The Return

Several thoughts included.

There’s nothing like coming back to work after a three day weekend and discovering that you now need a Sherpa to get into your cubical. I figured I’d set up a base camp and then attack the summit tomorrow. Illukiwit, my Sherpa guide thinks that’s foolish and we should press on all day. I’ve fired Illukiwit by pushing him off the mountain of paperwork. As far as I understand, Sherpas always land on their feet (obliterating the bones in their legs.)

It’s also fun to get to your voicemails. I’m very clear on my outgoing message that I won’t be in the office for a day, but that doesn’t stop people leaving me the “Call me back immediately”, messages. I just wish people would listen and relax. I’ll get back to you eventually. I’m pretty good about returning phone calls, even if I have nothing to say. I’ll call you back and just breathe at you.

Secondly, I must discuss Tailgaters. There is something very sad about those pushy S.O.B.’s. I just don’t understand where they want me to go. I can only drive as fast as the car in front of me and if he’s hitting his brakes then there is just nothing I can do. So I will give you dirty looks in the mirror and try to threaten you with my frowning eyebrows.  Just take it easy man, we all want to get somewhere and if we work together, we’ll all make it.

These are the same people that honk at you in the drive-thru. All you want is a few more napkins and extra sauce so you kindly ask the fast food jockey, but the jerk behind you thinks this is an outrage and starts pounding on the horn. My goodness, what gave your stomach priority over everyone else’s?

Thirdly, there’s relationship stuff. I’ve heard a lot of people talking about their relationships this weekend. It makes me miss my old relationship a bit. I learned so much about myself and how to express myself from my ex and I owe her a debt. (Of course she’ll never speak to me again because she has to move on with her life and she rightly should.) But I really appreciate everything she showed me and I’ve glad to have some perspective on it.

No matter how much perspective I have however, all I can say is that every relationship is unique and they will either work out or not.  It’s just having the courage to know the difference and make that hard choice. Sometimes pride gets in the way and we can’t let a bad thing go. We’ve worked so hard at it and to give up now seems like a waste. But it isn’t, we come away having learned something and are better prepared the next time something wonderful comes along. (Unless you’re me.)

Fourth, this is a short work week for most of us and I’m sure there’s an incredible amount of anticipation for the break. I know I’m excited to get down with Thanksgiving. Perhaps I’ll have more on that tomorrow.

I ain’t no God Damn Son of a bitch

I love punk music.  I really do. Nothing gets my blood pumping better than good old fashioned kick ass punk rock. Especially on a Friday morning when the last thing in the world you want to do is drag your tired butt out of bed and go to stupid work.

I was talking last night at the bar and I remembered that many years ago one of my best friends would surprise me with a punk rock song left on my work voicemail. So when I would get to work and start checking my messages, in the middle of the voicemails would be some awesome kick-ass music. It was just the thing to get in your head and help you get through the day.

So I sent my old friend a text message last night and said that I thought it’d be cool if he could find the time to call my current work voicemail and maybe, if he was so inclined, leave an old middle finger waving, anti-establishment punk song for me. He is a good friend and he delivered.  I was happy to get to work and find my little red light flashing on my phone showing I had a new voicemail. (I had four actually – it seems people on the West Coast don’t understand what Central Standard Time is.)

So now I have a good song in my head and I’m nearly ready to say, “Fuck No”, to just about everything.  People have a hard time believing I like punk music. I’m pretty clean cut these days and I certainly don’t go stomping around in waffle makers or anything. I just don’t like anything, and that’s punk enough for me.

Rambo - First Coffee

You know it’s going to be a particularly brutal day when you don’t get to have your first cup of coffee until 10:16 am. That’s just cruel and unusual punishment for trying to work hard I suppose.  Of course it’s also a joy to finally make it back to the coffee area at work and find a cold swallow of coffee left in the pot and that the Coffee Slobs have struck again.

Who are those mysterious people that refuse to acknowledge the mountains of sugar they’ve dumped on the counter top? Why is there a single piece of plastic wrap just lying out? Why are all the coffee stirrers scattered on the counter, did the box explode? Truly a mystery for the ages.

