
160
lbs. Occasional smoker. Bad skin.
Messy hair. Never clean-shaven. Poor eating habits. Depressive.
Unskilled. $10.75/hr,
Secretary. Too much beer.
I’m not a
writer. I’m not a singer. I’m not an actor. I’m none of the things I think people should treat me as. I laid down to write and my wife turned on
the TV. This is my last month in
Nashville. I release my claim on my
identity and take responsibility for the change. This is not good enough yet.
This body doesn’t break.
This body doesn’t heal.
I’m never really sure which of my lives are really real.
These sutures are superfluous, like eyes that never seal.
I keep pulling at the mending, just to see if I will ever
really feel.
Take my life in your arms; raise the chalice to your lips.
You drink me up in equal cups of overflow and proportioned
sips.
But I’m not sure just what I offer; you lift your fingers
and sift.
If it’s you I’ll spend my life with, I must have more to
give.
To me you are a mystery, the whole of scripture come alive.
I wonder how you ever got to be so close to me… so buried
inside.
You freeform endless poetry, sublime and canonized.
I take my cues from disappointing you—turn them into
bubbling pride.
I glimpse a hint of introspection; you legitimize the myth.
If it’s you I’ll spend my life with, I must have more to
give.
Add a dabble of distraction, wrap my fracture with a splint;
if it’s you I’ll spend my life with, I must have more to
give.
I’ll keep looking ‘til I find it—I must have more to give.
As of Friday, September 12, 2003 I
am 27, unemployed, unpublished, without a degree, slightly overweight and quite
unhealthy. I smoke, I drink, I curse
unnecessarily, I drink too much coffee.
I fear becoming delusional as my family pattern is. I do embarrassing things in my pursuit of
fame and fortune. I have a collection
of rejection letters from publishers and agents. I am very negative, and have always thought it my gift to be so.
I have a
crazy neighbor. Her name is Melissa and
she’s an artist. She eyes my cats as if
plotting to kidnap—er, catnap them. We
keep her business card on the fridge that just says “Melissa B., Artist and
Writer”. She tried to suggest a book to
us on the link between creativity and mental disorders. I dismiss that as an irresponsible excuse
for facilitating dysfunctions. I prefer
to believe a disciplined person can become whatever they want—in Melissa’s
case, she has disciplined herself to become crazy because she believes artists
must be.
The only
thing I have going for me is complete honesty.
I tried the other day to print up business cards of my own and I
couldn’t come up with anything to say that I am. “R.C. Hedegard.... person who writes down thoughts.” It just doesn’t work. All I do is pass judgment on things in
whatever form I happen to be inspired in at the moment. I am not exactly a poet. I am not exactly a writer. I am not exactly an artist. I’m just... me... not quite sure what I’m
marketing, my honesty for your entertainment, perhaps. But I want to be better.
I have
ambition. I have drive. I more than likely also have a good number
of dysfunctions of my own. But I will
not give in to them. I will not point
to them for vindication of the way I am when I know that I can be better. I would rather make the effort to discipline
myself and take responsibility for my own path. Yes, there is a lot to be discouraged about, but fuck me if I
can’t use every bit of it for good. So
what do I do? Start a new journal.
This is my
starting over. This begins with
transplanting myself to California from the east. Everything is stacked against me. I have no prospects and nothing to set me apart from anyone else
in Los Angeles. I want to reach the
same people. I want to work for the
same companies. I have the same
starry-eyed visions and will most likely make the same stupid mistakes as
millions of people before me. I have no
idea what the true outcome will be.
Like I
said, all I have going for me is honesty.
With a little discipline and faithful evaluation, I have an idea
something might click at some point. If
I am honest with myself every step along the way, I might be able to catch the
details that cause other talents to derail.
That is the point of this book.
It will be chronological because otherwise I’ll get distracted and
become something detrimental. This is
the strict monitoring process I have set for myself to avoid pitfalls.
First thing
first—I have goals. Yeah, well, so do
you. No one gives a damn unless you’re
prepared to back them up with hard work.
The first step, then, is to clearly define them—write them out, set up
an active, measurable plan. I want very
specific things. What are they? Can I rattle them off if someone asks me
point blank? Am I constantly aware of
them? The point is this; every moment
of every day I am moving either toward or away from my goals. If they are well defined, I will be able to
identify in an instant whether what I am doing is productive or
counter-productive. This journal is
that string around my finger, that well-worn, laminated card or trinket in my
wallet reminding me at every step that there is something I can be doing to get
me closer to the finish line.
This is
more than a journal, then. It is also
the log and minutes of my beginning in Los Angeles. I am recording them for myself in order to track my
progress. I am sharing them with
you—whoever is in the same situation—because I believe everyone must find their
own path to success. I tried for 26
years to follow protocol... I’m not that kind of guy. If you are reading this, then you are probably not that kind
either. So let me encourage you—because
no one else will—it’s up to you and me to show these motherfuckers what we’re
capable of.
I. Physical Goals
(appearance, endurance, assurance)
I want to look good.
I want to feel good.
All right
then, I want to be on a magazine cover in the next ten years with the caption
“Sexiest Man Alive”. In the next five, I
want to be one of the “50 Most Beautiful People”. I want women to talk longingly and defensibly about me, and
teenaged girls to have posters of me on their walls. I want a ridiculous fan created web ring with photos I didn’t
know existed. I want gay guys to hold
me up as an ideal. I want to be a
natural inclusion in those stupid entertainment industry shows about shallow
celebrity stuff like “Hairstyles of the Rich and Famous” or “The Stomachs of
Hollywood”. I want Melissa Rivers to
say she can’t believe I wore that. I
want to see myself twenty feet tall on a screen and know that I measure up.
II. Psychological
Goals (motivation, evaluation, affirmation)
I want to think clearly.
I want to perceive correctly.
I want my
thinking to be clear. I want to be
honest with myself and with the world—to know who I am and what I have to
offer. I want to make my own decisions
and not be manipulated. I want people
to talk to their spouses about how solid I am, how I am rational and well
adjusted, and am able to be so without drugs of any sort. I want to be trusted, to know my emotions
are healthy, an asset, not reactionary and destructive.
III. Spiritual
Goals (discernment, temperament, empowerment)
I want a relationship with God. I want to be a positive influence.
I want to
still write worship songs. I want to
quote scripture in daily context. I
want to make it through reading the “boring” books of the Bible. I want Christians and non-Christians alike
to be confounded by the strength of my convictions, and to respect that I am
what I am, solid in foundation but gracious in practice. I want the Church body to look outward and
the world to look inward; toward the doorframe I stand in and lean against,
actively understanding, as I do, and participating in both spheres.
IV. Social Goals
(family, friendship, fellowship)
I want to experience love. I want to exude love.
I want to
not work on holidays. I want weekends
and vacations, and to retire early and devote myself to family and
friends. I want date nights and
community volunteer days, to be the person people are comfortable visiting or
calling up at any random hour of night.
I want my tithing to go directly to the people who need it most. I want to make memories for people, the way
people made poetry for me. I mean to be
a force of good in individuals’ lives, an empathetic inspiration to anyone
needing comfort or guidance.
V. Intellectual
Goals (learning, earning, discerning)
I want to keep learning.
I want to keep teaching.
I want to
finish my BA. I want to learn everyone
else’s job. I want to connect with the
unappreciated and speak eloquently for those with no audible voice. I want to earn respect through
discipline and hard work, to show myself worthy for any position I’m given, and
to guide by example. I want to “speak
softly and carry a big stick”, to not demand anything I do not merit. I want to be respectful and appropriate, to
live in humility and submission as a man of question, not overbearing opinions,
nor tradition. I want to live in true
wisdom, tempered with structure, accountable to both God and humanity.
VI. Professional
Goals (reputation, situation, concentration)
I want to be wealthy.
I want to be renowned.
I want to
be a multi-billionaire. I want to be a
brand name. I want my money to make
money, and the profit from that to make more money. I want to buy Disney and Vivendi—or to have the option—or to have
the power to change their direction. I
want my purity of vision to restructure the world. I want people to forget that I was ever human, that I was once a
poor aspiring artist collecting rejection letters and not getting callbacks on
jobs. I don’t want luxury for luxury’s
sake, but to esteem highly the ethic and endurance that ultimately pays off if
a heart remains pure. I want the people
around me to be protected and secure, to be facilitated in honest endeavors and
to reach out with charity and spread the gospel with liberal generosity. I don’t want in order to have,
but in order to increasingly give.
And so it
is. My goals are set out and
defined. I think they are a good model,
but I can only lay out my own plan. The
important thing is that each person adapt him/herself to his/her own course,
and find a unique path faithful before God.
The plans must be as distinct, as different as each individual. What follows in this journal will be mine,
but it will only be a part. The full
picture will not be seen until long after I’ve passed, long after everything
has been presented and the aftereffects felt.
It should be interesting….
At-A-Loss Angeles: New Resident
Already Unhappy
I don’t ask too terribly much. A little common sense. Tempered with a little grace. I’m new here, but for the love of God, could
somebody explain California’s welcoming committee? I understand the difficulty in finding the right place to rent—we
had droves of starry-eyed, delusional “talent” arriving in Nashville, too. My wife and I spent our first few days
ruling out areas with more graffiti than movie ads, or places where we couldn’t
read the billboards; sort of opting for places we could actually feel safe
coming home to after ten. So we ended
up in Glendale.
That’s right, Glendale. The town that time forgot. Walking down Honolulu and the Montrose area,
I couldn’t see how any of the shops stay open.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re cute—it just felt like a movie set that we
weren’t supposed to be walking around.
Only Matt at the bank made it slightly more comfortable. Which brings me to my next rant, on
financial issues.
First off, you need to anticipate
the cost of moving in to a physical house.
In this case, the physical house only has one up-to-date electrical
outlet (the remainder being those old two-prong type—I mention this only
because my new energy efficient AC just quit working, which is why I’m writing
this at three in the morning instead of sleeping); a gas water heater without a
drip pan, at an angle much like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which makes a
spectacular banging noise whenever plumbing is used; and walls that look like
they were once crackle-painted. So yes,
we dropped the initial $1800 to be able to unload our rental truck, just one
day late, the landlady all the while calling to make sure we switched all the
utilities immediately to our name (who ever would have thought of that?),
and making sure we knew to dial “1” before an “800” number. She also said we had missed a school
payment, which is impossible since they are still in deferment. Nonetheless, she was very nervous to rent to
us, and absolutely WOULD NOT take Travelers Cheques, which is why we opened the
account at Washington Mutual. After
that goodly chunk of money, my wife’s parents and brother helped us buy an
energy efficient refrigerator.
Our new bank account would have
been very helpful starting out, except that it generally takes 7-10 business
days to receive an ATM card and real checks.
So writing a check or running a debit for groceries was out. Which brings up another way California has
already seceded from the rest of the country.
Let’s say a person’s brand new check card can’t be activated by the 24
hour, 7-day activation line because “It’s the weekend” (how that makes sense,
I’m not sure), but the person does have their new checks. California grocery stores can only
accept checks if you have a California drivers license—regardless of
where the money is. Keep that in mind,
we’re coming back to it.
Upon entering the state, you have
roughly twenty days to register your car and obtain a California drivers
license. The DMV recommend you make an
appointment. Therein lies the
problem—the next available appointment was after the allotted time
period. So, we went in at 10:40... and
left around 3:30. But we were
prepared. Okay, my wife was—I still
need to wait 7-10 days for a certified copy of my Birth Certificate, because
apparently in the year 2003 we still cannot verify Vital Records online among
government agencies. Also, no one in
California is able to provide you with an estimate of what registration might
cost. All we know for sure is that it
is about to triple (thanks to Gray Davis).
But, like I say, we were prepared—or so we thought until the somewhat abrupt
and humorless man at the window asked for our Marriage Certificate. But it’s okay, as soon as we said we weren’t
told we needed it, he sent us to a closed window to speak to a supervisor who
wasn’t there. Soon enough that was
resolved, the rude man was reprimanded, it turned out I was right and did not
need it, and my wife finally got her license.
No wait... I’m sorry, she got a piece of paper that said “Not A Valid
License” and was told she should receive it in about four weeks. This is the part where you recall that we
can’t write checks, and the part where you do the math and figure that four
weeks is well after the allotted time period.
All I’m saying is, those little laminating machines aren’t that
expensive—I know high school students who could make me a license faster.
All of those inconveniences and
mounting charges—even down to the smog check—would be fine with me, if it
weren’t for one tiny little detail. I
still need a job. It’s as hard to get a
call back from the local Starbucks as it is an agent. Even Staples makes you take an hour-long test before considering your
application (I mention this only
because my printer stopped working yesterday and I could have used their
discount). Put me to work and I’ll shut
up. Otherwise, lookout L.A., there’s a
new writer in town... and he don’t look happy.
Used to be the most succinct thing I could say was “I want
you.”
Recently beams of uncertainty have shifted aside.
Animal instinct sniffs the slums of Los Angeles in the
afternoon,
the dirty streets, graffiti and en Español Hollywood signs.
All my dreams of never dreaming I would
live here in the hollow heart of archery,
forsake an industry where once a week
street cleaners sweep the filters of the currency.
Another line, another quatrain or a tag-line
from a nonsense of urgency—
emerge another scripted writer with a tendency
to choose money over pay.
It is perfectly clear,
no one here can see past yesterday.
Where nothing is as it appears,
no one here can see past yesterday.
Everyone still talking about how wonderful everything was,
and presently contently residing off residuals from then.
Every buzz and each commotion stoking
embers from memberships forgotten,
former child stars and has-beens groaning
no one knows just what to do with them.
Still the star-painted faces of admiration, pasted off
Sunset,
offset the glare from the warehoused soundstages’
painstaking detail.
With job opportunities dwindling like tinder from both ends;
pick up a check, they pick your pockets, pick professions
carefully for the sale.
It is perfectly clear,
no one here can see past yesterday.
Through the thick cloud of hopes and fears,
no one can see past yesterday.
Now comes the barrage, streaming
through vertical blinds with retiring sun.
Another two hours wreck themselves against twisted vertebrae in plastic
chair. Breathing comes heavier upon
each throbbing temple, inanely following, with a perpetual “11” in the
forehead, faceless drones incapable of expression, reminding me of my own
accumulating stack of rejection letters.
I switch my cell phone on, then quickly off again as another succession
begins with waves of dread in accents and ancient languages resurfacing. I think of my few comforts back at the house
and wonder how long it will be—eternity perhaps, so overused—before I can enjoy
anything at all. An unplanned,
misplaced conglomeration of suits and sneakers picks through service trays
uncomfortably, and I shift position to upright and outside.
Sitting for
a second interview at Starbucks in La Canãda—the sixth Starbucks I’ve applied
to. It’s busy. A worker is late, so I’ll be pushed aside. I’m up to five cigs for the day, as I spent
the first half online searching for HR info at local studios. I was physically nauseous driving here, my
only prospect other than Häagen-Dazs. I
dread stepping foot, again, behind a counter.
If I were in school I would almost be guaranteed an internship. I wait for Roe and think about how absurd it
is that I’ll be making half what I left in Nashville. Ridiculous people make hundreds a day, and I’ve been unemployed
for over a month, with rent and car payments coming up. I’m terrified. I don’t want to serve people again. I don’t want to take phone calls. I want to silently work around a set, behind the cameras and
crew, unnoticed. I want to tend to
details on my own, see things trained eyes overlook and correct problems
independently of supervision. I want
the consumer world far, far behind. I
want to retain my empathy for the server… but God I’m tired of that
world. I want to create. I want to be paid for my mind and hands….
Back again.
Repeat of yesterday. Only difference
is, today I’m wearing jeans. And the
smog has rendered the mountains invisible.
Sent online applications to the top five agencies.
Seems a
California version of Belmont… times three.
I haven’t spoken much this morning… could break down at any moment. I am hard and dark without trying to
be. The projector gives prominent
writing credits—Peter Furler wrote this one.
