Perspectives.

After two years or so, Rose and I finally met up Saturday at Starbucks, her old place of employment. She brought me a plate of cookies and we sat outside, engaging in conversation the best we could given the constant distraction of her adorable but considerably hyperactive child.

After quitting Starbucks, she’d worked for Apple for awhile before being fired for a considerably stupid reason, and it was then that she decided it was the universe’s way of telling her: if there’s any time to chase your dream, its now. So she cashed in her 401K and started her own business. She’s a photographer, and a damned good one.

Her husband works a few days a week at a deli and spends most of his time in their basement. She doesn’t seem at all happy in her marriage; it seems more like an annoyance she’s just come to accept. He didn’t support her starting the photography thing, but thankfully, she didn’t let that stop her. When I asked if, at the very least, he supports her pursuing her passion now, she told me that at least once he expressed some semblance of support. He had taken a look at her photos and paid her a rather backhanded complimentl, essentially confessing that she was better than he had thought she’d be.

Apparently he suffers from depression. Both her children, I also discovered, are also on the autism spectrum. Given they both have different fathers, I assumed this had to come from her side of the family. She mentioned no one else being diagnosed within her family but has said that since she’s learned about her boys, she’s seen aspects of it in herself, and it does make some sense. Though I may have known this in the past and forgotten, I was surprised to hear she suffers from anxiety. She’ll have panic attacks and start ripping off her cloths because she feels constricted, claustrophobic. That’s why she prefers to be naked when she can and wear baggy cloths when that would be socially unacceptable.

I’ve never had the urge to rip off my second skins during the experience, but I know anxiety attacks all to well. Learning we shared this psychological glitch made me feel all the more close to her. I asked her how she dealt with it, and she said she smoked a lot of pot.

Sweet mother of fuck, I thought to her. Why can’t you be single?

Broadly speaking, her attitude towards life appears to be a rather wise one. In her eyes, regret is percieved as a sort of poision. After all, if things had not unfolded in the fashion in which they did, she might not be where she is today — with two children whom she loves dearly, with a life that allows her to profit from the pursuit of her passions. The kind of appreciation for her life that this allows her is inspiring. Everyone would be better off adopting this healthy perspective of hers.

When she texted me the following day to say how good it was to see me, she again touched on the fact that she couldn’t believe I hadn’t had sex with anyone since her. During our meet-up, she had asked me about my love life (which is nonexistent) and blatantly asked me if she had been the last.

I nodded.

In her message, she said she had fond memories of experience. I’m glad, its a relief, as I don’t feel I was at my best during that period despite how very much I was and still am into her.

As do I, I told her. Which is most certainly true.

She responded again right before my shift ended and I was about to drive home, and I don’t text while driving, which was frustrating given the nature of her response. She did the emoji thing: one shocked face and then a long line of laughing faces. I was instantly confused and paranoid and I obsessed and catastrophized about it all the way home.

I finally read her response upon making it to my apartment. She said that this was her typical reaction when she found anyone thought of her in a sexual context.

That kind of threw me for a loop.

She doesn’t know how interesting and awesome she is, nor how beautiful. I guess that’s not an entirely bad thing — it prevents her from having an ego about it, after all — but it also kind of amazed me and saddened me.

Fate, Free Will, & Bathroom-Centric Entropy.

Yesterday, after trimming the wild beard and shaving the ever-balding gourd, I grabbed the toilet brush, brushed the inside of the bowl once, and the handle snapped off.

Fuck.

Before leaving to do some shopping today for groceries (and a toilet brush), I proceed to brush the mouth-stones and hop in the shower. As I went to close the bathroom door, I ended up with a plastic doorknob in my hands, entirely divorced from the door to which it belongs.

Double-fuck.

Two cheers for bathroom-centric entropy, I guess.

And now, finally, I’m doing this fucking laundry, which I’ve put off for an embarrassingly long period of time. I don’t know how the uber-ambitious can get themselves motivated to get such major shit done and deal with truly awesome and potentially catastrophic problems when I’m struggling, at 41, with door handles and laundry.

Elon Musk I am most certainly not.

But why?

Many, at least in this country, would say that someone such as myself should just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” but I think that’s just the American myth of the self-made, self-reliant, and entirely free individual; a process many perceive as the sole, real, however difficult, avenue towards a successful, satisfying life.

I, for one, smell a steaming pile of donkey shit.