But I digress, the reason I didn’t have a chance to get a cup of coffee until 10:16 AM is because of you. Not you specifically but, the general you, the General Public, the evil, greedy, self serving general public. I hate you. I’m in a business wherein it seems to be perfectly acceptable for people to refuse to accept any responsibility for their own mistakes. I’m constantly amazed by the sense of self entitlement people have created for themselves. People seem to have developed a, “money for nothing”, attitude and its wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.    Most of us have to earn our money, no one just gives it to us because we think we’re owed it "just because".

Without getting too specific, I am in the insurance industry and I deal with claims on a commercial/retail level. I deal with people who alleged they slipped, tripped or fell in or around a certain retail giant. Be it on a clear dry floor or a clean and flawless sidewalk, people find a way to fall and not accept any responsibility for it. They say, “Well, it happened in your store so you need to give me money”. Our common response is, “Well, what did the store do to cause the accident?” and the usual response is, “I don’t know, but it happened in your store so, you need to compensate me”.       No. We don’t.

 People who refuse to read the labels of their own prescription medication and then discover days after they’ve been taking something that it’s not their name on the bottle. We ask, “Did you read the label when you picked up the prescription?”, and they often respond, “No, but it shouldn’t happen”. I agree, that shouldn’t happen, but it still doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility to check the label before you start taking any medication.

Nothing in this world is perfect and accidents will happen. The world is not made of Nerf and yes, concrete is very hard.  But just tripping on a well maintained and yellow painted curb and landing on your face is not my fault. It’s yours and you should accept responsibility for not lifting your feet or watching where you are going. It’s as if the old adage, “Look before you leap”, has been erased from the American mind.

All they want is someone else to accept responsibility and reward them for having an accident, which was their fault in the first place. That’s why I didn’t get a coffee first thing. I had to talk to you, the general public, on the phone all morning and listen to you moan. Now, go clean the coffee room and try not to hurt yourself.

The Games Jackson Played

Here is part of a short story I was working on. I'm not feeling all that topical this morning so....enjoy?

The Games Jackson played

Jackson’s games were only limited by the boundaries of his imagination; if not literally by the boundaries of his parent’s modest size country property. His afternoons were spent dashing about the fields and in between the hedgerows the next door neighbor, Mrs. Dufont, had somehow transplanted from her estate in France after the war. Jackson mostly traipsed across this landscape alone, climbing trees and wading out in the small stream that trickled out along the southern edge of the property. He could lose himself in fantasy and adventure till the fireflies came out. He was happy to have these adventures alone but every once in a while he had to play with the only other child in the area named Willie Snopes.

Willie was kind of a weird jerk. He wasn’t mean but he was callus.  Jackson couldn’t really blame him however. Willie’s dad ran off with some burlesque dancer when Willie was only seven and his mother had taken up with several notoriously crude and rude local men over the years. The last live in boyfriend was an iron worker who never seemed to be at work with iron. He was some kind of Polish Irish German mix of a man, meaning he drank and had one hell of a temper.  Ms. Snopes found something charming under that rough and slovenly façade so he was the man of the house of the moment. He wasn’t outright mean to Willie or anything, but just like Jackson, Willie was ignored.  Ms. Snopes wasn’t a bad woman either. She just didn’t really know how to handle herself without a man around. She certainly wasn’t prepared to take care of Willie all on her own. She was only 19 when Willie was born and was barely a woman as it was.

Jackson and Willie did what most boys do when their parents don’t seem to give much of a damn about them. They had imaginary adventures. Jackson was always the leader of the expeditions and adventures while Willie was given the lesser roles and in most cases was indifferent. Jackson was a patient and rather quite child, while Willie couldn’t give a rat’s fart about anything. Jackson had a sneaking suspicion there was something wrong with Willie but at 11 years old, before girls and other complications of life, there’s no way to really tell or judge. Sometimes it’s just the roles you end up playing in the imaginary stories of young boys. Jackson always imagined himself as the poised and heroic leading man, while Willie somehow always was cast as the Sancho Panza or Igor. Sometimes he was the villain.

Most summer days Jackson was content to play in his large yard, spending nearly all day in the sun or sitting in the shade of the large Maple tree. He’d really only ever go in to the house for meals and bedtime. Not that his mother was worried, she was usually on the phone talking to one of her six sisters or gossiping with Claire Donovan about who’s husband did what at the recent Moose Lodge Dinner Banquet. So Jackson was never really underfoot.