I still don’t get church. Don’t
take that wrong; it’s no different than how I don’t get anything else. I can understand why masses flock to it;
I’ve just never been one of the masses.
I’m so frustrated. I keep being
pointed to what I don’t want to do. I
have no interest in starting a company.
I don’t sit around thinking what will sell. I just react to things and create from it. Nobody knows what I am.
“What could
separate us from the love of God?” The
bald man talks about job searching, and God’s love being constant—that the
newness is fresh every day.
I stopped
eating yesterday afternoon. We set out
midday, jobless still, and the car stuttered through city traffic like the
transmission was slipping. We have $56
to our name. Less… Marci bought
cigarettes. We can’t make rent next
week, so have to borrow from parents again.
I printed
an iron-on and made a “Hire Me” t-shirt with my qualifications on it that the
humorless HR girl at Warner Bros. didn’t think was funny. Nevertheless, I go back today for an
interview for a Sales Associate position at Central Perk. I applied to six more jobs yesterday. Marci and I spent the day taking turns in
tears.
I wish
these cats would go away, staring up at me as if I have something to
offer. I obviously don’t. This, right now, is the poorest, most trying
time of my life. I don’t know what else
to do.
Weight:
150, Cigarettes: 0
Actually,
this is more thrilling than I expected.
The sales position is inside the functioning studio. I thought it would be a tourist thing—which
it still partly is, but just to be on the location is tremendous. So much security and activity. I’m humbled just to get a Visitor Pass. There’s a Starbucks here, a Ben &
Jerry’s and a Jamba Juice. Lots of movie
posters I didn’t know they were associated with. I get the sense I’m up against hundreds of applicants.
Marci is
sitting in the car waiting for me. I
almost cry again just that she’s so supportive… dressed up and waiting when she
didn’t have to come. But I would have
gotten lost had she not.
I’m still
broken, but better. The place is in
biking distance—well, about ten miles.
I’m dressed in my uncomfortable dress clothes. I kind of want this now.
Badly.
Now I’m thinking
about studios all day. A moment ago it
occurred to me that friends and family are going to start visiting soon. For many on the East Coast we’re the
settlers. We have to succeed. Imagine my cousin from New York, and all I
can show him is the mall. That just
won’t work. He’s relying on me. And my brother, the photographer, needs
connections to expand his business. The
elite out here would eat his work up.
Okay, so right now we can’t afford groceries or cat litter, but a lot of
people are counting on us to make it.
I had my
Warner Bros. interview today and Robert was a wonderful inspiration. I’m tremendously indebted for his advice and
encouragement. He said one of the most
important things out here is to be specific when someone asks what you
want. He said that people who can
help you want to help you; they just need to know the details. It was nearly a 45 minute interview, with
Kelli there part of the time, and I felt good about it. Not about my fumbling ramblings, but in the
interest Robert showed. He seemed
sincere. I wondered if my squirming
account of my Christian background made him uncomfortable. I don’t know what’s happened to me; I can’t
speak or write eloquently anymore. I
think this ridiculous job search—this lack of callbacks and these fruitless
interviews—must have crushed me.
Most of my confidence is gone. A little was restored today when Marci got
hired temporarily to cover an upcoming Union strike at Vons (that’s right, a
grocery store) and even though they don’t usually hire relatives, I was asked
to come in as well. In that case Marci
was right, and I was wrong, about calling places being ineffective. We have a three-hour training session first
thing in the morning, but aren’t guaranteed any work because the strike doesn’t
start until October 5th, if at all.
So we committed to keeping open for the possibility of work. But the paid hours tomorrow are enough to
believe my 24-hour protest fast worked, so I’m eating again, for now.
I spent a
good while online looking into Hot Topic, to see if there’s any potential of
tying them to GrimMISC, but it was inconclusive. I’m thinking I’ll proceed with the designs and begin offering to
produce everything (the alleged merchandise) myself. If it takes, it takes. If
not, I keep working, keep adapting and adjusting.
I swore I
was through writing once I reached L.A., but it’s always been the product of
discontentment and frustration, my way of sorting things out and reevaluating,
so I guess I’m locked in for another. I
really ought to put my efforts into something more productive. I’m thinking “Special Skills” section of my
resume. There is so much I can’t do, no
one cares if I write it down. Diaries
were never meant to sell. I don’t know
why anyone keeps them.
I should note,
however, that I’m settled, that everyone is not so horrible as I supposed. The longer you’re here, the more people you
meet, the more humanity and goodness you find.
(Who the
hell just wrote that?)
Spent
yesterday, while Marci was at work, cleaning for Allie’s visit, and to clear my
head. On her way home the car started
sputtering. Cigarettes: 2. The house was immaculate. I made calls to update people. I meant to make the bike ride to Warner to
time it, but the front tire was low, so I fixed the front brakes instead. Called Jay to wish him a Happy Birthday, and
he forwarded me $200, which I am most likely about to spend for a diagnostic.
Our service person is from
Nashville. He asked why we moved out
here and Marci said “work”. Boy, isn’t
that a laugh. I’m terrified that I
won’t get this job. Meanwhile, more
people are praying for me than I’ve even met.
I have to think that I don’t interview all that well, since I’ve gotten
only hesitance and no fruition. Marci
is waiting with me this time. I guess I
asked yesterday, “Why does God hate me?
I’ve done nothing.” Guess I
should have gone to church.
Another six
AM morning after being up past one. The
past few days have seemed busy, even being unemployed. Allie left last Saturday and I spent the
weekend painting cabinets in the garage of Aunt Betty’s new house. Her professional estimate for the rest of
the house was $34,000. I’m sure I could
do it for less.
[Good Day
L.A. happens to be on right now and it’s amazing how unprofessional they’re
allowed to be. I’m often embarrassed
for them.]
I’m at
Saturn again for the catalytic converter and an oil change.
[Aside from
my wife, blondes are irritating. They’re
tacky and cheap, and I think the darker the hair, the deeper the soul.]
For a frame
of reference, Arnold Schwarzenneger was just elected Governor by way of
recalling Gray Davis, Dakota’s “Run Ronnie Run!” that Bruce worked on is out on
DVD, and the supermarket labor strike begins tomorrow. We don’t have TV yet, so I don’t know how
intensely we’ll be hated, but Marci and I begin our Strike Relief at nine in
the morning. I’m thinking about renting
“Hoffa” tonight.
As for the
rest of our time of late, we’ve been at the bank frequently making deposits
from God knows where, shopping for new interview and work clothes, revising
resumes and making phone calls. I’ve
been obsessed with sex with my wife, so I’ve been hanging pictures of her in
the room and positioning mirrors everywhere, and hooked up two TVs to the
camcorder to see from every angle. I’m
sure it would be dirty and improper if it were not my wife, but it’s my
Christian duty to enjoy her. And I do.
Changing
directions, the more I look into Warner Bros., the more I want it. I sent homemade thank you cards to my four
interviewers and followed up with emails and phone calls. Now I wait, and continue checking the
website. Meanwhile, I interviewed with
See’s Candies yesterday with hopes for a callback by the end of the month.
I got
another call for W2s from the background check people, because Catholic
Charities kept up a two-week pattern of losing paperwork and not responding, so
I prepared an “Email-By-Request Background Verification” packet while revising
my resume again. In addition, I’m
deleting all the personal information and self-promotion from the website. I realized last Friday, while at a taping of
“King of Queens” that only taking my art seriously will set me apart from everyone
else. I asked one of the ushers how to
get a job at Sony Pictures and he said, “Honestly, you have to know someone… or
try the website for half a year or more.”
So I thought, forget it… I’ll stand apart by being the best at what I
do.
Ah, this
just in… the replacement part for my car was welded wrong, so they have to
reorder. So I’ll be back next
week. Ah well, another cup of coffee at
Saturn. I like this dealership. The one guy at the service desk reminds me
of Buddy from “Charles In Charge”—the guy who became “Bibleman” on the
Christian market. The girl at the
payment desk is pregnant.
Marci came
home from The Gap in tears the other night, just for hating it so much—the
pressure to sell. Corporations no
longer seem to believe that a superior product will sell itself. Rather, they push to be sure every person to
enter the store buys an average of $80 in merchandise, because that’s just
what we need. The only good thing about
the job is that she made a friend—who will be moving soon.
We haven’t
seen Didi in a week because we’ve both been sick. Bam thought it would be funny to crash Bruce’s rental car through
a wall in the room where he was sleeping.
Cops said if he’d hit a foot or two over the roof would’ve collapsed and
killed him. Ha, ha. Good one, Bam. Thanks, MTV, for encouraging responsible behavior.
So the
Union chose Vons for the strike, which started at 10:30. Which means I’ll get called in tomorrow,
first thing. Marci will be at Gap, so
I’m going in alone. Not a great way to
make friends in our community, but I’m fundamentally opposed to the modern
union. Marci bought me a 3-pack of Nat
Sherman Mints… I expect I’ll go through them quickly. I kept praying and bargaining with God for the strike not to
happen, so I’m a bit disappointed.
These people can’t afford to strike.
The Union mandates their actions.
They vote without hearing an outsider’s perspective: A) No one should tell a company how it has
to operate. B) There are millions of
people who would be happy to get a fraction of the pay and benefits they think
they’re entitled to. C) Who do you
think pays for their benefits?
Me and you, every time we buy groceries. If they would accept less, the prices could lower and everyone’s
bills—theirs’ included—would be more reasonable.
I don’t want to scan
groceries. Ever. Much less during a strike, with hundreds of
people hating me. It can only feed
itself, and worsen every day while the workers get more desperate. They shouldn’t strike. It’s a bad idea. Yes, it’s unfortunate that the companies have to offer less. But that’s life. It never promised to be easy or carefree. We just endure. We do whatever we can and hope it’s enough. I hope to God what I’m doing is enough. I signed papers yesterday to work for See’s
Candies. I’m officially hired; only it
doesn’t start until late October or early November. I tried to relax today, but kept pacing. I felt nauseous at the thought of Vons.
Fuck you ingrates for
striking. Now I have to do your work
under deplorable conditions, with almost no preparation. And you’re going to yell at me for helping
keep a job for you to come back to at will.
I’m resolved to ignore you all.
I’m angry that you put everyone in this position. I want a studio job, not a grocery
store. But I’m more desperate than you
can imagine. Suck it up and accept your
lot. Take your fucking job back.
I go to bed with the phone on my head, waiting for the call.
I think it’s
Saturday. I’m not really sure. I’ve been working at Vons since Sunday. On day three they made me the manager of
their Starbucks. There have been a few
stories on the daily news about the strike, and a few talk radio shows have
been devoted to it. Other than that,
things have been quiet. We’ll make rent
this month. We can afford cable
finally. The strikers are trying
numerous tactics, not all of them quite ethical. I rode my bike to work at 5:30 this morning.
Darlene and Suzie came up from Betty’s,
where they’re staying for a women’s conference, so we went to Michelina’s for
pizza. I’m starting to feel more
comfortable on Sunset. It reminds me of
New York. Darlene spent the last few
days in prayer (her usual mode) and had a vision that my feet were bound, but
God was about to cut the rope. She
sensed that it was more about a position than a job. I cried, and nearly am now just relaying it.
Lunch is
over. Back to work.
Mandatory
lunch… had to strand a new person I’m “training”. To do what, exactly? Lord
knows… I’m making things up as I
go. We’re almost out of milk. The days pass too slowly. Dinner at Didi’s last night. The computer stopped working. I’m exhausted. This whole thing is ridiculous.
Scheduled training for See’s on the 4th and 5th. I need sleep.
Six AM on
my day off, sitting in the café after dropping Marci at work, because I have to
take the car in again. My workers
aren’t there yet. The strikers are losing
their jobs. We’re hoping several cross
this week. I just got a voicemail from
WB’s HR asking me to call at my earliest convenience. Tomorrow we’ll get our first legitimate paychecks.
Now I have
a decision to make. The offer is
Temporary Seasonal Staff at Central Perk for $7.25/hr through November and
December.
I left a
message that I would do it, and happily will.
Now I sit at the café waiting for Marci, listening to a talker complain
about the strike and the poor economy, but happy to be served so quickly. Each customer scrutinizes their receipt for
five minutes before leaving. It’s
rewarding to be the best at what we do, but I truly hate being here.
Picking at the scab with no bleeding,
crossing in unfortunate times;
bite the slender fingers of feeding,
slitting throats with unionized lines.
(for John Ritter’s family, and others like them)
I won’t talk about this right now,
but when I get to your door, we’re gonna fight it out.
You got some nerve to tie me to this one day in history—
one shatter in the calendar year.
Oh dear. Oh dear.
Drop him. Please,
let him come back.
I don’t want to think this can’t be undone.
This isn’t fair!
This isn’t right! This is sick…
no good can possibly come.
I don’t want to let this let me lose my faith in you,
but I’m just not prepared to accept that it’s true.
Explain yourself!
Show the worth,
or drop him back to earth.
I still cry. I got
another verse before I reach the punch line,
but by then my red eyes will be rubbed raw,
and these people here will know that I am sick of them all,
and I just wish that they would cease their casual words.
It’s all just so messed up, with no resolution.
Drop him. What do I
have to do to make you hear me?
Drop him! No one not
in Heaven can ever understand.
How can you give such love, only to snatch it back again?
I am angry and there’s no one here to punch….
If you really want to get back my trust,
then drop him back to us.
Technically,
my day off. Sitting alone at a table
for two in the store café again, having woken up to drive Marci to work, then
being called back to open until Lynne showed up. Chris’s tires were slashed and windshield broken. The man-haters were by the door being
rude. Now Amelia and Dee-dee are
outside. They’re the regular Starbucks
workers, who I finally talked to yesterday.
The truth is that they’re afraid to cross Union lines because they fear
never being able to get another Union job.
Amelia is the good one—yesterday she wore fairy wings and blessed or
cursed people as they passed. Dee-dee
admitted that she was unhappy before all this started, just hoping to work with
children soon. They expressed fear for
me that Warner Bros. is unionized, that if they find out I crossed a picket
line I’ll never make it into a studio.
Now let me ask you, then, if all the Union workers base their actions on
intimidation and fear, are not the Unions doing more harm in this instance than
the employers?
I want
Lynne to take over the café. She’s
capable and willing, and I don’t yet know my schedule. Nor do I like being here, but I’ll do
whatever it takes. I am thankful
for the opportunity. But I’m 27. I’m tired.
Bruce’s
show did well for ratings. I decided to
start praying for them, and for his success.
California has been on fire for a week, so Murphys called yesterday to
check up on us. It looks like Bethany
will be the family’s redemption. I’m
proud of her.
I am a
blend of unending compassion and perpetual discontentment. I can pine for another’s situation while
aching for my own. I find myself
fortunate and vexed at the same time. I
can’t believe I wake every day. I can’t
believe I’ve endured 27 years of life, and found that this is all there
is. There is no resolution. There is no single moment after which
everything is okay. I can’t stand
seeing people every day living life. So
monotonous. So unfulfilling. Vons depresses me. Customer service is hollow.
There is no art, no creation, no vivacity; only self-centeredness and
misunderstanding. It’s amazing that
these people can function with so little sense or concern. The world is staggering. It is dead, with no hope of revitalization.
The
she-male at the deli talks over-loud and over-sweet, with a
trained vocabulary. She has been
brainwashed with videos and classes, conference calls and memos. She acts out of frustration and underlying
misery, wretched and cringing inwardly with hopes to stamp out the demon
terrorizing her life. She has no
sincerity or passion—least of all passion—and is only a shell reflecting
humanity. I, on the other hand, am hard
and harsh, but can be cut by a wind, impressed irrevocably by an involuntary
shiver or an ill-timed glance. I
shouldn’t be left to think.
There is
beginning to be a line at Starbucks.
Nicole has neglected to return from dropping Chris home, so Marci can’t
take lunch. These people do not
deserve our time. I hate consumerism
and what it’s done to people. Only
discipline can temper me.
