Losing My Shit Again?

I just don't have it within me to put up with anyone's shit anymore. I was never any good at it to begin with, having always been abnormally sensitive to external stimuli and cursed with an extremely low frustration tolerance — both probably a legacy of an early childhood spent malnourished in a dark closet, and not at all helped by an adulthood spent mostly as a homeless drunk. It sucks, really, because I'm a lonely guy who doesn't know how to live with himself and feel comfortable around other people without a steady flow of alcohol loosening me up and filtering out all the (considerable, in an urban environment) background noise.

It begs the question: Just how am I supposed to stop being so insecure, terrified of people and life, full of self-loathing, lacking an internal rewards system (the stuff that makes enjoyable activities and life goals possible), and high-strung to the point where I feel like I'm in Fight or Flight mode even when I'm sitting in front of my computer in my apartment all by myself ... just how in hell am I supposed to manage all that, when I'm either homeless or living in a dodge-city-brothel housing unit in the middle of an urban Failed War on Drugs war zone, standing in lines for social services with peers who are growing increasingly violently unhinged, and working jobs that are daily gauntlets of disgrace, drama, and dysfunctionality? And my friends! The one who has it together bores the crap out of me — because she's a mom and a homeowner she's too busy to hang out with, and we just don't speak the same language anymore; and the other, the one whom I have a rapport with, has her own set of problems that she's still in denial about — which makes it impossible for a stressed-out guy like me to properly handle.

Jackoffs fired me over the phone a couple days ago, which I expected. And, while I'm glad to have dodged that corporate-culture bullet, I regret that I left my concessions job on a sour note — in reality, it was a good job working with decent people and for bosses I got along well with. No biggie, because I'm starting work for Funtastic down at the Waterfront Park this afternoon, probably standing in front of some overpriced ride scanning tickets and feeling once again sorry for the customers that have to shill out so much to amuse themselves away from home. Yup, carnie work! I worked for these guys once before, almost twenty years ago, but little has changed. It's boring, tedious, thankless work, that's murder on flat feet; but as nightfall approaches the world changes, gets distorted by a lens of flashing multi-colored lights, screams of gleeful terror, and the cacophony of gaudy music ... and is transformed into one of the more innocent and benign Ray Bradbury stories. Not only that, but if I work the whole event I'll have enough money to pay the bills through August.

I should be glad, right? I won't have to punch that dismal bum's time-clock, canning at least half a day every day just to pay the bills. The local shitter job market is even robust enough for me to be confident that I'll have another regular job before I'll need to return back to that vomit, even with my lousy recent work history. Well, I'm not; look at the time I'm posting this! I haven't managed to catch more than maybe an hour of sleep, even though I've started going to bed between 11:00 PM and 12:00 AM. It has to be withdrawal from alcohol, which if I've read and recall from past experiences correctly means there's a good chance I'll be a volatile, restless, sleepless son of a bitch for up to six months. I guess I'd better seriously try meditation ... but I get freaked out by getting out of breath every time some New Age dove coos at me to inhale deeply and then hold it; I start freaking out about chronic pulmonary diseases, and the session's over and I'm more distressed than I was when I started.

Seriously, to hell with the meds, the mantras, and the mindfulness! Just give me a run-down shack alongside a river nestled in some woods somewhere, far away from the stresses of all the banality of monetary evil, social contracts that seem better suited to control than consensus, and hordes of troglodytes masquerading as human beings ... just get me AWAY from the noise and the people (even the good people in my life who are either not there or a pain in the ass), and just maybe I'll be able to sit down and start sloughing off the scales of my diseased thinking ... and six months from now I'll stroll back into town a better person. The person I want to be when I'm not looking over my shoulders and gritting my teeth.