It stems from or at least relates to a much deeper myth which I have despised for as long as I can remember, which is that we’re all the same inside.

We’re not.

Each of us is distinct. Unique. Yes, like a goddamned snowflake or whatever.

We all had different points of departure — we were born with different genetic predispositions to different parents and develop in and through different environments and circumstances. What is easy for one may be difficult or impossible for another. This we could call fate — the hand we’re dealt in the card game of life.

That doesn’t mean free will is a myth, just that we aren’t entirely free, just that it’s far more complicated than the bootstrap people would bother to consider.

I believe in individual freedom, in personal liberty, in what has been called free will, but every opportunity to make a choice presents a highly personalized spectrum of probabilities dictated by the aforementioned point of departure and subsequent choices. This probability spectrum ranges from the path of least resistance to the path of greatest resistance. But again, the pathway of least resistance for one may be of greatest resistance for another.

That doesn’t mean we all shouldn’t try, that personal freedom and responsibility doesn’t exist and we’re all slaves of fate — quite the contrary. It only means that not everyone has the same ambition, the same ability to focus, structure and follow through.

I struggle with laundry. With remembering to pay my cable bill. With dealing with my anxiety over driving on a daily basis. Musk? He struggles with Tesla, Space X, and countless other things that would each individually make my head spin. He was born with great intelligence, for sure. Was he simply born with more ambition and multitasking abilities, though, or was it cultivated? And if it was cultivated, was it a pathway of greater or lesser resistance for him?

To make matters worse, as a species it appears we greatly overestimate the amount of will we exercise in making our choices. Most of the time, particularly as we get older, we’re kind of asleep at the wheel of our brains, relying heavily on autopilot — on the deeply ingrained habit patterns we’ve developed through that interplay between free will and fate, particularly from our formative years.

It gets increasingly more difficult to change as we get older unless a great tragedy knocks us out of orbit or we have a life-changing transformative experience: something intense, something incredibly emotionally impacting. And what serves as a transformative experience for one might slide off another like rain. It could also happen to you or you could seek out such a powerful, transformative experience: again, always, it differs with each, unique individual.

So while I would applaud anyone who reminds us to keep doing our best, to keep trying, keep at it, I think its rather narrow-minded to spew out the whole “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” bullshit.

Though for all I know, maybe empathy and understanding is one of their paths of greatest resistance.

The Woman in the Vestibule.

On my way out of my apartment, I walked through the vestibule, where all the mailboxes are. I saw a lady standing in there, presumably checking her mail, and felt a slight shit of anxiety. I wasn’t really prepared to deal with people yet, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I looked at her and, with a smile, said hi.

In response she gives me this loaded look, something like a cocktail of curiosity and confusion, perhaps with a dash of amusement.

This is why I often find myself greeting dogs involuntarily and have to push myself to do the same with respect to the domesticated apes walking them. Humans seem like far less approachable animals. And when a dog looks at you with curiosity and confusion, its cute. It doesn’t leave you anxious and feeling like a fucking weirdo.

“I have that same mug,” she finally said, motioning to my purple travel mug. “Mine’s better, though, because its mine.”

I paused for a moment. If I were a Warner Brothers cartoon, I would have been audibly blinking.

Am I being weird? Is she being weird?

“Fair enough,” I told her as politely as I could before walking to my car a little faster than usual.

Need Me Some Body Knobs.

Today, I thought to myself: I wish I had four knobs on my body somewhere, or perhaps a remote control, all for adjusting the volume on seemingly hardwired aspects of this meat sheath, this flesh vessel, this corporeal container that my consciousness is temporarily housed in.

One knob would enable me to turn the volume up and down on my senses. That way I wouldn’t have to hear the machines beeping at work, or the ghastly country music playing on the store radio, or the current Christmas music. Or the jackass that pulls into the space beside me while I’m on break, trying to read a book, with his bass cranked to the max so it sounds like a goddamn T-Rex is tap-dancing right beside me.

So I wouldn’t have to bear the smell when I clean the restrooms. Or stand close to Gus.

So I wouldn’t have to feel the texture of the new rags when I’m cleaning something like the tables in the dining room, or the sound that results when the tag on a new mop head rubs against the tiles, or the bitter fucking cold when I mosey on into the walk-in freezer for something.

I could even turn down my senses to a reality-canceling zero in toto, thereby escaping into my mind completely whenever I desired.

