Goodbye To All That

I finally got laid off Friday. It was a real relief, it has been an emotionally devastating struggle to restrain myself from walking out in a ugly and hateful fashion, but if I quit, I cannot collect unemployment. I was laid off without cause so I qualify for the dole.

Dole is only my short-term goal.

When the new boss asked to see me in private, my thought was "Thank Godzilla, finally...", new boss knows she can't do the job without me and she says she begged her boss, Mr. Hole, to keep me but he said "no way". New boss knows that I've been running the office this week and that she's lost without me, but her superiors will not listen.

To them, I'm seen as a menace.

Their stated philosophy is thus: "perception is reality".
This translates into "we believe our own bullshit".
I told Mr. Hole " ... if you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig, but that fact is usually lost on pig-fuckers such as [him]self, since pig-fuckers only see the sow from behind."
(I was so happy with this ad-lib that I wrote it down!)

After that outburst, it took him FIVE days to get up the nerve to have someone else fire me...what a pig-fucker. Any man would have started swinging at that point, but he ran away and never faced me again.

She told me that her boss, the loathsome Mr. Hole, advised her to call security for back-up when she fired me - he was afraid of me, so he passed the duty to her and seemed to think that I might get out of hand (please realize that I would bathe in a pool of sulphuric acid before I would attack a woman) and it might be wise, he said, if she had 'back-up'. Apparently, my verbal assault on Mr. Hole really shook him up- he actually thought I was going to hit him and that I was a dangerous lunatic.

Man, hearing that was music to my ears! I've never thrown a first punch in my life , but I've learned that if you stand up to a bully , he will skulk off- because bullies are nothing but cowards at heart. Mr Hole is a weak bully and I'm pleased as punch that I scared the shit out of him.
I can't believe that he would leave a new, female manager alone with an employee that he felt was capable of physical violence, but that's just another testament to the utter lack of management skills displayed by Hole.

What he didn't know that is that she and I have been getting along fine. We even hugged when we said good-bye. She's a pawn just like the rest of us. I feel sorry for her and I tried to teach her as much as I could in the last week, but she just doesn't have the skills and I'm not gonna be there to do everything anymore. The company has set her up to fail and she knows it ...they told the Firm that she has extensive software experience that she doesn't really have.
The Company didn't tell Newbie that she was a software expert. She was shocked to learn that she is expected to know about programs that she has never even heard of. I'm the only one in the office who can run the programs and they laid me off...brilliant!

I've been brutalized by a barrage of conflicting emotions all week long. I'm outraged at what they did to my boss and to me;I'm insulted, hurt and degraded by the inference that I am not a good worker (if I am so unskilled, why are they trusting me to train the manager?) and I'm a bit melancholic over leaving a familiar place behind...but that passes. I'm also a bit excited about the future. A little scared, but optimistic.

It's been difficult to sift through all the noise and find the music inside the mess, but there is certainly a song in the cacophony; now that I'm no longer in the middle of the lying din I can eliminate the discordant notes and find the harmony, look for the melody...it's telling me that the best thing that could happen for me is a major, upward job change and that it's a realistic goal to shoot for.

This past week I have known that my work days were numbered, so I felt free to speak my mind- I don't know how many readers have had a chance to tell a hated boss to FUCK OFF, but if you have, you know how good it feels. It feels even better when he runs away in fear! Years from now, I will look back on this as a small, but significant victory.
After that encounter, I took the high ground and tried very hard to get Newbie educated enough to stand up during the coming storms. I did a great job and nobody can say I didn't- I beat the fuckers by being better than them. I was tempted to sabotage the entire system, but instead I trained Newbie as best I could, considering the short time available and her considerable inexperience.

I wish her well but my hopes are dim and slim.

In the long term, it doesn't matter to me. I've done more than was reasonable and now I have my own future to look forward to. I've got a show to engineer tonight and one to host tomorrow morning. Then I'll relax and do whatever the hell I want to.

Monday morning I'll file for unemployment and then drive to visit my grandmother.

I haven't looked forward to a Monday for a long time. It feels good.