How to Be a Corporate Pole-Smoker

Today was quite the rude awakening, my first day on the actual lot pumping gas, as to just how easy I've had it as a lone-wolf canner and working at various informal mom-and-pop outfits. I simply wasn't sufficiently prepared for a corporate environment, and now if I'm to keep this job I'll have to make those degrading concessions to a set of dehumanizing rules erected solely to benefit the upper-echelon shareholders and executives, and whatever sociopathic churl owns the whole thing. I don't like this one bit: I've despised corporations and the emergent corporate culture for as long as I've been aware of their existence, and now I'm forced by necessity to either toe the line or grovel in refuse eating garbage. Perhaps there really is no such thing as freedom, at least not if you don't want to starve by the side of a road.

I made the mistake of carrying my pepper spray canister to work, which I did without thinking. I carry it everywhere: one of the things you learn early living on the streets and in low-income housing projects, is that you need to always be ready to defend yourself and yours from thieves and thugs ... I've lost track of how many times I've been threatened or assaulted, or people have attempted to con me or have outright robbed me. Alas for my big mouth, it was discovered in a conversation with a co-worker that it was on my belt, whereupon he mentioned that I was violating a rule. Typically reflexively I flippantly scoffed at the rule on the basis that it's just another example of a corporation dictating unreasonable terms on employees. I objected even further, and in some indignation, when the assistant manager had her “little talk” with me about it and had me put it away. What right does a company have to disarm me out here in the Wild Wild West, where neighbors chuck furniture out their windows onto the street below and predatory jerks pick fights whilst standing in line waiting for free meals? What if I get assaulted on the way back home from work, and am unable to defend myself? My answer: maybe I should sue the employer who unmanned me. Naturally this didn't go over well with the assistant manager.

Predictably, I got sent home early. I'm still going to complete the idiotic Gas College tomorrow, and then I'll call the assistant manager to let her know whether or not I feel I'll be willing to work within the confines of a system that's as top-down and tyrannical as the government of Vichy France. Which means I'm going to have to do some bullshitting: apologize for having been so disgracefully individualistic and autonomous, and assure everyone that I'm just having kind of a tough time adjusting to a very different work environment, and I'm sure I'll learn and adapt and in the meantime my work ethic and performance will shine. Pfft! My inner Frenchman is aghast at the prospect, but it's a necessary bit of work politics if I'm to earn any money. For now; I fully intend to look for a job at another gas station, and to take it as soon as it's offered without giving even a half-hour's notice.

Because why should a company expect any loyalty out of me, when every policy and procedure clearly indicates that I'm viewed as a slacker, a moron, a thief, and someone always on the verge of wigging out on others without provocation? Any outfit that insists that I receive three days of training before I slide a damn credit card and cram a gas nozzle into a vehicle is almost going out of its way to demean the dignity and competence of its workers, don't you think? I must be flexible in my scheduling, I have to bend over backwards to be saccharine-sweet in my demeanor towards “guests”, it's imperative that I preen before a mirror and make sure my uniform and name tag are presentable and Army Strong, and I can't do any sitting down even though my legs are tired and not only is my lot clear but I've already changed out all the garbage and wiped down all the pumps ... what am I getting in return for all this? Minimum wage, and being surrounded by a bunch of wanna-be Stasi informants! Oh, and 10% off convenience store purchases!

Yeah, fuck this bullshit. I'm going to learn from this experience, but not the lesson Jacksons thinks it's going to impart to me. I'm going to learn to “hide [my] sword in a smile” as the Yakuza say. I'm going to despise my capitalist overlords and their soul-sucking system of exploitation and degredation, and I'm going to disdain my coworkers and immediate supervisors for being the brainwashed sell-out tools they are. It won't be hidden in a smile, but it certainly behooves me to learn to be less flamboyantly honest and passionate about my personal opinions; I'm just another factory hand in the Third Reich, so it'll be “Sieg Heil!” out loud and “Eat a dick!” muttered under my breath out in the smoking area. I must always remember: I'm not working for the company, I'm working for myself.

The Fourth Wall* of the Warsaw Ghetto

Another hapless extended binge knocked my life trajectory away from stadium concession toward convenience store and gas station cashiering. I quit my job last week — lol no-showing like a rat-bastard tween flake, like usual — after having gotten hired at a Jacksons gas station, which I applied at on a spur of the moment. Sort of; I used to work at a gas station, and for a couple months I've been pining for the (relatively) meager business flow and serene environment. Looking back, I must have been either desperate to have even applied to work the stadium job in the first place; two things I've always found profoundly unnerving have been crowds and loud noise — in fact, it's why I hate living downtown (and did even before screaming troglodyte tweakers overran the local street scene).

