Shifts With the Collapsing Kid.

Back arched, head down, ball cap pulled almost down to his eyebrows. To call him quiet would be to make a mole hill out of a goddamn mountain.

He almost hugs the wall when you walk passed him, won’t make eye contact when you try and speak to him, and any loud noise or sudden movement startles him to a nearly shit-the-pants level.

I happen to be next to him in the kitchen and I have to ask. “Be honest: is any of this getting any easier for you?”

Eyes still fixed on the table before him, he shakes his head up and down only slightly, and then gives me a brief side-eye.

“Yes,” he lies.

I keep asking Gus, who trained the kid, if he seems to be relaxing a bit more, if he seems to be getting better.

“No,” he tells me. “He’s getting worse.”

Even Gus feels bad for the kid, and he isn’t typically the kind of guy that gives people a chance. He won’t get halfway through a shift with a new employee and he’ll inform me with blazing confidence that they’re not going to work out, that they’re idiots, and he’s often cold, bitter, and sharp with them. I’m rather proud of him in this circumstance, for while he complains that the kid is a slow worker, he’s shown some uncharacteristic empathy with him.

He asked me what could make a person be like that. He assumed trauma, and I told him that for some people, it would indeed take a lot of trauma. Others, they may just be hypersensitive and even a little trauma could send them collapsing in terror for a goddamn lifetime.

This is probably more akin to a case of psychological projection than it is empathy, but I constantly find myself wanting to ease his anxiety. Suggest medication. Daily mindfulness meditation. A little CBD.

A joint. A beer.

Wanting so much to help when its really none of my goddamn buisness, it so often inspires a rather hopeless feeling and a fear that I’m being emotionally intrusive.

Still, I suppose it’s better than being a fucking psychopath.

A Haunting, Evening Stroll.

10/22/21

It took me forever today to stop watching YouTube videos, get up off my ass, and do some grocery shopping, but I finally got motivated around seven thirty. Rather than drive the truck the short distance, I decided to walk there and enjoy the cool, evening air, which I supposed I needed.

Taking a right out the parking lot of my apartment complex, I walked down the sidewalk, passed by some houses, then the cemetery. As I was approaching the short tunnel beneath the bridge, I looked across the street at a house that had put up some pretty cool Halloween decorations, but I kept getting distracted by an elderly, roundish fellow headed in my direction on the sidewalk, carrying grocery bags. At first I thought maybe he was having an aggressive talk with someone on the phone, but as I came closer, it became apparent this was not the case. He was holding a conversation with someone who wasn’t there — or some disembodied being I couldn’t see, for all I fucking know, but it didn’t seem to me that he was merely talking aloud to himself. As I got within a foot or two of him, he finally seemed to notice me, or so I thought he did, and I greeted him with a warm smile, a nod of the head, and a “how you doing?” He said, “oh!” as he stepped aside, returned my smile, nodded, and said, “thank you.”

‘Twas a little strange, but given the town I work in and the strange people that inhabit it, I am well-adapted to such encounters at this point.

So I proceeded to enter the short, dark tunnel, and as I do so I hear something buzzing, like electricity. I continue to walk my way through it and suddenly, out of nowhere, as I’m about two-thirds the way through, my adrenile surges, my anxiety heightens, and I get the overwhelming, terrifying feeling that someone is right behind me. I actually turn around and look over my shoulder just as I exit the tunnel, but no one is there. Until I cross the street, however, that sense that someone is tailing me still lingers nonetheless.

I get my groceries and then begin the walk back, entering the tunnel yet again just as a train begins to go over the bridge above. All is well until, yet again, I’m about two thirds the way through, when the same thing happens. Adrenaline surges. Anxiety breaks through the ceiling. Someone is behind me, following me, and the sense is remarkably intense. I don’t remember if I bothered looking behind me as I did on the first occasion, but the feeling of being followed remained with me for most of the way home this time.

I know of the hypothesis that electromagnetic fields (EMF) and infrasound may explain many ghost sightings, as being sensitive to such fields can cause, for instance, the sense that one is being watched. Perhaps the electric buzzing I heard on my first walk through the tunnel — and likely also on my way back, though I didn’t notice it over the sound of the train plowing by on the bridge above me — may suggest one or the other was the true culprit here. After all, I am reasonably convinced that I constitute what is known as a Hypersensitive Person (HSP), as I’m hypersensitive in nearly every conceivable respect, so perhaps EMF hypersensitivity is just one more aspect of that.

