Ray of Sunshine.

Imagine a short guy in his mid-50s with long, Crypt Keeper hair. Its a party in the back, but once he takes off his fast food hat its plain to see that any business that once occupied his scalp pulled up follicles and left long ago. Long, sparse strands plastered to his head in serpentine patterns by means of sweat and cooking oil are all that remain.

I keep telling him he should shave it down to peach fuzz like I do, but he keeps telling me he’s just going to get a haircut soon.

Its been half a decade, bear minimum, that he’s been saying that.

Despite the fact that he’s lived in Ohio for roughly three decades, he’s somehow managed to retain his Texan accent.

This is Gus. He’s worked here for longer than myself and it shows.

He has his admirable qualities — he’s fairly intelligent, he’s good at math, he has an astounding memory. And we talk fairly regularly. Often he’ll tell me about something he watched on television or an article he read. Often the article in question involves physics or cosmology, as he knows I have great interest there, or it’s political, as he knows my concern over where we’re going as a species as well as to what awesome degrees I detest Trump. He almost fetishizes money and has some minimal interest in sports, however, whereas I have below zero interest in either, but unlike others, he typically knows to dodge talk about stocks or corporations or dumbass sports shit when it comes to me.

Its nice to have people like him around that keep up on shit like that, who I can talk to about it. He’s not the only one, but he is part of a small minority of such people in my life — especially my work life.

Though he’s never exactly been a ray of fucking sunshine, to make a mole hill out of a mountain, he’s become an increasingly angry, aging man. He used to at least joke around, and yes, sometimes to the point that it got bloody annoying, but I’d much prefer that to this.

He doesnt really have good moods anymore, he’s just occasionally more enraged than his typical, baseline anger. Like today. I’m sure the booze I could still smell on him despite that distinct, overpowering odor of someone who almost never bathes had something to do with it. He is undoubtedly an alcoholic.

Sober or otherwise, trying to talk him down gets more difficult, and dealing with him bitching about the exact same shit about the restaurant day in and day out with with no detectable reduction in anger, as you might expect from someone who engages in continuous verbal catharsis, has gotten more irritating than his goofing around ever was. He bitches about the dishes despite the fact that its the same dishes every day and he voluntarily made himself the dish guy, he bitches when we don’t have people, he bitches when we do have people but they’re dumbasses, he bitches when he doesn’t get a break despite the fact that he always works on break anyway, he bitches at me when I point out he’s always bitching.

And I can’t help but be painfully aware of the fact that his bitching is infectuous, as often enough I find myself bitching about his bitching to others, who waste no time joining in on the bitchfest.

Eventually I can get him talking. I help him put away some of the dishes or cover for him at the end of the night when he’s alone in kitchen and wants to dip out for a cigarette, and I can bring him down a little. I don’t dislike the guy, as easy as that should conceivably be, and some of his complaints do indeed have merit. Its just that after all this time, he still always seems surprised.

And like a lot of people, he doesn’t always seem to see himself so clearly and how he contributes to many of the things he’s bitching about. We’re all flawed mammals here, and recognizing your own shortcomings, if nothing else, can bring you down off your high horse and stimulate some empathy and reason. I get caught there, too, but I manage to bring myself down. Gus, though, always seems to need the help.

He helps me too, I should add, and in multiple ways. On days like this, for instance, just being in his presence reminds me how much more bitter, angry, depressed and cynical I could be.

Next to him, I look down right optimistic. Next to this heavy stormcloud, I’m that ray of fucking sunshine. And while that’s kind of nice, it certainly doesn’t ease my worry for the guy. Not in the least.

Sexism, Racism, & Hypocrisy.

For a good many months I’ve kept almost entirely away from reading any political articles as well as posting them or, for that matter, having any political discussions on Facebook. This was certainly related to all that transpired for some time beforehand, namely my naive attempt to stimulate deep discussions about various issues on the Book of Faces — to bring people together for a calm discussion about the subjects that seemed to be dividing everyone. Despite my intentions, however, these discussions either descended into heated debates or were largely ignored, leaving a cold silence in which I felt particular individuals were angry at me given my views, or even my act of subjecting what I suspected were views that they held to question.

Some issues certainly came from my end as well. A few times I wrote posts in anger and in almost immediate retrospect realized that I clearly could have articulated myself better or kept my trap shut altogether. Even in the cases in which I think I conducted myself wisely, though, I had the distinct feeling that I wasn’t helping to bridge the divide at all, but was instead serving to exacerbate the fracturing. The news also kept fueling my frustration and anxiety, which I have a sufficient amount of anyway, and it came to my attention that driving myself crazy and making my life a living hell over things I can’t control and could hardly hope to make so much as a dent in was pointless and futile.