You are the embodiment of the detriment of my days.
You sift through the sediment of the regiment of my praise.
Time dishonored traditions stir inhibitions within
a disjointed ambition to break this condition of sin.
Enduring renditions reset my submission to the grave.
Passion comes but once, my love; absence never fades.
Eyes half closed on an upraised nose with a predisposition
of gloom,
frozen fingers lingering over bone scraped straight from the
womb.
All around there’s an eerily resounding, profoundly
disturbing resume,
exhumed from the plume of the wreckage,
divested from the crest of the tomb.
Disgrace and dejection—poised intercessional malaise.
Passion comes but once, my love; dissension never caves.
Oh, woe is me! I
feel it constantly weighing on me;
its shadows fall as sure as night.
I navigate this ship of misery solely
on the only thing on which I can rely.
You impress my weakness and hold me accountable for my pen,
the implicit details expressed by my reckless aversion to
friends.
You sharpen the focus evoked by the hopeless scope of my
lens,
embolden the cleansing commotion provoked when my frenzy
descends.
You bandage and mend when my tendencies bend under what they
intend;
passion comes but once, my love, but sorrow never ends.
Took
exactly one hour to make it here by bike.
I’m an hour early. I’m
nervous. There wasn’t much
communication, so I don’t know what to expect.
What if I can’t do it? It’s
about 52 degrees this morning. My new
hat left black fuzz in my hair and on my forehead.
The picketers at Vons are getting
rowdy, spurred on by the Ralph’s workers who taunt the young and weak. There are a handful of butch man-haters I’d
like to tie to the dumpsters. I won’t
work with Marci most of this week. It
bothers me, but they’ve made her a manager, and she likes aspects of working
there.
More than
nervous—I’m terrified. I want
supervisors to love me, to have not a moment of hesitance or apprehension. I want people to be comfortable with me.
7:41
AM. I’m calling Marci.
On the search for poetry, I came across discipline,
on the path of which I stumbled upon grace.
Now each day I see interconnected, overlapping worlds,
differing, while not disagreeing, in unique offerings of
perspective.
I think at times about things like Christmas, and warmth,
contrasting sharply with the empty parking lot
next to the VIP Tour garage,
lined with young trees of light crayon,
where vines climb unplanned in ugly solitude awaiting
familiarity.
I am here, waiting,
and all I can think of is my wife,
how nice it will be to sleep in one day,
without having to kick the cat at four in the morning.
I wait, forgetting where I am,
or what it is my intent to do,
not knowing what today will bring,
or what next week will be
colloquial speech.
Staggeringly
unprofessional. Central Perk had me
scheduled to train at 10:30, after HR had me in at 8:00 and passed me to five
different people. Everyone here is too
familiar, too comfortable, too young. I
walked around the lot to kill time. I
already want to go home. There are some
good points—a rental library, a screening theater, employee prices on media—but
nobody seems to know what they’re doing.
Of course, I haven’t started with them yet, so I may be harsh; it just
seems more chaotic than necessary.
I’m actually hungry. I miss Marci. I want to whip this place into shape. It should be flawless, immaculate and classy. So far only one guy seems to carry himself
that way. The rest should be in bands. The highlight of the day was the bike ride.
Our first
day off together since we started working, and Marci got called in. I smoke just to have a reason to be outside
with the picketers. Some Teamsters were
laid off last night. The employees will
lose their benefits in a few days, but I don’t think they know that. My hands are trembling from too much coffee
with no food. Their spirits are
down. It suddenly turned Autumn this
week. No one is sure about me, how I
fit in to anything. I dread having to
be here tomorrow. The Union head stood
in their corner near me to do some paperwork, but left as soon as she noticed
me. It’s been a week since I’ve even
worked here.
I hate
unions more and more. They make it
impossible for those of us with work ethic to thrive. I could very easily get fired from Warner Bros. for working too
hard—too readily trying to help. I got
to the lot at six yester-morning and prayed for a half hour that the day would
be better. Raza trained me to open
Jamba while I waited for their delivery, then I assigned myself the windows and
retail counter until help came.
Eventually I was assigned to Randy, to help with new merch and displays. He was laid back (or slow) and gave me a
personal tour of the lot—two actually.
[I just gave up my dry bench, as a gesture, unnoticed.]
I spent most of the day back and
forth between Bldg. 3 and Marylin’s office—she’s the one who started the store
some thirty years ago—the one everyone seems to fear. I get the impression she likes me. There’s a noticeable difference in the way I relate to
customers. The other workers remind me
of Nashville, in that they’re hoping to be discovered. I, frankly, know I’m undiscoverable. I’m there to learn everything as quickly as
possible.
Randy was helpful to that end. I was taught to never assist a Union worker,
and I saw very quickly that they are ridiculously overpaid. I’ve seen too many workers struggle and take
their time to do things I could do myself.
For instance, the Furniture Dept. had to walkie the Carpentry Dept. to
take a look at a loose wheel on a display, while I stared, bewildered,
thinking, “Just give me a fucking screwdriver.” Every tiny thing is at least a two-person job. Then I nearly got in trouble for working
past eight hours, so I stopped in the middle of a job—very difficult for
someone with OCD. I have gotten a lot
of positive reinforcement; I just wish the customers got the same treatment. There is a marked contrast between who they
know are WB employees and who have only one-day passes. I detest the distinction.
11-ish. Sitting on the bench at the other side, still shaky. The meaner—or, rather, less understanding
ones—are on this side today, the ones who don’t talk to scabs. We’ll see.
I’m sticking around because I’d planned to spend the day with my
wife. Some of these people are getting
exactly what they deserve. Or
more. They think they’re standing up
for something. Just stupidity. All anyone deserves is death. Anything more—life, work, entertainment—is a
gift from God. My immediate thought is
that death would be a gift for me. I
stay alive and active for Marci.
I wonder what it must feel like to
be loyal only to a collective that dictates how you act. I wonder how it could be rewarding to
intentionally isolate everyone else in the world. In the beginning their propaganda was geared toward community and
fairness. By now everyone knows the
dispute basics; the shoppers are those with a different life-view. I can’t see any of these people having a
life plan, taking responsibility for their own circumstances. Everything is “give me what I deserve, what
I’ve earned.” That assumes you deserve
anything at all. You deserve to be
fired. Immediately. You deserve to work at your archrival
Wal-Mart, since a third of you will end up there in five years anyway. I fail to see how your failed marriages and
poor life choices are the responsibility of the community or the company that
pays your bills. To me that seems not
only unfair, but unreasonable.
Most of these people are too harsh,
too angry. Their looks are hateful to
the people who give them work. It’s
appalling. It’s tiring. It’s old.
I want my wife to leave here soon.
The glass has always been half broken.
I’ve cut my mouth on its jagged teeth.
Sweet relief never dreams of cleansing the wounds
infecting these expressions underneath.
I take it as it comes.
I take it in stride.
It will never get the better of or wear me down inside.
Though my hands and feet are bleeding with the toil of the
world,
I suckle life from my precious little girl.
My reality is bleak and uncaring,
but I’m sharing it with someone just as dark.
Disproportionate misfortune and despairing
bare the imprint of disparaging remarks.
I take it as it comes.
I accept what it is,
this meaningless diversion from encouraging my sins.
From the perfect isolation of this complicated mess,
I linger with a fingering and center at her chest.
I take it as it comes.
She loves me as I am.
I flip the world a gesture and return to her again.
Her mouth retains the focus of my deprecating sneer.
I let the world pursue me, and she makes it disappear.
Okay, it’s
been over a month now. Picketers
deserve an explanation for why I persist in crossing the lines for temporary
work. First off, we need to be sure we
know actual terminology; Oxford’s second definition of “scab” is “person who
refuses to strike or join a trade union, or who tries to break a strike by
working.” Now then, I don’t refuse to
join a trade union, I simply haven’t been offered. Nor do I have any personal ambition to break the strike. By definition, then, I am merely a temporary
worker, not a scab. In order to
accurately call anyone such, you would need to determine their personal
motivation.
I feel it
necessary to apologize on behalf of those less eloquent for any disrespect you
have been shown while fighting for what you believe is right. I have been watching very closely both your
actions and the reactions of those who cross your lines, and the polarization
on either side has led to some unfortunate exchanges. I personally regret that things are not 100% civil. While it is apparent that some who cross do
so simply out of self-centeredness, that is not true for a great many of
us. The truth is, a fair number of us
are quite compassionate. Allow me,
then, to offer another perspective, even if only one individual’s.
I am
fair-minded and rational. I would not
accept a job simply for personal gain if I believed it at the ultimate expense
of another. So I am going to attempt to
explain where our ideologies conflict, and I expect not all of you will accept
it, because it is a complex matter based upon years of preconditioning. But I have remained silent and respectful,
and followed every detail of the dispute since the day I first applied out of
desperation to a grocery store, not knowing an ugly matter was looming.
There is
one fundamental difference of opinion from which this entire conflict stems,
and it has yet to be settled, but I must work up to it. I must first address a few of the flyers and
handouts I’ve collected, so that you understand the way many people feel about
your approach. It is important to
remember that any intelligent person can use selective information and
manipulate facts and statistics to present a believable case for
anything—that’s one of the first things Universities teach. For me, though they are emotionally
compelling, the handouts are intellectually unconvincing.
The
“Attention Shoppers” handout predating the strike claimed that out-of-pocket
expenses for health care would cause workers to opt out and become a taxpayer
responsibility, that retirement rollbacks would necessitate government
assistance, and that new employees would enter below the poverty line, thus
lowering the standard of living.
According to which numbers in your contract you utilize, that could be
somewhat true. However, if you think
about it another way, the cost of your wages and benefits makes it necessary
for the companies to keep grocery prices slightly higher, in which case we
(your neighbors) and you are still paying the same amount, only in a different
form.
A
subsequent handout introducing the decidedly propagandistic
www.SaveOurHealthCare.org claimed that the employers wanted to cut health
benefits by 50%. While I was not able
to find that outright anywhere in the Offer Of Settlement from October 5, I am
willing to concede that since there are so many numbers to toy around with, it
is possible to come up with that figure in some imagined worst-case scenarios,
but nowhere near convincingly enough to present it as a platform worth
crusading for, since in the majority of situations it will never amount to
that.
The
“Corporate Greed Vs. Human Need” handout is hardly worth discussing because
there was not one supportive reference, only unsubstantiated figures with
pleading commentary. It could only possibly
work on people who accept what they’re told without questioning the source
(like Michael Moore fans).
The “Facts
about the Supermarket Strike” handout brought up the cutting in half thing
again—which at this point is more of a sympathy play that actuality. It reminded the public that many supermarket
employees earn less than $10 an hour, but neglected to show the entire pay
scale. It mentions the “second class”
of new employees that I will return to later, and refers to increased profits
of 91% (once again failing to cite the source), without taking into account
what programs that profitability is reinvested into, such as new stores and
refurbishing, and fails to mention the proposed bonuses.
Most
significantly, this one claims that Wal-Mart is an overblown threat, that it
would only capture 1% of the grocery market in California. Being from the east, where Wal-Mart
dominates, let me reassure you, the threat is real, and in all likelihood it
will do more damage to your familiar lifestyle than you know. It is important to remember that the big
three companies you are clashing with have trend analysts whose sole job is to
predict market trends and help in suggesting proactive measures to ensure
company profitability. The 1.3 million
square foot distribution center in Apple Valley is not just looking to support
40 Supercenters—it is able to supply over 200!
The next
handout was a list of alternative stores to shop at. The interesting thing here is the inclusion of non-union stores
the UFCW website normally asks us not to patronize, which could lead a person
to wonder if the Union tactics change simply to target whoever is the most
imminent threat, which could raise questions about the sincerity and conviction
of certain stated causes.
The “Setting
the Record Straight” letter to customers made more of the same claims, somewhat
more eloquently and condensed, mentioning again the 50% cut in medical, the 75%
of employees being part-time and making only an average $312 a week, the
“second class”, and the pension plans for retirees, reiterating that Wal-Mart
is not a threat. (Meanwhile, your
employee areas of the store are plastered with “Wal-Mart Sucks” bumper stickers
and market trend posters showing its incredible gains.) This was the most effective paper yet, but
still failed to address the larger issue, which I am still working up to.
The
“Attention: You May Have Been Overcharged!” handout was just wrong. First off, I’d like to remind you that as a
regular customer I recall being incorrectly charged once or twice myself before
the strike. This handout was a misuse
of insider knowledge, calling customers’ attention to things that have always
gone wrong in the past and blaming the temporary workers. As for the statement, “Employees working in
this store have no experience in the Retail Food Industry”… out of the couple
hundred applicants I’ve seen in the past month, I think management has done a
fine job positioning suitable people where they are most effective. I’ve seen managers, degree holders, and many
workers with several years experience.
I myself have an eight-year history—just not in California.
The “We’re
your friends and your neighbors” handout is my favorite because it begins with
“Here’s the facts….” That’s right,
“Here is the facts….”
Grammatical errors show carelessness.
Also, I would hope that my friends and neighbors would not curse at me
and deface my friends’ vehicles, nor would I expect them to resort to
intimidation.
Then came
the “Fiction Vs. Fact” handout. Having
read the Offer Of Settlement myself, I cannot accept the actuaries provided by
a biased source because, as I have said, it is possible for any intelligent
person to manipulate any data to make it say whatever he/she wants. This Line News Issue brings up that
the typical grocery store worker is a single mom with three kids, averaging 30
hours a week at $12.30, and that the average hourly wage needed for a two
bedroom in Southern California is $18.59.
These portraits are too simple, intended to evoke sympathy for the
hardworking, barely-making-ends-meet individuals we are familiar with in our
daily struggle to survive. The L.A.
Times figure has been stored for justification since September 2002, lending
credibility to the possibility that someone is intent on presenting only
selective information to strengthen a case, which should set off an alarm to a
rational individual that perhaps they are not being told the whole story.
There is an
October 23 L.A. Times article by Michael Hiltzik circulating, along with another
“Dear Valued Customer” handout, supporting the Union’s position that Steve Burd
is the #1 target—the enemy, if you will.
I don’t know the man personally, so I will not defend him personally,
but I suspect there is a lot more going on behind closed doors than anyone
guesses. I think it is important to
remember that he didn’t just fall into CEO; he had to work hard for it and
prove himself to a good many people. If
he were as incompetent as the portrait being painted of him, he would not have
lasted. That seems obvious to me.
The
approaching holiday season has now prompted the Thanksgiving handout, once
again claiming CEO “greed”, and the “Shame On Vons” handout claiming that the
Vons Club exploits its employees. If
consistently respecting Union rules and continually paying your paychecks and
healthcare is exploitation, I must misunderstand the term. Even your own UFCW website acknowledges that
your (now expired) health care and pension benefits were “exceptional”, which
means unusual and out of the ordinary—most people don’t have
anything close. Meanwhile, your WIC and
Food Stamp customers complain to me about being made to feel guilty for
shopping at their usual store.
Finally we
have Line News Issue 13, which attempts to downplay how many are considering
crossing for the sake of their families and other personal reasons, and
suggests that support is growing and the strike might be nationalized. First of all, it is absolutely inhuman to
suggest that a collective is more important than each individual involved, so
much so that loyalty to coworkers should take precedent over devotion to
family. Each must do what is right for
his/her own situation, and it is no more than brutish intimidation to instill
fear that goodwill cannot exist toward those making personal choices that might
counter the Union ideal. Secondly,
nationalization will be difficult because a good portion of the nation has
never heard of your local California stores.
I come from a land of Supercenters and self-checkouts. Unions only have measurable power in the
bubbled-in island that is California.
The claims of community support are exaggerated—most people not crossing
your lines are either too afraid of retribution or simply uninformed about the
true numbers. Those who do cross—including
many union members—have very definite opinions about the validity of the UFCW’s
claims.
Now then,
how can there be ambiguity, confusion, or disagreement about the issues we have
been obsessed with for the past several weeks?
