Just doin’ it (while skipping around in time/space like a drunken temporal traveler):

Yesterday at work was the worst shift I’ve ever had, and I’ve had some truly exasperating shifts in that dish pit. I arrive to start my shift at four and find there’s already a good hour’s worth of work waiting for me… not just the usual dirty plates (the brilliant geniuses at Village Inn let the daytime dishwasher go at 1, generally, so there is always a good solid stretch of several hours for every fucking platter in the place to end up back on my counter waiting to be washed) but this time, about half of that hour’s worth of accumulated work is stuff that the day guy should have done… or, at the very least, stuff I am not allowed to leave at night without finishing up. Specifically, he left a cart full of clean dishes that had to be taken back to the cook line (which usually takes between five and fifteen minutes, depending on how many cooks are moving around in a very narrow space cursing me as I try to navigate around them with armfuls of clean dishes to place back under their grills) and, worse, he left a rack full of half clean, unsorted silverware. Sorting silverware takes a good twenty minutes. Since, as noted, every dish in the place not on that dish cart and all the silverware Village Inn owns not in that half washed rack were sitting over on the counter waiting for me to clean them, these two items, which should have been done by the lazy prick working the shift before mine, simply put me that much further behind.

Then we got slammed with business all day long and the stream of unclean crockery and soiled flatwear never let up, with the result that I never got caught up… and since Micromanager Julie has recently switched to managing weekends, and her professional speciality is poking her porcine head back into the dish room to find one more task (not included in my job description, generally) for me to do, just when I’m busiest, well, it was a HORRIBLE FUCKING DAY.

I very nearly quit, at one point. I’d been there half an hour when Julie marched back through my dish room and peremptorily ordered me to “help with changing the milk in the dispenser”. So I went into the cooler with her, got down the box containing the five gallon plastic sack of milk (okay, yeah, it weighed about forty pounds, but still, Julie was a waitress and all these waitresses carry around trays of food all day long that I myself would collapse under in four seconds, so it’s not like I’m actually stronger than anyone else there), and trundled it out to the milk dispenser. Julie noted that the previous box was stuck in the dispenser by ice, so I went and got a spatula to pry it loose… came back and found Julie was gone.

Now, I have never in my life changed one of these dispensers out before, but what the hell, if the manager asked me to help her do it, she must know how, right? And if she abandons me in the middle, it must be simple, right? So I go through all the steps, get it reassembled the way it seems it must logically go, cut the feed line so the milk can start being dispensed… and I’ve done something terribly wrong, because milk starts pouring out all over the place and will not stop.

In a panic, one of the waitresses runs and gets Julie, and it turns out Julie has no idea what I’ve done wrong, either, she just assumed I knew how to do it… why, I could not tell you, but in the past week, I have learned a new and novel thing about my job every single damned day, and very few of those things have been pointed out by management. They do not believe in training the dishwasher at the Village Inn; one is supposed to absorb job knowledge homeopathically, I believe.

Eventually we get this squared away, but of course I’ve been shown to be humiliatingly inept in front of the entirety of my co-workers at Village Inn, pretty much all of whom are female, and if you think I’m so enlightened that I don’t mind being displayed as completely inadequate and incompetent in front of a group of women I really have no emotional ties to, you’re crazy.

But the point where I nearly quit was when Julie poked her sowlike snout into my dishroom around 8 and told me that due to the milk spill, I was going to have to deckbrush the outer hallways (the cleaning of which are actually the job of the busser, but Village Inn doesn’t have a busser on Sundays, so guess who gets to do it?) after I hosed them down and squeegeed them that night.

Being middle aged has some advantages; ten years prior to this, I might have screamed in her face “LOOK, you fucking BITCH, the milk spill only happened because you’re about the most incompetent manager in the history of time and space, and I’m BUSY RIGHT NOW, SO SHUT THE FUCK UP!!” However, instead I just stared at her and said, quite calmly, “Okay, but you know, I really have a lot to do already tonight”.