So I just stopped.

Ever since, I’ll comment on Facebook about amusing events during the day or thoughts I think others might find amusing, if nothing else, but I mostly focus on posting memes that make me laugh and consequently drag me out of depression or boredom throughout the day in the hopes that it might serve a similar purpose for others on my friend’s list.

Things to connect us, not divide us.

I was doing quite well at this, too, methinks, until one day last week, where I feel I might have fucked up and fallen back on old — or perhaps it would be better to say “recently retired” — tendencies. What prompted this was reading another abortion meme that a girl I’ve known for a long time had posted. And to get it out of the way: I’m passionately pro-choice, and I see this as but a small aspect of my overall value in individual freedom and personal responsibility. Specifically, this is about what’s called bodily integrity. I like how comedian Doug Stanhope framed it; namely, as an extension of the right to property — or, perhaps more accurately, where the right to property more or less begins, with the body, with all other physical property functioning as its extension.

The meme in question said that the abortion bans aren’t about abortion, however, but rather about white men holding down women. Rather than going the rational route and arguing against women being imprisoned for having abortions, the poster argued that the men who planted the seed should also be imprisoned, as it takes two to make a baby.

Though one could argue it potentially only takes one to have an abortion — which was one of many things, in my opinion, overlooked by the poster.

Reading that shit, I suddenly felt the rush of anger I felt when the abortion bans began. When the storm of man-hating memes inundated Facebook. When the discussions of these issues similarly flooded YouTube and the news. I felt the burning need to speak up, to respond as soon as I saw the meme, but held off. After all, what good would it do? It would serve as catharsis, perhaps, but previous experience had strongly suggested that provoking these kinds of discussions rarely ends well, and I certainly didn’t want to make this shit worse. So I chewed on it off and on for hours, maybe as much as a day, and then made the perhaps ill-conceived choice to post something in response to the meme. Something I had more or less said before, during the abortion ban chaos, though my hopes were that I had more effectively articulated myself this time.

I pointed out the rather obvious fact that given that there are women who are anti-abortion and men — even white men, such as myself — who are rather passionately pro-choice, it may not be about abortion, as the poster claimed, but nor was it about “white men holding down and trying to control women,” either. Instead, I offered the possibility that this may instead just be another symptom of a sick culture that has no respect for personal liberty, in this particular case bodily integrity specifically. I also added, as I have in the past, how hypocritical and counterproductive these sexist and racist generalizations of “white men” are for those who are justifiably fighting for the recognition of abortion rights. That they should focus on targeting the real enemy rather than alienating and demonizing their brethren by speaking in precisely the same kind of sexist generalities they’re supposedly fighting against.

One woman responded. And it was days later. And she responded in that patronizing, holier-than-thou kind of fashion I used to only see as a characteristic of religious zealots and contradicted herself (also a characteristic I once predominantly associated with hyper-religious individuals) at least once in the midst of offering her admittedly well-written response.

She called anti-abortionist women “misguided.” She also implied that some men were allies yet those like me were similarly “misguided.” She said it in much the same way one Christian might call other Christians that disagree with them on fundamental issues “misguided” or simply proclaim they do not constitute “true Christians.” Yet white men in her eye, she then made clear, are nonetheless “absolutely” the enemy. This was the contradiction: her insistence that white men are “absolutely” the enemy despite the fact that some are allies, despite the fact that some of those allies are “misguided.” Why? Evidently they — I? we? — are sexists. And she said this, that white men are sexists, at the same time apparently entirely blind to the fact that seeing all white men as sexist is itself sexism — and that it is a rather blatant example of racism as well.

Package deal of prejudice supplied by the passionately self-blind.

If I had responded to her, I fear it may have spawned a side argument, as I refuse to accept those who try and redefine prejudice and discrimination in such a way that only those groups which they perceive as privileged can be prejudiced, never the disenfranchised groups, or the groups they see as such.

Sexism is sexism, regardless of your sex. To believe otherwise is, in fact, sexist. Racism is racism, regardless of your race. To believe otherwise is, in fact, racist.

And even if the women-hating “white man” generalization was true, which it is clearly not, we would be left with the flaws and hypocrisies inherent in her approach.