But, before I get to the point of this post, let me tell you ... DAMN! I've never had such a hard time getting actually started working a new job! Incidentally, this tale is about to illustrate most poignantly one of the many reasons why I avoid applying for jobs via web sites. Everything went pretty sweet at first: less than a week after I'd applied I had an interview with a manager who vaguely resembles Captain Onishima, and I was content with waiting three or four days for my criminal background check to clear before starting Gas College today (three days mandatory training at regional headquarters). You know, getting to work, right? Well, all of a sudden I'm logging onto a bullshit portal and having to electronically fill out and sign a bunch of forms — including gems such as signing away designated breaks and submitting random UAs — when an absurdly buggy redundancy delayed my completing this task, thereby delaying starting my new job a whole week (because Gas College is open only Monday through Wednesday, apparently). This redundancy was more of a reDUMBdancy, by the way: this damn site wanted me to submit the same criminal background information I already had, and it wouldn't even let me! No matter what I punched in, the error message MISDEMEANOR IS REQUIRED was returned! I hope this ordeal isn't some kind of omen, that the job either sucks basilisk eggs or won't even end up happening anyway.

So, to the point. This last job is the fourth job I've had in the past two years; the fifth, maybe sixth since I've moved in off the streets and decided to redouble my effort to get it together. Doesn't sound like I've gotten very far, does it? Well, it just recently occurred to me that folk like me (who have undergone some seriously bad shit, have consequently made even more and worse mistakes, and who took their sweet time trying to turn their lives around), apparently we have yet another set of hurdles to trip over. As if the crappy living conditions and peer groups that frustrate advancement and encourage backsliding and calamity weren't enough, we also end up with crappy jobs. These jobs aren't just crappy insofar as they fail to adequately provide for us, but most of these jobs are also bad for our mental health. Perhaps I ought to elaborate:

Most people from my background and in my shoes end up doing bottom-of-the-barrel service work or labor, usually because we're unable to further our education or are too old to be regarded as less than liabilities in better-esteemed professions. This means our co-workers and supervisors are all too often the same kinda peeps we're chasing out of our building for selling bath salts or who have a hard time deciding whether to drink or gamble their paychecks. Examples: I've had a boss who was a film-at-home evangelist who commanded angels to dry his clothing and brought a Springfield 1911 to work with him every day, another who heard voices and had a hard time perceiving people as human beings, and this last one promoted some idiot breeder with his dick and is going to be another lousy dad. I've been threatened and attacked by co-workers on occasions numerous enough to have forgotten most of them ... and, that's not even considering the whole customer-service thing, which even in well-mannered Portland is a spiritually ablative experience.

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• The first wall is the legacy of the past, or the inevitable trauma or just ignorant upbringing and peer influences that invariably lie at the heart of most dysfunctional and self-destructive thinking and behavior patterns. This of course extends past childhood and into the lousy decisions damaged people make and the desperate situations they find themselves in (as much as we're all influenced by our upbringings and our circumstances, without a sense of personal accountability all that's left is a self-absorbed victim).
• The second and third walls are the living circumstances and peer groups that are available to people who aren't blessed with the relative safety, comfort, and mostly healthy interactions those more affluent enjoy. It's pretty stressful living on a loading dock or in a sick building infested by vermin of both the four- and two-legged varieties; nor is there much edification to be found among one's fellows, who are any combination and concentration of opportunist, boor, thug, addict, and psychologically distressed.

