Losing out and calling wires

Back in early December.

Tempos

In three days, I’m moving to a place where I’m not living now. So, in the meantime, I have to do not-in-this-place things which overlap with not-to-that-place things which are both reasons to absolve myself of petty sins. These “things”, or “routine adult actions”, are really only contextually difficult. Let me argue, then, that placing them in different contexts is no more arbitrary than any given situation.

For instance, if I have a burdensome “thing” scheduled for today, I might create a to-do list and frame it in context biased toward self-satisfaction. The thing will be included in the to-do list, of course, but so will other demands that a moral audit might determine are part of a daily non-vegetative style of living.

SAMPLE TO-DO LIST:

1. Set alarm clock for tomorrow.
2. Feed and water cats.
3. Pet cats.
4. Wash hands before touching eyes.
5. Check e-mail.
6. Responded to urgent or sexy messages.
7. Make coffee.
8. Eat two (2) bowls of Waffle Crisp.
9. Clips nails.
10. Watch morning news.
11. Turn off television before “The Price is Right” comes on.
12. Neatly fold newspaper.
13.  Read breaking news headlines.
    
14. Read wacky news of the weird.
15. Secure loan and discuss personal credit with banker.
16. Check e-mail again.
17. Keep urgent messages as “new”.

Nice work, advantageous perspective. Now I can review my list at the end of the day and see in print what a productive motherfucker I am.

The biggest thing I had to do yesterday was get my Ford Tempo keys copied at the neighborhood Lowe’s home improvement center. It was initially a small kind of big thing before I realized I would have to remove my keys from my key ring in order for the convicted felon manning the Lowe’s key copy center not to get pissed off. Looking back on the situation, I might have just handed him the keys in feigned absentmindedness if I didn’t suspect he would steal my car and strangle prostitutes in the back seat. Come on, the police would probably impound my car for months before they’d return it.

Anyway, I paid for this purchase with my debit card, because that’s just how gold check card members roll. But I felt compelled to find some way to convey my gold check card member status to the cashier, because, when I swiped my debit card through the Lowe’s home improvement center card reader, I did it the wrong way. “Sir, it goes this way,” the cashier said flipping my card around and holding it condescendingly over the slot. Though that last sentence sounded extremely homoerotic, the experience was actually just frustrating because I so know how to swipe my card through a card reader. Any card reader. Just try me. I tried to communicate this fact through an oh-how-silly-of-me facial expression, but I don’t think he saw this, and I was chagrined.

“Some gold check card member,” the cashier said.

The possible uttering of this statement haunted me until I found my Tempo facing front-side-out in its parking spot. “Oh yeah,” I remembered. “I totally did a pullthrough on this bitch.”

Pullthroughs, along with pornography and biding my time, are a regular pleasure amidst so many incalculable “things”. Pullthroughs, to me (,to America), represent strength, opportunity, decisiveness and courage. But most of all, pullthroughs mean not having to back up, and backing up represents repression, timidity, regression and getting hassled by that fucking car impatiently waiting to take your spot. Of course, this aggressive car is operated by someone who just won’t give you room enough to back up comfortably — someone who, clearly, doesn’t posses American pullthrough values.

“Alright, dude, I see your turn signal, I see your turn signal. Just give me some space and it’s all yours. This fine piece of land just 25 yards from T.J Max. Just let me back up really … oh come on, man, come on. How do you expect me to do this with you all.. No, I need more room, man, step off. Come on, you want this spot or what, just let me… NO! Fine, whatever, fuck it. I’ve just decided I have some more shopping to do, I’m thinking Best Buy. Oh yes, they’ve got thousands of CDs with sweet cover art just waiting to be scrutinized. You know what, assclown, I don’t even think I’m going to do that. I think I’m just going to pull this granola bar out of my glove box and enjoy it here. After all, I need some energy for the drive home and when I’m done with that, who knows. Maybe I’ll just get out of my car and do some stretches for 15 minutes.”

That might be the only time I’d stetch in public, though, because stretching in public just looks weird. Or maybe next time the situation comes up I’ll have some better things to do.

Pretenses

I’m going to start calling regular coffee “caf”, because you should be allowed to call anything that gives you diarrhea on a daily basis whatever you want. I’m also going to do this because I feel like a 200-pound mammal gored me in the abdomen whenever I come down a caffeine hump and start backpedalling tight-cheeked toward the nearest restroom.