Fighting fire with fire only feeds the fire. Becoming the perceived enemy in order to defeat the perceived enemy ensures the perceived enemy’s triumph.

And ends do not justify the means. They are shaped by them.

I, Extractor of the Guardian of Souls.

Generally-speaking, I hate having to kick people out of the restaurant. This usually happens at the end of the night, and in these cases specifically, I dread most of all having to kick out this sweet elderly couple that comes in rather late, maybe an hour before we close, and this despite the fact that when I do they’re entirely kind, understanding, and rather comedic about it.

There are those occasions, or should I say those individuals, who I go out of my way to kick out, however. Customers who always stay to the end, bitch up an indignant storm when I politely ask them to exit, and always, always leave a mess.

They’re looking for conflict. They’re after a fight. They’re eager to be assholes.

And kids who come in earlier in the shift: ankle-biting loiterers who buy next to nothing but nonetheless manage to make an epic mess and are a nuisance just because it makes them look cool in the eyes of their herd.

And then there are other dribbling douchbags.

This is where we once again come to Mr. Aqua, the self-professed Guardian of Souls.

There was one day last week when he basically hung out at the restaurant for the length of my shift. He would sit down on the concrete patio outside, beneath a window, lingering somewhere between sleeping and waking, but in any case light years beyond sober. Heroine, maybe? Who the fuck knows.

Usually I would be understanding, but my empathy, over the years, its learned to set certain boundaries. Limitations.

Whenever I went out for a smoke in my car I would see him there, occasionally making some strange noise. When he came back inside, he would sit at the first booth by the front door, slouching down and staring at the wall in a drug-induced stupor.

At one point, and this was later in the night, I was up front with the assistant manager and we both watched as he suddenly lifted up his arms and hands, palms upward, as his face, fixed eyes, and posture remained unchanged. And he paused there for over a minute.

“What the fuck is he doing?” I asked her, breaking the perplexed silence between us. “Summoning a god?”

That same night, one of the kids came out of the restroom and announced to me that while they were in the stall Mr. Aqua had come in and — how should I say this? — blessed the floor tiles with his holy fucking urine, straight from the tap. It was clear he wasn’t even aiming for the urinal, he said.

After mopping it up, I concur.

Hearing this, the assistant manager said the words that my ears had been dying for years to hear:

“He’s kicked out. He’s banned from the store.”

Halle-fuckin’-lujah.

I even got permission from her to kick him out should I see him in here again. I suddenly had something to look forward to. A goal. A reason to live.

Its the little things, you know?

A day or two ago he walked inside and I followed soon thereafter, eager to kick him out. Unfortunately, by the time I got in he was already exiting out the door on the other side of the dining room. It felt like such a tease.

Then there was today: The Day.

While I was on break, I thought I saw the back of him as he went in through the door, but I wasn’t entirely certain. After I clocked back in from break, having gotten slightly stoned with a manager, I proceeded to do my usual and began changing trash, starting up at front counter. As I was changing the first can, I look up to my right and there he was, waiting impatiently.

The pissing aquafiliac. The fast-food-frequenting, god-summoning Guardian of Souls.

It was like a shaft of light shone down upon this epic piece of human excrement from the starry heavens above. My atheist equivalent of prayers had been answered, the godless sign delivered. Now was my chance, and I felt too high, to anxious, too awkward.

Just do it. Push passed it. Just play it cool, I told myself.

“She kicked you out,” I reminded him in a polite sort of exasperation. “You’re not allowed in here any more.”

He knew this. He was waiting for me to say it.

“I just need a refill on my coffee,” he said frustratingly, pointing to the stained, battered cup with a smashed sippy-top lid, both of which were clearly acquired from the trash cans outside or the all-too-frequent litter in the parking lot.

“Dude, you should have never gotten the coffee in the first place,” I told him, again reminding him that “you aren’t allowed in the building.”

Then he asks why. Playing dumb again, but this time with building rage. I remained surprisingly calm. A stoned, goddamned Zen Master.

“Well, for once thing, you pissed all over the restroom floor the other day.”

Anticipation verified: he denied it. Then he began getting all red in the face, pointing at me, and saying a lot of ragey things I couldn’t make out, though they were threats and things that made it clear he wanted to be seen as a victim who had finally had enough. Though as he did all this, he was backing up towards the door. Incongruence at its finest.

“Thank you. Have a nice day,” I said to him as he continued jab-jab-jabbering his dumb ass out the door.

Please, please don’t come again.

