(No) Help Wanted.

Some people will look upon your efforts to be polite, kind, and helpful as an act of empathy, and they appreciate it. Others? They see it as a sign of weakness and, devoid of guilt and drunk with power, they waste no time attempting to exploit it, to control you, to make you their servant, and I’ve found that its important to shut that shit down as soon as possible.

And then there is something in some people that makes them instinctively percieve your act of offering to help them as insulting, for they interpret that as you perceiving them as being incapable of doing it themselves, of being too ignorant to know this or that already.

Most of the people that have this within them recognize that this perception has more to do with them than the true perceptions or motivations of the other person, and while they can’t help how they feel, they realize their feelings don’t necessarily reflect reality. They’ll grin and bear you helping them or politely decline assistance. I respect that and once I sense this in them, I steer away from attempting to help them. Discomfort is contrary to my objectives here.

There was this regular we had who was in a motorized wheelchair. There was a sign taped to the back advertising items for sale, which I thought was unique, but nit as unique as the helmet he always wore. I quickly found he wore it so he could hit the button on the hand dryers in the rest room or help push open doors with his head without bruising his skull. He was a guy who wanted to be as self-sufficient as possible despite his handicap, and I admired that. He’d grin and bear it and give a warm thank you when you opened the door for him, but you could feel he hated it. That it hurt him.

Others who are like this aren’t so self aware, however. To the contrary, they become possessed by their overwhelming fears of feeling or being percieved as weak or ignorant about anything, and as a means of self defense convince themselves that they know all, can do all, and immediately go on the attack, responding to your attempt to be helpful with viscious bitterness. Often these same people also like to assert their dominance over others even in the absence of having any recognized authority over them. They don’t want anyone to offer help, no, they want to tell you what to do — not because they can’t do it, of course, but because they can do it better than you. Because they know better than you. Than everyone.

And these are one of a handful of personality types that in turn triggers something dark in me.

I feel myself shift from my painful default of hypersensitive to unbelievably insensitive in a flash. I feel a rush of insane rage and profound hatred that I try to hold inside myself with every ounce of effort I can fucking muster. I dig my nails into my palms, bite my tongue until it bleeds or my coffee-and-cigarette-stained, not-so-pearly whites shatter into countless pieces and I find myself compulsively, aggressively ranting to someone about it or bleeding it through my fingers just to relieve the unbearable inner pressure.

So yeah, I guess we’ve all got issues.

Violations.

8/31/20

I hate training people.

Given my position as detail maintenance man, it doesn’t happen too often, thankfully, but it happens far more often than it should. Glen, the morning maintenance guy, has been here for some time, as have I, the night shift guy. For some reason we can’t seem to find someone reliable to cover the weekends, however.

I got along with the last two guys, both of whom were from Kentucky, although when I caught word that both were Trump supporters I made an effort to avoid political discussions with them. This was easy enough, at least for the second guy, as his accent was so heavy that it was, often enough, all I heard. I’m not trying to be a dick, but often what he said seemed like alphabet-soup-of-the-mouth to me. I’d often give neutral or ambiguous responses and focus on working off of what little I could understand. I didn’t want to tell him his communications were garbled to my ears — again, he was always polite, and I only wished to return the favor.

Both had a tendency to not do their fucking jobs, however, which got on my nerves — and which is ultimately why they don’t work here in our fast food grease palace anymore. This is also why they hired the new guy, who I’m tasked with training for the next two days, and who will then be trained in the mornings by Glen.

So far, based on direct, personal experience, he seems like a cool guy, and on top of that, a hard worker. He’s also not a white guy from Kentucky, but a black guy from here in Ohio — Cleveland specifically — and that’s a nice change of pace.

They went for something different in hiring this guy, and its infinitely better, at least in terms of his work ethic and general personality.

I was just beginning to like the guy roundabout mid-shift when Marjie, one of two assistant managers now, pulled me aside and gave me the news. Evidently, when store manager Kelly’s boyfriend came into the dining room and saw him, he claimed the guy was a child molester.

Fuck, I thought to myself: please don’t make this be true. Particularly because

As soon as she told me that, my mind flashed back to earlier in the day, when we were alone out by the dumpster corral. Feeling nervous in the awkward silence and feeling the need to fill the verbal vacuum with something, anything, I asked him why he left his last fast food job to come here.

“To be closer to my son,” he said, and, at the time — which, again, was before I heard Marjie’s news — I felt he said it suspiciously awkwardly, like he was hiding something.

I will not rush to judgement until all the facts are in. I will not rush to judgement until all the facts are in. I will not rush to judgement until all the facts are in…

Earlier, I caught Marjie in the office, behind a closed door, screaming into her phone. More than once, in a barking, threatening voice, she bellowed: “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE. GET OUT OF MY FUCKING HOUSE.”

