(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.

On How the Reasonably Empathic Can Rule Like Psychopaths.

When I first started working here in this fast food shit show of a job, we had six-month reviews and raises based on merit. We had picnics and parties at some fucking park every year where all crew members from every store in the franchise would be invited. Where you’d get free food and enter your name in a raffle to get prizes. Then, over the years, that shit started going away. Slowly but surely, until it was entirely flushed down the drain.

Though I only saw him on the rarest of occasions, I began to think of the franchise owner, who I’ll call Bob, as a psychopathic tyrant who cared not the least bit for those beneath him – those workers in each of his stores who made this shit happen, that made all of this possible for him.

I remembered reading at some point in the late aughts or early teens that according to studies, just 1% of the general population had psychopathic traits compared to 15% percent of the prison population. These were power-hungry, control-thirsty assholes devoid of empathy and compassion who were often able to utilize their charm to disguise their true nature to achieve dominance, profit from their manipulation, and elude capture when they committed crimes. Compared with the 15% of psychopaths that comprised the prison population, however, it was found that up to 12% of CEOs had such psychopathic traits as well. They were just the more intelligent psychopaths who learned how to play society’s game and used it to climb up the corporate ladder.

This, I thought, must surely be the nature of Bob.

Then maybe a decade ago they tore down our store and initiated a rebuild. During that process, there was a day when another guy and I were supposed to help out Bob. He drove us around, got us a meal, and we all talked. It blew my mind that he turned out to be such a warm, reasonably empathic, even funny guy.

He wasn’t a psychopath. Not. At fucking. All.

I say this with reasonable confidence because I’m convinced that I’d know a true psychopath if I were around one for long enough, as I feel I was with Bob. I say this with reasonable confidence because I feel that I’ve met roughly half a dozen people in my life who I’m convinced were full-blown psychopaths, and two stand out, at least with respect to the road I wish to go down and explore here.

One was an Uncle of mine, the other a girl I worked with. Concerning these two, while every red flag and alarm bell went off in me regarding their nature, I found it utterly amazing how calm I felt when in their presence. With most people, the “energy” or “vibes” on the surface are often in a state of chaotic flux, with the core rather complex but consistent, but with these two, who I presumed to be psychopaths, there was a dark, angry, ambitious core, but the surface “vibes” were eerily still, disturbingly quiet. Given my hypersensitivity to the emotions of others, however, as disturbing as I knew it was given my intellectual understanding of what it signified, the surface experience itself was calming.

Bob? He was a perfectly normal guy in terms of emotion. Not a psychopath in the least. This confused me greatly. After all, how could someone like that run a business the way he did? I kind of felt the same way recently when watching some clips of the Lex Fridman Podcast where Lex was talking with Jeff Bezos. To me, Bezos has been the real-life embodiment of Lex Luther. While the portions of the interview I watched didn’t sway me from that perception entirely, he didn’t exactly resonate with the stereotypical supervillain I’d made him out to be.

Assuming Bezos is not a mustache-twirling, villainous psychopath, the same question I had after meeting Bob is also true in his case: how can he run his business as if he is?

As far as I can tell, at least in Bob’s case, it’s for no less than two reasons: isolation and delegation.

The higher you are on the corporate ladder, the less likely you are to develop an understanding and empathy with the workers at the bottom. You’re isolated, insulated from those social ties because you don’t work with those people daily, week after week, sometimes year in and year out.

The higher up the corporate ladder you are, the more you can delegate, and the more you can have those just below you do your dirty work for you.

If you need to lay people off or fire them, it doesn’t hurt you, at least as much, because you haven’t developed ties with them, and on top of that, you don’t have to be the one doing the laying off or firing — you have the store managers do that for you. You don’t have to slowly get to know people, empathize with them, and then look those same people in the eye and tell them they no longer work here.