Julie smirked and replied quite pertly “well, you have to do this too” and that was when I resolved that I’d stick out the evening, get this all cleared up, and as I walked out that night to my cab, I’d mention lightly, over my shoulder, that I wouldn’t be in again except on Friday to pick up my check.

Julie must have gotten something from my tone, or simply made one of her rare sensible managerial decisions, because five minutes later, she had a woman named Cindy out there hosing and squeegeeing and deckbrushing the outer hallways. Cindy also came back and helped me shift several mountains of dishes, pots, and pans from the dirty side through the dishwasher to the clean side, otherwise I’d probably still be there right now.

Today, in about two hours, I’m walking up to Accent to take what Paul and Scott both assure me will be nothing more than a typing test and a phone demeanor test, both of which I should pass easily. I’m not sure if it’s more annoying that I have to get up early and do this on my day off from Village Inn, or if I’d find it more aggravating if I had to get up early and do it on a day I had to go into work later that afternoon. I think it’s somewhat more annoying happening on a day when I otherwise would sleep until 2 p.m. As it is, I tried to get to sleep early last night (for me) around 2 a.m. so I’d be somewhat rested, but I don’t think I got much downtime. I don’t feel too bad now; I have a slight sensation of grittiness around and behind my eyeballs, and a kind of low grade subdermal ache between my shoulderblades. But I’ll get through it, and if I want to then toss one of my days off entirely into the blender of entropy, I can lay down and snooze when I get home again.

I’ve already told Paul, if today or tomorrow Accent gives me any solid indication they’re going to hire me and I’ll start in the near future, I’m never going back to that goddam dish pit. He didn’t even argue.

Last Tuesday stuff happened. First, I woke up and looked over and saw that the digital clock on my wall wasn’t lit. Then groaned, as this means the power is out. Momentary power outages aren’t abnormal here in Zephyrhills (to be fair, they weren’t abnormal in Tampa, either; sometimes I miss Syracuse, where we never almost never had power outages, but, well, I guess I’d have been stuck in a big one last summer if I’d still been living there) so I sat there for a few minutes waiting/hoping the power would come on again on its own, and trying to remember when the last time we’d given Progress Energy any money was. Oddly, I’d just worked out a monthly budget/payment schedule with Paul and the utilities were going to get paid that upcoming weekend.

Well, they got paid that morning, over the phone, using my Visa debit card, because ten minutes later, I finally called Progress Energy and got some cheerful fuck on the other end who happily confirmed that yes, the sadistic trolls who extort money in exchange for one of modern life’s most essential elements had indeed come sneaking around like goddam nasty furtive little hobbits with toolboxes sometime that morning and shut us off for non payment.

When I exclaimed in some puzzlement that I was pretty sure we hadn’t gotten any kind of reminder in the mail, the smug smirking dickweed on the other end of the line told me unctiously that once I’d paid our Progress Energy bill online the first time five months before, they had stopped sending paper bills. That, he informed me in tones of supercilious superiority, was The Deal… Progress Energy beneficently offered me the opportunity to pay my bill online (for a $5 fee, mind you) and in exchange, they didn’t go to the trouble of printing and mailing a paper bill, EVER FUCKING AGAIN.

He insisted this was mentioned somewhere on the webpage where I’d made the payment, and maybe it was; there’s a lot of text, some of it quite tiny, on that web page.

Anyway. He condescended to take my payment over the phone (with the $5 fee) and mentioned there would be a $40 reconnection fee, and I asked him quite nicely if I could speak with his supervisor about that fee because it seemed to me that this was Progress Energy’s mistake, not ours; if he’d examine our file, he’d find that Paul and I had always paid our bills on time when we’d been aware of them. He kindly allowed me to speak to his supervisor, first warning me that under no circumstances imaginable, nay, True Believer, not if Mighty Thor Himself came down to the Progress Energy corporate headquarters and threatened to level the place with one swing of enchanted Mjolnir, could that reconnection fee be waived.

