him in this moment, how he says it, all of it is in total congruence. He seems not only forlorn and contemplative, but sincere. Nothing about him or what he says strikes me as threatening, dangerous, bat-shit crazy or worrisome, and the last line struck me as stemming from the heart of true empathy.

He walks away after that, and I’m left stunned, honestly, and feeling rather guilty. Feeling as though I’d prejudged him from the dawn of my shift.

All throughout this shift, I’ve been thinking about how all my years of working in this town has changed me from this open, trusting, naive, and broadband empathic asshole into this suspicious, judgemental, jaded and cynical asshole determined not be manipulated, exploited, used and abused as I have been in the past, and that however depressing that shit might have been, and however nostalgic I am for who I once was, this is simply the process of embracing realism through accepting and adapting to the way the world truly is rather than hanging on to your insipid, idealized notions of the way you perhaps selfishly think it should be.

Now I start thinking to myself, maybe I really have just become a prejudgemental asshole. Maybe it really is that simple.

Then it happens.

It’s probably twenty minutes to ten in the evening now, and just as I’m finishing up mopping the dining room and on my way out for a smoke, I see him at the door.

The OCD Vagabond.

This tall, bushy-bearded, clearly obsessive-compulsive homeless guy we kicked out earlier — who apparently carries around a purse with him.

No, not a satchel. A purse.

He tries the door, finds it locked, and a moment later I step out and tell him that we close inside at nine. Arby’s is still open, though, and they at least used to take walk-ups in the drive-thru.

He’d paid me fifty cents for a cigarette earlier despite my protests, as I mentioned, so when he asks me for a smoke again, I just give him one. Then he asks for a lighter. After he hands it back, he walks around the corner, and I begin to sink into my thoughts, as I tend to do.

Then I’m jolted out of my head when he asks me a question, and while I’m sure I heard him right, at the same time I had to have misheard him. Nothing else makes sense.

“What?” I ask.

“Are you Brad Pitt?”

I’m looking for signs he’s joking. A smile, a twinkle in the eyes. Nothing.

“No,” I say with a little laugh and, to set him up for what I hope is a punchline, I then ask, after a pause for dramatic effect, “Why?”

“Somebody told me he wanted to lick my balls,” he says. “I was gonna be, like, ‘I’m not gay, dude.'”

Then he mumbles to himself as he walks across the street to Arby’s.

So it was a satchel after all. Got it.

Honestly, sometimes this town is like a fucking fever dream, I swear.

The One Who Knocks.

Aggressively tapping my knuckle on the tiny window until it hurts, pounding my fucking fist on the shaking door as I call out his name: nothing works, and my anger is temporarily outweighing my concern here.

Move over, Walter White. It is not you, but I. I am the one who knocks.

At least when it comes to this particular door every time this coworker of mine fails to both show up for work and answer his fucking phone. Likely scenario, he’s blackout drunk like last time. And the time before that.

Even so, I can’t shake the haunting image out of my head: that on the other side of this door, beside a variety pack of empty beer cans and a half-smoked pack of dirt-cheap cigarettes, there resides the wiry-bearded, booze-infused corpse of my perpetually-grumpy coworker, his Crypt Keeper bed-head hair sprawled out in tangled strands over the couch where he rests his vacated head.

If he’s not dead, I swear I’m going to kill him.

I look to my right, politely nodding and saying hello to the neighbor of the unresponsive Captain Boozebeard, who’s been walking back and forth between the door and the red car haphazardly parked on the lawn behind me, arms full of boxes, in a dress that seems ill-suited for the activity.

Something else seems off, and I can see the neighbor picks up on my confusion as it involuntarily flashes across my face. A second later I realize it’s the face behind the heavy make-up — that and the Adam’s apple — that threw me off, and I feel like a douche.

I admit defeat and return to work, where after getting my coworker’s number I call him four times, leaving increasingly threatening messages on his voicemail.

Then I’m asked to check the women’s restroom, as a woman has been in there for roughly an hour.

I knock on the door, asking if anyone’s inside. No answer. Walking in, I look through the open door of the handicapped stall. Unoccupied. The small stall door is locked, so I knock. Ask again. Dead air.

Peeking a little under the door, I see a moving shadow. I repeat the question. No answer.

Five minutes later, as one of the managers is in the midst of calling the cops, I open the door and say, “if you don’t respond, we’re calling the police.” I say this two, maybe three times. Nothing.