I mentioned that there is only one fundamental difference that has
caused this situation, and we have finally gotten to it. The issue is this; how is the new contract
“unfair”? “Unfair” is the word
plastered all over your signs, accented with “corporate greed”. So the real problem is that you have failed
to support your main claim. An accurate
sign would have to read “Unfortunate Labor Practices”, unless you are
able to prove that it is actually unfair by today’s standard and that the CEOs are
truly greedy—a difficult claim.
Amassing personal wealth by heading your own company can hardly be
considered greedy—it is in fact the American dream. How one goes about prospering is an individual, personal matter;
Steve Burd chooses to head a corporation, while many grocery store clerks
choose to rely on his leadership and management—even while second-guessing
it. Some pursuits of wealth work while
others fail. That’s just life.
The
problem, then, is ideological. You can
either believe that personal success is a matter of demanding it, or you can
believe that it is a matter of earning it.
At the moment, I daresay you are not exactly making yourselves assets to
the company. You may maintain that you
have worked long and hard for your employer, and therefore “deserve” what many
deem an excessive package. While I
fully respect your hard work and dedication to doing whatever it takes to care
for your families, I remain convinced that there must be a limit to how
involved in your personal lives an employer must be. No one has been able to tell me why it is the employer’s
responsibility to take care of the typical “single mom with three kids”—unless
of course that employer happens to be the deadbeat dad who abandoned them. I reiterate that some people’s lives and
financial situations are unfortunate—I am familiar with neglect and abuse and
illness and death—but there is just no way that it is an employer’s
responsibility. They pay your paycheck,
and if you are truly fortunate they use their power to assist in other ways as
well. But to completely coddle every
single worker is by no means fair.
Indeed, to expect more than that seems unreasonable.
The second
class of workers argument is a non-issue.
First off, most companies adopt a policy of confidentiality, not
discussing wages. Secondly, there is
already a pay scale that groups workers by skill level and tenure. New employees will automatically accept that
those hired before them will earn higher wages. The notion that this could cause “unfair firings” is absurd while
the companies are still subject to government regulations in an atmosphere of
legal paranoia; a worker can only safely be fired it there is just cause.
I am
reminded of a parable where a landowner hired some men early one morning to
work in his vineyard for a denarius. He
hired more men at intervals throughout the day, and when the time came to pay
them, he started with those hired late in the day and gave them each a
denarius, then paid each of the men the same thing regardless of when they were
hired. When those who were hired first
received no more than those hired last, they grumbled against the
landowner. But he answered, “Friend, I
am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you
agree to work for a denarius? Take your
pay and go. I want to give the man who
was hired last the same as I gave you.
Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am
generous?” The new hires will be the
ones who agree to the new pay rate, and it will be fair because they are
entering into an agreement with the employer, regardless of what agreements
anyone else made. Whatever workers make
themselves an asset to the company will not be let go; only those with
questionable work ethic need be concerned.
I am not
one who accepts anything without delving into it. I have to wonder what is at stake in this strike for the Union
leaders, what happens to them if Union power diminishes. I would want to know how much the Union
leaders make, and what they do, and how their jobs and lives and financial
situations compare to those they represent, since their jobs depend on Union
dues, membership, and support. I would
want to know why I did not see them marching around the parking lot with the
workers after their pep talk at the rally.
I would wonder, if the Union was really so fraternal, why the
newsletters warn people thinking about returning to work that they will never
again have that solid relationship with their coworkers—I fail to see the
understanding, compassion and individual concern in that. In fact, I hardly see that the individual
matters at all, even though that is who the Union leaders say they are trying
to protect. I would question authority
that discourages finding out as much information as possible from every
available source to determine truth. It
was that kind of arrogance in the Catholic Church that led to Martin Luther’s
Reformation and St. Francis of Assisi’s ministry of poverty.
You must
consider how rapidly technology is changing the grocery industry. You must realize that you are not
irreplaceable. Case Ready Meats, EFT
efficiency, automatic espresso and coffee vending machines, electric carts,
surveillance cameras, online shopping, and U-Scans (which I am terribly fond
of, and which are already everywhere back east) are an unavoidable reality that
will drastically reduce the manpower and training needed to run a grocery
store—that task will fall to computer experts and technicians. Wal-Mart is only the first step, the
immediate future; there is much more coming to destabilize your workplace. You (and the employers) must now adapt and
evolve or you will find yourselves quite on the losing side. I did not wish this strike for you, but I am
convinced that the employers are taking the necessary steps to ensure that many
of you will have jobs a decade from now.
They are preemptive measures I am convinced should be unopposed.
Perhaps I
am old fashioned, but I still believe that loyalty and hard work will pay
off. It is up to each individual to decide
their course, never allowing themselves to be at the mercy of uncontrollable
elements. You must make yourselves
indispensable, invaluable and irreplaceable.
These are my convictions. I am
not cold-hearted, selfish or misinformed.
I truly believe there is a power greater than the Union, and that he is
still in control; and that we must be faithful with what we are given, and
thankful for what we have, and count it all extra every day God allows us to
wake up and continue our service to humanity.
That is why I cross your line every day.
About nineteen picketers out, several
in D.C. for the negotiations the Union keeps walking out on. We’re getting more and more crossing, to
where only the die-hards and imbeciles are left. I pity the dimmer ones, the ones who got themselves trapped on
the losing end. I still take my breaks
outside, but I care less and less what happens to these people. They are responsible for themselves and
their own misfortune.
WB is
giving me more and more hours, as if they’re trying to integrate me into the
necessary staff. Even the Vons
customers all seem to be connected somehow.
Most of the picketers right now are workers’ kids with signs they don’t
understand. Chris has been venting all
day in his awkward, timid, whispering voice.
I’m completely out of supplies, trying to run a Starbucks with no mocha,
chai, or venti cups—even alarmingly low on coffee, no decaf. The picketers still don’t talk to me, don’t
threaten or attempt to taunt me like they do everyone else. I attribute it to my perpetual smirk. One obnoxious closeted teenager yells louder
than everyone else. I think he has a
desperate need to be accepted. Chris
too. He kept following Marc and me
around, wanting to hang out and drink after work. I just want to go to bed. And eat meatloaf and mac & cheese.
The newspaper beside me picks up in
the wind. The employees walk back and
forth in conversation, never say anything to the customers.
Artists have brushes now,
and instruments
with which they need only master technique
in order to call themselves such.
I wonder how well they might function
with raw materials,
having been themselves manipulated,
and chosen their careers for various reasons.
I have nothing
—absolutely—
but the remnants and scars
of past artists, great names
with personalities forgotten,
and with it I make
nothing else entirely.
Today will be slow,
and I will make, if I am lucky,
another $50
sitting outside
a great expensive studio,
relating to fewer and fewer people,
on this midday before Thanksgiving.
A poem without similes is like a day without sun;
I haven’t seen one in a long time.
It is the fifteenth today, nearly Christmas,
and I am scheduled 53 hours between two menial jobs,
yesterday the day Sadam was captured
and my President once again a hero,
today everyone walking around, coated, doing jobs like
holding up microphones above the sightline.
I was homesick yesterday while my wife shopped,
little things setting me off—because there are only little
things—
everyone scrounging for some meaningful accumulation,
me dreaming it all away while outsiders pass off into the
sunset,
painted on scrim, so many people I don’t know
doing things I can’t imagine while I annotate,
and punctuate my commute with time to spare,
and nothing to fill it with.
After the third cup and the third nodding off,
after finding once again the inherent flaws with the system,
the injustices, impoverished and abused,
shredded bits of identity wrapping up for presentation
our best hand-painted paces; exhaustion sets in,
phone tag increases in frequency, back to notes and cards
and scrawled on hands, and eyes prematurely closing.
I do not remember what it’s like to sleep.
My wife does not remember being appreciated.
No one remembers God or life not on a schedule.
I can’t recall what it feels like to sit in an easy chair
or having feet not aching.
There seems for a moment
to be nothing but this, and no reason to continue it.
I’ve worn these same clothes, this ragged outfit
for three days now.
How many times?
I have no more room to question
this refuse of strenuous repentance
nowhere near redemption.
Too many crimes unreported
to the legislative hierarchy,
anarchy replacing the amended
constitution of exemption.
In this atmosphere, I must point out:
there were only ten original commandments.
Apparently there was some ambiguity.
San Bernardino is on fire.
Lines encircle with increasing
venom, distemper.
A fountain full of secrets
slices silent mockery,
as the day
struggles to begin,
labors to end.
There is no healing
the trademark undeliverable punch
broken up by lines
airbrushed to my abs.
I am thin, and thinning, slowly dying,
sick to an unthinkable degree,
watching, still observing
the surrounding (enveloping) world
with signature disdain,
wrought with compassion,
anticipating the next cut,
the final chip and chisel
that will release me from
the burdensome shackle of
framed, awkward eccentricities.
I.
I would rather
smoke myself to death
than continue this shift.
II.
Occasionally
a customer makes me smile; my wife
always does.
I’m not sure the tradeoff is worth it.
There was a reason I went to school,
and right now
it is this woman’s hair.
III.
Laurel, in Sylvia,
was about the most
hilarious thing.
My coworker,
making those same
gestures in life,
makes me smile.
I am torn today,
between talking and crying,
and ever remaining silent and sad,
not ever reaching for another word.
I am slow in unreal circumstance,
gazing through the monitors’ methodic mayhem
as a fixture or unpersuasive compassionate smile.
It occurs to me that I nearly wrote,
“The express lane opens;
the light flickers on,”
and a wave of futility nearly escapes.
I consider how little sense or thought
it takes to do what I do,
and slump into despair at how much
less than that surrounds me.
The little known girl
cowers on stage,
screams with a flickering tongue.
She will be something,
but I sure don’t know what;
I certainly don’t.
Pleading with the audience,
converse with convergence—
urgent, urgent, urgent!
Divergent ex-virgin,
the girl, the girl,
the littlest known
girl in the world,
surrounded by her
tea party toys.
The little known girl
collecting boys.
The transition is over. We are established. I am unhappy again, having spent my only day
off Christmas shopping, and now back to my three hour sleep schedule, to the
routine of cleaning before bed and again no sex, though again the finger points
to me. I want perfection and cannot
create it. I have no control over the
details despite my discipline.
I know that
I have a remarkable woman, an amazing wife, but I do not support her like I
should. In desperation I blame my
customers. I hate them, with their
clipped coupons and impatience.
Let me give
you some advice, friends, if I should serve you. Be certain to gauge my mood, that you don’t fall on the receiving
end of my imagination.
You just
handed me a photocopy of a coupon.
Please tell me you’re joking.
If I begin
to write, customers will undoubtedly arrive, though it is hard to predict the
flow three days before Christmas.
Hopefully everyone is at the mall.
There is no… something. There is
no mood for serving customers. Only the
opposite, of course.
I write the
way people think, associative and disjointed.
I was born tainted.
Watching my
wife effortlessly, pretending to write with no ink.
The lot
smells like steak.
Not that cheap steak
—the good kind.
I am fresh and inspired,
living in two very,
very different worlds,
having left so many others
to stand now by a poinsettia
with a steaming black-eye,
watching the clock
to swipe my badge
to the minute
on the hour.
There is nowhere I can live I do
not see utter depravity or grace shining through it. Autobiographical, I watch the marinated state, with thoughts of
judgment and perception skewered with ideals.
I am vague, while others smother selves with transparent cover,
wondering how they can breathe, or how I?
Living in the crime ring of peaceful Glendale I am another minority,
even still more altogether alone with my wife, considering that within race
there are no places, no finishing at all except death, and I am angered and
calm considering that Caucasians are rude and cheap and self conscious about
it, while Armenians are rude and cheap and proud of it (or in denial). We take things personally; they give it no
thought whatsoever.
The Christians are in church today.
The Catholics are in church today.
The others are in church today,
except the callus atheists or
careless waifs, or the poor.
A regular… a pause,
familiar conversation.
Backup arrives in a tiff.
What I do
is watch,
habitually, closely,
the interaction among species,
cringing as necessary when
something subtle or overt
involuntarily knocks my head
to the side.
Words like intolerable spring to the forefront.
I am already working past scheduled
and see things vividly for what they are.
Life is not hard
if you try,
but most people are not willing
—not incapable, but lacking the foresight
to head off what to me seems inevitable—yea!
to all to whom I give a hearty half gesture,
the way they go through life.
I am separate, given cause and authority
to esteem merit and judge the condition of
those who are clearly not me,
those insufferable, unfortunate things.
Everything breaks down under my gaze.
My stare is an instrument of demolition,
the precursor to fresh budding of
new hopeful cynicism.
I have been this way too long to expect
any surprising reintroduction.
I saw Tara Dé’s eyes
emblazoned on another head,
sadly reminiscent of those winters.
All I want in this
single snapshot moment
is a tremor of fueled sighing,
a couple minutes to cry silently,
a brief recognition of longing,
of misplaced fond passion,
disappearing in peppermint.
I wonder, is Tara Dé still Tara Dé?
I hope no, and happier for it.
One man, somewhere, stabs himself with
this model of pen, with hatred and disgust,
his life having been reduced to clicking,
temporal utensils, diagrams, brochures and meetings,
and I would gladly trade him for a week or more,
then just as happily kill myself with paper cuts or scalding
coffee,
get myself fired for the shock value of just once telling a
customer
the unbelievable truth, holding up a knife blade to terrify
with reflection
and speak what every human really knows to be the state of
things.
A simple 24 hours and everything falls back into
perspective,
the writing it down is still not worth the five months
required to get there.
The only rewarding thing will be death, will be knowing that
there is no more tomorrow, no more alarm or having to
confront
the absolute horrendous fucks deserving slow, torturous,
creative ends.
I entertain the thought—yes, daily—smiling as I do with
each and every step you take in my direction.
I have you summed up, already dead and buried thirty years,
before it will finally occur to you how wasted and small and
unliked
you really were for that half a year I had to endure you.
The only great loss is my time, so I remind myself that
without my attention… you still exist, still equally
as intolerable and wretched.
PAs are funny,
with their random notes
about ice cream and coffee,
wired in to very busy people,
very busy, impressive people,
who cannot so much as
set a stack of papers down.
I keep hoping to write the poem that ends it,
the one that finally hits and draws to a close this
nonsense.
I am responsive and faithful to the whore—my mistress and
muse—
the idea that something will come, when nothing ever does.
I write not because, but because I cannot not.
I reiterate the deeper things that age with misuse, with
neglect,
or are refined like sand.
I am too tired to think, too tired to stay awake and create.
Long after I have died, a useless and tired, wasted barista,
you will read this and miss entirely the pointlessness of my
life.
The whole of my work is to impress to you the futility of
hope.
Do not fall victim to the idea that it ever will pay off.
I have not yet found that verse.
Stand here, in this
designated standing area,
or sit in this round of chairs.
I wonder if
riding my bike so far
opens up my lungs
further to cigarette smoke.
Always, there is time to kill,
and never enough to let live;
patches woven together
into a shroud.
“Young man, I spilled coffee right here.”
“And what, your legs are broken?”
I can’t imagine anyone I would rather be,
with such quick wit.
After hours: ice cream unavailable,
coffee pots dry. Men who speak no
English, uniformed and silent, scrape at the floors under Security’s eye. I am on another mandatory lunch, squeezing
in the half hour before rushing home for a few bites of cheese and rice—a beer
if I’m lucky—then rushing off to the grocery store for an overnight of price
changes; then back here again for six hours of Starbucks. I go wasted, my mind, my body, my voice, my
tender core buried under years of scowling and hardness. I am hidden and neglected and stronger for
it, though sometimes more independent than a married man should be. I kill time like an angry man.
With that extra bounce in her step,
that extra bright gleam in her eye,
a smile that flirts like the sun on the ocean,
the shelter that keeps me dry;
she makes it look effortless,
like she don’t even try,
she makes it look easy,
and it’s easy to see why I’m her guy.
