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.