Poverty & a Big, Fat, Humbug.

“So you call this your free country. Tell me why it costs so much to live…”
— Duck and Run, Three Doors Down.

In fast food and other such shit jobs, you don’t necessarily get paid vacations, sick days or personal days. On top of that, you often have to work holidays. No extra pay, either. Yes, to be fair, you occasionally get holidays off, like perhaps Thanksgiving and Christmas, as is the case in the grease-laminated fat factory I have been employed at for over a decade and a half. When you get that holiday off, however, it isn’t paid, and you don’t get anything like a Christmas bonus, either. Which means instead of getting extra cash to invest in gifts so you can respect our stupid, consumeristic traditions and buy family and friends gufts, you lose a day of pay and get further behind on rent, bills, gas and food than you were before.

Not to mention the drugs you need to purchase in order to maintain your sanity in the rat race, hamster wheel, shit-show we call modern society. My choice is just weed, but whatever floats your boat.

I have 20 dollars in my bank account at present. And I think I have 40 left on my Wal-Mart gift card. I had to borrow a hundred bucks from Gus, who had kept telling me that he’d lend me money if I ever needed it. I tried my damnedest not to ask anyone, but I need gas. Food. Cigarettes.

My next check is due December 25th. Until then, I can’t even afford Christmas cards. This despite the additional hours I’ve managed to pick up throughout the workweek and having worked a sixth day the last two weeks. Between rent, gas, bills, groceries and cigarettes, my last check went rather quickly.

I need a side hustle. Maybe get a PayPal account, buy these blogs of mine already, whore myself out, and put up some ads — once I figure out how all that works. Maybe find some of my best artwork and try to sell shirts online, too, all so I can at least make a little money off of doing shit I’m actually passionate about.

And, yeah, keep looking for a better job I’m at least reasonably confident I can handle.

Bah humbug and shit.

Of the Dangerous Duet of Thumper & Pumper.

12/14/20

Shortly after awakening, the scene replayed in my mind vividly, insanely vividly, but I was still groggy. I at first assumed it was a dream, though it soon dawned on me that, no, this was a memory of something that had actually happened, and it had happened yesterday at work.

It was the end of the night and I was up front, having a brief exchange with Anthony, a guy who started maybe two, three weeks ago. He’s a broad-shouldered machinist, maybe it his late twenties, who works with us only part time. He has a young son he sees weekly, I believe, and he currently lives with his parents. I find him to be an incredibly likable guy, typically upbeat, kind, and reasonably social. He’s also forged a bond with Paula, a sixteen-year-old that works with us, as well as Gillian, an 18-year-old girl who started about a week ago that has been referring to both him and I as “daddy.”

I forget why exactly I referred to myself as “a dirty old man” in his presence, but as soon as I said that, his floodgates opened.

Out of nowhere, he confessed to having feelings for Paula, who also has feelings for him, too, he said, despite her having a boyfriend and being underage. As I cringed inside, I told him I had put that one together myself. He drives her home, hangs out with her, spends money on her — shit I feel she wanted me to engage in months back, though I thought that to be an epically bad idea, given our age difference. I also suspect that some part of her delights in manipulating men simply so they do things for her, which is precisely why I started putting my foot down with respect to letting her bum cigarettes and letting her take hits off my vape pen.

I will not be controlled, goddamn it.

He also confessed that Gillian had been sending him boob pics and so on since he flirted with her that one day — though I seem to remember him mentioning to someone else how he had sent her a dick pic that day as well, which seems to go beyond casual flirting, despite his failure to mention it in this context. I mean, to me that sounds more like a blatant advertisement, one that nonverbally announced his intent and desire, so it would seem he was literally asking for it.

Gillian had also been telling him how she always wanted a kid, which he openly declared was a red flag as he went on to tell me he needed to stop thinking with his dick.

I concur.

Unlike the case with Gillian, he feels connected to Paula, he tells me. He’s had a lot of girlfriends and he’s never introduced his son to any of them. I didn’t immediately get the connection, but he seemed to feel bad about this for some reason, so I quickly did my best to assure him that this was, in fact, a sign that he was being a responsible parent.