I watch as he bitched about us, maybe myself specifically, to some poor soul outside, now trapped in his tractor beam.

I wasn’t at first aware, but it turns out I had a small audience of my fellow employees watching in wonder.

“That was interesting,” one of them said.

Staring Into Space.

As I was awaiting a call from the shop Monday morning and have yet to set up my voicemail, I did what I typically fail to do and kept my phone off vibrate and put it on the end table at my beside so it would be sure to wake me up. At about 9:30, after maybe five hours of sleep due to my insomnia (or perhaps only my nocturnal tendencies), the phone rang. I neglected to answer, for while it turned out to be the shop in the end they had called me from an alternate line, and I refuse to pick up the phone unless I recognize the number.

At any rate, I decided to have a few cigarettes and start the coffee before calling back.

For a long time I developed the habit of waking up and going almost immediately to Facebook or YouTube — until one day, perhaps a few months back, when for whatever reason I elected to just sit at the chair at my table, enjoy a smoke, and just let my mind unwind as I stared off into space.

It felt great. It felt right. So I try to do that more often nowadays, and I did that upon awakening this morning.

Its such a better way of waking up than bombarding your mind with data from the get-go. The typical bombardment, in retrospect, seems like little more than a distraction, and now I’ve been trying to do the quiet reflection thing more often when I have one of my perhaps-too-frequent smoke breaks at work, too. If I can manage to be alone, I just put down the phone and let my tense mind unfold before my inner eye.

It makes me feel closer to me. It reminds me of the internal state of freedom I always have access to.

Thanksgiving Curses & Dark Daydreams.

Last Thanksgiving began with a bit of a mess.

It happened the day prior, actually, about ten minutes before my shift ended, when I snuck outside to warm up my car. My plans were to leave for home in a nice warm car, try to get to sleep, and drive to my parents the following morning. The car wouldn’t start and I had to hitch a ride home. My father had to come pick me up and I had to wait till the following Monday, when the shop opened, before I could learn what was wrong with the damned thing. Turns out I needed a new engine. I didn’t have the money, so my parents stepped in, which I certainly appreciated and desperately needed but which nonetheless made me feel as guilty as fuck.

Thankfully, I actually made it back to my apartment this year, though when I opened the side door of my building the next morning and began approaching my car, which was parked right beside the dumpster, I saw what looked like a pipe hanging at an angle beneath it.

No. No, no, no.

As I got closer, I was frustrated to find it wasn’t just my frequently paranoid imagination. Taking a peek under the car, it was immediately clear that some assjack had sawed off my catalytic converter. Though I knew what it would sound like, I started up the car, which in a moment growled to life as expected with what to my ears sounded like an enduring sonic boom. I quickly turned it off. I could feel myself shaking. Anger and anxiety flooding me, I just stopped a moment to take a breath, to take stock, and then made the dreaded phone call to my parents to ask them to pick me up due to car issues for the second fucking year in a row.

On his way to pick me up, my father suggested that I call the cops, which I did. The officer arrived and took pictures with his phone — evidently, this hasn’t happened in this town in some time. Thanksgiving itself was wonderful, and my mood was okay — likely due to the CBD I dropped on my tongue to ease my tension before dad came to pick me up. My parents dropped me off at the apartment that night and the following day I called the shop and then had AAA tow it there. Later that day, the shop called: the estimate not quite 600 bucks and they won’t get the part until Monday.

Now its back to asking people for rides. Fearing I won’t have enough money to cover the cost of the fix. Having to wake up earlier so I don’t miss the call from the shop.

Stupid, irritating complications. And at least one, the money, which inspires more than a bit of fear.

And why? All because some asshole decided to steal from me.

I kept thinking: what if, as I had planned, I had taken out the trash a short time after I had gotten home the night before Turkey Day? It could be that I would have caught that saw-towing, cat-napping asshole, maybe even as he was beneath my car. Likely betwixt the side of the boxed-in dumpster area and the driver side of my Sunfire, just sawing away at the pipes, his legs exposed.

My confidence is an absolute joke, really — until I’m finally pissed off. Then I’m all seek and destroy, and in this instance I would already have him in sight. My hands swiftly balling up into fists so tense my knuckles are bone white as I’m seeing red obscuring all. Hyperfocused anger suddenly possessing me, I’d kick at his legs with uninhibited rage, hoping that I’d break something in the process, or at least hurt him badly enough that he wouldn’t be able to run away.