Sometimes I’m unguarded when her voice comes
from the other room, and undoes me fine.
I get swept up and wrapped up and caught up and
tangled up in her, like barbed wire electrified.
She makes it look natural,
like it springs from inside;
she makes it look easy,
and it’s easy to see why I’m her guy.
She makes it look simple,
like it can’t be denied;
she makes it look easy,
and it’s easy to see why I’m her guy.
The cat
disappeared
into death sentiment,
guilt and grief;
and I was amazed
that people who take
everything so seriously
could so lightly dismiss
a woman’s comfort and joy.
For those of you with
pets you love;
he came back late into the day,
and now lays at my feet.
It took dying
for Duke’s family to visit,
all with memories
too good humored to turn the engine
or work into schedules,
all still smokers, they,
which in fact is less destructive
than the emotional and intellectual ways
people cripple themselves.
He was a good and hardworking man
—probably—
but toward the end
could not open
his own door.
I must confess I am perplexed
and more than just a little stressed.
I’ve seen the pleasantries vividly digress,
leaving a mess of dreadful sets to coalesce.
Please be joking.
Tell me you don’t mean this.
I can’t believe you’re serious. This is ridiculous.
You’ve just got to be kidding me, but it is not funny.
I can’t even articulate the absolute absurdity.
My sunny disposition is conditional at best;
you put me on the offense, my definition to the test.
Please be joking.
Say this is just a little jest.
You stun me like a swarm of killer bees. This is madness.
I mean no malice. I
intend you no harm.
But it’s just that all this stupidity has me alarmed.
I can hardly contain my shock, barely hold back my rage.
I am noticeably incensed by overwhelming malaise.
Please be joking. Don’t
make me lose faith.
Just point me at the camera so I can laugh and wave.
Virtually
every employee scheduled on a strange calm day, a half-hour to kill staring at
black painted windows. I don’t know my
place. Or rather, no one else
does. Easily I could sleep to add to
the cumulative 5½ hour total for the week.
I was called in early, then earlier still, but not told why, so I
struggle to stay awake. A quick nap,
perhaps, head down on the table, a few more cigarettes, and then thrown to the
devourers.
12:45
awakened. Man of the hour am I.
Am I faithful with what you’ve given me,
or do I expect to be given so much more?
Who am I living for?
Have I gotten comfortable?
Do I keep starting over each time
you change what lies in store?
For shame! I hang my
head low
for forgetting you letting me
tell you which way I would go.
And say, I should have known
you could only return
what I offered to give you alone.
I should be weeping.
It’s uncontrollable.
The sun must rise and set on another day.
It’s embarrassing; I’m so dismayed that this
travesty of me needs to see more than you gave.
For shame! I fall to
the ground,
denouncing my own set of values
for crowding you out.
And hey, I can’t make a sound
without doubting my mouth
or the grounds I’ve been howling about.
There is no bridge I can safely cross
without deep streams beneath,
or through forests where I could get lost.
I regret I neglect sometimes to remember your hand,
that you’ve been there before and are sure
you know just where to stand.
Help me to see where the light,
streaming between the leaves,
meets the path that you promised
would always be beneath my feet.
For shame! I beat at
my chest
for forbearing to foster the fortune
adorning my neck.
I pray I get out of this mess,
to best know how to use
the blessings you’ve given me next.
My time is measured out
in ten minute increments,
hours frothing to waste
quickly, discarded.
I have a wife and no
luxury to enjoy her.
I do not find fulfillment
in cup after cup, fold after fold,
sale after sale.
I am surrounded by unenchanting
disenchantment,
a franchise of callous drivel
causing me to not care
if I live or die;
indeed, to lean preferentially
toward the latter.
I wonder, how many walking this
same stone walkway are truly happy,
and how many are simply
too distracted to care?
When days like this hit,
I meld with weather.
Music disappears; sounds dissipate.
I stand in different judgment,
hard communion with nature,
small-ing, coining abstractions,
feeling the breadth and insignificance
of wobbly, sprayed Styrofoam,
people-less.
This is not a good life.
There’s too much awfulness,
too much awkwardness, too much strife.
My lover is away and I cannot sleep.
I can’t keep believing this wild
beating heart will ever be tamed.
I keep waiting for my death,
in the reds of its eyes.
I keep meaning to stop waking up
day after day to that look of surprise.
Change does not exist.
No solution ever comes.
I am far too much an optimist to think
the sickness ever lets on where it’s from.
With broken back and soiled hands
I petitioned the sky to fall,
with the full force of urgency
reserved for these times.
I keep waiting for my death,
for my fated last goodbye.
I keep expecting to be gasping
my last breath by the conclusion
of these useless rhymes.
I keep waiting for my death.
I keep counting the chimes.
I sit back in a solitude, alluding
to an ending yet to be defined.
I keep waiting for my death.
I’ve been waiting all my life.
I keep living through the influence
of innocence, infected by a network of crime.
I keep waiting for my death.
Quickly
now, I must rest. The next phase has
begun—I pray it is short. The strike is
over. Murphy is back in New York. I am now the Starbucks manager, officially,
and still at WB—waited on Jack Osborne the other day. Working roughly 65-70 hours a week, unable to do anything else.
We are the low list.
We are the meaningless.
This is the catalyst.
On to the conquest.
It’s just too much trouble for too little reward.
I got too much invested where I cannot afford.
I can’t remember where my treasures are stored.
It’s all too much trouble for too little reward.
I didn’t know when I set out this path would be so tough.
I didn’t know the definition of sacrifice.
I learned quick that when this world hits, it hits all at
once,
and it’s never quite the listed sticker price.
It’s just too much trouble for too little reward.
My bones are breaking and my back is sore.
I’ve been overlooked by God and all his angels before,
but it’s too much trouble now, for too little reward.
I am struggling just to find a place to put my faith.
My blasphemy has tainted me for worse.
Mama, what’s your little boy become of late?
The pain and hate have stuck like some ancient curse.
And it’s too much trouble for too little reward.
I’m taking my complaints before the Lord.
If I don’t come back I haven’t been ignored,
it was too much trouble for too little reward.
We found out by email that Hannah is dead.
When David died from an infected dog bite,
it didn’t matter enough to mention.
But I liked Hannah.
Hannah matters just like Pete mattered.
(The things we revisit in a lifetime….)
Don’t worry, loves, I’m still here.
Standing behind a counter opposite Safi, dodging tour groups and Perk lines in tight, ridiculous clothes. I finally realize I’m worth as much as anyone on the lot, and that impresses the absurdity of the whole thing. I can’t afford the Bukowski disc or a bottled water, and the whole place is laced with people stuck in routines—their most pressing decision what to buy today, their biggest concern getting the correct boost in their Jamba Juice.
I slept in this morning… 8:30, with the cats locked in the bathroom.
People wear suits as if this were a
cruise, or cargo pants as if there were no one to impress. Everyone survives on polite conversation,
hung on names and badges, and flocking together like—I can’t even think of
what—something worse than cattle, something altogether worse than animals. The cell vibrates at my hip and I can only
glance at the name and ignore.
I am now the ice cream man,
standing before fat people, looking the model of judgment. I do not practice restraint, but discipline,
discipline in the form of disapproval.
My head calls for a redeye and the service guy jokes like an SNL skit. Oh, to have such a simple life, to be
content knowing how incompetent electricians can be.
Between
every verse:
stop and
scoop,
stop and
scoop.
Question? I don’t honestly know. I don’t eat the stuff. Stuff your makeup-caked face.
Stop and
scoop.
And now I
am also the juice man. (I got something
for ya’… tell ya’ where to stuff your wheat grass.)
Wasted. Yes, that’s the only word; leaning back
scrawling, hat pulled down, ducking beneath the brim, unprofessional—as if
standing behind a fucking counter with a saran-wrapped smile is a profession. I profess a lot with different food smells
drifting over, complicating satellite waves over cell phone pauses. I will not smile today; smiles do not
disdain, and I will certainly not today condone anything quite so Hollywood—not
for all the meager money in the world.
My shift begins
one hour before the sun
begins its slow fade in,
while only God
and God-knows-who are vibrant.
Five months of dread,
petitioning God for
the next phase;
it begins, and it is
exactly the same
as the last.
Feel every pause.
It doesn’t fall apart, the grocery,
or even the retail outlet
where I spend menial hours
earning my $10 or my $7.25/hr.
They do not come to a crashing halt,
or if they did, what difference would it make?
There is an agenda to lock me in, not conscious,
not concerted, but the unfortunate result
of century after century of decline,
of brilliant men reducing life and impact to systems,
overanalyzing with disregard and poisonous recklessness.
Once there were brilliant minds, shaping what needed
improvement with cynicism and sparks of imagination.
The dead result is a world where entertainment
replaces expression, and disingenuous mantras
wear into dead souls with professional courtesy.
I glare deadly through each of you, day after day,
stepping as you do to the same counter for the same
reinforcing empty words, for the same unfulfilling drink.
A man with a handheld scale weighs the empty cup for
deviance;
I weigh his empty head and treacherous hand for alms
and produce none.
Words wildly bend at this moment apart—
this brief restoring look and refreshing distance—
blend to curves over the tip of the pen.
Poetry speaks to me as I often wish none of you would.
With your clumsy, fumbling ordering,
I suspect you are up to no good.
My customers coddle themselves with the bloated notion they
should.
I throw them like kindling and coal to the smoldering
heaping of wood.
Life is cryptic at best.
I can’t find the message beneath the mess,
and in the daylight of all the distress
I profess my dismay.
Life is ecliptic; and yes,
the seasons return in a sickly cruel jest,
and as it happens that they coalesce,
I can’t get away.
The puzzling perplexity of literature liberally bends,
ensuring elasticity of dichotomously literal trends.
My handwriting falters as I slaughter your thought with my
pen,
then fashion remembrance with trembling, resembling the
author of then.
Life is cryptic at best.
I am just meant to grin and endure it, I guess,
but as I keep moving closer to death,
I am much less afraid.
Life is elliptic, and when pressed,
I confess it is increasingly obvious
that if it ever comes to a rest
I will beg it to stay.
I keep getting hit.
I keep getting hate.
I keep getting ripped.
I can’t get it straight.
How dark is too dark?
How much can I take?
What penance must I pay?
Who must I forsake?
I’m on the edge, about to snap;
on a ledge, about to crack.
Look out! Look out! Look out!
Look out! Fuck it… I can’t cope!
It keeps getting bleaker.
It keeps me awake.
It keeps getting deeper.
It wants me to break.
I’m at the end of my rope.
You’re at the end of my arm.
This is the end of the scope; are you alarmed?
I won’t mince words; I’ll make mincemeat.
I’m baring my fangs, ready to eat.
Look out! Look out! Look out!
Look out! Fuck it… I’m done!
I am driven by constant fear.
Don’t you think that’s just a bit neurotic?
I am tired of living this way.
I’m still torn up.
My stomach still bleeds.
I’m still unhealthy and unhappy
and disgusted by the same old things.
I still get those pangs
of incredible pain.
I’m still as utterly sickened
for no apparent reason
just to be awake.
And I am still on course
in the direction of the sun;
I’m still about to burn upon reentry,
and I still think I’m the only one.
I’m still about to burst,
and I still can’t breathe.
I still do all the screaming
and the seething, and the teeth
are all still buried in me.
I’ve been waiting for my death,
with its outstretched hands;
it calls me like a siren
to the undertow of violence
in a vibrant land.
I’ve been waiting for my death;
it’s been waiting there in kind.
It gets nearer like a pendulum swinging
with a double sided axe on the line.
I’ve been waiting for my death.
I’ve been praying it comes soon.
I’ve been playing with fire
and electrical wires,
and inhaling the fumes.
The mug
is not designed to fit
my hand;
my hand
is designed to fit
the mug.
I would like, today,
to stand
straight three hours,
unaccosted.
My voice is failing.
Already the monitor shows
daylight, revealing hoards.
I want AND
I do not want
so many things without control,
and poorly today will be graded.
I know the secret shopper by face,
and think
“how about grading me on
something that matters,”
while I critique humanity at large,
and you in particular,
again with aching bowels and
an upset stomach,
longing for baking soda and hot water.
Johnny Depp
is a good looking man,
but I’m not sure
we would have
anything to talk about.
I thought
this morning, “I smoke so that you know I’m unhappy.” It is the only outward symbol of the
destructive pattern of life. It is the
very least of my worries. I reek now of
cigarettes, with a half hour left until the half hour trip to work. Jess is visiting all this week, making it
impossible to relax in what rare moments I’m home and unaccounted for. I have profound plans to be productive and
am instead reduced to catnaps with an aching neck and forehead. The computer is once again corrupted at the
moment I was poised to use it. I don’t
know what God wants from me. Everyone
else wants too much.
I hate my customers. I cringe as they trickle in. I hate the companies I work for, and am
ashamed of who they hire and how they operate.
I am insignificant and wasted. I
have to move on. Soon. But why should God give me better? My wife reads my journals and worries. My mother used to do the same.
I was
prepared to quit yesterday, but all my supplies came in today. We are all—the four of us; me, Carlos,
Amelia and Andrew—cruelly overworked.
Poor Amelia had a line of about eleven people as I stored loads,
everyone looking at me as if I should be behind the counter helping, not
realizing I was already two hours off the clock just to accomplish half of what
needed to be done. I hate customers. I hate my job. I hate Starbucks and Safeway and Frappuccinos and everything
about corporate America. I hate
minorities. I hate not being surrounded
by whites, even more than I hated Green Hills.
I hate coupons and waking up at five every morning, groping through the
dark to not wake up Marci. I hate
clocks and breaks and applications, and I especially hate unions. They make it fucking impossible to work, or
to help my own staff. I’m still quite
ready to quit today, poised to quit tomorrow, but I won’t even have time to
think about it as I anticipate the busy hours alone, running the bar and
register at once. The challenge will
be—or rather, the masochistic game—to see how quickly I can get everyone
out. I don’t care how fucking long the
line is when they choose to stand in it.
There are four other Starbucks within two miles, if they weren’t so
fucking lazy and stupid. Don’t blame me
for not knowing your order or having your money and Club card ready. And the coupons! Why the hell would I keep a stack behind the counter, or allow
you to reuse the same one over and over?
You’re lucky I don’t just gouge your eyes with the pastry tongs. I’ll get roughly four hours of sleep
tonight, after being gone all day; then I’ll work another fourteen-hour day
tomorrow. This is some big fun, this
phase. Marci’s been praying for me for
seventeen days. Meanwhile I remain
dark, miserable and tired. (It’s a more
emotional word than exhausted.)
Slow weak,
sort of. No coupons, but lots to do.
24 hours later. Not sure what to expect. Already killing everyone in my head,
flipping them off behind the counter, the nagging life question, who the hell
is up at this hour, oblivious that the store is still recovering from Night
Crew? I have no line. Now I’m terrified. It’s going to be a mad day.
People are unoriginal; get the same ideas at the same time.
This must be some kind of fairy tale,
but I have yet to live up to the notion.
This must be some twist of fate to be
painted in undue shades of devotion.
If this were real life,
if this were true,
I would be able to treat you
like I keep pretending I do.
If this were simple,
or if it were fair,
I could stop dreaming
and we would finally be actually there.
All of my songs sound the same;
I just keep complaining and crying in vain,
but if this were real life,
I wouldn’t be so scared.
This must be some kind of mystery,
but it feels more like an inquisition.
I must be some kind of hero,
but I feel more like a huge imposition.
If this were real life,
if I could have faith,
I’d be able to read you
by just taking cues from your face.
If this were redeemable,
if I could believe,
if this whole fucking thing could be
over with one last reprieve,
I would clasp my hands over my heart
and offer you ever last piece of my art,
but if this were real life,
I’d be keeping an ace up my sleeve.
I kick and I kick and I kick,
but the door won’t open.
I’m sick and my skin is thick,
but my back is broken.
I’ve got to get out of here.
I’ve got to get out of here.