Then I talked to the supervisor, a very nice lady whose name I cannot presently recall, and pointed out that her corporation sucked relentlessly and profoundly and she should be ashamed to work for flesh devouring ghouls of this nature… okay, well, I pointed out that we had not known we wouldn’t get paper bills any more if we paid online, and that was really stupid, and we would have paid if we’d gotten a reminder in the mail, because living without electricity sucks, and she agreed to waive the reconnection fee ‘as a one time courtesy’, which was big of her.

After that, I immediately called our landlady and begged her not to cash the check I’d written her the day before, which was no longer good, since the utility payment had come out of my account.

This all happened around 11:30 in the morning, according to the wind-up watch Paul has that my grandmother gave him and I’ve started to wear to work so I know what time it is there without running out to the time clock every twenty minutes.

Then we waited four and a half hours for Progress Energy to get their thumbs out of their asses and come hook us up again. I know how to do it… a neighbor once taught me… it’s not that hard. But power companies get really pissy with you if you unscrew your meter and pull the little rubber card that they use to cut the flow of your electricity out from between the prongs inside it… they charge you a ton of money, and they can, if they want, actually have you up on charges for it. So I didn’t, and we sat there with no electricity for four and a half hours, due to a corporate screw up.

That’s the bad thing. The good thing about Tuesday was, a big box of comic books from Demolition showed up, and now we’re going to talk about some of those.

Let’s see. I got a lot of Hawkman, a lot of JSA, a lot of Avengers, Paul got a lot of Spider-man titles, I got a great big stack of Alan Moore books (Promethea, Tom Strong, Terrific Tales, the final issue of the second story of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the Smax mini), four issues of Gaiman’s indescribably wonderful 1602 series, the final issues of Black Panther and Fray, and best of all, the first three issues of Busiek and Perez’s utterly brilliant and totally worthy JLAvengers mini series.

Oh, I also picked up the Essential Howard The Duck, which made Paul roll his eyes and smirk, and half of Paul’s Christmas present from me (a Marvel Masterworks edition of the first ten issues of the Lee-Kirby X-Men; yeah, I should have gotten him the MM edition of the New X-Men’s first several issues, but I forgot, and these are much better anyway).

I’d talk about some of that stuff… I could write for days, or at least, hours, about how much I adore 1602 and Smax and especially how wonderfully non-disappointing and absolutely fantastic the JLAvengers mini has been so far, how completely spot on Kurt’s characterization has been, and how absolutely fabulous it is to have a writer who clearly loves both teams and both universes and who isn’t wasting the potential of this long yearned for battle/team up on some typically forgettable generic silly ass Marvel Team Up style plotline such as we’d seen in all the previous Marvel/DC crossovers, but who is instead enacting an epic event truly worthy of such a titanic conceptual occasion, and who is absolutely carrying it off with a style and flair very nearly worthy of Silver Age Englehart in the process.

But, when I write about stuff like that no one ever responds in any meaningful way, so I'll just leave it out.

As to the rest of last week, well, we went grocery shopping Thursday night and Paul kept insisting we had lots of money to spend so he bought himself the Indiana Jones DVD set and I picked up a two pack containing the mediocre Rounders and the utterly brilliant Color of Money, and, well, we spent pretty much all the money we were going to spend this weekend paying bills, at Wal-mart, on stupid shit, and we didn’t even get a Christmas tree.