All systems: go. Release the animals. Uncage the monster.

This scene played over and over in my head, but then I got to thinking: how would this end? Clearly, he would try to escape the car’s underside and come at me with the saw — which, one would imagine, would be his instinctive means of defense in this instance.

What then? I would be fucked.

I keep seeing myself with a baseball bat in imagined circumstances like this. I don’t own a bat. I need to buy a bat. For some time I felt that I needed a gun, just in case all goes south in this country, perhaps globally, and it becomes a necessary survival strategy. That way I wouldn’t have to rely solely on luck (at worst) or on others in my hypothetical group (at best).

Guns do make me nervous, though. I keep running these scenarios where I’m living in a trailer in an isolated location and I hear a noise at night, grab my gun, and shoot the intruder — who turns out to be a loved one. The idea twists me the fuck up inside. So I’ve thus far neglected to buy a gun.

But a bat? Going Negan on someone requires a bit more intimacy. If nothing else, you have to be in closer proximity. You’re less removed from your act of violence, so hopefully more in control. I mean, despite my apparent affinity for the bat over the gun, choking, punching and kicking would provide the epitome of intimacy. Then again, I have trust issues and tend to be rather phobic regarding getting too close in general, so perhaps the bat thing makes a good deal of sense.

None of that really matters in the end, though, because even if I seriously hurt someone in self-defense or justified anger, it would haunt me for the rest of my life. Even imaging it makes me feel guilty sometimes, at least if its tied to a real person, a real situation. I try to keep those rage-fueled scenarios safety-sealed in my imaginative space.

I can’t lie, steal or hurt another without hurting myself, even a little bit. And yet that asshole who stole from me? It would seem he was perfectly fine doing it to me.

In other news, maybe I should just plan to uber to my parent’s house for next Thanksgiving.

Revelations & the Art of Boiling Alive.

When my flashbacks happened, I remember thinking: how on earth can I go on living as usual given what’s been revealed to me? How could all else not be dwarfed given what I’ve now remembered?

It felt akin to how comedian Doug Stanhope explained his first DMT trip with Joe Rogan as they were both working for The Man Show, a now-defuct program both have expressed shame for being a part of. While they were at Rogan’s place, they decided to take a break from writing their monologues and engage in the psychedelic experience. Given how he tells the tale in his bit, Stanhope’s mind was clearly blown, and after this short, intense revelation he had to go back to the mind-numbingly mundane act of writing Man Show monologues. I’m paraphrasing, but he said something akin to, “I’ve eaten the apple of knowledge — and now I’m back to looking for cable-friendly euphemisms for the world ‘blowjob’.”

You feel as if you’ve been given great knowledge, but what are you supposed to do with it? In my case, that became the issue. You feel as if its your duty to do something with it, but you can’t. So you just go on with living your simple, silly, disgusting little life as if you were still in the dark, as if you never peered behind the veil at all.

And that’s what people seem to be doing with respect to climate change. Here, though, it appears to go even deeper, as I was reminded again when speaking with a friend the other day.

Even among those I know who believe in climate change, they never seem to factor it into their future plans, or their vision of the future of our species in general. Its like its been shoved and locked into some other compartment in their mind, where they don’t have to contemplate the ramifications of this revelation — and a scientific one supported by those of various disciplines, I should add, unlike the revelations of, for instance, Stanhope and I.

Why do we respond this way to such major revelations — or even potential ones? With respect to flashbacks of seemingly alien encounters or a breakthrough psychedelic experience, one can always retreat into uncertainty to ease the overwhelming sense of powerlessness, because its always difficult to know for certain whether or not you aren’t just fooling yourself, but one would like to think the same wouldn’t be the case for such established, scientific facts.

Yes, one would like to think.

The argument has been made that our brains simply haven’t evolved to make us sufficiently equipped to handle such large scale problems. Such issues are too long term and broad, too gradual and far-reaching for organisms such as ourselves, who have evolved to tend to clear and immediate problems.

Its the frog soup analogy, basically.

Throw a frog in a cauldron of boiling hot water, the little fucker will hop out. Put him in luke warm water and slowly turn up the heat, though, and the frog will be boiling alive before it knows what’s happened to him.

We do know what’s happening, though, and it makes us feel rather powerless. Fully aware we’re boiling alive as its happening and, at least individually, entirely unable to do anything about it.

Stop the Beeping.