He wasn’t finished, though. He then added that he did introduce his son to Paula, however — clearly his way of conveying to me how much she meant to him.

Again, I like this guy, but he needs to be careful. The age issue between him and Paula is by no means a minor one (pun not intended, believe it or not), and thinking solely with his evidently photogenic Johnson is certainly not to be recommended.

Its not just him and her and her, either. To the contrary, every time I see the struggles and complications people deal with, the webs they get wound in when it comes to sex and relationships, I begin to remember why I’m an isolationist bachelor that keeps people at an arm’s distance at best.

I get lonely. I’d like to feel that connection with a woman again, to trust someone, to realize in the midst of fucking her that no matter how hard, how aggressively I thrust, I could never get as close to her as I yearned for.

But then I remember how shit ended. How it always ends. How all is transient. How the nature of the universe is entropy. How the only constant is change, and of all things, the experience of that kind of joy, connection, trust, and meaning has been most fleeting. And how in the end it seems as if the universe tricked you into trusting someone enough to let them lift you up from the muck and the bottom of life and help you ascend to the skies — just so that it could drop you. Just so it could abandon you to gravity, cast you towards impact, and reinforce those negative, pessimistic, cynical, fatalistic, perhaps nihilistic notions regarding existence, thereby justifying your act of staying close to the ground, swimming through the muck.

The lesson?

Allow yourself to be vulnerable and the best you can ask for is that you’ll be stabbed from the front.

Though most frequently I have been the one to end things, in which the lesson would be:

Believe you have the courage to make it work only to find yourself giving up and walking away a short time later, as if some part of you was determined to fuck things up all along.

I took at him and them. I look back. I look around and within and I tell myself that its not worth the effort. Even aside from the particularly dangerous elements in his specific circumstance, the cost is too much. Perhaps I should cast this lingering dream aside altogether, aspire to be a self-sufficient monad without all this perpetual second-guessing. Yet I still find myself looking for The Girl — in girls I’ve pushed away and passed by in my life, girls around me, girls I may have yet to meet.

I keep looking like I expect to find someone, but maybe this is just a stupid game instinct tricks us into playing.

Listening to your heart may be no more wise than listening to your dick. And being hypnotized by the duet may be the most foolish path of all.

Of Bad Habits & Paying Attention.

Waking up having not consumed booze the evening before makes for such a better morning. I don’t feel the least bit ill, there’s no worry about what I might have posted on Facebook while under the influence, or what I might have texted or Facebook messaged people. I don’t wake up abruptly and with intensity, with automatic negative thoughts punching through to consciousness with unparalleled, psychological violence. The degree of shame and self-loathing, which to some degree is always there, is at the very least bearable upon awakening.

Its like my brain has a quota, that it must achieve the required daily degree of anxiety, depression and anger, and the booze postpones this. I’m a happy drunk. After booze wears off, the moment its out of my system, however, it rushes back in to bloat in the void left behind, promptly making up for lost time.

The lesson: you don’t escape your problems, but you can postpone dealing with them — which only exacerbates issues upon their return.

I must remember this.

It used to be that I’d wake up, make a pot of coffee, consume it all, go to work, drink maybe the equivalent of another pot throughout my shift, take a cup home with me for the ride and then, upon arriving home, my first order of business would be to take another pot of coffee. I don’t think my body was entirely caffeine-free for a moment between the mid-1990s and the first quarter of this year.

The change started slow: I began to stop drinking coffee at any point in the day when I realized I felt anxious, angry or depressed. I stopped drinking coffee when I anticipated getting high, too, unless I was at home. Slowly, I brought myself down to drinking two large cups in the morning, that’s all.

I never thought I’d so much as diminish my caffeine intake, I couldn’t imagine ever getting to that point, but as soon as I permitted myself to accept how it exacerbated my anxiety and many of my other emotional issues, I more or less naturally weened myself off of it.

Could this process work with booze, even with cigarettes? Just heighten awareness regarding the negative effects and I’ll naturally, gradually bring it down to a healthier level, perhaps kick the habit entirely?