Another knob would enable me to control the volume of my thoughts, though there appear to be multiple layers of thoughts, so maybe I need multiple knobs. At least two: the fully conscious and seemingly deliberate ones and the involuntary and automatic ones, and I’d mostly aim at the second set with respect to conscious adjustments. Specifically, the target would be what are known as Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs), the intrusive “Flashback Bitchslap” memories (unless they constitute ANTs themselves; I am a bit perplexed on that point), and that bad music that plays on repeat.

When alone and prepared, I’d turn up the volume and in so doing hopefully banish their spell, take away their semiconscious and no doubt subliminal influence on not only my conscious thoughts, but my emotions (though it could function the other way around, too — or perhaps both, in a feedback loop. I’m not at all clear on that point, either).

I would write them down like a stenographer of the self so that I’d know all the shit I’m saying to myself, whispering to mysekf, and then practice on defeating them. Not through “thought stopping,” as that infernal technique just results in an emotionally intensified and painfully loud rebound, but rather via techniques that actually seem to work, like objectifying the thoughts and bathing in the realization that you are, after all, not at all synonymous with them — like in mindfulness meditation.

Don’t push them away, don’t grab a hold of them, just witness them dispassionately. Let them arise and pass away.

Until I got the hang of it, I’d spend the rest of my time with the semiconscious and subliminal automatic thoughts cranked down to zero. Life is bad enough without exacerbating the issue by compulsively, obsessively kicking myself in the ass from the inside and sucker-punching myself within the confines of my own sacred psyche.

Still another knob would enable me to control the volume of my emotions — and, if I’m not bat-shit insane, the emotions I absorb like a fucking sponge when around other people and sometimes mistake for my own.

Much as I just said about the thought-knob, two knobs might be a better fit here, too. Not because that some emotions are liminal and others semiconscious or subliminal, however, but because some emotions are my own and other emotions seem to come from other people, and I’m sick of feeling them and reacting to them as if they were my own. Empathy is by no means horrible, its just that my empathy is lacking discipline, healthy boundaries, and doesn’t often if ever submit itself to voluntary control. I’d work on this shit like the ANTs — put aside some window of time to practice managing them and effectively mute them when they become overwhelming in the day-two-day and night-to-night.

Last but not least, I’d like a knob for instinctual drives — at least the drive to have sex, as that desire can be quite distracting, particularly when you’ve gone a considerable length of time without scratching that itch.

The consequences are ridiculous. Truly. Everything is sexualized. You feel like you’ve come to share the humor of Beavis and Butthead, as sex becomes your default context for everything. You hear someone say something superficially innocent and giggle like an idiot because in your deprived mind it sounds sexual, like a “that’s what she said” joke, and next to orgasm, laughter spawned from comments twisted into naughty things is the best transient fix available.

While I don’t mind that too much, and for all I know I might have a perverted sense of humor even if I regularly got my rocks off with a preferable member of the opposite sex, the intensity of the drive is agonizing, the need to take matters into my own hands bare minimum once or twice a day lest I be incredibly tense and likely an asshole is frustrating, irritating and, when intixucated, often time-consuming — and needlessly so: why hold off until I can find that “perfect” porn to unload to when it could be done and over with in record time if I wished?

No, having the capacity to turn it off when it’s not seving me or when I can’t manage to serve and/or get served would be wonderful.

Its not too much to ask, either. I mean, why has evolution not granted us this blessed reprieve? After all, there’s even a point where, after you’ve starved for some time, you no longer desire food. Its like your body realizes that you’re at the end, that you cannot acquire the required sustenence, and seeing as the body is probably going to die, it has some mercy on the inhabiting consciousness. But when it comes to fucking, for some reason, the body evidently feels the need to conjure up its capacity for ruthless persistence.

It holds the species above itself, sky-high above the individual organism. It holds the herd above the individual. The troop over the singular, sexually frustrated, domesticated ape caught in the grips of circumstantial abstinence — the circumstance involving fear, lack of confidence, and so on.

Fuck that. I’m starving.

So give me a knob I can turn to take away the pointless agony.

Low Moods, Attorneys & Gizmos.

As soon as I clocked in, I was told they needed to throw me in kitchen, but “only for a half hour,” which I rolled my eyes at. They always say that and nine times out of ten this alleged “half hour” is sixty minutes or more. Today it was roughly sixty minutes, this time because Gus hadn’t shown up yet.