Insomnia: A User's Guide Pt. 374

Ever had trouble sleeping and have someone suggest that you "count sheep?"
Bah.
Sleep is for the weak and counting sheep is for pussies.
I'm a bad-ass motherfucker, I don't need sleep and I sure as hell am not gonna waste my precious insomnia on being a virtual shepherd.
I like to lie awake all night and torture myself by making lists of things I can't change.
OK, that's not exactly true- I don't enjoy making the lists, but I do it anyway.

Here's a sampling from some of my fave self-torment lists:

THE LOVERS:
I'm not now and have never been promiscuous , so if I think about it long enough, I can actually name almost every woman I have ever slept with. But just counting them isn't enough, there aren't that many and it doesn't take long to merely list them. To really deprive myself of sleep, I need details.
So when the insomnia hits, I start sorting them by alphabetical order, last name (if known) first.
Then by chronology. And so on:
-Hair color.
-Astrological sign.
-Where we met.
-What music was playing?
-Drug of choice.
-Favorite position.
If we were 'dating', I replay the details of the break-up and try to figure out what it was that I did wrong. This leads to my next list- Faults, real or imagined:

THE FAULTS:
- HAIR: I started losing my hair when I was 18 but didn't admit it until I was 30 and I started shaving my head in a show of solidarity with my mom, who was undergoing chemo at the time.
If I had started shaving my head when I was 18, it would probably take me a lot longer than it does to count all my ex-lovers. For years, I had long hair and a bald spot, which is probably the least attractive hair-do a man can sport, short of wearing a toupee.
Once, a hippie GF convinced me to try wearing a ponytail.
I was dumb enough to agree.
I had a ponytail and a bald spot at 25 years old.
I may never outlive that shame.

- ROCKIN':
I used to be convinced that I would make a living playing music. Either that, or I would be dead before I turned 40. For 15 years, all my extra energy went into making music. I have at least six hours worth of my own material recorded- I could have written a novel, graduated college or invented a time machine with all of the energy I wasted on Rockin'.
Rockin' has ruined my love life more than once.
One of my girlfriends used to cheat on me when I had gigs- when I was on stage, she knew I wasn't gonna catch her at home...years later, I was trying to impress another woman with my musical awesomeness, so I sent her a CD. She called me and told me that my songs were indicative of serious mental illness and maybe it would be better if we didn't see each other.
That bothered me.

-GETTING WASTED:
I had a PermaBuzz from 1983 to 2005. From Absinthe to Xanax, I have done it all at least once. For a long time, this was fun, but it's really a difficult lifestyle to maintain and it tends to drive away sane people. I once boasted, truthfully, that I could snort an entire eight-ball in two giant lines. That ability didn't exactly attract the best sort of person, my personal possessions had a habit of vanishing when certain 'friends' visited.
And it leads to my new favorite list...


YET ANOTHER BRUSH WITH DEATH:

- DEATH BY AUTO:
Years ago, a man ran a stop sign and I broadsided his new Lexus with my old Honda at 55 mph, totalling both cars. We both emerged unscathed...I was so surprised to be unhurt that I didn't even get mad at the guy, in fact, we sorta bonded on the roadside, looking at the wrecked cars and waiting for the cops...dude sent me $600 even though I told him I wasn't planning on suing or anything.
A year or so later, I blew a tire and bounced my newer Accord across five lanes of rush-hour traffic. I hit a Ford, totalling it, bounced off a Toyota ( wrecked) and finally stopped pinballing when I hit a guardrail. My Honda had a couple dents and lost a headlight. The police officer said he couldn't imagine how I managed to wreck two cars while barely hurting my own. I drove away without a bruise or a ticket...my 4th of July collision with a deer made me think about that...three serious smash-ups that I've walked away from without a scratch.

-DEATH BY SCORPIO:
I haven't had a lot of girlfriends, but at least half of them have been Scorpios and each one of them has made at least one attempt on my life. Knives, guns, a bass guitar and a Wolf-Shepherd hybrid are some of the weapons employed by Scorpios seeking my demise. On the positive side, a failed murder attempt can lead to some pretty terrific revenge sex. It's the mortality buzz, I guess.

-DEATH BY BOOZE:
This is the one that lingers on my mind the most. When I saw the deer's blood and guts on the side of my car, the first thing I thought of was my own experience with alcohol-
induced internal hemorrhaging and how much of my own blood I have seen. If you drink heavily for a long, long time, your guts will literally dissolve and you will drown in your own blood - that is what happened to me.
I made it to the ER with a few minutes to spare. When I read the recent news story about a woman who bled to death in an L.A. hospital ER, I had a flashback that triggered a serious panic episode, so I know the fear is still with me. The fear keeps me sober.