Is this the route to self-congruence? Is self-control what you’re purchasing when you pay attention?

On Whack-a-Mole Memories.

On December 5th, I awoke with a short, final scene from a dream in my head. I was walking passed a table of three in a crowded restaurant and heard a familiar voice. I turn and discover its Mickey and Channing, two friends of mine from high school that I recently learned have a child on the way. We all hug warmly and I congratulate them.

As of late, for whatever reason, I’ve been spontaneously remembering and thinking about a lot of people from my past. Most notably, however, are the memories dealing with Anne, an exgirlfriend, as they keep popping up in my mind. Its like there’s a frustrating insistence behind it, too, as if some part of my mind keeps trying to remind me of these moments.

I don’t dwell on these memories as I used to, having made a deliberate attempt to stop. When it comes to my more anomalous experiences, that is a different matter, but in that case it isn’t about emotional reminiscing, but a desire for greater understanding, and I try to do this in tandem with research that expands beyond my own, personal memories. Unless it ties to something in my present, be it a real-life experience or a dream, or at the very least brings something new to the table, I try to avoid mulling over the same old memories. I want to move forward, not drift backward.

At least with respect to Anne, however, the thoughts and memories keep recurring. Its always along different avenues of thought, too, and its beginning to bother me. I thought I was done with this, done living in the past, but the present keeps opening doorways that lead me back there.

The past is always present, this I know, and I’m not one of those people that constantly blasts others for focusing too much on what’s behind them or trying to look too far ahead of themselves. Its important to remember, it pays to anticipate, and given the time lag inherent in our sensory perceptions, we never experience the objective “here and now” anyway.

Sorry, Buddhists. Facts are facts.

Even so, on a personal level, I’ve spent a good deal of my life thinking back, looking into the past, and its long overdue that I focus on moving forward in my life. I don’t want to get distracted or hung up on things, good or bad, that happened years ago, decades ago, lifetimes ago.

Now I’m forced to wonder why I keep getting led back to her. Yes, I realized relatively recently that if I should have stayed with anyone and actually nurtured an intimate relationship, for countless reasons it should have been her, but that is long since over and done with, dead and gone. And unless it relates to something at present or presents something that will help me build a better future, I can’t waste my time and energy digging into it. Yet she keeps popping up. Its like I’m playing some psychological game of Whack-a-Mole, or like I’m Bill Murray’s character Carl, fighting that goddamned gopher in the movie, Caddyshack.

In either case, I realize, that rodent of a thought inevitably wins.

Odd Dream Fragments (12/1/20).

At some point during my sleep I awoke, though I don’t think I opened my eyes, just sort of floated in that twilight bardo between sleeping and waking. I recalled an interesting, well-structured, and rather elaborate dream, and desperately wanted to remember it — but suddenly the details of the dream slipped through my fingers and I fell back asleep.

While I don’t think it was the same dream, I did recall a dream involving a beautiful girl, at some point entirely naked, and feeling comfortable and excited about her and the bond we shared. Despite the vague memories, I’m pretty convinced this was sexual and that it involved a girl I work with.

It was close to when I had to leave for work that I remembered another incredibly realistic fragment of a dream — one that I briefly mistook for reality before it came to my attention that it simply didn’t fit. Yet again, the scene involved my closed apartment door and something happening just outside, in the hallway.

As I listened with my ear to the door, I heard what sounded like someone pressing hard against it, applying pressure, and moving around slowly as they did so. For some odd reason, I’d imagined that someone must be trying to fix a large sign to my door.

Every time I have one of these free-floating dream scenes about my apartment door, I’m always terrified of opening it. I kind of do this in real life, too, when I hear something in the hallway. I’m not terrified, but I get real quiet, desperately trying not to give away the fact that someone’s home.

What? (11/24/20 Dream)

It was the last scene of a dream I cannot otherwise recall. Two cars are going too damn fast down my parents driveway. I lose sight of them for a second, and when I look again, the cars are gone; now its just a little, red truck, like the one I drive now. Suddenly it hits the back of my father’s big, red truck (which he no longer owns). A tall, skinny, sort of disheveled-looking black guy casually gets out and walks towards the garage attached to the house — and towards my father, who I think is coming out through the garage. I point my finger at the stranger accusingly and, once I know I have his attention, wiggle my finger in a way that implies he should approach me. He looks at me and defensively goes, “What?”

