Hey little butterfly/ would you slip me some on the side
The homeless man on the street, talking jibberish, makes A. nervous. Itellyawhati’mthegirlyou’refuckingthegirlhe’stheman! We have come from middleclass families, with suburban neighborhoods, and do not know how to deal with this element, just standing there stupidly. I give the guy two bucks, enough to buy another beer. A. inexplicably gives $5.00. “Are you serious?” I ask him later. “You gave him five?” Giving two, I feel like I deserve a gold star. Something creeps up within me. I feel bad. The only thing separating me from being a homeless person is my parents continually giving free handouts, to more or less articulate solicitations. A. must feel really bad, I deduce.

Back in the bar, I see some guy I used to know. He’s slumped down in his beer, writing what could be the great American manifesto or just some kind of love letter. “How’s everything going?” I ask him. “Not too good,” he fills me in. “I just broke up with my wife.” I don’t know what to say. I haven’t even made eye contact with a girl in days. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I tell him. “That’s too bad.” He looks pretty broken up and I’m totally unversed in the etiquette of failed marriages to know what to say. I should have bought him a beer, maybe. I don’t know.

Walking back to my seat, I think of a picture I’ve recently seen in a book. It’s a photograph of William Burroughs seated before a gigantic placard, while smoking a joint. The text reads, Life is a Killer, in gigantic print. The homeless person and the divorcee are the same then, soaking up their sorrows in the brine of spirits and others. I don’t really have much of an excuse, I realize. I sort of feel alright tonight and so I buy A. the next one. On the way out, I tell the bartender, “Get that guy another one of whatever he’s drinking,” and she gestures magically to the end of the bar, where our acquaintance is scribbling away on his piece of paper, to where she will deliver the balm. Back out on the street, we hustle by the homeless person, who is now giving hugs to nervous bystanders, in exchange for a dollar.

It’s nothing new but it’s something I’ll get used to
The sky today, bulging at the seams. All billowy and white, fecundated with the material which will have northeasterners talking derisively under their collective breath, mumbling small curse words. Damn snow, you will hear someone saying later. It’s only a while longer then, before it hits. In the meanwhile, I am being one omnipresent motherfucker today, Map Questing all new locations around town which no one has ever heard of before, visiting places called Lear Drive and Automation Lane (I am not kidding about this, either: hey, where do you work? Automation Lane. Somehow, I can’t think of anything more hilarious). You discover the small nooks around town you never even realized existed, an office park squished into every location imaginable, named after the thing it has replaced.

The place I will be working for would like me to take a drug test. It’s nothing personal, they tell me, just standard procedure. What this requires is picking up the paperwork and then going to the analysis lab, which I arrive at just before lunch. There is a big sign on the desk saying, No admittance after 11:30 am. “Can you fit me in?” I ask an older woman at the desk, who looks like she doesn’t need this right about now. She fumbles with the paperwork, checking things over. “Can you give me a half a cup of urine if I asked you right now?” she needs to know. “Uh, well, yeah—I can certainly try,” I tell her. This is not reassuring, however. She becomes short with me. “No, that’s not what I’m asking you,” she says in small words. “Can you positively give me a half cup of urine, or if you’re thinking about it you’re going to have to come back in an hour, after lunch.” I feel a small school child, being yelled at like this. Trying not to laugh, in the most sincere tone I can muster, I tell her that I can in fact produce a vial for her, which then produces the pangs of self-doubt that has me wondering what will happen if I can’t. Will she beat me with a ruler? Give me detention? She leads me back into the receptionist cubicle, where she instructs me to take off my hat and coat, and asks if I have anything in there. A small vial of pee maybe, to mask the fact that I am actually a crystal meth-smoking maniac and have been out on a bender all night, tearing up the town. You immediately feel the part of the criminal element in this situation. “No, I don’t have anything in there,” I tell her. She sends me in to the bathroom, where I fill the cup plentifully, which she makes no mention of upon returning. A gold star for peeing, I was hoping for. A smiley face sticker. I sign the requisite paper work and am then set free into the afternoon. “Have a nice day,” she tells me, cheering up a little before lunch. “You, too,” I tell her. “Thanks for getting me in.”