Clearly, I’m hypersensitive across the board. So when the fryers are beeping, the oven is beeping, the microwave is beeping, the grills are beeping, when every goddamn thing under the sun and within the confines of the fast food circus I seem destined to die in is beeping, it makes sense to me that it would irritate me more than others.

And this despite the fact that I’ve probably worked over two and a half decades in fast food altogether and fifteen years in this particular oil-infused food distribution center.

It truly amazes me. It makes no sense. None at all. I can sit in my apartment before my laptop typing away until my fingers bleed as I chain-smoke cigarettes and not smell it at all — until I leave to do some grocery shopping and return, of course, when the wall of nicotine-laden smoke becomes very evident — but over two decades of this orchestra of incessant beeping and I’m not desensitized to it at all. Not in the least. I still can’t fucking tune it out.

No sensory adaptation for this.

Still, as I said, I’m full-spectrum hypersensitive, so it makes some sense that it would irritate me like mad, but what compounds this irritation is that no one else seems to be bothered by the beeping at. Fucking. All.

I’m ready to claw my ears out and scream bloody murder after fifteen minutes and not a single soul in the store is so much as phased, so I have to keep running around everywhere, pushing buttons to stop the beeping, ease my ears and sustain whatever vague semblance of sanity I’ve managed to hang onto.

I’m getting so tired of this. So tired, so irritated. Downright enraged. How can you not be bothered by this at all? How can I be the only one driven mad by the beep-beep-beep…?

Sensory overload? It sucks donkey balls.

By far the absolute worst is an older guy who recently began working with us. His name is Darren — with a capital DUH. While we have kind-enough exchanges when we pass by one another during the work hours, I’m so perplexed and angry with him I feel like I’m holding back my urge to go ape shit every time I catch sight of him. Shortly after he started, when everyone was telling me what a pain in the ass he was and I was still in my usual phase of giving a person I don’t know very well a chance, the ol’ benefit of the doubt, there was an incident that took place. An incident that took a serrated knife to the jugular of the benefit of the doubt I had afforded him.

It was a Wednesday. I pull out the two grills in the kitchen on Wednesdays. He was trying to change the settings on the grill I was about to pull out when I kindly told him to just use the other grill, as I was about to pull it out. I even gave him the reason, for fuck’s sake. Even so, he stayed where he was, crouched down, trying to change the settings. Like I didn’t exist. Like I was a ghost. Like he didn’t give the vaguest semblance of a damn. Though I’m sure he heard me, I told him again, in the same polite manner, the same empathy-fueled tone, to just use the other grill.

He kept at it.

I could feel the empathy drain from my body and all the pleasantries bolt out the proverbial window.

“STOP,” I said firmly, loudly, pointing my finger in front of his face to the other grill. “THAT ONE.”

I didn’t want to be a dick, DUH-arren. Why did you leave that as my only option?

When he finally, finally leaves the kitchen to stroll into the walk-in cooler in the back for something, I couldn’t contain myself. I turned to the guy who had been training him, and in the same barking voice, which I’m not going to type in caps again because I find it fucking annoying, I asked him, “The guy’s clearly not deaf. He’s not stupid. So what’s his fucking problem?”

I hate being told what to do. I get that. Really. You have no, no bloody idea. But when you’re new at a job, a new job you need to pay bills and survive, you need to learn the ropes. You need to learn the ropes from those who have been doing the job for far longer than you, and you shouldn’t feel so bold as to be such a stubborn asshole at the very least until you’ve familiarized yourself with the place, learned proper procedures and established yourself by learning the ways of the workplace natives and sufficiently bonding with them. Being a stubborn douche-bag right out of the gate is never a promising approach, especially when it’s utterly unnecessary.

Now, I could have let him put the appropriate settings on the grill — an activity he was clearly struggling with and felt determined to accomplish (respect, at the very least, for that) — and then rendered what I presume would be his eventual accomplishment utterly useless as I turned off that very grill and pulled it out anyway, leaving him to endure that same process with the other grill. But no, I tried to stop him short. Tried to help him. Didn’t want him to waste time and energy on what was destined to be an ultimately useless, fruitless endeavor. I did what I thought and felt to be the right thing. And in return, he fucking pretended like I didn’t exist.

Fuck you. We’re all in this together, shit-bag. Don’t make it any more difficult than it has to be.