Time for Some Changes

After a pretty long hiatus I've decided to change the name of this blog and to make some small changes to it:

• I changed the title to more obviously localize the content, and to express my disdain for the scene and governance of Portland.
• I removed the daily tweets widget because of dissatisfaction with Twitter's tight-fisted approach to customization, and also as a part of paring down my online presence in response to the egregious data-farming and -selling (and -stealing!) engaged in by social media, communications gateway, and just about every other advertising-driven web site/service.
• I'm going to experiment with adding pages to the blog, including adding my old Welfare Hotel blog as an archived collection, adding a bio, and adding essays as I get around to them.
• Comments are disabled because I dislike my inability to satisfactorily customize the inline form; also because hardly anyone has anything constructive or illuminating to say.

Craigslist Rant about a Customer

The following is an edited rant I posted on Craigslist yesterday. I decided it reflected my ancient disdain for mainstream society, my contempt for mindless consumption and the rotten ego-stroking such an economic engine requires, and my ire at tantrum-throwing golems who can't see past their meager, empty selves to notice the people trampled beneath their feet.

I'm sorry I accidentally dipped your bag of cotton candy into your nacho cheese last night.

But, seriously? What do you do about it? You were already whining about the prices ... like you've NEVER been to a movie theater, sporting event, carnival, etc. before? In light of that, it came as no surprise that rather than accept my apology and acknowledge that I cleaned the gunk off your bag of cotton candy, you instead started up with that entitled victim crap it seems everyone in this country's all about, all but demanding (in that tone we coolies know all too well indicates what spirit governs this interaction) that I “cut you a deal.” Bitch, please! Of course I wasn't about to fulfill your desire*. Besides, how would a box of Skittles, or whatever, have lubed those shards of corn tortillas down that gaping maw of yours? I told you the Moda Center would comp you for the lost sauce, but your ruffled feathers must've clogged your ears.

Anyone who can't plod forward through life without always trying to make people feel smaller than her, or vice versa, is a walking example of a particularly irksome little speck of banal evil. You aspire to spiritual cannibalism. Well, I don't play that game, not even for GOOD money! Yup, I'm a rebel, and I always have been; that's why I'm a loser, not because of any moral failings or shortcomings in the upstairs department. I just never could bring myself to gleefully partake in the vampire parade of society, but because all the frontiers are settled and no new penal colonies have been erected I'm stuck out here on the margins. The point being, I'm not kissing your or any other customer's ass — even if that attitude sends me out on the streets, picking up bottles and cans and doing occasional labor gigs to eke out a squalid existence.

I get that food's expensive at the Moda Center; it's part of why I've never gone to any events there. Which is pretty much the underlying point here: why in fuck would you drive to Portland, put up with its parking nightmare, and shill out all that time and money ... just to see something you'd probably get more out of from even a mediocre home theater set-up? Was it specifically to meander the concourse complaining about the prices and conniving freebies? I know that's what some people really do; I've done this before. Well, I don't give a shit; if you don't have the sense to actually enjoy yourself when you go out, don't think for a second that you're going to make that which is YOUR problem mine ... namely, that you're a more shit-for-brained and narcissistic consumer than are half the dope fiends digging holes in their faces down by the Saturday Market.

I wonder if I'll hear about this when I report for the Blazers game in a couple hours. Trust me, if I do it'll barely even be a slap on the wrist. And, I'll be back to my regular customers, who are at worst laggardly beyond credulity ... but never snap their fingers at me or lash their tongues at me, like I'm some goddamn Victorian bumboy!

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*  “Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint” is my favorite Göthe quote for a reason.

If the Buddha Flips You Shit at the Drive-Thru Window

“What did I learn today?” is a question I asked myself earlier as I was walking back home from work, and this is something I decided is another thing I ought to make a daily habit of doing — and probably also log. Can someone actually learn something every day? Of course, I mean something instructive or edifying; not Trivial Pursuit bullshit. Well, I suppose I'll find out. Today's lesson was: If I'm going to work a long and/or hard shift, I'd better make sure I play with my meditation app for ten minutes or so around the time I usually start feeling froggy, and maybe also look into diaphragmatic breathing or progressive muscle relaxation. Because today kicked my ass, and I had an unpleasant moment with a few customers. And, well, as much as the more egregiously entitled among the dunderheads sometimes deserve my contumacity, I didn't get hired to stupidly squabble with my boss's business's bread and butter.