He’d sit and read a lot of the time. His favorite book for the longest time was King Solomon’s Mines by Sir H. Rider Haggard. The scope and scale of that adventure through the deepest and darkest landscape of Africa stirred his soul. At night, tucked under the covers his mind would swirl with the breathtaking action and adrenaline fueled excitement. He’d hardly be able to sleep with the anticipation of heading out in the yard and begin his own African expedition. Jackson pretended he was Allan Quatermain and he convinced Willie to be Allan’s friend, Captain Good. Willie of course shied at the name. He thought it wasn’t all the creative, corny in fact. He got a little jealous about it soon after their imaginary adventure began and he started complaining that Allan Quartermain was such a cool name and Captain Good was just lame and why couldn’t they play robots like he wanted. Luckily Willie had to get home for lunch so Jackson was able to continue his adventure without that complaining nag.

Jackson had a lunch of his own to get to but he pretended it was a trap set out by the evil Kukuanas witch, Gagool. He wouldn’t repeat that to his mother. She wouldn’t know what he was talking about anyway. She rarely ever knew what he was doing. He had asked her hundreds of time to please not to toast his bread on his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because it scratches the roof of his mouth, but almost every day, there was a toasted peanut butter and jelly sandwich waiting for him at the kitchen table.

There was little Jackson could do of course, being the small, replacement child that he was. So he would sit and crunch and choke down the sandwich quietly at the table while his mother sat across from him, talking on the phone, smoking a cigarette. It was sometimes hard to tell who she was talking to, or if there was anyone on the on the line at all. She never seemed to stop talking or give anyone a chance to respond to what she had said. There were family photos of her on the phone, cigarette in hand, a half moon smile on her face.

He didn’t hate his mother, he loved her very much. He didn’t know there could be something not quite right with his mother. He adored her anyway. She tried in her own way to be a mother.

Jackson finished his lunch and put his plate in the sink and went back to the yard to finish the African adventures of Allan Quartermain.

Years later, when Jackson was a teenager and his adventurous spirit had been broken, the most he looked forward to doing in the yard was getting Cindy Callagan to let him touch her breast again. She let him touch it when they were fifteen and two years later he hadn’t seen it again. To him, Cindy’s breasts were just as elusive as and somehow more important than King Solomon’s Mines.

To be continued….?

I want a new Drug

I recently heard of a new illness called Sleep Work Disorder. It is apparently for those individuals that worked third shift jobs for years and years and now cannot adjust to a regular sleep schedule.  I thought to myself that was just crazy. Another made up disease by the pharmaceutical companies to pump out a bunch of new drugs, much like Restless Leg Syndrome. That one makes me laugh.

But it occurred to me that for most of my adult life I have been staying out very late in bars. In years past I might have stayed out passed 2:00 AM at least four nights a week. I started to wonder that perhaps my inability to wake up at a normal morning time might be the result of Sleep Work Disorder. Not because I worked a late shift at some job, but I worked the late shift at too many bars over the years. And by work I mean drink.

I know it sounds pretty crazy but I seem to have all the symptoms of those suffering from Sleep Work Disorder; exhaustion during normal waking hours, restlessness, inability to concentrate, lethargy and sleeplessness at night.  It’s a scary thought that in all those fun years of staying out till 4:00 AM on a Wednesday might have been causing me some serious mental strife years later.  I mean, I wouldn’t dare blame the alcohol. That would just be far too easy. No, it must be something I just heard about and was likely just made up in the last two years. Yes, that has to be it. 

Not only does there seem to be some mental toll this Sleep Work Disorder has caused but there are physical troubles as well. You see, I never sit down at the bar. I will stand at the bar for six hours or more. The only time you’ll see me sitting down is if I am literally too exhausted to stand. I have been standing up at the bar for nearly all my drinking years and now, my back hurts. I know; how in the world could it have come to this? It’s quite clear that all those years of standing have caused my vertebra to compress and cause me some great discomfort.   Clearly it’s not due to my lack of exercise or diet, but obviously from my long stretches of standing.