Me and the trainee were nearby, and he turns his head to look at me. “Is she mean?”

“No,” I said with a bit of a laugh. “She’s actually pretty cool. She usually only gets like that with her boyfriend.”

The boyfriend she has had issues with forever, and finally kicked out of the house — only to let him move back in again. And she’s back to square one in that respect, as she’s been complaining about him again lately, saying how she wants him to move out.

And I personally like the guy, I should say — its just that she doesn’t seem to like him once they’re together again, but seems to forget that fact once they’re separated again. It just frustrates me. And that frustration wouldn’t be so intense, perhaps, if this wasn’t a recurring theme in countless people I’ve known throughout my life. This is such a tired, common, frustrating story to hear. And yes, not to sound sexist, but in my personal experience in most cases they have been women. I’m not saying my very limited sample represents the whole, but that has been my experience.

None of this I told trainee, of course, and all of it was true, though it turns out that this was not who Marjie was screaming at through her phone behind the closed office door.

No, it was her brother. Her brother by marriage, she later emphasized, and after she told me what she told me, her placement of that emphasis made a lot of sense.

Her and Kara had hung out. The girl has gone through a rough patch — I’m beginning to suspect her circa two and a half decades of life has been composed of nothing but a series of relentlessly rough patches, as a matter of fact — and she really needed it. A night out with friends. Some fun. Marjie brought her out drinking with aforementioned boyfriend and the aforementioned brother and she seemed to be having a great time. Marjie even complimented her boyfriend for helping her out to make Kara seem comfortable. They drank, they taught her how to play pool, and she was joking around with Marjie the whole time, smiling, laughing, and thanking her for bringing her out.

So then they go home and Kara elects to sleep over at Marjie’s house, which is evidently not something she typically does. A suggestion of trust building in her toward Marjie. And Marjie went to sleep, and enter: her brother.

Apparently he’s always joking around, getting handsy with Marjie, grabbing her boobs, which Marjie told me without shame and with a shrug. He’s not blood, she tells me. Still. Given that they were all getting drunk that night, Marjie told him specifically: do not touch Kara.

And so he touched Kara.

And she won’t talk to Marjie about it. Or to Kelly. She’s afraid they won’t believe her, that they’ll get mad at her. I feel a sinking in my chest. A knot in my gut. My blood begins to boil.

“It sounds like there’s history there,” I say to her, and then Marjie mentions Kara’s stepfather. Molestation. She told her mother, and she didn’t believe her.

This was the history I suspected. Traumatic, repeating history, where the past is always present and shows her no mercy.

I felt sick.

Later, I’m at the sink in the stock room, detail cleaning the filter boxes for the fryer vats — an activity that I know will take some time — when Ronald comes back to do dishes. This necessitates us being close in proximity, of course, and I don’t know if I had ever stood that close to him before, at least for that length of time.

That’s when I realize it. I can literally feel it. He’s one of them. I can feel the energy around and within his body drawing off the energy around and within my body, particularly on my left side. After a few minutes, it feels like energetic chunks are missing from that side, if that makes any sense (it probably doesn’t) and my energy feels uncomfortable, weakened, and lopsided. I feel violated, and I’m not exaggerating. I try to talk nice to him, but I don’t have to say much, as he just won’t shut the fuck up. I eventually have to escape the situation. I run back to the break room to check my phone, which is charging, and then go out the back door for a cigarette. All hoping this horrid feeling in my energy corrects itself given the distance, which was not happening, and to kill some time so maybe he’ll be done with dishes by the time I get back.

He isn’t. So I tell him I’m going to get out of his way and clean dining room and he should just tell me whenever he’s done.

As I’m cleaning tables, I see Paula outside, who is here off the clock, and is stoned, waiting for her curbside order. I ask her for a hug, which probably seemed weird, but my energy felt slightly better afterward. I only hoped I wasn’t leeching off of her as he was leeching off of me.

It struck me how violated I felt, as intolerable as it seemed, must be nothing next to what Kara has experienced. Continues to experience. For one thing, the energy violation may have been unintentional. Clearly that’s not been the case with the violators in her own life. Not merely has her energy been violated, either, but her body, and apparently again and again.

It constantly astounds me what us humans are capable of doing to one another. Kids being raped by caretakers or neighbors is a disturbingly common story I hear, and while it reminds me how lucky I’ve been in my own life, it doesn’t improve my outlook on our fucked up species. I constantly feel bad that I can’t grow close enough to Kara for her to trust me, but I’m not certain she can bear to trust anyone anymore given how often that trust has been violated, and I sure as fuck can’t blame her.

And what would I say to her? What could I do for her to make things better? What could anyone?

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.