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>