I woke up in a low mood and now, aside from that and being irritated about being in kitchen again, I find myself worrying about Gus. Every time that man is late for work I can’t help but wonder if he’s dead, and its always a relief when his grumpy ass walks in the door.

Until he opens his mouth, anyway.

Finally, he arrived and I just tried to avoid him when he started bitching to me about the same old shit again. I can’t be his confessional with a pulse today, I tell myself. My own shit mood is enough to deal with right now.

By the time I start cleaning the fryers up front, business is in high gear, and they keep dropping fries in the last vat I have to clean. Tired of waiting, I decide to sweep the parking lot until its calmed down some, maybe smoke a cigarette, too, and so I sneak out the back door.

I’m out there maybe two minutes when a car pulls into a spot a short distance from the patio, where I’m launching cigarette butts into the dustpan with my broom. The old man in the driver seat rolls down his window and politely asks me if I work here.

“I do indeed,” I tell him as I approach.

It seems he can’t hook up his iPhone to his car through bluetooth. He had it working before, he said, but someone messed with it and he can’t figure out what they did. After seeing him fiddle with it for a few moments, I asked him if I might take a look myself. I quickly found the problem somehow, and it was only a matter of pressing a button. He thanked me and told me he had been planning on going inside, assuming kids worked here and that they’d be able to figure it out better than himself.

He’s an attorney and he’s taken classes on this stuff, he told me, but in six months you simply forget. I told him that makes sense, as unless you’re utilizing the knowledge on a daily basis, your mind’s likely to just let go of it.

Kids today are learning how to utilize this tech when they’re in their formative years, so their brain better adapts to the technological environment and the increasing speed of technological advancement. Better than their elders, anyway.

While it comes easier to them because they’re born into it, however, they’re going to suffer more because of it, too. For instance, from day one their brains are trained by the quick fix offered by our devices, struggling to juggle simultaneous streams of data. Its no fucking surprise everyone’s got ADD, that no one can focus on anything for very long, that we find wisdom only in bite-size memes and one-minute read articles, that we have such little patience for anything less than immediate gratification.

Our minds are struggling to adapt to the technological landscape and are unable to push passed its natural limitations. It has ill enough effects on the elder generations, on the attorney and myself, but kids today? They have it so, so much fucking worse.

More to the point, though, I don’t know whether it was the fact that he was so kind, that he needed help and I was able to assist him, or what, but I felt better after talking with the guy and helping him.

Of Boxes & Bomb Threats.

After collecting and taking out trash every day, I go to organize and cut box tops in the stock room, and it never fails. No matter how little my hope for us as a species may be on any given day, this activity sends it plummeting to depths that make the Mariana Trench look like a quarter-filled kiddie pool.

Its particularly the case on Sundays, when I’ve been off for two days. Sauces smeared on the ground. Product on the wrong shelf. Boxes torn open like a wild animal attacked the damned thing in an insane frenzy. And my absolute favorite: two boxes of the same product, placed side by side, both opened.

“They’re so lazy,” some have said when I’ve bitched about that last one.

“No,” I always tell them. “I could understand laziness. It would piss me off, but I could understand it. We’re all lazy sometimes. But to be lazy would be to take from the box already open. It takes more energy to open another box, so its not an effort to conserve energy. This? Sadly, this has to be sheer stupidity, nothing less.”

It doesn’t get better as the day goes on, either. Today was a special day in this regard, however, as I received word from two fellow employees early on in my shift about a bomb threat that had been called into the local Walmart. Though it should not have been my first thought, I immediately found myself thinking how a smarter person wouldn’t have done it today, on a random Sunday in December, but rather on fucking Black Friday.

If its a disgruntled ex-employee, forcing them to shut down the store on the busiest day of the year would have gotten them where it hurts them: namely, the wallet.

And if you truly had a bomb in there, being a homicidal maniac and all, you’re probably, a, not going to call in a bomb threat anyway, and, b, aim for the highest potential body count — so again, two weeks ago would have been a more sensible choice.

By no means am I condoning this behavior, but if you’re going to do something unethical, at least be clever about it so I can have some respect for some aspect of you.

Tis the Season for Considering Antidepressants Again.

BEFORE.

For my birthday in November, everybody in the immediate family met at my parents house to celebrate. Me, the ever-distant brother and son. Me, the guy who almost never buys gifts because he’s relatively poor and, even when he does have the money, is horrible at finding gifts. At driving to places beyond the well-worn paths of his comfort zone to purchase those gifts or has the foresight to order them online early enough. They managed to do it all for me, I should certainly return the gestures.