Another drug overdose? Heart attack? Is she deaf and got lost reading a good book while taking a massive shit?

A cop pulls up in record time, and I unlock the door for him and step aside. He looks within the stall, asks if everything’s okay, and I hear a woman’s soft voice respond.

Hanging my head, I sigh in frustration. What the shit?

For some reason, the shift manager beside me asks if she’s naked. I look at him, one eyebrow raised, and shake my head. Bitch’s pants weren’t even down, and from what I can gather from the restroom door, she’s frightened because people she doesn’t know are trying to kill her.

I seriously hate this town.

Later, I go back to Boozebeard’s residence — after the cop also knocked on his door without response, and after we also unsuccessfully called him a couple more times.

The red car is now in the driveway. The neighbor is sinking into the ratty couch on the porch, wig off, makeup smeared, still in the dress, smoking a cigarette in slow motion, wearing a look conveying a disinterest so pervasive it nearly qualifies as catatonia. I decide to take a chance anyway and ask if he’s seen Boozebeard at all today. He manages to conjure up the energy to not so much turn, but roll his head towards me and so-mo shake his gourd from side to side.

So I start pounding on the door again, trying to drown out that worst-case scenario that’s been haunting my mind all day in the process, yet hear not a peep in return.

Yes, I am surely the one who knocks, but no one fucking answers.

He answers the phone for the closing manager hours later, though, so now I am the one who is going to knock his remaining teeth out.

Meeting Macy.

After I’ve finished walking up three flights of stairs, dark cloud hanging over my head, I see a woman walking towards me with a small dog on a leash, and she instantly veers towards me.

“Stop it,” says the woman. “He doesn’t want to pet you.”

I look up at the woman, maybe a bit too desperately, seeing my window.

“Actually, can I?”

She laughs out, “sure,” and I’m down, one knee on the carpet, petting the pooch, who’s excitedly licking my face, before she continues, without pause, “she loves attention. Like most women.”

Well, I’m happy to oblige.

“What’s the name?”

“Macy.”

Petting her a bit more as I stand back up, still looking down at her, I say, “Thank you. You made my day. Very nice to meet you, Macy.”

“C’mon,” she says to Macy, “he’s tired. He just got home from work.”

She then descends the steps as I walk towards my apartment door, buzzing, the sensation of the involuntary smile on my face feeding the joy that just inspired it in a blissful, rejuvenating positive feedback loop.

I needed that.

Today, it kind of sucked donkey dick.

And I know that I won’t forget that wonderful dog’s name despite the fact that every human being I meet who tells me their name flies in one ear and out the fucking other.

I close, lock, and deadbolt the door before I realize, yet again, that I didn’t even think to ask the name of the woman walking her.

Bird-Brains of a Feather.

On the floor before me, beneath the fryer I just moved, a pool of oil I’m mopping up — and it’s taking forever.

In the kitchen behind me, a loud kid with a big ego — one of those people that are territorial over territory that is not their own, assuming authority they are neither qualified for nor officially recognized as having. One of those people who suffer from the grandiose delusion that they’re King Shit when in reality they’re just, well, shit.

I keep waiting for him to do that to me so I can put him in his place. For now, I’m just a background character observing with pure rage how he’s treating my fellow coworkers.

To my right, Dish Boy appears, his bald head shiny beneath the fluorescent lights. Reaching for the fry baskets, he asks me if he can take them to clean. Like countless nights before, I tell him yes, but just take three. They need the other three so they can drop fries when necessary.

He says okay. He takes the three.

Five minutes later, he returns. I’m still mopping. He reaches for the remaining three fry baskets, asking me if he can take them to clean.

Really, is there a glitch in the Matrix?

I look back up at him, at his glistening gourd, free of follicles — plenty of room for a neon sign announcing “Vacancy,” I might add, just to serve as a bald, heads-up to others. To warn them what they’re going to be dealing with when it comes to him.

No, I tell him, they need those three.

Finally done mopping, I go out for a cigarette, and upon my return find two coworkers taking fry baskets from the table beside the dish sink back up front with exasperated looks on their faces.

I go back and look: he had cleaned all six of them.

I am Bill Murray and this is Groundhog Day in fucking July. He is Guy Pearce’s character in the movie, Memento.

Am I expecting too much out of people?