Decaf drinkers are another reason for this caf initiative because they apparently enjoy unnecessary diarrhea spasms. And I will not accept that. “This? Regular? No, this is decaf. What? You bet it tastes terrible. I’ll tell you what, if it didn’t give me that sweet diarrhea pick-me-up everyday, I wouldn’t touch the stuff.”

A caf drinker myself, I found myself sneaking to the bathroom the other day less than two hours into my shift. I’m always determined to quickly lay my burden down and return to my regular duties (snicker) before anyone notices that I’ve been skipping out everyday about this time for ten minutes to take a shit. The moment my ass smacks the porcelain, however, my industrious pretenses leave me in a materially symbolic manner. And then, when no one is looking, I masturbate.

No, not really. But something even more offensive happened in that very stall earlier in the morning and this is how I discovered it:

As I was tearing off a yard of acorn-smooth toilet paper, I noticed something written in black pen on what was visible of the mega-role. KILL. Direct, I thought. Very direct. Possibly the work of a mob, caveman or young Republican.

But there was more. I pulled out another curtain of toilet paper and ALL appeared in the tiny window. More aggressive, I thought. Or, one could argue, ambitious.

This eliminated the caveman as a suspect and, as I gave the mega-role one last tug, I found enough evidence to indite either of the remaining parties. TOWEL HEADS, the last words said.

Shit, I said. Shit.

Come on, guys, I said. Come on.

But this mental scolding was as far as I took the situation because I know my boss is racist. I did, however, resolve to convince anyone I saw who wasn’t black or white to quit . (Note: This group does not include white people who insist they’re American Indian, because that’s irrelevant or bullshit. “Hey, I’m not white, I’m 1/95th Choctaw.” Congratulations. I’m sure the Choctaw people will accept you as one of their own until they realize that you’re actually white and that all but one of your ancestors shot small pox-loaded ray guns at any Choctaw who wouldn’t give them 125 acres of land in exchange for beads.)

More disturbingly, the act of deciphering a hateful message reminded me of word searches. Word searches, for those of you too unfortunate not to have a lazy teacher, are a jumbled block of letters allegedly containing words written backwards, forwards, diagonal and vertical. Though unknown to students, these searches are specifically designed to be enjoyable and unchallenging for stingy moralizing nerds who refuse to share their answers with anyone.

More importantly, how could any teacher in good faith assign this shit for credit? “Okay, students. For you math assignment today, I will to need you to find the word ‘multiplication’ going backwards, left and diagonal on this sheet of paper … I know it’s tough, I know. But you will thank me later for drilling you on the essentials.”

To be fair, gym class was as consistently bullshit as word searches ever were. Word searches, on the other hand, weren’t supervised by a gym teacher. Gym teachers, to be fair, are only gym teachers because they realized too late that their gym-teacher athleticism would not secure them a job in professional sports. Professional sports, on the other hand, do not allow gym teachers like Mr. Kimbrell a chance to choke Doug Morris and evade disciplinary action. Disciplinary action, to be fair, is a little beneath your dignity if you are Mr. Kimbrell’s successor and demand to be called “Coach L” even when not coaching the high school basketball team and/or naming your son Jordan Michael.

But who knows. Maybe Jordan Michael will be tall and athletic yet uninterested in sports and, on his 16th birthday, steal his father’s beloved Firebird and spend all night writing angry Post-it notes to leave around the house. Then suddenly, maybe, he will develop MS and think his legs are just sore and then try to “sleep it off”. And maybe he will have a difficult time sleeping because he’s drank so much coffee just to stay awake and get some shit off his chest he’s been wanting to say for a long time. And maybe, when he curls up in the backseat, he will fall asleep for a while. When he wakes up, though, Jordan Michael will be both paralysed by MS and attacked with a massive surge of diarrhea. And he, Jordan Michael, will ruin both the backseat where he was conceived and his father’s bloated vicarious ambitions that never sleep.

Heaven

B105, you stack one mean and buttery soft rock playlist. What? You? Yes, you. Of course I mean you. Don’t act like you just didn’t start this shit off with “Benny and the Jets” and then move into “Stuck with You” before spinning the best uncreative cover ever (being, of course, You Can’t Hurry Love” by Phil Collins). This is how passersbys on Tin Pan Alley must have felt, I thought as I turned up the radio and continued to marvel. And now, now, you’re going to drop “Heaven” by Los Lonely Boys like you don’t expect me to plump up between the legs and drive down to San Angelo without using my hands just to thank Henry, Jojo, and Ringo Garza for overcoming any reservations they might have had about combining Spanish and English for the sake of alliteration?