I’ve got to disappear.
I scrape and I scratch and I pick,
and my teeth are grating.
I thrash and I gnash, and my
passionate rebukes are scathing.
I’ve got to get out of here.
I’ve got to get out of here.
I’ve got to disappear.
I write because
I’m not distracted by the same things
that distract other people.
No, I am distracted by other things,
by seeing improvements that need to be made.
I am distracted by anger and longing
and falling asleep sitting up,
head propped up over a journal.
I am nothing if not adaptable;
I’m unflappable to the sting.
I am nothing if not invincible;
it’s the principal of the thing.
Well, hey howdy, I hail from the South,
I’ve got it dripping from my mouth,
and I’m ripping in with my talons,
to your talentless soul.
And just like an old country cliché,
as syrupy sweet as molasses, they say,
I smile in the daylight, but at twilight
take my torchlight and resume digging holes.
I am nothing if not hospitable;
I’m remittable and mundane.
I am nothing if not retractable;
I am tactical, practical and sane.
Well I’ll be some wasted analogy,
rife with comparative lessons garnered from life,
an old wives’ tale that perhaps began
as a quote, from either Shakespeare or Jesus.
What difference, as long as I thank you politely,
and then reap the profits of raping you nightly?
It’s frightening how easy it is to please us.
I am nothing if not rational,
internationally acclaimed.
I am nothing if not formidable,
inimitable and strange.
You are nothing if not completely gullible,
lullable to a false sense of safe.
You are nothing at all but an animal
with a pleasant aroma and taste.
Can’t clock
in or start working because the Union is watching, so I’ll stand around useless
another five minutes, allowing myself to get behind; which will affect all my
customers as they back up in line at once.
“If I see you in the store working
off the clock, I’ll write you up.” What
are we, in grade school? You’re going
to fire me for having an ethic, you self-centered fucking baby? What I choose to do with my free time has
nothing to do with you. Write me up…
I’ll write you into a poem so everyone can read about the pinnacle of your
achievement.
The man I instantly hate,
simply for being a customer,
reminds me innocently
that he is getting coffee,
that he also doesn’t want to be up
on his way to work,
that he doesn’t win a dollar on the lotto.
I promise him a poem
to immortalize endurance,
a testament to posterity;
he smiles gruffly
and drags away in a leather jacket.
Next, Bob the stuntman
for his venti Irish Cream,
then the IHOP waitress
for her tall Americano.
I stare at the clock
as every one of us suffers.
It is a slow morning,
boding poorly for Carlos’s afternoon,
when I strand him for four hours.
The paperboys are up,
the nurses in scrubs up,
the gas station attendants
and truck drivers, mostly up,
and the people who make coffee
—motherfuckers all—up, up, up
for no damn reason,
while the farmer sleeps peacefully,
content.
$100 opening till.
First four customers—
$20 cash back.
I smile. Next.
Decaf, venti, soy, 1= latte.
Instead, how about a big cup of
FUCK YOU (to go).
I guess it could be worse
—I could still be checking;
the only humor in my day,
what I write about
each person I well-wish.
Another soy latte;
thanks a lot, Train…
that was a good joke.
Just how much is too much when I’m just
not sure just how much more I can take?
Just when I touch on the source of my troubles,
I’m crushed by a new rush of fate.
I can’t wait for the day to be laid out to greet me
when minutes do not turn to jabs,
when the state of my urgent defamatory gestures
refrain from their scraping at scabs.
It’s a long time to be miserable,
when there’s just so much more to endure.
How much more ‘til it’s purely unbearable,
when it keeps caving in even more?
How much longer can I harbor faith
in a heart that seems destined to never be full,
will I foster the frosted imposter who’s lost
in a monstrously wretched downpour?
Surely the end must come quickly,
when there’s surely nowhere else lower to go.
Just when I think I’ve no rope left to hang on,
I find a knot tauter below.
It’s a long time to be miserable;
it’s too hard to pretend I’m this strong.
This persistence is cruelly unthinkable,
and I shouldn’t have lived it this long.
My tiny world, hectic in its smallness,
its unimpressive monotony, set off by magnetic strips,
lined with Plexiglas and particle board;
pushing pastries and soy to fat, obnoxious people,
or unfulfilled single women on the [go, go, go],
in designer sunglasses and faux coats.
My small world encompassed on a security camera monitor,
writing myself into another corner,
condemning myself to a single tragic line,
waiting for the arm-in-arm in spirit to cascade in,
embittered but ignoring it; suppression the long-term
condition.
Had to call
out of Warner to cover the close at Vons.
My new employee wasn’t trained for register, so we can’t leave her
alone. Amelia has had enough, and I
frankly need her to leave. I have a
meeting on the 27th to discuss further management training, so I
have until then to find another job.
It’s impossible to schedule around Union shifts, so I end up working
10-20 hours a week off the clock—still getting in trouble if I don’t clock out
at six hours. All I need is $400 a week
to quit both nowhere jobs, but I won’t have time to think about it today.
Marci is off as an extra in an
indie film. It’s been almost 98 years
since the San Francisco earthquake. I
need more cigarettes.
Every day
I go to bed early—
shoes and outfit set out,
coffee maker set,
binding myself with eye masks
to make work by five—
is a day further from
the day I no longer have to.
Six minutes to kill
is enough
to kill
or to sum up unhappiness,
falling asleep
on studio steps.
Simplicity is beautiful,
all else commonplace,
inadmissible,
as quick minutes tick.
Ten minutes
to kill sitting in a parking lot, smoking, watching lunch hour breakers stroll
the front with newspapers I’ll have to put away. I’ll work the busiest 3½ hours alone, then leave Carlos for 3½
hours of the same; then go home to attempt paperwork—unpaid—just to be back at
5:30 for inventory. Marci is in
Pennsylvania with Didi, because Bruce collapsed a lung falling off an ATV. Christopher Reeve is staying at her hotel.
How do you do?
How do you do that,
stand there looking so pleasant,
while all my emotions at present
are tied to some far off future time,
that likely may or may not ever arrive?
I stand with my pen in my hand,
scribbling vainly some vague escape plan,
but I am just a man who can’t understand
how anything gets done.
Thank you for reminding me
that people can be so vile;
I haven’t dwelt on it for a while, but now
I feel that creeping feeling settling back in.
The day has a slow start,
so I think they must know
that I’ve been graciously obliging,
while wishing they would all
just go away. They
must know that
I despise and rue the day.
Jesus has come back to me lately,
like a memory triggered
by some mundane thing.
He’s come back to me;
he’s right back here where he said he’d be
when I finally resolved to acknowledge him
in my suffering.
There’s a time for wailing
and a time for worship,
a time for healing my peeling skin.
There is peace and restoration
in the plan of salvation,
and all I need to do is let him in.
Jesus is presently, patiently waiting,
while I push with my face
through the earth of this dirty world.
While my tears make a mudpack
and my ears hear the bloodbath,
he clears the way as the years unfurl.
Accosted immediately
on the day I might kill everyone.
I will not be able to fake it today.
It is too much.
Too, too very much.
I have tried and tried with all of my might,
and all of the goodness I had wrapped up inside.
But I’m tired, so tired of holding to these ideals
when it keeps being reinforced that they lied.
It doesn’t pay to be good.
I am still just as far from my goals.
I really thought that it would,
but I am poorer now and left in the cold.
And if I ever said in past I’d never compromise or quit,
or if I hinted at a target I believed I that I could hit,
well it just shows how little I really know.
I redefined in my lifetime words like solid and endurance,
and I did it all with never any help or reassurance.
I just kept on getting spit on and stepped on and kicked
around.
Well, I have finally had enough and reached the end of my
ambition.
There are limits to how tall a man can stand in this
condition.
My position is changing as I’m crumbling to the ground.
It doesn’t pay to be good.
I am still going through this alone.
I really thought that I could get a fair shake;
but, oh my god, no.
And if I ever quite let on that I expected resolution,
all the suspect evidence, instead, is fraught with
convolution.
I am lost in debtor’s prison, and the system just let me go.
It doesn’t pay to be good, and even less to be better.
I had peaked at perfection while I waited for that letter,
that one bit of good news that would make it all worthwhile.
But like I said, not one solitary thing ever goes smoothly;
I guess God somehow forgot that he was ever going to use me,
so I am wasted here beneath this feigned and breaking smile.
This temporary job
has gone on now seven months,
longer than I’ve lived some places.
I stand over a counter, ticketing pampers,
another coffee kiosk to my right.
My face drops,
my countenance falls,
my soul sinks as I continue to find
still deeper levels of despair.
I say yes to everything and remain
agreeable to nothing.
I am being shed on
by trees,
quietly covered and
serene as stone,
still with a flurry of activity
in a whirlwind of walkies,
as the convention sets
and men sweat in business suits.
It is as if it is winter, and
I am not here.
A stream continues in;
I do not know what they do,
and they certainly
do not know what I do.
I spend every hour
frustrated,
seeing the same words
recurring in my books,
over
and over
and over,
reapplying the same coats,
just barely covering
the dry rot underneath.
The unnecessary man
with his tool pouch
limps over slowly,
flustered and melodramatic
as if the whole world
that doesn’t matter
hinges on his
twenty minute tangents
that don’t matter.
I wonder what he must have
been like
as a weird, weird kid,
playing down by the creek
with smooth stones
as best friends.
We wear down the cart battery,
and the time clock,
silent and unnecessary.
I am worn down to nothing,
flailing around like a scarecrow.
I was expecting something,
but my outstretched hands
are worn down to the bone.
Like a charcoal that makes a great
smudge as you press harder down,
or the ivory that once was
an elephants tusk, smuggled out
of a third world town,
I age like an imported bottle
of fermented grapes,
and am forced to endure in immediacy
all my potency going to waste.
I am worn down like a crayon
making signs saying,
“Will work for food.”
As my resume sits on your desk,
unimpressed, you dismiss me as
just another one of those fools.
I have finally moved beyond
the confines of finding things so awful
that I just had to write them down.
This new ground I pound my stake in
cannot break or falter or fail.
And words like finally betray me,
once I think I’ve reached with certainty
a plane that can’t get worse
or any verse that gives a summary.
I keep finding new ways to say
that I keep getting nailed.
“I’m not sad anymore,” I said.
You said, “I’m glad.”
But I was thinking there is something
so much deeper than sadness.
There are some things so terrible
that all you can do is bounce back.
I try to keep my comments brief
because relief will never come to me,
and what’s the use in speaking
if it won’t amount to anything?
I may as well retire my pen,
and just lay down and die.
Wouldn’t that be just the ending
for my constant stream of poetry?
But Jesus seems to keep me here;
I just can’t imagine why.
I can finally smile;
it’s just that it means something
different when I do it.
I’m not sad anymore.
You say, “That’s great.”
But I’m afraid I mean I’ve sunken
past that point you can relate to
and discovered an entirely new plateau
so much lower than that.
I’m not sad anymore;
I am so much more than sad.
L.A. is the only place that thinks only L.A. is relevant
to everywhere else in the world.
The actors and producers and writers here think the earth is
square.
Well, I have been to the edges of the map, only to find
that it folds back and meets the other side, line for line,
and California is quite to the left of the borders it
shares.
I shouldn’t talk about people I may meet, but I’m afraid
I have very strong opinions based in ethics and morality,
and anyone who doesn’t agree will likely burn in hell,
even if they choose not to believe hell could really exist,
because how could a loving God allow anyone to go there
for thinking their way is right, as long as everyone treats
everyone well?
I’m so bored with people who think truth can be subjective,
who will key my car if I don’t share their perspective; yet
they
don’t share mine,
and therefore keep confusing tolerance and hate.
And every other thing I find I have a platform to complain
about
will wind up being something I could never have campaigned
without.
You doubt me, but I guarantee you never did, or ever will
relate.
It doesn’t mean I don’t respect you; it just means I really
don’t care.
Customers are vile. I hate all of them. Hours off the clock since Monday: 6½.
Rosebud was a sled, and that was the very last thing he
said.
Mr. Cane and I share a striking disdain for life.
Bruce Willis’s character dead, every Jane Austin gentleman
wed,
and Mattie Silver was ultimately paralyzed.
I’m ruining the endings, cause they’ve all been ruined for
me.
Just hand me the Cliff’s Notes to my enduring legacy.
And when we find that in time our assignments on earth are
recalled,
it appears I’m the only Guardian Angel left after the fall;
and though I am strictly forbidden to influence how it
unfolds,
I just love the look of surprise when you’re finally told.
No good can come of this simply ridiculous, burdensome
foolishness.
It’s as if my punishment sprung from the strung up lights in
the sky.
I sift through the tealeaves to tell you of treachery, coups
and mutiny,
and still you seek council and comfort that I can no longer
provide.
I’m ruining the ending not worth seeing through to the
surprise.
I’m defiling your memory by not allowing it to be disguised.
And when at last it comes down to just dwindling embers of
truth,
I’ll walk over barefoot to drip and extinguish that fountain
of youth.
I’m proving my stature as a prude who alludes to the means;
I’m ruining the ending, cause the ending is not what it
seems.
I am rethinking now my aversion to all that has come before,
realizing that there are moments of late I will be able to
look back on.
My lives—the many wonderful stages and colors—are so far
removed,
so distant and behind that they have begun to truly matter;
or I have only begun to realize that they did.
No one knows that there ever was a clubhouse.
No one suspects stars or campfires, or would certainly
imagine
I could ever have been young and unmarried, that I ever was
uncertain of myself and searching for love. But I was.
I was.
Having found so much does not dissolve anything,
does not mean I have never cared for another human being.
The fact is, I was a kisser once. I experienced each thing for a first time.
I am built of people I am unable to find—nor do I have the
inclination.
But those times, those firsts and that learning
are how I got here, and in this moment just before sleep,
I would reclaim each of them with fierce devotion.
Dear hero, I kind of know you.
Yes, you are the quandary, indeed, I have adjusted to.
I know you live just across town, I know your schedule,
I know you’d love my stuff, but I respect you enough
to never go down to where I know is your favorite bar.
When I accost you, I half expect you to
extend your crossed arms.
But why should I expect to be like you?
I know you’ve had success,
but please, this is me you’re talking to.
Who will believe me now, after thirty years?
Who am I to think that there will ever be relief?
You think it’s laughable, I know,
and I quite agree.
Just look at me;
I am laughing through my tears.
I have my wife, I have my own life,
and I have two jobs that I don’t like,
and I keep struggling just to keep
my head up above the ice.
This is it for me; I have everything
these tiring eyes can ever believe in.
I honestly don’t know why I even try.
Now why should I expect to be like you?
You know I get depressed whenever
anything comes true,
and I am not too blind to notice
the devotion in the vultures’ eyes.
Who am I to say it shouldn’t be this way?
Deep abrasions, in the shape of a heart in pain,
scar the surface where the hope allegedly resides.
But I am too young to know if it survives.
Up at five
for inventory. Six hours at Vons, then
another six at Warner. Marci got a job
at Cosgrove Meuerer, which she once did an episode of Unsolved Mysteries
for. Morrissey songs in my head for the
past month. Bruce is back in PA for Bam,
and Didi will join soon. Haven’t had
time to job search, but am confident something will come. I can’t stay this mean for much longer. Customers bother me. The people I work with bother me. Everyone is self-seeking but me. I just want to get away from it. Haven’t vacationed in over a year. Haven’t seen family in nearly that
long. They don’t like me in CA; I don’t
really have a choice. God put us
here. Mostly I need time with my
wife. Alone time. No work.
All I can do at home is clean a path to my side of the bed. My coworkers are asked, “What do you want to
do?” As if a company store or coffee
shop is some path to get there. And
what do I want to do? Nothing more than
I do already. I just want to get paid
for it.
I have suddenly stopped caring.
No, it wasn’t sudden.
It
stretched out over a thousand years,
dragging me over coals, scraping my face
over twisted grates and concrete.
I have been crushed and rebuilt
so many times. (I am
so cliché,
and so much more for saying so.)