I look up at him, at that gleaming gourd, where maybe a scotch-taped piece of paper announcing “Out of Order” might be more appropriate, and explain yet again to Goldfish brains about the baskets. This time with some barely-concealed, rage-fueled emphasis.

Later, up at the counter, I see Dish Boy and King Shit talking, bonding. A meeting of the minds melding into a singular, energetic entity of multifaceted irritation right before my very eyes.

Birds of a feather flock together, I guess.

Kind of wish this bird-brained flock of two would soar away high into the sky and get sucked into a fucking jet engine, honestly, but maybe I’m just an asshole.

Alarms in Murdertown, Ohio.

As I’m migrating my bacon and eggs from the skillet to the plate, that irritating, ear-piercing alarm issues from the hallway. Sighing, I calmly slip off my pajamas, put on my clothes, quickly gobble down breakfast, grab the basic necessities and descend three flights of steps before emerging outside.

If it weren’t for the fact that I’m in the midst of packing, I honestly wouldn’t mind if the place burned to the fucking ground.

At the front of the building, the other tenants have begun to gather. Other than the OCD neighbor to my left and the morbidly obese shut-in down the hall, I only get glimpses of my neighbors during these false alarms. I don’t mingle during these circumstantial get-togethers, either. I sit on the steps, smoke my cigarette, and observe.

Until today, that is, when my considerably sleep-deprived ass meets my pretty cool neighbor across the hall, in 305.

Just as the fire truck arrives and I move my ass from the steps, he approaches. Unshaven, with his long, gray hair tied back, Mr. 305 holds a cigarette in one hand and a large can — energy drink, beer for all I know — in the other. He tells me how the last time the fire alarms went off it was one of our neighbors down the hall who owned half a dozen cats. Evidently he’d bumped over a candle and lit his carpet on fire.

I then learn that Mr. 305 grew up in Deerfield and was homeless for a while, even living in his jeep for two years. At one point he even crashed at a house in, of all places, that cess pool of a town I work in — until he woke up on the couch one day to find two meth-heads just staring at him.

Yeah, I hate that town, too.

Over the course of twenty minutes I learn not only about his life, but not-so-fun facts regarding the town we share, where I’ve lived for nearly a decade. Until this last year, my only major association with it was one of interest — the mass UFO sighting that took place in this county on December 14, 1994, to be exact — and not disgust.

Then came two instances of animal abuse. That dog someone abandoned in our dumpster a month ago. That asshole neighbor to the right of me a few months back with the dog that would yelp at three in the morning with pain I could feel through the wall, causing me more than once to scream, “Leave the FUCKING DOG ALONE, ASSHOLE.”

So this town, it had earned my disgust.

Today, horror is added to the mix.

He tells me how an F5 tornado tore up downtown in May of 1985. And the murders. Had I heard of all the murders in town?

I had not.

Mr. 305 enlightens me to the July 1980 incident in which a couple were shot multiple times in their home by their former son-in-law.

He tells me how a woman shot and killed her husband in their home in 2007 and then fled to Brazil. Extradited back to the US eleven years later, she was found guilty the following year.

Also, in July of 2012 a guy killed four people at another apartment complex in town before going to the local cemetery and proceeding to spray-paint the tombstones with his brains.

After expressing amazement that I’d never heard of any of this, he goes all Eddie Bravo on me and tells me I should look into it.

So I did. Unfortunately, all of it checked out.

Feeling thankful that I’d received this local history lesson just a month before I move, I found myself wondering if the town I’d be moving to had an equally grisly history. I went no further than the Wikipedia page, where it mentioned only a school shooting.

All things considered, not bad for ‘Murica. Not bad at all.

Confessions, Pop Bottles, & Job Essentials.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m not kidding.

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

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

It fucking exploded.

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

Floored.

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

Look here, motherfucker.

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

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

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

“Where should I put these?”

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

“On the table, man.”

“Here?”

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

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

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

And on the fucking floor.

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

Don’t Piss in my Goth Water.

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

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

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

“You good? You good?”

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

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

“I’m good,” I tell him.

“I’m gonna pee real quick ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I might get on that.

Weenie-Beanie Sunday.

6/2/24

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

None of this bodes well.

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

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

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

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

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

And so the work week begins.

Scrying & Sacrifices.

5/9/24

“Do you ever flood the floors?”

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

New high score is 28.