Well, this is not the full extent of Darren With a Capital DUH’s irritating tendencies, as I soon learned through observation. My usual people-watching. My compulsory research and study of the individual. On countless occasions since I have heard the fryers in the back beeping and, irritated as hell, have stepped into the kitchen to press the single button one needs to press in order to banish that infernal noise, and what do I find? I find Duh-duh-Darren, staring at the fryer, upon which “duty” is blink-blink-blinking on the digital display (for whatever reason) as it continues to beep relentlessly, and he just stares at it. Gazing like a goon. And he stares at it for too long — right before just casually walking away.

It’s been at least a month, I’d surmise, but to date, I’ve never seen him press the button.

Just press the button, DUHarren. Extend a digit, make contact with the button just below the display, and apply pressure. That’s all. This isn’t rocket science. You don’t need a degree.

Once you know what you’re doing in general in this job, the only issues you really have to worry about are boredom and frustration. If you can’t handle properly executing a job as simple as this, you should probably jump into a pit of lava, take a long walk off a short version of the mythical pirate’s plank, or commit yourself to an asylum (unless, of course, you’ve mistakenly — and understandably — mistaken the town this fast food fuck-feast is embedded within as one), because you’re not going to be able to handle anything greater.

You’re in an ass-end position in a bottom-of-the-barrel job, Derpy Darren, so do as Morty said and get your shit in order. Take it to a Shit Museum and so on and then find a place among the rest of us low-tier turds in this shit job in this toilet bowl of a society and learn to float along.

I’m still convinced the Day of Flushing is near. Be patient.

And he did the same bullshit today. Heard the beeping, stared, walked away. He was the worst, of course, but everyone else collectively earned the runner-up. As I was struggling to get my own shit done, I had to constantly stop what I was doing to press buttons. To stop the onslaught of cacophonous beeps. At one point, I couldn’t contain myself. I screamed:

“JUST PRESS THE FUCKING BUTTON!”

And in the end, it was I who had to do it. Always me. Answering the summoning of the beeping machines that plague my day.

To hell with people. Fuck machines.

If I had to be stuck at a job at 41, I wish it would have been a library.

Like a Blind Man in a Mine Field.

I’m not very social. I’ve always preferred to spend my time alone, at home, as I feel I get more than enough social contact during the workday and it tends to push me towards sensory and emotional overload. On the weekends, however, when I’m not in Monk Mode, as it’s been called, I’ll occasionally be social. Nowadays, being social in my world typically manifests as my friend, Moe, and I sitting in my apartment and just shooting the shit for awhile, usually over a few beers.

We talk politics. We speak about our mutual, seemingly-paranormal experiences. We discuss family and friends, share ideas and pose questions. Moe’s an intelligent motherfucker and I feel lucky to have him for a friend. He’s not one of the sheep, he doesn’t follow the herd, the guy thinks for himself. He has a lot more of the typical attributes ascribed to males than I do, however — he’s more confident, more ambitious, seemingly free of the kind of anxiety that plagues me and a lot more suave and experienced when it comes to the female of the species.

We shook it up a few weeks back and didn’t remain in my apartment. Instead, we meandered to the bars in the town I live in, which despite being here for so long I had declined to do myself. We had a pretty good time, and when he texted me on or around Thursday, he requested we do it again this weekend. Despite my profound dislike for the cold, I was down.

It may have been while we were still at the apartment when I wondered aloud whether Pepper might be at one of the bars tonight. I used to work with her and she was always fun to be around. It was another one of those situations where everyone kept telling me that I should try and get with her, at least try and get laid, but I’m typically too much of an anxious wreck when it comes to that sort of thing, even (and perhaps especially) when I have the perfect opportunity and sense that the girl is actually interested, actually waiting for my anxious yet agonizing horny ass to make a move. And I’m just paralyzed inside. Terrified. Even alcohol, the ol’ social lubricant and liquid courage, has so often failed to spur me into action (though I suspect a mix of the booze and the cannabis might do the trick).

In any case, I had at least two golden opportunities in the past and failed to take advantage of them, and that was years upon years ago. Yet recently on social media she expressed desires to hang out again, akin to the one time we visited a single bar in the town we both currently live in, though I don’t believe I lived here at the time. We did have a good time. Maybe I’d get another chance if we hung out again, thought I.

Moe started pressing me to message her after I told him I was considering it. This could be a means of getting laid. I told him that she might just want to hang out, that she might have a boyfriend or have gotten married for all I know. I didn’t want to simply assume that she had any sexual interest in me. After telling him the circumstances he insisted, no, girls aren’t like that. Take your chance.