See, the problem is, Paul is so utterly bemused by this notion that we both have jobs now, and therefore we have PLENTY of money, that he just wants to go out and spend every cent he has like a drunken sailor the instant he gets paid. And, well, I let it rub off on me. And I’m, well, if not as bad, then nearly so; I threw away nearly $200 at Wal-mart when I got my first paycheck, and I’m still trying to figure out where the hell the goddam $555 porn check went to. I mean, I got a check for $555, deposited it, and a bit later, got a paycheck for $370 or so, deposited that… and what the hell did I do with all that money? Well… $200 went to Demolition Comics, yes. Another $200 (well, $189) went to that Wal-mart binge. I took out $100 as walking around money when I first cashed the porn check. That’s around $500. I’ve probably spent another $50, easily, in spoiling myself on cabs and such since then… so that’s the porn check. And I suppose I could have fairly easily spent the paycheck in its entirety on the utility bill payment and this month’s rent… so… yes… that’s where it went.

Jesus, money just evaporates like fucking dew in Death Valley when you’ve got a little of it, doesn’t it?

This Friday I get paid again, and we have to pay the water bill, and give our landlady quite a bit of money, and with what’s left, we have to get our Christmas tree (rather later in the season than I generally prefer; I loathe people who start Christmas before Thanksgiving, but I do like to get into it right after) and then buy presents for everyone we’re going to buy presents for, and since all our relatives are going to be here for Christmas this year, well, that’s a lot of presents with not much money. And I think Paul and I will be eating spaghetti all the following week until he gets paid again.

As a passing note, getting paid every two weeks sucks great big rocks.

As another passing note, through odd circumstances, I found a copy of that missing blog page for September 10th. It would take too long to detail the process whereby I discovered it, but, well, basically, I found a copy in my stored buffer under another Windows log-in name, which I used on a whim a few days ago. So I’ve restored 9/10/03 to the archives list. But, it will only be in the archives from this point on; going in to every single page between 9/11 and now and adding it to those archive rolls is simply an appalling prospect and not to be considered. So if you go back to a page earlier than this one, you won’t find a link to the 9/10 page.

Hmmmm. I’ve been online for over an hour as I typed this frickin’ thing. I just checked my AOL screen and noticed an IM from my ex girlfriend Kristy… I must have had the speakers turned down, so I didn’t hear the chime go off. She’s back offline now; hopefully she doesn’t think I’m just evil.

I should also mention here that my cuz in law Melanie brought me a new monitor. It is the first monitor I have ever seen that does not have an attached, built in power cord and co-ax feed line to connect to the CPU, and since I have no auxiliary co-ax that will fit it, it's currently sitting under my desk and I have no idea if it works. But I appreciate Melanie bringing it over, it was a very kind thought.

I want to say I’m looking forward to getting rid of the job at Village Inn because there are a few hotties working there and it just makes me feel sad and unwanted to be constantly lusting for women who barely know I’m alive and who will probably take days to notice that I’m missing once I’m gone. And that’s true; one of the hostesses at Village Inn in particular, Alexis, is just one of those stunningly beautiful women you run into from time to time working in a restaurant or a store or somewhere else mundane and you just wonder why the hell she isn’t modeling or working as an actress somewhere or married to some rich old guy in Austria. And it’s just onerous, working with someone like that and having them be completely unaware of you… although even when I was in my physical prime, someone like Alexis was light years out of my league anyway, and now that I’m past forty and well past 200 lbs, well, I shouldn’t even daydream about it.

However, if I’m going to Accent, I’m well aware from both past call center experience and from Paul and Scott’s reports that there will be a plethora of extremely doable women working there, all of whom will be quite pleased to ignore me (at best) or heap scorn and derision on me (should they become aware of me gazing at them with lust). So that will suck.

If you’re going to be alone, it’s much easier to do if you can actually BE alone. It’s evident that I’m going to be alone for the remainder of my life, and that’s a result of choices I’ve made, can’t unmake, and most likely wouldn’t anyway, and I take full responsibility for all that. But I do look forward to a time when I can hopefully be self supporting as a writer and pursue a mostly solitary lifestyle. If I don’t have to see everyone else enjoying social lives far more successful than mine all the time… if I don’t have to spend a considerable portion of my waking hours longing for what I can’t have, and yet, that is displayed in front of me nearly constantly whenever I leave the house… I’ll be much more content.