Operating in the real world, with its minute everyday degradations, is a weird place to be. Somehow, I feel absolved most of the time, just totally aloof in the small corner of the universe which I happen to occupy. But on occasion, just by matter of circumstance, you find it sucking you in, and subverting even the best of your intentions. Oh, well: I guess it’s something I’m going to have to get used to. Looking up in the sky, though, you can’t help but hope for some kind of celestial event. Or something to send the earth spiraling off its axis and into the blinding sun, which would bring about the great ice-age thaw we’ve all been waiting for. Or even less childishly, a snow day.

Anything you could grasp you could easily pass to the ashtray
I am startled to find that I have developed a Pavlov’s Dog-type reaction to hearing the ring tone on my phone. I first developed this nervous tic about a year ago, when L. would incessantly call my number day and night. Hearing the phone would create a wave of nauseous panic so thick that I would actually find myself flinching a bit. A steady diet of avoidance thereafter was enough to get back the courage to answer phone calls again, thinking it would not be her. But here, in the Ferris Bueller’s phase of my unemployment situation, it is reoccurring ten fold. The agency unrelentingly calls upwards of 3 times a day now. Additionally, they have taken to writing me emails upon not responding to their calls, which only goes to further my totally cringing and subservient nature. “Where have you been?” Sarah wants to know when I finally get around to calling them back. “Yeah, well, uh, I’ve been kind of I’ll,” I tell them. We are graceful—courteous almost—to one another on the phone, while behind the scenes we have taken up arms. They have hour-long meetings on how to break down the resistant and unemployed-insured employee’s will, with PowerPoint set ups and tactical demonstrations. Who could say what they’re doing?

The insanity reaches a crescendo today, when I find myself temporarily changing the ring tone on my phone so as to not have the nervous reaction. Things have gone too far, clearly. I am so busy with my defense strategy all day that it has become a full time job, and while it does come with a pretty spiffy benefits package, I have had enough. I will do anything. Just leave me alone, man. “What have you got?” I ask, finally calling her back. Working for the temp agency is a lot like reaching your hand into a gigantic jar of jellybeans and almost always coming out with the kind you didn’t really want. I’ve worked some OK jobs through temp, but mostly I hate jellybeans. “How do you feel about doing envelope work in an administrative setting?” she asks. A crusty kernel, it has revealed. I pop it into my mouth anyway. Because fuck it, I’ve run out of excuses, and my stomach is all upset.

Your feet aren’t walking/ because you’re too screwed up
An amorphous expanse of free time, reaching my hands out before me and blindly feeling for the perimeter of which there is none. Stumbling and falling on my face. I am currently in the process of making a mixed-tape (okay, CD. whatever). I have a beginning and ending point, the space in between those two songs to be determined. I pretty much verge towards the obsessive compulsive and so it drives me insane: I like the song endings and beginnings to share a least some common thread, and like caulking on a ceiling, mine always gapes. I will sit there all night obsessing over this gap, until finally I get up, leaving the room entirely. That’s the thing with me: the choices drive me crazy. It’s pretty much just right and natural that being a consumer you think of these things. Every purchase is wrought with the same challenge. Would I prefer the International Delights’ Southern Butternut Pecan or Vanilla Toffee Carmel? The conundrums abound, and considering the amount of time spent in grocery stores daily, going over these things, my psychological state is just really precarious. The cashier I see every day asking me. “You really like to grocery shop, don’t you?” she says rhetorically. I don’t really know how to respond to this kind of inquiry, which introduces a whole other layer to my thinking process: she thinks I like her or something, am in fact going through her line every day to check in on her. I’ll have to drive across town now, to do my vacillating at a different store, my ritualistic exercise of living in the first world, which gives me the options, endlessly, driving me totally insane. “Yeah, well, uh, I like grocery stores,” I let her know. “See you tomorrow,” she says brightly. “Probably,” I say. There are still some International Delights coffee flavors I have to check in on.

Out of the store and into the night. Driving through the Tech. Park and trying not to hit some guy putting packages in the drop. The temperature is easily below zero, as he shuttles along at top walking speed, attempting not to run, as his face slowly turns to a sanguine red. I used to do this same job, I remember, at any variety of office jobs I’ve had, running around, doing mundane tasks. That sucks. I turn up the CD I’ve made. Everything has come together pretty nicely so far. Not too bad, if I do say so myself.