I'd like to think that all these close calls have made me braver or stronger somehow, but yesterday it caught up to me- all of it- and I was literally paralyzed by thought. I spent the afternoon just sitting and trying not to think about all of the things that I have just spent an hour describing.
It must have worked, because I actually did sleep last night and my dreams weren't at all bad.

I had a good dream.
My dream had an accent, not an accident.
It was full of love and it rocked without fault.

Nothing Personal

I'm walking to the bustop and I'm forced to pause a moment when a blue Toyota noses out of the parking garage to my left. The driver, a beautiful dark-skinned woman, waves at me and smiles.
I smile politely back and continue walking, but she keeps waving.
Her window comes down and she calls me by name, beckons me over to her window.

Me? You know me? You want me to talk to you? Can do!

This is exactly the kind of thing that should happen to me every day but in reality never does. Except maybe now.

" Hi! Hi! Remember me?"

Wow. She is remarkably beautiful. My IQ plunges as a dormant part of my mind rouses itself and starts searching for something cleverly stupid to say, draining resources from my already faltering memory.

I don't recognize her.
Or.
Maybe I do. Ah...it's like a mnemonic sneeze waiting to happen.

"Uh..."

" I'm Kris! From Bank of Generica! How are you?"

Oh yeah. Now I remember. Kris with a 'K'... I liked her, but we didn't work on the same "team", so we didn't get much time to chat. She looks different now, but I can't say how.
I was mortally drunk during that period, so my recall of those days is just a little blurry.
She was nice to me. I remember that much . It's a start.

"Doin' good! Nice car."

Jay-sus. That's not quite the dumbest thing to say, but it is close. There's a second car pulling up behind her, forcing her to move out of the lane and I've blown my one chance at being witty and charming. Her face is round, beautiful, her expression expectant; I look at her and I go into instant mourning for our never-to-be children. They would have been wonderful, talented kids. Our life together would have been a blissful celebration of unending love- but I have already fucked it up. Our future dies a painfully existential imaginary death.

Years into the future, I feel the leaves falling on my solitary, unvisited gravestone.
No one clears them away.

"Need a ride? I'm going towards Suchandsuch street."

"Sure! Thanks!"

Hah! So much for falling leaves and unmourned graves!

This is cool. It's twenty years in the future and we are walking hand-in-hand along a moonlit beach and laughing about the old days which have suddenly ceased to not happen yet.

But first we have some small talk. We live in the same neighborhood, just a few blocks apart.
Good.
She refers to our ex-boss as a "fucking asshole", breaking the profanity barrier and establishing some common ground.
I am so digging this.
Ha ha, yeah you are right, I agree, that dude was a major asshole. Fuckin' checklist this, ya know?

Haha!

Do I need to be somewhere? No, not really.
Why?
Sure, that sounds great. They have a patio bar, maybe we can sit outside.
Park and walk? No, I don't mind waiting on your porch while you change.
Trust me, I understand what you mean when you say it's a mess inside!
It's a gorgeous day, take your time.

She's a quick changer and she looks great in jeans, two admirable traits. We head to the corner bar.

Dude. You are rolling. Don't fuck up.

Kris orders something with Crown Royal in it. I order coffee. Kris doesn't say anything specific, but I sense that my failure to order an alcoholic drink is a minor breach of an unwritten social contract. Not a fatal error, but a sign. Of what?

Nevermind to all that. This is going really well. Kris just got a promotion, she's branch manager at a competing bank; she's pumped up about it, thinking about buying a house...I can feel her imagination from across the table and it is warm and inviting. Kris is very articulate and funny, haha- I think everyone hated the "ice cream socials" at the Bank, but no one said so- Kris tells me she despised them, I tell her that I was actually ejected from one.
That was you? Haha! Awesome!
She gives me a hi-five. Well done!

The ice cream the bank served was barely edible cheap, mushy, terrible stuff made from tainted Chinese yak milk; yet we were supposed to act grateful and obedient for having it foisted on us in lieu of raises. Ten cents an hour more would have been better for morale than bad ice cream.