Of course, I also wanted to thank them for writing a song which actually seems to be about suicide. Sure, adult contemporary music fans and I were excited when we heard lyrics set to mid-tempo bluespop and referencing God. Well, this is a refreshing change of pace, we said. Finally, a song that reaffirms the values expressed by the leaders of our society, we thought.
But not so fast, us. Too busy being impressed by a guitar solo at the beginning of a song, we must have missed the opening line. “Save me from this prison/ Lord help me get away,” Henry sings in a Down Sydromey baritone. Initially, I thought this prison could be either (1) lust or (2) his inability to grow a mustache. Henry, however, seems pretty confident about the shitfuzz, so if he would only leave his papist ritualism for the pure walk of devotion known to the American evangelical, he could conquer his fleshly struggle. Anyway, the point is that the prison he mentions is an obvious reference to existence, because no one writes a song about God unless they’re suicidal or it’s Christmas or they’re not talented enough to sell music to people who don’t listen to Christian radio stations.

During the whole song, really, Henry is just waiting for God to drop the stern face and stick some bullshit exception to suicide prohibition. “Put it in Nehemiah,” Henry suggested. “No one reads that boring shit anyway.” And here’s something else the official Los Lonely Boys website won’t tell you: the second verse originally included the rationalization, “I don’t know if this could get worse/After all, man, Jesus did it first” but was later changed to the mopey, “Lord can you tell me, how far is heaven/ I just got to know how far, how far is heaven/ Lord can you tell me”.

I’ll resentfully grant Henry artistic license, but I just don’t know if he’s aware of what the heaven God has in mind for him is actually like. “Look guys,” God said in a prepared statement (4/19/4500 B.C.). “If you buy what I say and live the miserable life I have laid out for you, I won’t send you to hell. It’s really bad, this hell stuff, believe you me. I know I might have gotten a little carried away with it while me and my friends were drunk, but it’s all done now and I’ve got a reputation for doing things right the first time. Look, this whole project actually worked out well for some of you cuz I was just going to damn all you guys to see how you would react. Bet you wouldn’t have seen that coming. Ha! Okay, sorry, that was a little cold. My bad, guys, my bad. Anywho, this is what heaven will be like: humans worshipping at my feet for all eternity … Hmm, what else, what else … Well, there is no else. That’s it. Hey, come on. Come on, guys. When you get to the point where you’ve always been and always will be, then you can maybe bring your pets up here or something. The ones I got are a little weird. Jesus, who designed that shit?”

But everyone knows that heaven’s a drag and nothing to crusade about. That’s why we — you, me and Henry — have concocted a heaven that looks more like the things we like. More like things on earth. Let’s see, you got your family and friends (who, of course, God likes, too), a big house, some sweet rings, nice landscaping and clean egalitarian robes for all.

Much better. That’s someplace I could be dead at for a long time.

Though fear of hell might dissuade people from doing bad, the promise of heaven is most effective at soliciting good only when it is contrasted as the alternative to damnation, because people do good things in an effort to stay on earth as long as possible. This could be as a body or a spirit or a sentimental memory in a friend’s mind. Or, for instance, as a sculpture that gets its picture taken by middle aged postcard-duplicating tourists.

Okay, when people’s thoughts catch up to this idea –which people’s actions already apparently recognize — I promise to buy a six-pack for the first person who tells God that heaven might actually be better if he found a different place to wait out eternity.

“Blasphemer! Heaven could only be heaven with God in it. He is the source of goodness and meaning for ever and on and all eternity!”

Possibly, but most of us spook at that rustle-in-the-night theism only when we’re reminded that the divine is supposed to be the focus of what we were enjoying up until that point. God, for all his Godness, just gets attached to things we find meaningful already– things we created in absence of him.

Look, this isn’t only the Elks wearing silly hats or the town atheists getting together for a monthly meeting at Ponderosa. This is the religions ritualists (including and particularly Christians) building churches, performing ceremonies, raising children, taking care of each other and, of course, gathering together like those restless atheists to eat a whole shitload of food.