Return of the Thanksgiving Curse.

At some point in my twenties, I came to detest Christmas, but it was never really a Grinch or Scrooge mentality. For one thing, I always have barely enough money to scrape through myself; I simply couldn’t afford gifts. Even when I could, I never knew what to get anyone. I also hate driving, particularly in the ice and snow, and that anxiety was always amplified due to consistent car issues.

The last three years, Thankgiving has come in at a close second with respect to my most dreaded of holidays. And again, it’s not because of family — I love my family. Its not because I’m opposed to delicious food, either, I assure you. Its just that for the last three fucking years now I have come to have car issues.

The first Thanksgiving, the engine in my car seized the day prior. The second Thanksgiving, I was preparing to leave my apartment for my parents house when I noticed something hanging beneath my car. It turned out to be my exhaust pipe. The night prior, some asshole had sawed off my catalytic converter.

That brings us to this year.

Sometime last week I was driving home from work in the truck more or less gifted to me by my parents a month or two back when I heard a screech or squeal. The smell of burning rubber then filled the car. I tried not to freak out. A few days later, it did it again. I tried to pop the hood the next day, but couldn’t find the lever to open it, so I drive to work. At work, I finally got it open and saw that a belt had snapped, which was better than the diagnosis my friend Jerry had given the issue as I described it to him — a failing wheel bearing.

Jerry took a look at it and recommended that I didn’t drive it home. My plan became to leave the truck at work, get someone to take me home, and then get someone to pick me up early Wednesday so I could drive the truck a short distance to a shop, where hopefully it would get done by the time I started work at 3:00. I got a ride home and secured a ride for the following day, which is today. My hopes were that my direct despoit would go through by today, assuming they were going to give us our money early. They did not. And my ride to work fell through, I couldn’t find another, and so I had to call off two hours before my shift lest I get written up.

Given the holidays and weekend, the shop won’t be open until Monday. So now I have to get a ride to and from work on Sunday and a ride to work, at the very least, on Monday. And go without a vehicle for five fucking days.

Quaranteen of a different kind, I guess.

I spent some time today setting up an Indeed account and looking at potential jobs closer to my house and better paying. I need to get on with this. I’ve been broke as shit. I was looking forward to using this check to buy more groceries and maybe getting a descent cushion of cash in my bank account again so that I’m not just barely living from paycheck to paycheck. That may be shot to hell now, and the fact that I had to go home early last night because it was the only ride I could find, that I had to call off today, and that we get our typical, unpaid holiday off tomorrow… none of that is going to help.

And who knows how much this might cost? I hope its just the belt, but who knows? I’ve learned not to assume the best.

As for Thanksgiving, we’re practicing social distancing this year. My parents are cooking up the food and driving it out to my sisters and I. So at least I don’t have to ask my parents to come pick me up three Thanksgivings in a row.

The cup’s not half full, clearly, but its not entirely empty, either, and I’m doing my very best to focus on the puddle thinly coating the bottom of the glass here.

And, of course, do my best to ignore the fact that its piss.

Disappointed.

“I. Am. Very disappointed.”
— Zorg, The Fifth Element.

It was Tuesday.

Back by the dish sink, a young manager and I were briefly discussing the spike in Covid cases when he tells me, with confidence, that he thinks the real problem is that there’s “too much testing.” That stopped me in my tracks. I looked at him to make sure he was serious, and he was.

“Do me a favor,” I said to him as calmly as I could. “Stop what you’re doing and think about what you just said for a moment.”

Just then others came to the sink area, interrupting our exchange.

Then, right before I clock out for the night, a few of us are in a discussion about Covid again and one of the managers informs me that the new girl standing right beside him, who I had taken to be a rather intelligent girl, thinks the whole thing is a hoax. I look at her. “Really?” And she just shrugs, confirming the allegation with some obvious embarrassment.