Kris points this out:
"The only thing worse than having a shit job is being forced to enjoy it".
Ha! Damn, that's true.. I like women who say stuff like that. It shows realism. I bet she's a good manager.
Hello, comfort zone.

Sure, why not have dinner while we are here?

Tonight's special: filet of carpe diem served with a garden salad of earthly delights. Just don't fuck up.

Kris is very animated, I'm entranced by her delicate hands as they tell the story of how she went from temp worker to management in less than a year. She is looking at houses, thinking of moving to the country even though the commute will be long. She would like to have a greenhouse and an outdoor dog. She has a cat now and it's stir-crazy in her apartment; her fingers make scampering motions on the tabletop as she talks. Manic cat, they say.
Her talking hands are not wearing a diamond. They gesture at me.

"How did you do that?"

Do what? My exploits are legendary. She could be referring to any number of my award-winning accomplishments but I haven't even had a chance to tell her how totally fucking awesome I am yet.

"What's that?"

"The weight. How'd you lose it? I hope that's not being too personal...but you look great."

That's right! I was fifty pounds heavier back then. At this moment I feel 75 ft. tall, but in reality I am short. Fifty pounds was 25% of me. I was in terrible shape back then.
I'm proud that I look good to Kris.
Don't fuck up.

"Well, I...uh...well let's just say there's a lot of calories in beer."

Her gaze shifts to my coffee and then to her cocktail and back to the mug. Behind her bottomless brown eyes, her banker's brain is busily calculating, doing the math. She adds it up. Smart woman.

"So...you don't drink at all?"

"No."

"Oh."

She needs to tell me something. She has dated two alcoholics and they are both dead. She was engaged to the second one when he killed himself. It is nothing personal, but if I have a drinking problem, she'd appreciate it if I told her now.

Don't fuck up. Now is not the time to mention my family history of self-annihilation, yet here it is again- the past is destroying my present.

I pause, fumble around... a refill buys me a few seconds to gather my thoughts.
This is tricky stuff.
I am convinced that I will never drink again, but I can't deny that I have a drunk in my past or that a single drink might kill me. I won't let that happen but I don't know how to explain this to her. There is no guarantee. I can't promise anything to anyone.

"I used to drink. I don't anymore."

"Used to... a lot?"

"Yes."

"Oh."

Again, it's nothing personal, but she can't take a chance with a drug-using heavy drinker again. It's been too hard on her and she can't go through it another time.

I can tell that she has been having an imaginary future too, and in her vision a life that never was has just ended.
It's a familiar feeling and I recognize it for what it is.
And she is right.
It's nothing personal. I've had a number of variations on this conversation over the last two years and I know the only reasonable outcome is unfavorable to me- in an impersonal way.
I can't offer up any proof that I won't drink again. There isn't any.
I can't expect her to take a chance - not after what she's been through.
If you are betting on horses, it's not wise to put money on the one with a record of falls.
Given her luck, maybe it's best to avoid the track altogether, but we are all gamblers at heart, so some chances will always be taken.
Some will not.

Like people, the better the chance, the more likely it is to be taken.

I am an untaken chance.

This is an awkward moment. The chemistry is intense but Kris isn't looking for a one-nighter and frankly, neither am I.
It wouldn't work like that. We can both tell, no use pretending otherwise.
We are both looking for a nearly identical imaginary future and that search is what separates us.
Her dream requires an absence of alcoholics , mine merely requires my own sobriety.
It's a subtle but irreconcilable difference and it brings our imaginary tomorrow to a real end tonight.

Maybe my feelings should be hurt. Maybe they will be, but I doubt it.
I didn't do anything wrong- I didn't fuck up!- but I can't ask for trust that can't be given. Watching someone you love kill themself will fuck you up, no doubt about it. I know.
Two drunks in her life was two drunks too many and there is no third chance to be taken or given.
Who wants to volunteer for a suicide mission?
I understand this. It bothers me but it doesn't destroy me.

It's nothing personal.

Big Brother's Vacant Stare

I am growing increasingly disenchanted with work. This new 'motivational' poster isn't helping.

We had a New Guy that I actually liked, but he quit last week, after working less than a month. That is about as long as anyone lasts at this job.
Except me. I've been here a combined total of about two years.