A lot of people might look at the up to 12% of CEOs who show signs of psychopathy and wonder how it could be so high, but honestly, I’ve looked at that percentage for years upon years and wondered how on earth it could be so low, given how those in power tend to treat those below them. Given the perspective granted to me by Bob, however, I feel I’ve come to understand the remaining 88%, and that’s the understanding I’ve attempted to articulate here: they’re not psychopathic. They might even be exceptionally empathic, for all I know. It’s just that the system allows for a perfectly empathic person to rule over a hierarchy of underlings in a psychopathic manner because it allows them to be cut off, and isolated by the masses over which they rule through isolation, through delegation.

Given that those capable of exhibiting psychopathic tendencies – whether or not they are themselves truly psychopathic – are at the top in our society, this means that they constitute the equivalent of apex predators in the natural environment.

In others words, we have built a social system in which psychopathic tendencies serve as the optimal means of survival. We’ve constructed a culture in which psychopaths, or those who can operate in a psychopathic manner while not being psychopaths, constitute the most successful mutation, bear the greatest survival advantage.

Humans have managed to construct an inhumane society.

We’ve self-domesticated ourselves into believing that becoming narcissistic assholes with a tunnel-vision aiming for the greatest conceivable manifestation of dominance is the way to our rendition of the promised land.

In conclusion, this seeming revelation makes me sick and I don’t want to be a part of it. Furthermore, I don’t think I serve as a suitable member of a social species and I’d like a lawyer who can provide suitable divorce papers for me to sign.

That is all.

Perils of Snowses.

On my way to work, it was about 50 degrees outside with heavy cloud cover, but there was good visibility, good road conditions. On my way home? It was in the mid-20s with relentless flurries of sky dandruf obscuring my vision as I treaded home along a long, dark stretch of road coated with a thick layer of slush and snow.

Fucking Ohio.

A white Christmas? Didn’t ask for it, didn’t want it. Anyway, that’s kind of Christmas-racist. A Winter wonderland? Nay, you snow-loving knaves, ’tis a frosty hellscape.

Despite driving in a truck with four-wheel drive, I didn’t exceed thirty miles an hour all the way home, trying to focus on the road and to keep breathing deeply and slowly in the attempt to keep the anxiety attack creeping up inside of me at bay. As is typical, I was also involuntarily thrust into the role of Snowses — a knock-off Moses of the slushy tundra, leading all the cars behind him all the not-at-all-merry way.

In the past, it has come down so hard that the snow was hypnotizing, akin to how it looked out the window of the Millinium Falcon when Han Solo made the jump to light speed in Star Wars. Even when I could see through the chaotic and entrancing mess of flakey white shit, the snow coated the ground so thick I couldn’t tell where the road ended and the land began — particularly given there were no tracks in front of me. I was plowing the path for those lined up behind me.

This time, at the very least, it wasn’t that extreme.

I was so focused on the road, so fixated on driving with extreme caution, however, that I didn’t even notice passing the two major roads that typically serve as signposts for my progress on my way home. Time seemed to disappear. When I saw myself approaching the bridge I drive under shortly before arriving home, I was honestly amazed.

When I finally got into my third-story, one-bedroon apartment, closed the door behind me, locked and bolted it, took of my shoes and grabbed a beer from the six pack I bought, I sat down and let myself exhale a profound sigh of relief. Like, yay. I didn’t die and stuff. Its Christmas Eve and I’m off for two days for the first time in two or three weeks.

And while it saddens me that I won’t see my family this year, at least I didn’t have to drive all the way to my parents house tonight. The distance between work and the apartment generated anxiety that exhausted me enough.

As was the case with Thanksgiving, my family is social distancing this year due to the virus that the majority, at least in my country of birth and current residence, don’t seem to be taking seriously enough and some epic dingbats continue to believe is as benign as the flu, or even a hoax. I’m not naming names — like, for instance, the name of a narcissistic douchebag that still thinks he’s going to serve a second term as the supposed leader of the allegedly free world — but I assure you, fine reader, such ignorant, unempathic, self-serving and delusional fuckfaces most certainly exist.