Fucked if I know.

And maybe the two dreams as of late that I’ve had regarding dead people, the most recent of which was this morning, provided a context that led me to interpret the sensations I had when walking through the tunnel in just the way that I did. Not to mention that its Halloween season.

Even so, I find it curious that on both occasions the sensation came on abruptly and amazingly strong only when I was about two-thirds the way through the tunnel, yet it wasn’t in the same area within the tunnel, but rather at equal distance from opposite ends. I find it hard to believe that the source of the EMF would be moving, particularly in that specific fashion.

And then there was that roundish, elderly fellow arguing with someone that wasn’t there — or someone I couldn’t see — just as he was walking towards me from the direction of the tunnel. Did he experience it, too, perhaps more profoundly than I, and was he seeing and talking to an entity I only felt, however profoundly? Or was he even more sensitive to EMF or infrasound than I was, and so his experience was more multifaceted and intense than my own?

Highs & Lows of an Isolationist Bastard.

I have had an extremely low people tolerance since as far back as I can remember, and I’ve always felt guilty about it. It doesn’t matter who the people in question are, either; if I’m around anyone long enough, I begin to feel drained. Not only that, but I feel a sensation akin to someone who is claustrophobic being pushed impossibly hard into a corner. The pressure is unbearable; the sense of discomfort, relentless. It’s like my soul is being crushed, like I’m suffocating, and if I don’t run away to the freedom of silence and solitude I might lose myself.

I need to reserve space and time when and where there is no need to attend to the needs of others or serve the interests of a person or a place I’m employed at. I need to be left alone in an environment that I control. An environment that is mine.

This is how I recharge my social batteries.

I’ve always been rather nocturnal, too, enjoying the alone time that comes when darkness falls. Before I began engaging in what I call “active insomnia” in my teens, where I would get up and do things until exhaustion hit, I was constantly a practitioner of “passive insomnia.” Though in bed with the lights off, with eyes open or closed, I was awake, thinking or daydreaming as a kid until I tired myself out. In my teens and twenties, I’d have the lights on and I’d read a book, watch a movie, write, engage in artwork, or just stare into space and think, think, think without interruption or distraction. Often I’d listen to some music, look at myself in the mirror, and lip sync, pretending I was the lead singer in a band.

Now? Now I either drink and smoke pot or vegitate before YouTube or Netflix. I used to be so much more productive in my solitude and I enjoyed it so much more. Of course, I was consistently thoroughly caffeinated, too, which probably, at least in part, explains that increased productivity.

In any case, this people-tolerance means that after an average work shift, I’m pretty much done with people. It sucks that I’ll refuse to hang out with friends I truly value or cancel plans I naively made with friends because, when the time comes, it turns out that I’d been around people in general too much and simply couldn’t take it anymore. And I know how impossible it is to get my frkends to understand this about me and to not take it personally. And I know it sounds like a lame excuse, but I honestly feel as though this is simply how I am, how I’m wired, and there’s not much I can do about it.

I’m introverted. I’m hypersensitive as hell. This is simply how I operate.

When I’ve tried to battle against this and hang out with friends anyway, I’ve been irritable, angry, downright ragey — that, or I just shut down, withdraw, inevitably leaving early or pressuring whoever took me there to take me the fuck home. On weekends, I’m always reluctant to go out as well, as I won’t have an opportunity to be alone for such a wonderful stretch of time for another week.

This has irritated friends, ruined friendships, and has certainly played a role in fucking up the rare intimate relations I might have with a girl. Anne understood this about me, anticipated and accepted when I wished to be alone, but I could feel it bothered her, and that made me feel guilty as fuck. It wasn’t her fault, of course; she was just doing her best to make us work. When she tossed around the idea of eventually moving in together, she said she knew we’d have to have a room or place I could have all too myself. Perhaps yet another reason I should have fought to hold onto her.

Any long-term, live-in relationship would require me having a study. That’s right: a study. Fuck the “man cave” bullshit.

I often wonder if I could ever make a true relationship work, being how I am, who I am, particularly given how long its been since I’ve actually tried. I’ve tried to write off the possibility entirely, but dreams and the unprompted meanderings of my waking mind seem persistent that the desire for intimacy with a woman is there, that its something I need, whether I like it or not.

Is it just my nature to constantly wage war with myself, are these extreme contradictions within me as immortal as they are persistent in their nagging, or could these opposing forces within me actually be reconciled?