I've had this job three times, once as a temp, then again twice as a regular employee. I quit last winter and failed at a new job, only to be re-hired - good thing too, since I was broke...I've had a few leads and even an interview elsewhere since then, but nothing has panned out yet. I keep my eyes and ears open but so far no matter what I do, I keep winding up at the same desk.

It's the Ant Lion at the bottom of my career funnel.

Today I gave stacking training. Stacking training is the process of explaining how to stack objects of various sizes, shapes and weights, such as boxes and office equipment. Generally, one places the larger and heavier objects on the bottom of any given stack, with the items growing smaller and lighter toward the top.

Take the following objects:

-Three big boxes full of paper.
-One big box, empty
-A fax machine

If you stack them in any order than the reverse as listed, you are inviting trouble.



There was trouble.

Crashing, Burning and Politics

Yesterday a car collided with my bus. It was a very minor incident, no one was injured- in fact, no one inside the bus noticed it at all, the car hit the windowless rear of the bus and bounced off- the damage seemed limited to a headlight and a bumper, but still...you gotta wonder how one manages to rear-end a bus.

Anyway, local traffic got more interesting this morning. Interesting traffic is never good.
To the north, I-95 had been the scene of a fiery crash(above) which shut down all southbound traffic for hours when a tractor-trailer apparently collided with three other trucks that were parked , somehow causing the" carpeting materials" in one of the parked trucks to burst into flames:

Three tractor-trailers were parked along the side of I-95 south near the rest area. Police are investigating whether the drivers had pulled over to sleep or for some other reason. Police don't believe it was for an emergency.

A tractor-trailer driven by 47-year-old Wilson Greene of Richmond swerved to the right, Cunningham said. It hit the rear and middle tractor-trailers on the shoulder. The middle one hit the first.

The middle truck was carrying the carpet material that was on fire much of the morning, Cunningham said.

This afternoon there was a much more serious incident less than a mile away. We could see the traffic jam from the office.

An accident involving a tractor trailer and other vehicles has shut down Interstate 95 North at the Belvidere Street exit.

According to Richmond Fire crews, a tractor trailer flipped over and burst into flames. There are reports that several people were trapped. State Police reported several vehicles were also engulfed by the flames.

8News has learned there one person has died in this accident and five other people were injured, three of those were seriously wounded.

There is no word yet on how long the northbound lanes will be closed but expect major traffic delays in the area.

I saw the eyewitness accounts on TV. What they described was horrible, it seems that the fire occurred under a bridge and the tunnel formed by the bridge and the highway walls served as a sort of oven, roasting the trapped vehicles- it's amazing that there was only one fatality.

Speaking of burning disasters, has anyone noticed that Bush is still president? The Democrats dropped back and punted on the war budget, but at least five members of the House had the balls to say out loud what many of us are thinking:

(APN) ATLANTA – US Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) has become the fifth total co-sponsor of US Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) bill to impeach Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney, Atlanta Progressive News has learned. In addition to Kucinich, the additional three Members of Congress who have signed on to H. Res 333 are US Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-IL), William Lacy Clay (D-MO), and Albert Wynn (D-MD).

"This Administration has continued to erode the trust of the American people and enough is simply enough," stated US Rep. Clarke in a press release issued first to Atlanta Progressive News.

"H.Res. 333 was introduced to the House of Representatives by Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio on April 24, 2007, and asserts that the vice president manipulated intelligence to make the case for going to war with Iraq, falsified a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and has threatened aggression against Iran," US Rep. Clarke says.

Amen! This from Rep. Wynn (D-Spine):

"Vice President Dick Cheney is the architect of the Administration's deception about the war. Cheney persistently and deliberately deceived the Congress and the American people about the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the alleged link between Saddam Hussein and the attack on September 11th. There should be a serious dialogue about the conduct of this Administration. Cheney should be held accountable for purposely misleading the American people. Despite the obvious lack of success on the ground, Vice President Cheney continued a barrage of propaganda claiming that we were winning the war and successfully rebuilding Iraq which is patently false. His statements and representations about the situation inIraq amount to malfeasance for which he should be taken to task."

Remember, this is the same country that impeached a competent President for lying about blowjobs. It's not unreasonable to ask that BushCo be held accountable for Iraq, is it?

If it's unreasonable to ask that, then let's be unreasonable.

"If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable."
-Eliot Rosewater, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater
( Kurt Vonnegut, 1965)