In any case, my parents are making food and generously bringing it to my two sisters and I, but given the weather, I won’t be seeing them until Saturday. I miss them and my sisters terribly, and I feel like dog shit that I haven’t bought any gifts or cards due to lack of money — despite my overtime.

I thought I’d be in the clear after this check, but I have increased insurance for the truck, I have to pay my phone bill, I have to pay my rent (since a new company took over my apartment complex and we no longer have the ten-day grace period we used to have, starting this fucking month) and I have a delinquent cable bill of two hundred bucks or so that I can’t pay with this check, either, because, well, rent and food and phone and insurance and gas to get to work to make more money that will vanish the moment I get it is higher on the hierarchy of importance.

Of course, I also just bought beer and cigarettes on my way home, but I need to try to enjoy my life to some degree lest I go utterly mad, and enjoyment has been a depleting element in my life as of late. Does this make Snowses a piece of shit?

This may indeed make Snowses a piece of shit.

In any case, he wishes the readers — or reader, or the nonexistent audience — a happy holiday, a happy zombie Jesus day, a happy whatever, nonetheless.

Pointless Resolutions for Another Revolution.

I bought two 24 ounce beers on the way home from work last might after we closed the place early at ten, but I wasn’t in the mood to drink by the time I got home. So I put in a pizza, got mildly high and watched the last few episodes of the second season of Lost in Space.

Aside from work, this wasn’t a bad New Years. Not in the least.

I still find it interesting that on the night when everyone drinks I elect not to participate despite the fact that I’ve been drinking frequently as of late. I think I just like to bite my thumb at tradition. Any time a large group of people are really into something it immediately becomes suspect and any appeal it had tends to evaporate.

Its like when I’m planning on doing something out of my own volition and then someone tells me I have to do it or really should do it. My desire withdraws.

Earlier in the day, I was thinkimg on how New Years resolutions seem to be a pointless practice, as no one ever seems to follow through with them. That fact kind of takes the pressure off of making such resolutions, though. And since I’ve been trying to write every day, I forced myself to make some with the full awareness that I will not, in all likelihood, live up to them and they’ll probably roll over into 2021:

1) Stop drinking. Or at the very least slow the fuck down. At this point, I would really like to just stick to smoking weed. Weed hangovers are comforting, like someone wrapped you in a fluffy, warm blanket. Booze hangovers make you feel sick, and sometimes they can even make you feel like a raw nerve, hypersensitive to everything. And I clearly have enough of that naturally. I’m nearly always self-loathing when I wake up after drinking, too, and this is never the case with cannabis.

I’ve continued drinking because it allows me escape from my emotions, from giving a shit at all. Its also a convenient way to shift gears and not take the fucking bull shit work packs into me home with me. No wage slave hangover.

I’m a very happy drunk — and another word that begins with an “h” and ends in a “y” — and so its much like having a button I can press to make myself happy whenever I wish. I have also told myself that it helps with writing, but it does only up to drinking, say, a 24 ounce beer. After that, only poetry seems possible unless I want to write something I’ll find stupid and horrible upon sobering up. And while pot may not be the best sleep aid, experience suggests its infinitely better than booze.

2) Draw every day. Even if its just a few little sketches on a single page of my sketchbook, I need to get the artistic juices flowing again on a daily basis. Not drinking may help with this process, as booze and art do not typically go together in my experience. Cannabis, however, is perfect for the practice.

3) Get laid. Not drinking may make any attempt to get laid even more difficult than it already is. The longer its been, the more anxious I am when I sense that a golden opportunity is in close proximity. The more I need it, the more difficult it is to obtain.

Drinking at a bar, which I rarely do anymore, would provide a potential way to circumvent this not-getting-laid problem, but clearly not if I quit drinking altogether.

Though it’s probably not the time to rant about this, I really wish they’d legalize prostitution. It could be regulated if brought into the light, the women would be safer all around, and schmucks like me would certainly invest. I think I’d be happier and more relaxed. Probably more confident as well.