I exit stage left abruptly, telling everyone I would see them tomorrow.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: so much of what I detest about religion has come to infect politics as well. Unquestioning devotion to narcissistic leaders, for instance, and blind, uncritical faith in what they say. And while Trump is merely a symptom, a manifestation of an underlying disease in our global culture that will not be going away, his, specifically his general, narcissistic philosophy and dumbfuck ideas are beginning to be adopted even by those who aren’t necessarily members of his cult. Things such as:

– Anything I don’t believe in is a hoax.
– Any game I don’t win is rigged.
– Anyone with loyalty to reason and democracy rather than loyalty to me must be banished.
– Its always somebody else’s fault.
– Truth is born by saying a lie often enough, loud enough, and with enough confidence that others jump on your bamdwagon of bullshit.
– The real way to defeat this pandemic until we have a vaccine isn’t social isolation, mask-wearing, and quarantine, but to simply stop testing, because if we stop testing people for coronavirus, the number of cases will go down.

Years ago, I lived with a girl named Rena, who told me more than once that when she did something she thought would inspire her father’s anger, he tended to claim otherwise.

“I’m not angry,” he would say to her, “I’m just disappointed.”

And that hit her so much harder, the stinger went deeper and stung more than anything.

Shit like what I heard yesterday from my two coworkers makes me understand her father’s perspective, though. I don’t hate them, I’m not even angry at them, really, its just that I had hoped that they would think for themselves and reason it all out in their own minds, not follow the spray-tan so-called leader of the supposed free world.

So, yeah, I’m fucking disappointed.

North Node in Virgo in the Eleventh House.

I’ve always daydreamed. My mother explained me as one of those kids always bored in class, staring out the window, lost in my own world, and age has not led me to shed that tendency in the least. Even now, I spend a good percentage of my day invested in that which is going on inside my own mind, playing back moments that have occurred, running potential future scenarios, engaging in imagined interactions, or engaging in internal monologues and dialogues as I try to understand a concept, take a different angle on something, or flesh out my own ideas.

The visual arts and writing have been my core passions, my defaults and go-tos, and they both have provided for me a means of catharsis and internal alchemy. And yes, as with daydreaming, they serve as an escape.

I must say, however, that I find it suspicious that daydreaming, much like drug use, is often perceived as an escape. After all, any escapism suggests there is something to escape from — mundane reality, I presume — and to my ear, that only seems to frame mundane reality as a sort of prison, the body our personal cell. And if that’s the case, could one honesty blame anyone for taking advantage of escape routes and jailbreaks?

Is this a novel adaptation, or is it maladaptive? I can never be sure, though I do suspect that regardless as to the nature of this tendency, its just the way I am. I don’t need to bury or overcome this tendency, I’ve come to believe, I merely need to find some practical way that I can apply it in such a way that it serves to support me in life — financially and otherwise.

I have consistently failed at this endeavor. I need to blend my artistic tendencies with the practical, and I wish astrology didn’t resonate with these facts, but they do. Does that mean anything? The rational, skeptical side of me is eager, itching for that to not mean a goddamn thing, but in looking at my natal chart, I feel myself conceding…

Perhaps it was the approaching and passing of my birthday on November 12th, the shit that has gone down in my life this year and my burning desire to get my shit in order. In any case, I feel like I know what I have to shoot for, I’ve got the bullets and the gun, but im,far too ignorant to load it and use it correctly, much less hit in so much as the proximity of the target.

To the contrary, I feel myself falling backward.

It just feels that as of late I’ve been getting sucked into my head again like a scared turtle, reluctant to poke my head out of my shell, almost resentful of the external world and its constant demand for my attention. I realized it yesterday once or twice while talking to someone at work: I felt cornered and sensed myself instinctively pulling away, running away, despite the fact that my feet remained in place.

I’ve passed up so many opportunities out of fear and frustration — romantically, creatively, and so on — what are the odds that I’ll get my shit together and truly evolve before I die?

Its getting painful, holding my breath.

I wish I was confident I could pull out of this, to find a way to advance, evolve — but at my age? 42? What are the goddamn chances?