Today we’re celebrating the birthday of the eldest of my two younger sisters and its going to rain and snow, which summons up that acute anxiety over driving down to my parent’s house. I anxiously check the weather out of my third story window, check the forecast on my phone, then at another place online. My mind struggles between selfishly wanting to remain safe and warm in my apartment until tomorrow, when I have to drive the much shorter distance to work, and the desire to face what may just be irrational fears of the road conditions, be with my family and return, as best as I can, the respect and love they showed me a mere month ago.

I always feel like such a shit. The black sheep, the fish out of water, a square peg in a world of round holes — some fucked up being born in the wrong time, wrong place, and who could never really belong as hard as he might try. Plagued with anxiety and depression. Fundamentally unsuited for the way of life that characterizes the society he’s been born into. An unintentional asshole, perhaps, but an asshole nonetheless.

I’m not certain if writing all this is healthy and cathartic or serving to reinforce my anxiety.

If I ever went back to therapy, I feel horribly confident that even the technique of systematic desensitization would fail work for me. My anxiety appears to be immune. Facing that anxiety head on has done nothing to diminish it in the end, at least not for me. I’m terrified of driving in even the best road conditions, though anxiety is much higher in darkness, fog, rain and snow — even though I drive nearly every day. Even though I’ve driven in all those conditions. I drive to and from work five days out of the week. On the weekends, I force myself to do my weekly shopping. Still, it remains, stubborn as ever. The anxiety in me doesn’t dissipate with exposure over time.

AFTER.

Eventually, I took my shower and headed out to my parent’s house, and the weather wasn’t too bad. It was a bit worse upon coming home, but there were no real problems. Just the anxiety.

And the anxiety, contrary to what I wrote earlier, has gotten slightly better — or at least my means of dealing with it has over the last year or so. I’ve gotten better at not feeding the cycle by reinforcing it through paranoid thoughts, I should say, which I think is something I have the meditation to thank for. Controlling my coffee intake has helped, too. Even so, the anxiety remains.

The depression lifted a bit once I got there, but it’s been weighing heavy on me the last three days or so. Yesterday, I avoided my phone. I just needed to hide. I felt horrible for blowing off Moe, who called and texted me, wanting to hang. I texted him at my parent’s house and apologized for being an antisocial asshole. He texted back and seemed slightly angry, but not as much as I anticipated — perhaps not as much as would have been warranted. He asked what was wrong, and I really tried to give an honest answer, but I wasn’t sure. I told him maybe it was just the gloomy fucking weather. He requested we hang out, shoot the shit and have a few beers — until I told him where I was, and that it would be I’m possible tonight.

I tried to engage with my family, but I just didn’t have a lot in me today. I had wanted to get my sister a gift and had called me parents yesterday. I knew she liked wine and asked what kind she preferred, if in fact they knew. Dad told me and said they could get me a bottle, which I said I’d pay for, and I did, though I suspect it costed more than he claimed. I also got her a card, though my suspicion was that it was the same card I’d gotten dad for his birthday, which bothered me.

Turned out I was right. It was.

I’m just glad today is over, mostly because, considering the way I have felt the last few days, and particularly this morning, it felt somehow impossible.

As I texted to Moe: ‘Tis the season for considering antidepressants again.

I truly hate my emotions sometimes.

Spankbanks & Dreams of Life & Death.

Upon waking up today, my first day off of the week, I found a message on my phone from Rose. This is a girl that I met through my friend, Moe, who had been longtime friends with her until they made the catastrophic choice to get into what turned out to be an ill-fated relationship. By the time it ended, I’d already established my own friendship with her, and though I harbored a lot of guilty feelings with respect to it despite Moe’s blessing, her and I also had sex for a brief period — though only once or twice.

I had been occasionally popping muscle relaxers at the time, which certainly had some consequences on at least one of those occasions.

She is, in fact, the last girl I had sex with — some nine years ago. If that turns out to be the last time I ever have sex in this goddamn body, I’ll surely be disappointed, though this certainly has nothing to do with her (quite honestly, I would be proud for her to be my last), only that I certainly wasn’t at my best on that occasion, and I can’t express enough how very much I would have liked to have given it to her.