Once we were at the bar, he had convinced me to message her. He even critiqued my wording, helping me to phrase shit correctly before I sent the message. He wasn’t being an asshole, either. I know he was doing this because he’s my friend, because after nine years of nothing I desperately need to get laid and he knows that, and given that he’s infinitely better with women in this respect, I felt it wise to at least consider his point of view. And, in the end, I pretty much did as he suggested. And she responded. And we messaged back and fourth a bit.

She couldn’t come down, as it turned out, because she was just going into work, but promised to let me know when she was free.

It felt good when it was all said and done, but what should have been a relatively easy task had me anxious as fuck every step of the way. Moe urging me, me struggling as I pushed myself. All this despite my wanting. All this resistance due to my constant paranoia. I don’t know why I can be confident regarding the emotions I sense that others are experiencing — until it comes to me and how I make them feel and how they feel about me. I’m never confident about it and I’m always so goddamned concerned about it. Obsessively so. It consistently freaks me out inside. It makes me feel like a blind man in a mine field. Moe had to essentially take me by the hand and guide my sorry ass every step of the way.

The following day, as I’m getting drunk and high in my apartment, she messages me. “Whatcha doin’?” I lock up. I don’t open my phone. I’m feeling anxious and I’m drunk so I just ignore it. I eventually pass out, wake up, and spend a few sober hours watching YouTube and Netflix. I still ignore it. Its too late now anyhow. The following morning, after I’ve had sufficient coffee, I message her, telling her how my sleep schedule got a bit fucked up this weekend (which was certainly not a lie) and apologized, adding that I wasn’t ignoring her. Which was kind of a lie, but I was only ignoring her because I felt anxious as fuck. A few hours later she messaged back, telling me it was all good. Profound relief on my end in response.

What’s my fucking problem? Why am I so horrible at this shit? As I tried to explain to Moe this weekend, I’ve watched people play so many games. I’ve watched them play this game with each other so many times. I’ve played it a few times, but it always makes me sick. I hate games. All of them, really. And in this context, it always seems to be about concealing the truth, manipulating, putting on masks and playing roles. Faking it till you make it.

I’ve also always felt incredibly guilty about wanting to get laid. It makes me feel shallow, mindless, primitive. This despite the fact that unless I actually like the woman in question as a person, I’d never dream of pursuing it, doing it.

But every time I actually do get laid, as infrequently as those horizontal hokey-pokey periods have been in my life, its like a load has been lifted (or blown, more accurately), like I’ve been fucking cleansed, like it serves as the Solutio to the Nigredo that has served as most of my life, like I’m somehow back in balance again. And part of me hates the fact so much that fucking seems to be an antidote for so much that ails me, that I’m so much happier once I can scratch that primitive itch through some skin-on-skin friction.

And then things inevitably go to shit, typically thanks to yours truly, but for awhile, at least, it’s beautiful.

Musical Chairs of the Psyche.

We naturally grow to accept it, but when you really think about it, its quite odd that we don’t know ourselves — and that the unconscious, that reservoir of the unknown within us, can often act in ways that seem as conscious and deliberate as the conscious aspects of ourselves. An easy example are dreams, some of which can be as coherent, stable and sensory rich as waking existence — and you manufactured it all without being aware of it, despite being simultaneously aware of the dream environment in the context of the dream as it unfolds. We experience the dream as not something we’re manufacturing, as I believe Jung pointed out, but as something that is happening to us — in just the same way that mundane life happens to us.

You have to assume that this unseen part of yourself operating behind the dream-scenes might be just as conscious as the you that you identify as yourself and, as a consequence, you could actually have a dialogue with this stranger inside you. Maybe that’s what dreams are in a sense, though the language is predominantly metaphor, symbol, sign, analogy, plays on words, idioms, phrases, and so on. But you also have conversations the way we usually think of them in dreams, so a sort of verbal dialogue should be possible, too, right?

It was like the ideomotor finger responses in my one and only hypnosis session so many years ago: my fingers were answering yes/no questions that the hypnotist asked outside of my control. I did learn that I could resist them easily enough, but they lifted in response involuntarily. Its like my old “automatic artwork” and writing, too, though that seemed to me to be a sort of joint effort, a collaborative practice between conscious-me and unconscious-me.

Though perhaps it isn’t as simple as our unconscious constituting a singular personality — maybe there really is a crowd in the mirror. Perhaps the conscious ego is just the personality that won the game of musical chairs of the psyche and rest are just stuck behind the curtain that separates the conscious mind or working memory from the rest of the mind.