Today's tour of duty wasn't the usual short shift wherein the worst my job could throw at me was one or two small tidal waves of tediousness; this was day one of a state-wide high school wrestling tournament. I wasn't even originally scheduled for the event, but I suspect one of my co-workers has moved on. (If so, a pity: he was both one of the better ones and one of the least annoying to be paired up with.) I had no idea what I'd gotten myself into; I'm one of those employees who gets all gung-ho (and greedy) and volunteers to cover shifts without factoring in such inconsequentials as burn-out. It was wall-to-wall kids! More than I've seen since ... since I was in high school! I think it was even more busy than the Philip Knight Invitational was; there were no rushes, just non-stop business until the last hour we were open (and we remained open later than all the other concessions — lol those weenies!).

I've never described my job, have I? We have two kinds of stands, which are usually paired: the Dippin Dots stands and the lemonade stands. Dipping Dots is just scooping balls of freeze-dried ice cream in shallow cups; it only gets challenging during the intense Blazers intermissions, and of course when the logistics of it are clusterfucked for whatever reason. The lemonade stand, however, is a slightly different animal. The lemonade is squeezed, from a somewhat cumbrous aluminum press that always makes me miss my beautiful old German stainless steel number. No big deal, so long as I maintain a steady stock of pre-squeezed cups throughout the event. What makes the lemonade stand a pain in the ass are the damn sno cones, specifically when instead of just scooping them out of a Cambro full of shaved ice I have to use that infernal ice shaving machine, which takes time and requires a little finesse.

Now that you have an idea of what I do, imagine me doing ALL of that shit! You see, elsewhere WWE was happening ... and double events simply destroy us; something always either goes horribly wrong or nothing goes right. I can run both stands just fine by myself during a Blazers game, with someone jumping in during the meaty part of the intermission rush. But, this was an entirely different flow of business; I needed someone at the Dippin Dots for most of the shift, but my partner was a supervisor running between both events, so I was handing one to four customers every ten to twenty seconds by myself, and these kids wanted an unprecedented number of lemonades and sno cones with their Dippin Dots! It took about six and a half hours of this, plus leg pain from standing and unrequited pissing yearnings, before the unpleasant exchanges occurred. So, yeah, proactive on-the-job stress management.

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The title of this post is a flippantly irreverent perversion of the Zen kōan “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The answer, of course, is “...be sure to count back his change, smile, and bid Him good day.” lol

No Advancement for the Cultural Half-Breed

I know it shouldn't bother me that that I was passed up for promotion to supervisor, in favor of some girl who started working there a month later than I did and who never once worked the only stand that makes any money. She's got some nice tits, she listens to the same awful rap that the senior supervisors do, and I'm sure she's probably never called in like I have and is more social and compromising (i.e. kiss-ass corporate) than I am. Even down at the bottom of the barrel of America's service-driven economy, the losers and the misfits have to learn some small measure of court etiquette if they're to advance any. Not even the Architect from the Matrix trilogy could make the world into a true meritocracy, after all. Besides, I'm really not well suited to working with people, anyway; I should be pumping gas or pushing a broom somewhere.

Fitting in has always been a problem for me, but lately it's gotten a lot worse. There was a time when I had a pretty extensive circle of friends and acquaintances, during which seldom a day would pass that wouldn't find me hanging out with someone or another. This was almost twenty years ago; I've since become an insular cultural half-breed who has grown bitterly cynical about the whole business of human interactions. It's pretty clear from how I write that I'm intelligent, educated, and a decent and probably sensitive sort of guy, with sophisticated tastes in food and literature. It's equally clear that I'm also pretty white trash: I've spent most of my life homeless or in slums, have a foul mouth, and that I lack some of the emotional and behavioral control that elevates the well-bred from the people who do their landscaping. So, my intellectual and cultural peers consider me an uncouth boor who should stay in his trailer where he belongs; whereas my socioeconomic peers despise me for being a stuffy know-it-all elitist.