I do not believe you can really be truly happy without sharing your life with someone else. But clearly I’m not meant to do that with this life, so I will enjoy a time when I can simply be content to be, for the most part, by myself.

Leaving aside that sort of self pity, which my recent rereading of Friday has reminded me is one emotion Boss despises above all others (and who am I to argue with the wit and wisdom of Kettle Belly Baldwin?), I’ll note that there is one particular waitress at Village Inn I find excessively irritating. Her name is Kim, and she’s quite physically attractive… not in the Beautiful Alexis’ category, but a solid Number Three (after Autum, a sweet married 18 year old with an utterly earnest nature betraying absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever, but who is always punctiliously nice to me). However, I have no romantic interest in Kim at all, since she’s covered with tattoos and smokes heavily. Still, I try to be friendly to everyone, and Kim, for whatever reason, simply ignores me completely whenever I talk to her about anything except work related matters. It’s really quite openly contemptuous. She talks to everyone else there; I’m the only one she treats with this kind of utter disregard. Oddly, she’s cordial enough when I say something work related to her, and even occasionally seems, if not friendly, then at least open and pleasant… but let me so much as comment on the weather and the cold front closes in again.

Tonight we wound up waiting for a cab out front together, long after everyone else had departed. As always, she was giving me the cold shoulder, which I expected and was accustomed to. The cab was very late and I wanted to just leave and walk home, but I grew up in the 70s and 80s, when you simply did not leave an attractive woman by herself in an urban area after dark under any circumstances (and the world has not become a better place since then). So I stuck around longer than I wanted to waiting for this cab that apparently was never going to show up. Finally I mentioned, jokingly, that if I weren’t afraid of leaving her by herself, I’d just walk home, which would guarantee that the cab would show two minutes after I left.

Kim responded to this that she was probably going to walk up the road to a bar and have a couple of drinks anyway, so I should feel free to leave if I wanted. I offered to walk her to whichever bar she was going to (she’d indicated a direction roughly towards where Paul and I live from the restaurant) and she got truculent and insisted that I didn’t have to… so, feeling trepidatious, vaguely guilty, and rather annoyed with her for so utterly rejecting my offer, I left.

I have no clear idea what it is Kim has against me, and probably never will, as I don’t anticipate ever getting to know her at all. But I get a vague sense from her that she is one of these women who finds it offensive and obnoxious when she detects what my cuz in law Melanie refers to rather melodramatically as ‘the lust’ from an undesirable male. (Kim’s tattoos have a home made, prisonesque quality to them, and one of them features a female name with a white rose through it, so I’m wondering if perhaps she simply dislikes my entire gender… but she’s been more or less friendly to other males working at the restaurant, so maybe not.)

What’s annoying is that, well, yes, Kim has a very nice body, from what I can see, and her face would be pretty if she ever smiled, and when she lets her hair down at the end of her shifts she’s undeniably sexy. Would I jump her, given the chance? Um… maybe… cigarette breath is a major turn off for me, but still… maybe. She’s undeniably desirable physically.

Nonetheless, I don’t drink and don’t like bars, I’m not hugely attracted to women with excessive tattoos or women who smoke, Kim doesn’t strike me as someone who can spell the phrase ‘favorite author’ much less name one, and she’s been a complete bitch to me since the first minute we both laid eyes on each other. I was not trying to pick her up when I offered to walk her up the road to whatever bar she wanted to go to; it was not a come on, and I do not want to have an intimate relationship with her. I was being a nice guy, and offering to go out of my way to keep an attractive woman safe in a not great neighborhood after dark.

And she treated me like some drooling, slobbering piece of shit… like a speck of particularly odious dried food she’d just found on her uniform, or something.

I’m just TIRED of this.

I have to leave for Accent in about 45 minutes, so I’ll post this, check email one more time, and start getting ready.

NOW, naturally, I’m starting to feel really beat and sleepy. Oh, well. Time for another Pepsi.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.