4) Get a better job that’s closer to home. This would either require getting a job closer to where I live now or securing a job elsewhere and finding a new residence in close proximity. In any case, I could watch this shithole town I work shrink in my rearview mirror for the last time and it would be beautiful.

Ragú? Meet X-Files.

Strange it is, how utterly real that some dreams can seem. So too how the mood some dreams are infused with can follow you out of bed and haunt the remainder of your day.

At work, you’re speaking with coworkers, cutting box-tops, chiseling human feces turned to brown concrete off the inside of a porcelain bowl, and the dream, the mood, still lingers, poking and prodding you from the background.

In between breaks, as you smoke your cigarette from inside your car or out by the dumpsters, you Google search on your phone, trying to understand why recurring dreams happen, what the variations on the recurring theme that’s followed your dream life for three decades might mean. When you can manage some time alone, you chew on it. Beating your head against a wall.

No answers, only questions. And the most frustrating part is that some part of you has all the answers.

Your mind? The Truth is in There: Ragú meets The X-Files.

Even so, that deeper part of you isn’t letting up, isn’t letting you in, filling you in, shedding any further light on it. You’ve left yourself in the dark. Is there an impenetrable wall between you both during mundane, waking consciousness, you wonder, or is that other part of you deliberately hiding the answers for some reason?

These dreams don’t bother you, not in and of themselves, and you don’t necessarily want them to stop. That’s not it. It’s just not knowing what’s behind them, why they’ve recurred so long, what it is that they’re attempting to convey with such persistence.

Rumsfeld, that political demon, once spoke about categories of knowledge, ignorance, and awareness:

“… there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

Given the existence of compartmentalized information in governments and corporations (I mean, there is a distinction there, right?), it’s clear as day to you that he missed a category. There are certainly known-knowns, known-unknowns, and unknown-unknowns. They’re all frightening, and the last would certainly be the most frightening of the three, but not nearly as horrifying as the fourth that he failed to mention: unknown-knowns. Things you know but don’t know you know.

For instance: allegedly, 9/11 occurred because the various factions of the US government didn’t share their intelligence and resources. They couldn’t put the puzzle pieces together and see the tragedy that was brewing because no single faction had all the puzzle pieces and there was no picture on the box to guide the sorry bastards. The issue was that collectively, the government didn’t know what they knew.

Unknown-knowns are about as frightening as unknown-unknowns, Mr. Rumsfeld, you have found yourself saying in the past. Don’t dodge the responsibility the government has for its own self-imposed ignorance.

Yet: as above, so below. As it is without and around, so it is within and inside oneself.

You? Well, you certainly suffer from your own unknown-knowns. How on earth can you rectify this circumstance? Meditate on that question. Test whatever answers come forth.

You don’t “want to believe.” You need to fucking know.

Planned Obsolescence & a Trust Refresher.

At work, we have two sets of fryers: the vats in the back, where we fry the fish and chicken, and the vats up front, where we fry the fries. As the detail maintenance man, I filter the oil in all the vats five days out of the week and test the oil on a daily basis to see if it needs changed — which is to say: if the oil is dirty and I need to put in new oil. Then I change the fryer or fryers in question if need be. All the fryers in the back needed to be changed today. This is never a problem if the automated system that runs these so called “smart-machines” is operating properly. Unfortunately, they are not often operating properly.

Today, Sunday, the first day of my work-week — typically never a good day to begin with, to put the matter at the mildest — the fryers were not operating properly.

For some reason, it would drop the oil into the removable “pot” (a metallic box at the base of the fryer containing the disposable filter) but not automatically run the oil through the pot-filter and recycle the now-filtered oil back into the vat as it was supposed to. I had learned this on Thursday, which is my last day of the work week. What I was uncertain of, however, is whether or not it would automatically drop the oil into the pot and dispose of it automatically.

If it did not, I’d have the take the pot into the stock room and dump the oil into the receptacle that was used to dump the oil traps from the grills into every day. This would be a longer ordeal and inevitably messy, as one inevitably drips oil between the area of the fryers and the aforementioned receptacle in the break room. This would, as a consequence, mean a lot of mopping.