Shelved

The first three months of my last year in high school I worked part-time disregarding my knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System. That’s a little inaccurate, I guess, because I started the job in May. I remember the month because the manager of the library branch I worked at cited a birthday cake on one’s birthday as an example of a perk and the abundant goodwill and camaraderie throughout the manila building. My birthday came and passed, however, without one slice of creamy whipped frosting on extra moist confetti cake appearing in the break room. After that, my generous feelings of apathy toward my position as a shelver started to blossom into tasty resentment.

In the event you didn’t know how “-er” functioned at the end of a verb-turned-noun, a shelver, just to clarify, is the lowest-ranking employee at any given library (unless that library is in India). You see, while librarians are busy negotiating insignificant fines and assistant managers are looking out for homeless guys downloading pornography, shelvers are dashing around the place just trying to keep the fucking peace.

Actually, they just re-stock books, and I didn’t even really do that.

Let’s see, I was originally hired because I tested acceptably well in rudimentary knowledge of what has become known as “alphabetical order”. I also had completed the 10th grade at the time, which was important because it was a requirement written on a piece of paper by someone in a position of authority somewhere. The shelver position paid one dollar more an hour than my last job, so that motivated me to temporarily appear scarce and pleasant.

But the job was awful because, like all low level government employment, it centered around the principle of passive aggressiveness. An order is passed to a subordinate which is filtered through an emissary that is backed by an obscure threat which is qualified by a resolution that is supposedly understood by you, in full, and then placed in a folder and remembered by everyone and whispered about for longer than you might suspect. While nothing positive or negative was ever accomplished per se, the assbackwardsness of it all was always in the periphery like the encroaching form of the assistant manager who thinks speaking your name and breathing a laugh through his teeth effectively breeches the uncomfortable space between a confrontation and the words that follow.

And these are people, I reminded myself, who spent six years studying the parts of the outsides of books and the insides of buildings constructed by county governments.

So, at that point, I did the only thing I could do. I started reporting to work two minutes early rather than five minutes early . The rules asked for five minutes which meant the rules required five minutes, but I still wasn’t technically late at two minutes and it wasn’t like I needed the time to prepare. This prompted ranking librarians — people who delight in micro-managing money, rules, paper and time — to begin pushing their clunky war of passive aggressiveness on several hushed and unstategic fronts.

One way, I suspect, was to give me an unnecessarily large number of books to shelf during my tri-weekly 4-hour shift, and then to increase the number of books required when I had completed the original assignment. I was, I recognize, in the middle of a particularly fertile high school love-angst poet phase and work (work?!) would not be a barrier to my creativity. But the injustice of it all, I knew, would only push me to compose magnificent works during those servile hours.

I wrote into the dark at horizons of girls and fame and far away places like Oregon.
I also liked looking at the paintings and photographs on the covers of those green-backed Penguin classic editions and made several reading selections on the basis of my impressions of these. Specifically, this is how I picked out Sister Carrie — a puzzlingly honest and melodramatic book that makes the outlines of the tops of world uneasy again for the stomachs of young men.

About this time, I also learned that the top shelf of each row served as the overflow/re-shelf area of each section in the event that a book was mislabeled or wouldn’t fit on its designated shelf. As you might imagine, this led to a many such events. So many, in fact, that I think I only correctly shelved books when the assistant manager was doing his best not to look like he was watching me.

I knew this practice was fairly conspicuous but I would have stopped it and done anything –up to and including scolding downtrodden homeless men for shaving in the restrooms– to avoid a formal reprimand. I wasn’t worried about getting fired, I knew that could take months. I simply dreaded spending time alone in a room with a man who would enjoy such a meeting if he had confidence. As it happened, the situation was actually bearable because I acted contemptuous the entire time and consequently felt good about bringing direct aggression into the building.

Needless to say, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to send an editorial to the paper when the county proposed an $84 million expansion for the library system. It was corrupt, unnecessary and against the state’s constitution, I said. A few weeks later, just after the library kicked off its petition campaign, the paper called me in for a mug shot.

I had my mom notify the relatives.

After the editorial was printed, the only person in the library who confronted me was a black co-worker who listened to death metal and that was only to tell me the head manager was furious. I looked around the library at the signs reading “support lifelong learning, sign the yellow petition!” and felt vindicated.

Alas, the relationship wasn’t meant to be, and a few days later I resigned to accept a job in the entry-level cashier field at Kohl’s department store.
“I’m leaving this job because it is a terrible job and you are a terrible manager,” I explained in my two weeks notice. “No hard feelings, though. Sign the yellow petition, -D.F.”