Of course, my counselor at Central City wants me to work on my prickliness, because it's a defensive posture that seems to land me in more trouble than it helps me. How am I supposed to do that? Oh, one thing she mentioned was to change my vocabulary from a hostile and self-aggrandizing one to one that's more neutral (e.g. stop calling people “filthy primates” and my former street peers “troglodytes”) ... I suppose a kind of crude neuro-linguistic hacking technique to diminish my hostility toward others. Honestly, I don't know about this: pretty much all my life people have been either some kind of problem for me, have rejected me for one reason or another, or I've watched them trample other people underfoot and set the world on fire with their narcissistic foolishness. Even the role models aren't all that great: Martin Luther King Jr. was a philanderer, and the Dalai Lama is just prince exiled from a country he and his ancestors couldn't be bothered to erect such worldly flimflam like schools and hospitals in!

So, yeah, it would behoove me to start at least kind of liking and tolerating people, and to cultivate good relations with co-workers, neighbors, and whomever I seduce into playing Car Wars with me. I know it; I'm dreadfully lonely, even though I'm a pretty self-contained person compared to most. But, still, every time I look at someone or listen to him, all I want to do is leap into a boat and push out from shore, and hide out in the cabin watching Kolchack whilst cradling a lap full of chimichangas and shotgun. I'm never going to fit in anywhere I want to be, and it's just plain agonizingly hard, trying to drastically reinvent yourself in your forties. Besides, every time I make some progress, that's when malevolent fate rabbit punches me in the kidneys. I'm not going to get anywhere without some kind of incentive.,/p>

It's 2018 — Don't Panic

It's 2018, and I'm not going to make it unless I stop focusing on — often exclusively — the negative, undesirable, and fearfully problematic aspects of things. Because this year's gonna suck, no matter what spin you put on it: Trump's in office, Americans are experiencing a cultural conniption that almost feels like a civil war, China and Russia are ramping up their sinister machinations, the Ring of Fire looms large in my drained tea cups, and all the commercials I'm seeing on TV fill me with mortal dread (and awful, unforgettable jingles). None of Slandering Dan's posse have assailed me yet, I still have a job, and at least for the time being I'm still enjoying my apartment ... so, I should be thankful, right? Yeah, I don't know how to do that gratitude thing, just like I'm not adept at compassion, patience, contentment, and socializing without being intoxicated.

Well, I'll learn, I suppose, though I reckon what virtues I'll cultivate will end up more resembling Guarded Optimism, True Grit, Fairness and Justice, Longsuffering, and Self-Reliance — a New World Order cattle rustler's stark interpretation of the New Age postmodern man of gentle strength? lol

Ugh! I should be canning instead of sitting in my apartment trying to feel like The Man in the High Castle. Work's slowed down for a couple weeks, so I've been holed up inside watching TV and playing video games, and unsuccessfully avoiding bad company and the worse hooch that I can't do without when I'm in their company for longer than fifteen minutes. I'll get to canning when I'm broke, of course, but evidently I've lost my taste for it: it's dirty and disgraceful, sometimes it's also a miserable slog through the soggy underbelly of heaven, formerly tolerant residents have grown hostile to canners, and there's always the chance of a confrontational encounter with some jackass who woke up on the wrong side of the freeway — worse in my case, since some of those troglodytes have heard a couple people accuse me of being a sexual predator.

Still, canning's ultimately just exercise and gloom-choked sunlight, a chump-change stop-gap to my ultimate problem of needing to find a job that'll work me more than eighteen hours a week (that I can keep!), and to take that money and get a life with it. I always hate it when people say “Get a life!” but there's something to it. Of course, most of the times I've heard that directed at me it meant something stupid like I ought to take up kayaking or I suck for not liking the Foo Fighters. Indeed, I wouldn't mind enjoying some kind of healthy social life and engaging myself in edifying activities ... but I suppose this is more of an end goal, something to get around to in summer when I'm working whatever gigs I'll be working until the next Blazers season. In the meantime, try not to be too negative, try not to drink, and try to get out if only to keep from getting fat.