And now, after a year shy of a decade of not having sex, of my mind being twisted by porn, the things I would like to do…

Despite what I regard as my piss-poor sexual performance, despite her abruptly getting in a relationship with the man to whom she is currently married, thereby eliminating any ethical means of me ever making up for it, it doesn’t appear to have damaged our friendship in the least, for which I am eternally grateful.

She’s intelligent, interesting, and at least slightly weird. And it feels good just being around her.

Like many people, for whatever reason, she has also periodically told me about her dreams — typically those in which I feature, as was evidently the case this morning. Her message involved a dream she had in which she had learned, through watching the news, that Moe and I had been in a kayaking accident and drowned. She messaged not only to tell me this, but to confirm I was okay in this world, and feeling it best to break my rule regarding not answering any messages or engaging in any form of human contact after awakening until I’ve had sufficient caffeine and nicotine, I promptly responded that I was indeed okay. I told her that I was happy I was periodically part of her dream life. She told me that she dreamt of me quite often, in fact.

Then, rather than merely saying we should hang out, as we have so often done in the past, we actually made plans to get together at her former place of employment — Starbucks — on December 21st. The day of the Winter Solstice, as it turns out.

Though I’ve had an undeniable attraction to Rose since first meeting her, my admiration for her has grown since then, to the point that its become a sort of envy. I’m sure there was more of a build up than I was aware of, but to me it seemed as if one day she simply decided to quit her job and chase her dream — one which I had been previously unaware she had even had — to become a photographer, specifically photographing births, though much of what she currently shares on her studio page involves beautiful photos of women, including herself. And she is very good at what she does.

Though I appreciate the art, there is, I must confess, another level of interest in the photos she has shared of herself online and to me personally on messenger, and it helps that she is well aware and seemingly entirely comfortable with the fact that she has high status in my spank bank, though the frequency of my deposits into her account are nonetheless rather embarrassing.

In any case, its difficult for me to imagine the motivation, confidence and discipline it would take to start your own business, to put your all into pursuing your own passion. Despite the simultaneous stress, the sense of liberty and power that must come with being your own boss is attractive, to say the least. It seems something far more akin to living that what I’m presently doing, at the very least within the largely uninformed simulation of it that I cradle within my mind.

She’s alive. Pursuing passions like a boss.

I wish I were capable of such a thing. Doing what you love for a living, it’s something I’ve always dreamt of. My job remains as unrelated to who I am as could be. Its more like a prison sentence, and I certainly hope I manage to escape and find greener pastures some day soon. I don’t want to die scraping mystery substances off the bathroom wall of a fast food restaurant.

I’d prefer the kayak-drowning dream scenario to that, for sure.

Poverty of Respect.

I hadn’t been clocked in for ten minutes when it happened. While in the midst of changing trash in the back, I heard my name and poked my head around the corner. It was the assistant and store managers calling for me to come up front.

“Mr. Peepee is here,” the store manager tells me, “if you want to kick him out.”

She meant Mr. Water. The self-proclaimed Guardian of Souls. And this? This was like an early Christmas gift.

“Oh, I’ll kick him out.”

I see him at the far end of the dining room, sitting at one of the small tables. He had ordered no food or drink, of course, but as he unpacked his new cell phone, he was nonetheless making a mess on the table that was spilling to the ground.

“You’ve got to leave,” I told him, but not in an overtly aggressive manner. I try and use the Mitch Approach, which I inherited from a manager I formerly worked with who is now high up in the company. You remain as calm and polite as you can and as they inevitably grow increasingly more aggressive, just maintain your calm, polite approach.

Not only will it keep you out of trouble, but it really, really pisses them off.

He’s talking in that angry, fast-paced, mumbly, verbal-Scrabble kind of way that he does whenever we kick him out, but I managed to make out something he said about him having just bought a 20$ gift card to our fast food joint.

He also used the word “slander” in a way that implied to me that he didn’t really know what the word meant. So I elected to ask him politely if he knew what that word meant and in response, he angrily rattled off an incorrect definition as his eyeballs seemed to bulge out of their sockets. I kindly suggested that when he got his phone up and running he should access an online dictionary. He rattled off his incorrect definition again and kept up his fast-paced, angry, mumble-speak. I just kept telling him to have a nice day until he was out the door.

So that’s how my shift began.

I should just come out and say that I do indeed realize I’m being an asshole here. Relevant to this interpretation of my behavior includes the fact that he has a mental illness and drug problems, as is the case with many wandering the streets in this town, and on top of that I believe he’s currently homeless, and its bitter fucking cold out there today.