I wonder if the pharmaceutical companies can come up with a drug to help those of us suffering from long term bar exposure.  I’m sure they could come up with something to help us continue to enjoy the bar experience without all the long term side effects that go along with it. Something like, Drinkitall XM or maybe, Boozalin. Oooh, how about Dionysusian. Yeah, I like Dionysusian. (For those of you that don’t know, Dionysus was the Greek God of Wine and Grapes)

So that’s what I’ll have to do. I’ll have to petition some generous pharmaceutical company to come up with a fake study regarding the long term effects of long nights of standing at a bar and then come up with the fake drug and then I’ll be rich.  Yes, obviously it’s a sound business plan. Now that I think of it, Fred Flintstone might have come up with something similar once. Or was that just a conversation at the bar?

Positive Mental Attitude

I’ve been told that it’s important to have a P.M.A. and that having one will make your job and other stressful life activities much more bearable. Shut up I say. I’m more of a stiff upper lip type anyway. You know, I bottle it all up inside for weeks and weeks and then one day I go on a crabby tear and feel a general malaise toward everything and anything. Like a real middle class American man.

A positive mental attitude was something spoon fed to the worker bees so they wouldn’t get any bright ideas about changing their lives or taking steps to improve the quality of their employment.   It’s a tool of evil corporate stooges to get us lulled into a sense of security and complacency.

“I think this machine is going to tear off my fingers”, said the worker bee.

“Well, look at the bright side, think how much less you’ll have to spend on gloves”, said the corporate stooge.

“At least you have a job, right?” I want to stuff people’s pants full of chicken droppings and make them run a marathon when I hear them say that.  Yes, it’s good to have a job and be a contributing member of society but shut the hell up. Most people I know hate their jobs and no amount of positive thinking will make their jobs any better.

I should step back here however and try to stop being such a complainer. Really, who wants to read about me and my severe blood debt hatred for my job on a constant basis?  That’s just not entertaining at all. I apologize, dear reader.  Monday’s are just so hard to be positive. It’s a long way to five o’clock on Friday and the vastness of the week long desert can be overwhelming. I’m sure your weeklong struggles aren’t any worse or better than mine.  I’m just hoping that lovely woman I met Friday night will call me. (Sigh)

I guess I should try to have a more positive attitude and maybe it’ll corrode my cynicism just enough for me to not feel so lousy and in turn make you feel lousy. It’s tough to do with the mountain of evil (I think it’s called Manure Hill) yet to climb. But if we clap hard enough, maybe Tinkerbelle will come back to life and she’ll sprinkle us with Fairy dust and we can all fly over those mountains and poop on the freshly washed cars of those that held us back.  That’s what fairies do right?

Adult Activities

I was prepared to write all about my lovely grown-up dinner last night. It was a lovely evening of excellent food, good wines, good company and OTC cold medicine. It was the sort of thing you always imagined you’d do as an adult. It was quite pleasant and I was stoked to write about it. Until I got to my car this morning.

My poor car has been brutalized by the city. I know it is one of the hazards of owning a car in the city; you do run the risk of the occasional dent and ding but this morning I was really taken aback. My right rear tail-light was completely smashed out, just gouged right out of its housing.  I was appalled. I hoped in vain that some considerate American might leave a note on my windshield apologizing for hitting my vehicle with their insurance information and of course, I was disappointed.  So I was put off from my original thoughts of Adult fun and grown-up responsibility and it was replaced with a grumpy old man sentiment and fist shaking anger, “Damn you darn Teenagers!”

It brings me to a greater point about adults and responsibility, today is Veteran’s Day and it’s important we take some time to remember the very adult decisions we asked a lot of our young men and woman to make in the defense of our country.  Most of those Vets were and are barely out of their 20’s and yet we rely so heavily on them to protect us and defend us in the world. To them we owe a huge debt and I sincerely salute their sacrifice.

I would also leave a note if I hit one of their cars out on the street. I respect them so damn much.

Anyway, there’s no shame in thanking a Vet if you see one on the street or at the airport or cheering on your favorite local sports team. We owe them at least that.* And if you hit their car, or anyone’s car for that matter, be an adult and leave a note. Take responsibility.

*(We also owe our Vets the opportunity to use what they learn in the workforce and make sure they have excellent health care and benefits for the families they often leave behind)