Another Friday night with company
in town—Amy this time, who we can no longer call Ross, two months before her
wedding. The dark wood lattice holds us
in while full wall windows push out to false streets lined with neon and
streetlights. I live again in another
major city, as always unimpressed as envious suburban teens imagine the glamour
of moving streets. I am stagnant and propelled
forward by the moving walkway of purpose.
I was not called here. I did not
choose here. I did not even make the
conscious decision to move here. I
simply obeyed. I heard and was
responsive. I don’t know how it
happened. But now….
This is L.A., the place you read
about. The place happy hollow people
sing about. City of Pasadena. A fire truck drives by. People walk by. A draft moves the awning.
Somewhere near, Morrissey lives and breathes. It is not out of the question to run into such people. Another Friday night, craving suffocation.
When the third person stopped to talk,
I thought, “I have to stop sitting on benches.”
First, sitting Indian style, the man stopped pushing his
cart,
ignored my cigarettes, and said,
“You know, sitting like that is bad for your heart.”
I guess I figured the white man would slaughter me anyway.
Second, do I want a resort in Palm Springs?
“Already got one,” I puffed.
The third tap on the foot as I nodded off;
“Aren’t you going to make our Starbucks?”
“He’s on break.”
Finally, “I’d like to pay you for a cigarette,”
she said, following with a comprehensive list
of heart and glaucoma medications,
and that her husband died two years ago.
Mmmm-hmmm. My lunch
is over.
Monday evening, just before seven; Trader Vics, Beverly
Hills.
Sitting uncomfortably with the group that clearly doesn’t
belong
—the type that don’t order drinks (just water), say they’ll
pay,
then coyly slip in “You can split if you want to,” or,
“The appetizers look good… I wonder how big they are?”
When the meal comes, they ask by reflex for salt and pepper,
real butter and soy sauce… and more lemon.
I think to myself, “Why don’t we just slap the waiter in the
face?”
The valets and excellent servers have more class in their
dish sinks
than we in our homes.
I dread the bill and am asked to put my journal away.
I oblige. I would
hate to offend anyone or not fit in.
Joe Phu, I admire you.
I tell stories twice,
even though
they are not interesting enough
for a first, and despite
that I lose interest
somewhere in the middle,
and end with,
“I guess you had to be there.”
And you think to yourself,
“I was there, actually.
And it wasn’t funny then.”
But I guess that’s love.
Listening like that, I mean.
Years ago, I thought
I was killing myself.
Apparently, it takes
more than I smoke in a day,
more shots than I do in a day,
and apparently far less sleep,
far more loneliness
and many more tears and words
than I can fill a page with.
Much more has to go wrong
before I am taken.
The suffering must never end.
The sentiment must never end
ever.
Time is no friend of mine,
as friends are no friend of mine.
Family, the same, and obligation.
I am unchanged, even though more fully
realized from what I was outside Seminole,
sitting as I did against my pillar,
betrayed by places and memory,
discounting the minutes to the approaching tone.
Here pass high-ranking men with awards,
and the excitement—the dreaming and acting out
of scenes in my mind—is gone.
I cover with heavy eyes the colors of flowers,
alive and still in their brief commitment to life,
avoiding the sentiments my predecessors
would have afforded, every day
another part of my death realized.
I am put off by the parade, disgusted by
the procession, and once again betrayed by
measures of happiness set forth by man.
The road to success, paved with…
I do not know.
My road is not paved,
and does not lead to success.
It leads, in fact, nowhere,
circles around sometimes,
loses earth and wear,
blends in to the thicket,
becomes something more of
an obstacle course.
It may not get better,
but it can’t get any worse.
I am ready to be fired, braced for the swift,
just fulfillment of my changing role.
I have served my drinks, served my purpose,
and am no longer fit to stand smiling behind the counter.
I no longer fit the mission statement,
no longer meet the qualifications,
because now I drag my customers down,
invite them to sample my misery
and grin sadistically, adding members to my cult.
They now feel guilty for ordering,
disgusted with themselves for arriving each day,
feeling the ice of my silence and eternity in my look.
This is arrogant, but true;
I am no longer the best at what I do,
but now only the best at what I am.
There is no longer a place for
Ryan the barista or Ryan the clerk.
It is now Ryan, hope to the hopeless,
voice of souls.
And now the customers tell us how much things
are.
I think, perhaps, the one three back in the suit,
with tapping hard feet, must be amused at the rare sites of:
Me here after noon,
Me on break.
She’s late, and her drink will not be as good.
I am almost relaxed now. Almost.
I get up for a split second
to explain the wording of a coupon,
what “Valid June 20th Only” means.
(It is June 19th).
For the first time since we got here,
my wife and I will have a weekend.
Together. Alone.
I breathe out that breath before crying.
Here
on the fountain step,
a pained breath
before a longer sigh,
the day after
I stopped caring.
This is no life,
behind a counter,
stretched back arched,
waiting, waiting, waiting,
with never a stagnant moment
but the stench of death surrounding.
18… no, 19 people waiting for orders,
leaning on my glass case,
me leaning on the hard point of inner counter.
This is, they say, the slow month,
these the dead weeks before production resumes,
and yet, I can’t get to my orange juice and ice,
and I think that’s Briggs (maybe).
I ring one by one,
glance down to people’s hands
and try to hide somewhat my written on wrists.
Horrible people (—What do they do?)
like ants, or whatever swarms,
press in.
I didn’t write your haikus, S.F.,
the recitations from
this morning’s ride to work.
And I didn’t go to graduate school.
I wrote that in one sitting,
because I am that literary.
Wearing what they shouldn’t be—
probably aren’t allowed—
lacking anything
I ever found appealing.
I think of my wife, glance at my cell,
faintly tremor in the lip,
scour the store quickly with
stone, deadpan eyes.
And now also, walking,
I would be filling with smoke
my decayed lungs, my collapsed chest,
quite happy, and quite not.
Things get weird, or weird is questionable,
when for no reason Elaine shows up,
and a version of playful Dianna, halfway to Sarah,
with elements of someone else, as yet unidentified;
taunting and mocking with envy my rejected note tablet.
The park bench splinters as I spring from bed, another
sensation lost,
head straight, naked, to the coffee pot;
and the cat pads at the inside of the door.
Poetry will ruin the day, and the day will ruin poetry.
Monday mandatory meeting,
managers in ties and leads in white and aprons;
I lean against the doorframe with a nervous foot tap,
stranding my single worker, to watch satellite television
to a pileup of customers.
A stack of paperwork overdue,
my shipment backing to the dock, breaks left uncovered
and the hour approaching—encroaching—
when I start getting told not to hit overtime,
and not to work off the clock.
Out front of Vons, on the bench
near the bike rack. Eleven miles
yesterday. One six-hour shift to go
before a two-mile uphill ride home, then a nap. A potato bug crosses slowly in front of my grounded foot. Three things off the clock yesterday. Screening for Brothers Grimm was full. The day will not be good. I just want to sleep. Traffic is already heavy on the 134. I tap on the glass with keys to be let in.
Even here I draw stares.
I draw deeper breaths than everyone else,
don’t fulfill any particular part,
and remain outside as a source of intrigue.
I am too comfortable,
slipping in and out of skips.
I am admired; meanwhile
I admire far off places
and circumstances not mine.
My wife who loves me—still sensitive where I died
in the last year—sleeps downstairs with a struggle against weight. She is beautiful, but doesn’t know it. She is playful most of the time, but on
those days between looks down and hates her body, which is only an expression
of herself.
I write
today only because it is early and she still sleeps downstairs. The sputtering coffee maker calls my first
cup, and I breathe to hear my own strained sinuses. My muscles are tense and sore and my eyesight is poor. I am still crooked in neck and spine, and now
there is flab on my stomach. I am at
that in-between age, where I am not quite old, but certainly not young. I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know if it gets better. I am surrounded in life by struggling,
unhappy people (although, every one more sociable than I) able to say they’ve
been with the company for nineteen years.
I am not allowed to quit my job because of school debt and living
expenses, but I can’t look elsewhere working 62 hours a week, especially now
that our computer crashed. Did I not
know God, this would all seem impossible.
I have
given my whole self away to everyone, and expected nothing in return. We are in Arrowhead for the weekend, in a
cabin in elements similar to that cottage five years ago in Canada. It is the first weekend with nothing to do
since the strike started. I have been
miserable. On the way here I put in the
CD mix Todd made for my birthday two years ago, and I cried to realize I
haven’t purely enjoyed anything since moving here. Los Angeles has a unique death to it that I wonder if I can be
revived from.
Marci is
up.
Already,
the neighbors TV on. The observed
holiday means most likely an absurdly busy day. Marci is off. For three
days straight I’ve gone immediately to bed upon arriving home. Customers love me. I hate customers. It is
unfair for me to continue. I’ve never
been shy about what I want. God has
been shy granting it.
Weight:
140, Cigarettes: Switched to Eclipse; they don’t count.
At least there, I had at least
some moments of anticipation,
or at the very least
something short of contempt,
even behind the strong wooden counter,
and the beer cooler
that one bitter collaborative writer
started in by nine in the morning.
There I had an occasional smirk
or worthwhile conversation,
a sudden reprieve every so often,
in the feminine form of a tip jar.
Here my eyes close for
altogether different reasons.
I know it’s over. Weight: 137, cigarettes: ½ a pack, bike miles:
18. Rushing through coffee tasks and
customers to try and finish a schedule when #257 called twice to borrow
workers. I said I would call before
noon—when I finished. They got
angry, called Paula; she waddled over to see where I was. (Keep in mind that I can’t work off the
clock, meaning no schedules at home the night before due.) I showed her the requests I was working
around, and she responded with, “They’re only requests; Vons doesn’t work
around family.” Hmmm… you know
what? Fuck Vons, because I do. It’s a fucking grocery store. People are more important than your fucking
bottom line.
All that is to say I know I’ll be
fired. Soon. They know I’m looking.
They know I hate where I am. And
frankly, I haven’t abided by the Union rules or Safeway to-do lists, because
they haven’t supplied the resources to back me up. I’ve been doing a reverse fast for an answer about work. Rather than deprive myself of yet one more
thing, I thought to read the Bible every day for forty days—to add to my
life. The fortieth day will be Friday,
August 6th.
Two to clock in;
one more minor emergency.
It’s only coffee.
I miss my wife.
Safeway stands above me
with a sickle.
Please make up my mind,
so I can know—
just KNOW
what I’m supposed to do.
Standard issue straw hats for the
parking attendants, logo T-shirts, red, white or blue (get it?). 11:30, Sunday morning, the camera awkwardly shakes
and zooms too close on the shiny headed, puffy man stumbling to relay the power
behind continuously running keyboard music.
Then the greet—and I thought I could get through a day without cursing.
Now affirmed it is that this is
again—standard model—every other church, at the very least across America, and
my head drifts and I lean back and drone out as the ushers come forward. My passive gaze penetrates the tall, booted,
indistinguishable type, projecting too loudly from sincere obligation; out the
bay windows, past two crossing men in cell phone conversations, past the street
with passing cars, past the church lot across the street, and out to the trees,
and in the trees I find the actual living embodiment of the creator. We the created hole up and bless walls,
dedicating to Christ the measured confines, while outside a wind rustles a
series of hanging blossoms. The sermon
plays to the Hollywood dreams the duration of the service.
12:10, Sunday afternoon. I am in church in L.A., longing to be out in
the hills with Christ.
Outside California
you don’t see leaf blowers
hitting the pavement around cars.
Here, they put coasters
beneath your glass.
Here you don’t know
how much work and cost
goes into the illusion of happiness.
Eight
Starbucks managers, me the only guy, none of us manager by choice. A new kiosk opening in the same complex as a
company owned store. A little nervous;
feels like day camp. Chariots of
Fire plays overhead. I bet Vangelis
wasn’t thinking about grocery stores.
Seven
huddled around a Starbucks table, exchanging anecdotes about spilling milk and
leaving tops off blenders. I think
about Christmas, and listen to Costello and Radiohead on the in-store. I stopped writing about relationships. I stopped writing about hopes and
dreams. I don’t mention my ideas for a
holiday room. I don’t mention anything.
My eyes are
hard. My face is hard. My stance and shoulders—hardened. I relate to no one. I don’t care about audits or health codes,
or guests standing around waiting for drinks.
They’ve killed me, and I breathe back death. I want the system to crash the way I have crashed. I want everyone to break down with what I
feel. I don’t want to manage a
counter-full of coffee.
It’s not the fat,
but the disproportion that bothers be,
and that they don’t hide or correct it.
Disproportionate people
unevenly distributing children
is the worst abuse of all,
not respecting,
not loving,
not training,
people who don’t deserve children.
Another day
wasted, money wasted on stale coffee and weak people, an island of boxes and
binders, excessive array of monotony and money; worker ants scurrying around
the island counter, sinking, sinking, forgetting what in life truly matters and
replacing it with systems and ready answers.
People with apparently nothing to do—“whatsoever people” as I call
them—converge and descend like bored parasites and dim the substantial. I am flooded with obscurity, and breathing
becomes gasping through calamity.
How can I miss so intensely from only one room away?
Who are these pointless motherfuckers
who waste my conservative days?
All the dreams we had rest like wreckage beneath a vast sea,
and I’m suddenly sorrowful for the lost suckling between you
and me.
I am draped with dissension and dripping derision and scorn.
You are the catalyst coping, not knowing how to keep me
warm.
Oh, what happened to life?
What happened to happiness, bliss or intrigue?
What happened to closing our eyes and imagining
that there was anything left to believe?
What happened to life?
What happened to that thin silhouette in the moonlight,
breathing with fear that our heaving and thrusting
would awaken the household when I pulled you near?
Sliding one hand between your legs, one up under your shirt,
getting harder the longer we played in that heightened
alert.
What happened to life?
What happened to passionate longing in sweat?
What happened to staying awake all night long
‘til every inch of our bodies was wet?
What happened to that?
What happened to life?
What happened to dying to see you undress?
What happened to nakedness, beauty and intimacy
being everything I could have guessed?
What’s left?
My enemies are closing in from every side.
If I slip up and fall now, I swear I will not survive.
My thin bones are weary and my muscles are sore.
A torrential downpour is imposing,
the likes of which I’ve not seen before.
I have given my all and it just keeps getting worse.
The scenes I am given are not quite the scenes I’d
rehearsed.
I’m just one day ahead.
Any minute I could fall.
The whole delicate balance of power
could shift and I could lose it all.
I am just at the cusp and the structure could burst.
I could be at the point where historians voice
it began to get worse.
I have seen the prize, but I practice what I preach,
and if I have learned anything for certain, it’s always
outside my reach.
I’m not quite forsaken, but my luck may have peaked.
I may wake up tomorrow back on track with my losing streak.
It feels like a shiver with a quivering lip;
I mouth my mantra and brace for the impact that may sink the
ship.
I’m just one day ahead.
I could so easily lag behind.
I am prepared for the wake to overtake me
and to drown in the tide.
I’m just barely in front of this impending storm.
I can see my reflection in the eye of its ominous form.
I’m just one day ahead,
at the foot of a hill,
prepared to be kicked by the crowd,
determined and avowed that they will.
I’m just one day ahead,
near the end of my ride.
Instead of repentance, accept
they will never take me alive.
At Bruce’s,
the Saturday before Didi comes back, for a West Coast Viva La Bam
production crew reunion. Eva from
Dakota is here—Harry Anderson’s daughter.
Tim Glomb seems unable to make eye contact. I’m sitting downwind from the smoker, amid Eclipse and Foster’s,
as usual, with nothing to say.
7:30. A few more show up while I nap against the
patio wall. Marci makes coffee and I
hear introductions without participating.
The girls and I find our way to the kitchen. Eminem plays as I write; I wonder how many people can relate if
I’m the only one I’ve seen writing through an entire party. The Cure comes on.
8:15. Moz now.