But he’s also such a self-entitled, narcissistic jackass. I can’t ignore that, either.

Despite the services available to him — free money sent to him every month, therapy, access to affordable housing — he’s always asking for cigarettes and food, constantly loiters here and presumably in other restaraunts in town, leaves behind a mess (and at least once, a puddle of urine on the floor of the restroom) and keeps getting kicked out of apartments he’s lived in for reasons I’m uncertain of but can easily imagine.

I’m not going to judge him for being insane (after all, I may qualify myself), or for being poor (I’m not homeless, but I only have a paycheck as a cushion between paychecks if I’m careful), or even for drug use (I heart Mary Jane, I think my on-off relationship with booze may qualify as abuse, and I’ve experimented, though mainly with psychedelics and careful attention to set and setting). I will judge him on the basis of his character, however. I will judge him for a total lack of empathy, attempts at malicious manipulation, and how he treats others in general.

And he’s a dick.

So while it hurts me hurting his feelings, I’m willing to take that psychological pain-echo because I realize its entirely justified. And a dark, aggressive part of me does enjoy kicking him out, there’s no fucking denying it.

Don’t bite the hand that feeds. Don’t extend your poverty to the realm of respect. Don’t take advantage in the negative sense of the word. Don’t take things for granted. If he didn’t act this way, there’d be little issue with him hanging in the restaurant. He would still have a place to live, too. He’d have shelter and warmth.

And me? I wouldn’t be cradling these internal contradictory emotionally-laden perceptions in which I feel guilty yet justified in being the guardian of my loathesome workplace with respect to him.

My Own World.

“I don’t hate people, I just feel better when they’re not around.”
— Charles Bukowski.

Since as far back as I can remember, I’ve preferred to be alone whenever I can manage it. As a kid, I remember it frustrating my parents quite a bit, and for at least a short time they would get upset with me, urging me to hang out with friends.

As I got older, I’d spend a lot of time in my room, alone, engaging in writing or artwork, and once I moved out of my parent’s house and began living with friends, they would often joke how I nearly lived in my room. That if I had a coffee maker in there, they’d probably never see me at all. Even when we lived in the two houses in that college town and Sandra would throw her absurdly huge parties, I would ultimately retreat to my room — until others followed me and I eventually felt inspired to return to the party, mostly because I accepted the futility of isolating myself given the circumstances.

The first time I lived alone, it was in an efficency apartment a short time after breaking up with my last girlfriend over a decade ago. For a long time I loved it — until the mixture of weird events in my life and concerns over bills grew to a peak and I decided to approach a friend of mine, Nick, Sandra’s brother, who I had previously lived with. He had just gotten a divorce, was living with his father, and seemed incredibly depressed. I had started hanging out with friends on the weekends, bar-hopping with them in the aforementioned college town, and told Nick we should look for an apartment together there. That he should join our little bar-hopping group, too.

He did. We did. And for awhile, it seemed to work. Over the course of a few years, however, I came to the conclusion that I was the kind of person who needed to live alone. While the circumstances ultimately unfolded in ways I didn’t intend and would have never desired and there was a rather trying period of struggle, ultimately I landed myself in the one-bedroom apartment that I live in to this day.

I’ve remained satisfied with my decision, too. I love it. I’m in control of my environment. Toilet paper goes under, not over. Put something in the fridge, it stays there until you eat it. The only dishes I ever have to clean are my own. No worries over roommates having parties or of people unexpectedly hanging out at the house. I also have to rely on myself more, as there is no one else to depend on. Its my space. My lair. My personal freedom and responsibility.

On my lunch break or the smoke breaks I take at work, I usually hide in my car, reading something, writing something or just staring off into space, enjoying the solitude as I imagine or contemplate. I can finally catch a much needed breath, bathe in something closer to silence and return to myself at last, and that’s never something I can entirely manage to do around people, even those closest to me.

I don’t know why I’m this way. Is it my introversion? The sensory and emotional overload I continually experience, evidently due to my status as a Highly Sensitive Person?

Sometimes it sucks, because a part of me wants to get in a relationship again, and relationships, in my limited experience and constant observations, don’t tend to tolerate a lot of alone time. And in the end, I know that as much as I want to be close, I need to be free. To be me. And it seems I can only be my true self, or a closer approximation, at the least, when I can isolate myself and drown in my own world.