So I did an experiment: I dropped the oil from one fryer vat into the pot to see if it would dispose of the oil. At the very worst, I’d have to take it back to the stockroom manually the dump it, which I’d have to do anyway. So I pressed the dispose button, all the other required buttons, and walked away to do something else. After awhile, I checked the pot to ensure it was empty. To my utter amazement and glee, it was. It worked. So I did another fryer and checked. It worked again. Confident, I tried another fryer, and didn’t check this time.

So, as you can probably guess, it didn’t work.

The automated fryer system suddenly decided: no, fuck you, I’m not disposing of the oil. Sadly, I didn’t know it didn’t work, for as I said, I was confident in its capabilities by this time and failed to check it. So the pot was already filled with oil to maximum capacity when I then mindlessly dropped all the oil from the following vat into that already-full pot.

Pot runneth over. All over the floor. I just watched the dirty yellow fluid bleed out from the top of the pot onto the floor in a swifty-expanding pool.

Normally, I would have totally lost my shit at this point. Cursed all machines, the living manufacturers, the earth and all else. Cussed and screamed and been in a shit mood for the remainder of the evening. However, when I had taken out the trash earlier, a fellow coworker had offered me a hit from his bowl.

I smoke cannabis on a daily basis, but rarely much. I’ll take a few, maybe several hits at home, as that will make me sufficiently high and not serve to exacerbate my social anxiety, as I live alone, which I should add is wonderful. When at work, however, if I’m offered any by anyone, I take what I’ve often referred to as a “baby hit” or “pussy hit.” I’m hypersensitive toward damn near everything, so such a small dose certainly affects me, but just enough to where I’m comfortable and can focus on the calm, relaxing, often joyous sensation it offers me. And I can still be productive at work.

And so that’s the state I was in when this happened. I was baby-hit high on weed.

Not one to toot my own horn, either, but due to the pot, I’d handled the circumstance remarkably maturely. I got the shop vacuum from the back, sucked up as much of the oil that I could, dumped the remainder of the pot in the aforementioned receptacle in the stock room, and mopped the area of the kitchen that the oil had coated.

Psychological Chernobyl dodged thanks to the Devil’s Lettuce.

It got me thinking, however. That at the end of the day — which is now, I might add — there are, I believe, two takeaways from this incident with the fryers.

First: it’s high time we, as a global culture, stop with the policy of planned and perceived obsolescence. Cease the creation of products built to fail. No more artificially-limited lifetimes for manufactured products for the purposes of significantly reducing the replacement time and producing “jobs” through artificially-required specialized maintenance personnel and expensive parts-replacement in the interim because it creates jobs.

“Why is the shake machine always broken?”

Planned obsolescence, bitches. We didn’t do it.

The disposal society idiocy has gotten out of control. Now more than ever, with climate change (news flash: IT’S REAL) especially, we need to make shit that’s built to last.

The longest running car runs about eight years. The longest running Mars Rover? It lasted about fifteen — almost double. And without constant maintenance, mind you, even ignoring functionally-irrelevant cosmetic concerns. Without tire rotations, tire changes, oil changes, topping off other fluids, tune-ups, and so on, this shit lasted way longer.

Let’s start building earth-bound shit with that interplanetary mentality.

Second is a reinforcement of my former beliefs: don’t let your guard down by means of trusting too much. Of placing yourself anywhere in the proximity of blind faith with respect to anyone or anything. It’s just a set up for a let down. I learned this in a short, intense, sexually-charged relationship with a gal from Barstow, California, oh-so-many years ago, and it’s a lesson I thought I learned.

And then dumb, trusting, naive me mindlessly assumed the fryers would continue working as I believed they had proven they would and so didn’t check the pot to ensure it was emptied of oil before dumping the oil from the following fryer.

Always and forever: beware of dogma.

I thought I knew this. Evidently I needed a reminder. I suppose I should be thankful it didn’t manifest as something more serious.