The newcomers discuss Kerry’s DNC speech, not knowing I’m a
Republican. I drink black coffee, the
only non-alcoholic beverage here. I
thought I cursed a lot, until now; now I’m convinced I curse poetically. Glomb talks about controlling his own
life. He brought his own table and
chairs. I listen to everyone and say
nothing.
The gifting
is a gem
I have turned
to dagger,
scraping off skin,
pulverizing
precious faces,
awaiting the swelling.
I am an oyster today.
You will have
nothing to show
from me
for a thousand years.
Someday I will be
held accountable,
and claim masochism
as my defense.
I have, to show for
my time,
a sales figure
that would have
been the same.
Put someone else
here, then,
and let me at
rest,
the merciless tyrant
I am, with my
frothing pitcher staff.
Something very wrong about
the cut and pull of that woman’s tight white slacks,
even worse the self-important stance
and outmoded hairdo on heals,
those matchless shades of pink;
something horrible about any intolerable detail of
so pointless a life—85 years all told,
just to wind up a standard vehement curse
in a world unhinged from perspective’s frame.
I’m doing all that I can do.
I’m doing everything I can.
I’m doing all that I know how,
and everything that I was taught
would make me a better man.
It’s all that I can do.
It’s taking everything inside me
not to crumble before your eyes.
It’s all that I can do not to cry.
It’s getting darker by the day,
It’s getting harder by the hour.
It’s getting tedious and troublesome
to keep up this facade
that it has not all gone sour.
It’s all that I can do to keep from crying aloud
while I’m just trying to get through the day.
It’s all that I can do to keep on living this way.
Please don’t ask me how I am.
I’m too emotional to speak.
It’s simply better if I hide myself
until I am not so weak.
Sitting up
asleep, partially sheltered in a mildly shaded wind; a droning outside day
passes unnoticed by the inside workers, scurrying to checklists and Union
hours. I hate my own words, struggling
for some glimpse of faith or grace beneath a hazy blue sky of sunshine, trying
desperately to breathe serenity over the glossy film of careless daylight. Another forty years of wilderness flake away
like chipping paint. Winter is
coming. Thoughtless people push on with
hollow drudgery through heedless streets and sweeps of… busy… busy… busy… dead.
Incapable are
the shoppers of calculating the equations enveloping them with a frenzy of calm
detachment. I see it, but am bound to
its futility and unable to feel that once familiar water-logged sensation of
floating up and up and up. Language
turns to languish, and I long to hand in vocabulary for wings.
Thirty years of suffering
for one inestimable phrase;
when the thirty years pass,
wisdom of the age remains.
Later on a day not named in the
week, a boy from Greenland watches his fingering and laments over the loss of
home and simple ways. (A helicopter
passes overhead.) A little girl crawls
beneath feet, lined in chairs up to the playhouse, trimmed in shrubs and
clinging vines. On track, a scheduled
PR, pristine event with lifestyle artists and awkwardly suited aging couples,
unaware of aspiration, believing what they’re told and see.
A light Merlot’s aroma marks the
key change, and fruit trees bounce back monitored sound to the hardened face of
a man hours from now in a bar, mocking the surroundings. For now I wonder what makes people think
ideas are okay, what says things are not endlessly hilarious.
Poetry is knowing
what to steal from whom,
without them knowing.
I got that from Ellis,
who got it from Lori,
who got it from
God knows where.
Huddled round under the same ever-changing sky,
arm in arm, but definitely not eye to eye.
All of my songs and pleas, it turns out, were lies,
and anything you ever said to me was certainly a surprise.
We are all in this alone.
There is no such thing as together.
There is no way to get into each others’ souls.
We are all caught without raincoats under the weather.
Thinking hard, trying to remember what names I’ve forgotten,
all of those lovers whose faces used to mean everything.
Living as though those foundations were completely rotten,
I think I’ve uncovered the roots of my suffering.
We are all in this alone.
I have since gotten over your influence.
I have learned how to stand on my own,
and I honestly can’t see the difference.
Here’s the part that cuts you to the heart, unintentionally;
it’s just that “I love you” must’ve meant something else in
your head.
I never intended to keep more than one girl forever,
and I sure never meant for you to hold me to what I said.
Now we are all in this alone.
There is no ground for you to intrude on.
Now that I’m happy, healthy, and grown,
there is nothing else you could improve on.
We are all in this alone.
I don’t mean to sound so indifferent,
but I’m well, and I want you to know
that all I ever needed was that imprint.
Soul stirring, wide eyes;
I can’t believe I made you cry.
So fluid in your natural grace,
I need your eyes to find my
future in your face.
Seems too cliché to say
I love the way you bring me to life,
breathe motion on my tattered banner
and return as my wife.
There’s something subtle and spectacular
that sweeps when you speak,
ignites the private life,
the pilot light residing in me.
Soul stirring, bright eyes,
so innocent, sweet and wise,
so flawless in your natural state;
I need you by me just to
spy my rightful place.
Seems obvious to offer
praises when I can’t hardly talk,
get choked up with emotion,
and can’t wait to walk up the walk.
A million moments, in my
vivid, wild imagination,
live like a true romance;
a deep, enhanced sensation.
Soul stirring inside;
how did you agree to be mine?
So tempting and divine,
so sensual and fine.
Soul stirring; tongue-tied,
I take one look at you and die.
Flaming
Lips and drinking games a level down.
Kirstin’s Ryan’s housewarming, nearly everyone meeting for the first
time. Already I pity the
neighbors. Marci settles on the couch,
talking theater and marriage to a 23 year-old in a Dodgers hat. I’m in the corner as usual, at the moment
thinking about Mollygraphs, almost looking forward to revisiting Nashville next
week. My $500 Starbucks manuals sit in
my backpack across the room, and I’m already half asleep thinking of all I have
to do before Wednesday.
Photographs
are interesting; I wonder as I get older what age I’ll want to be remembered
as. I think of this because I’m wearing
a Longfellow shirt—a very bizarre concept if you think about it.
It is
impossible for me to look interested.
Kirstin leaves the game and joins our corner, half a sweetheart, half a
person. There are no virgins at the
parties anymore.
For a thick slice of
deep dish, sausage
pizza with extra cheese,
dripping with oil
down the crust,
I think I would do
almost anything.
An uncomfortable rehearsal dinner,
with two distinct cultures awkwardly sitting with crossed arms and legs. A weight hangs over the room in the form of
chatter and gossip.
A closed BP outside Fairview after
Amy’s Rehearsal Dinner. Marci and the bridesmaids
are down in Hillsboro Village for dessert.
I’m stuck with Rog’s overheated car and a gallon or so of water, hoping
it’ll cool down enough to make it over the hilly, excessively narrow road back
to Beck’s. This is why I ride a
bike. Fairview is not the sort of place
one sits in a parking lot writing.
On the day Amy’s life begins,
lit by lowering sun and candles,
one way or the other through soft frosted glass,
the piper and the players congregate,
the family in tailored or fitted clothing,
recede into shadow,
the simultaneously cool and inviting concrete
arches in, framing the scene,
and solemn introspective thoughts detach,
lift like feathered birds, graciously and slow,
while the sad and excitable silent orchestra
twitters delicately in form from wall to pew,
from walkway to pulpit, gilded with candelabras.
If I had everything the world has to give,
I would still not have found my reason to live.
‘Til you showed up here with arms open wide,
I never knew how much I needed inside.
The world is not enough;
I need your warmth, your faith, your love.
With every breath I ever breathe,
I need you right here beside me.
If I were king over some vast enchanted land,
I would fend dragons off to win your precious hand.
And in our fairy tale, the riches wouldn’t count.
Only our love is what the tale would be about.
People say that I’m a dreamer,
but I have only dreamed of you.
I’m not ashamed to say it’s possible
that all my dreams are coming true.
The world is not enough;
I can’t survive without your touch.
If every other wish came true,
it would mean nothing without you.
The world is not enough;
I never asked for all that much.
I only want one simple thing…
for you to wear my ring.
Let me not miss how the light hits
so delicately the blush of your cheek.
Let me not casually take for granted
bewildering beauty.
But take your cue from me looking at you
like I can’t find my way through this life
without taking each step like we’ve only just met,
and yet knowing you’ll end up my wife.
Keep the stars shining just where they are,
and don’t let their luck ever fall.
Leave in place, my lord, every last trace
of the moment that started it all.
Help me always to see how perfectly
only I and she fill up the frame.
Let me never lessen intensity,
never forget the sparks caused by her name.
But guard our hearts as the most central part
of the narrative of our charmed lives;
write our names with indelible ink in our thinking,
to always remember this night.
Hold in place every detail encased;
wrap us tight like a permanent shawl.
Keep on our faces the tender embrace
of the moment that started it all.
The almost came and went.
The almost wile away.
Casting shadows of red, they play and they play.
I was your biggest fan and closest friend.
You were the cockeyed grin beneath my shades.
Whatever happened to when your words could blow me away?
A year has passed, perhaps, maybe a winter or more.
I sit now just where I did, to reclaim it I think,
but it just isn’t the same—even this memory is cliché.
The almost paint new pictures, but hang them in old frames,
keep changing the verses to the same old refrains.
The almost keep playing in vain.
I know my wife loves me
because little things like
grilling chicken strips,
melting cheese across
and wrapping in bread,
the whole thing folded securely
in by wax paper,
then dropping by work to
tuck it with grapes and granola
into my bag,
are otherwise too much effort.
These are the acts most people
fail to see motivation behind,
and the infinite accumulation of these
is why I love her back.
I hope I can remember
the next time she asks.
“Tell me a story,” she says, when I’m already halfway
asleep.
“I’m not that creative,” I answer, then turn to her pouting
cheek.
“Alright, let me think,” I give in, because there’s no
resisting those eyes.
“Well, my favorite story is the story of you and I.”
When I was a young and aspiring artist, I met a girl
who made me forget there was anything wrong with the
world.
We both looked for life and love elsewhere,
but still remained friends,
and kept meeting up in unlikely places again.
I was terrified because I was just a kid;
still I knew that I loved her, yet never let on that I
did.
“I like this story,” she says, “But I feel like I’ve heard
it before.”
“It may sound familiar,” I say, “But I probably should tell
it more,
because the world would do better hearing a story like mine,
how there’s only one other on earth for each person to
find.”
As I grew slightly older and a little bit more mature,
I was through with the games I’d been playing,
and found myself needing her more.
Our innocent friendship turned into an intimate romance,
‘til the day came I could no longer leave it to chance.
So that’s when I asked her if she would marry me.
She said yes, and I never regretted a single thing.
“Well, that’s a good story,” she says,
“But that doesn’t sound like an end.”
I can no longer speak as she kisses my cheek again.
She once again turns me to tears as she turns away;
my favorite story is the one she adds to every day.
People keep
asking about the band-aids (5) on my arm.
And the red mark. I burned my
arm on a light bulb, and fell off my bike while making business calls. Not the same day.
Central
Perk is short staffed, so I’ve been running between departments.
Cross-legged
by the fountain, having been pulled to coffee for the week. I really love not being in charge. My last day at Vons will be Friday, the 10th. I look forward to… sleep, and my wife, and
watching my President change the country in tangible ways. I look forward to not waking up at 4:45, to
editing my books, and going out sometimes.
I look forward to the death of retail and the end of customer service,
to a Bradbury future where my sphere can be reduced to a chosen few.
I can’t
remember my last time in a pool, or soaking in a bath, being immersed in water,
feeling thin and clean and loved by light.
I have hope again. I am alive
again, active in parts that had been dead for a year. That, friends, is the benefit of creativity.
Same
fountain, knees crunched up and shoeless; very between shifts, eyes
dragging. People treat this like a real
job, but it’s a joke. School is back
in. The week is too busy. All I want to do is sleep. A crazy woman gets in everybody’s way.
This is
the life I know.
Not
the one I imagine.
Once again
mistaken for a homeless person, I’m woken up to be checked on. My response probably confirms it… hard to be
instantly coherent mid-dream. There are
too many people in the world. I should
find somewhere else to sleep.
These tears don’t make any sense.
They can’t say what they mean,
and certainly can’t plead their defense.
They just fall at the mention of you,
seemingly unprovoked, in these
unspoken moments of truth.
I feel it again, this feeling that will not end.
Whenever I think that I’m through,
well, you surface like someone who drowned.
I feel half dead, but I think that I killed you instead,
by becoming that one sort of person
impossible to be around.
These fears must make it intense
when they can’t be deflated,
my grotesque shadows growing immense,
while, so small, you look up from the corner
with eyes that can smash me to pieces
and melt back the core that’s inside.
I feel it again, that victimized cry you send,
that unintentional message that slips
when I’m sensitive to being exposed.
I feel your heart, while breaking its pedestal apart.
Once it started, I found I could not
keep Pandora’s Box closed.
Three
days. Three miserable, wretched days
left. I proved myself and paid my
penance. That’s all I can stand. And next?
This place, kneeling at my fountain, dreading even my next step
forward.
I conclude that I no longer need
to stamp my disapproval
across the face of everything.
If, after all, God remembers his covenant
to not wipe out mankind again with waters
or rain down sulfur from Heaven,
I can certainly divert my eyes
and not rejoin the image of my scorn.
After all, now that I have plateau-ed
back on my blistered feet,
I can at last look eternally back,
and under any circumstance, say
with great conviction, triumph and relief,
“At least I no longer work in a grocery store.”
Day one of my new life, a flat on
one bike and jammed gears on the other; three miles pushing with my foot and
coasting, a half hour late. That’s day
one.
Everything is calm right now. I know it can’t last. I had my first weekend. Semi-agnostic Jared was here. I live by anxiety, ready to pounce on what’s
next.
Weight: 141, Cigarettes: 0,
Black-Eye: 1st
I am
increasingly:
stiff,
stoic,
stern,
finding amusement
in deadpan
face,
more and more at ease
perfectly
still,
matter of
fact,
curt and
concise,
very happy to not
respond at
all;
the less reaction,
the funnier,
the more absurd.
Lunchtime. Everybody wanders, bags under arm and cup in
hand, wrapped in loose fitting second layers hiding nothing, headed somewhere
as if they were needed there. Every day
the nuances of nuisance increase, and I conclude that I cannot police the
world. All I can do is remove my
glasses, allow everything to blur, and hope the world is not the same when I
look back up. It always is, and I
always respond reiterating thirty-year trends, pent up tendencies rising like
magma from deeply hidden core.
Sanctuary. Retreat.
Respite. My eyes well the moment
I wake.
Someone can afford
a fountain. That’s
it.
A top of 42 flush
stones in a square,
and a filtered reservoir of
probably 200 gallons of
crisp water in constant shade
by paper trees.
I don’t have 50¢ for a soda;
and water surges perpetually
up from a bubbling spring,
merely to walk by,
or to be thrown pennies
by children.
Should I feel bad?
I’m failing.
The angels assigned to me are wailing,
for they have seen what I’ve done
and keep on doin’.
They have witnessed this
proud prophet turn to ruin.
Once I was the focus of her dreaming.
Now I’m just the reason she sleeps.
Once I was the light inside her, beaming.
Now I’m just a souvenir she keeps.
Should I be saying something?
This is awkward…. I
know my voice
has turned to nails against a chalkboard.
Everything I promised I would be
is all she ever asks
but never sees.
Once I was the hero of her fantasy.
Now I hold her captive to the lie.
Once I knew the secret to her fancy.
Now I am the man who makes her cry.
Once I was a certain sort of person,
the likes of whom she never knew before.
Now I’m just a faint and tainted version.
What I was, I am no more.
If I’m happy now, then why
am I still irritable?
Despite my placement,
people are the same,
always standing, waiting,
crossed arms and
poor word choice with a smile,
unnecessary spending and
circular time.
I am interrupted by a thought:
If I write while on the clock,
are they paying me to write?
Does that make me professional yet?
No, what a stupid thought.
And then I wonder, what happens
if I don’t pocket yet my journal and pen?
What might happen
as my eyes wander