Friday, May 19, 2006

I could tell you things about this wallpaper that you’d never ever want to know
Two girls who sit next to me at work have made the acquaintance of one another. They have exchanged information, and have planned a night out somewhere. For some reason, I find this peculiar. Today is only the second day of the job, and from what I could tell they did not know each other previously. That means, in the time span of two days, despite little communication while actually working, which I’m there to observe, that would leave a period of time comprising a little over an hour for these two people to hash out a plan on lunch break, determine that they are compatible in some fashion, and then actually go about the process of hanging out tonight. It could be, though, admittedly, just my horrible social graces at work. I will be the first to admit that my sense of social etiquette probably needs a little polishing. I must have been absent during that class in grade school, and thus it could be that I am the one standing so far outside the proverbial loop in this situation that in my video camera of perception I have it all wrong. But I still find myself hard pressed to imagine a scenario at work where some prospective friend is sitting next to me, and who I make some plan with. I’m not ruling out all possibilities, but it seems unlikely to me, on day two.

One of those church-front billboards I see tonight offers the following words of wisdom: Make friends before you need them. I wonder which passage of the Bible that comes from. It seems like logical advice, however. Because you never do know when you’ll find yourself outside the loop, with no one, nothing.


I am hanging out with McBeans tonight. I’ve had a bad day today, and it is McBeans who elicits in me some modicum of OK-ness. It's probably akin to telling about how great your child is, when to the average onlooker, actually, the dog is a bedraggled and hairy mess, wagging its tail and slobbering all over you. But I love McBeans. If something were to happen to him, if he hustled the first path out of town on a neighborhood jaunt some night, I would be devastated. And this is something that I contemplate often. It debases things when you explicate them. But I realize that McBeans probably has no further recollection of me than as the person who comes to take him out at night, complimenting him with a bone once in a while. And in his bedraggled, tail-wagging enthusiasm for those things, I am probably horrendeously misinterpreting his need for food and strutting around the neighborhood. Something like this. It’s a matter of need-satiation, on behalf of both parties. Something is exchanged, but we call it something else, in disguise. The church sign points this out clearly, and at the same time articulates my shortcomings.

Most of the people I know are out on dates right now, eating and drinking in dimly lit establishments. And it’s funny how you find yourself alienated in your friends’ romances of the moment. I can’t really say I blame them. There are superior forms of satiation, obviously, which the church sign may or may not be alluding to. Whatever the case, I am totally fucked (not fucked), as I have no one. I look in my phone and realize there are people I could probably call up right now, hang out, drink a few beers. But these are peripheral friends, who would probably be weirded out by such an offer. No, it will probably just be the usual, I have decided; I’ll probably just hang out and listen to depressing music again. Drive around town, wonder where things went wrong.

In my head I chided those girls for their arrangement. It seemed so mechanical and weird to me. In those well conscripted plans, I had a glimpse of the bare-naked neediness in people. Human beings seem comprised of one hundred different compartments, and one hundred different needs. And it’s only in the absence of those things that they become staggeringly large and overwhelming, an astonsihing technicolor rainbow of sadness and despair. Clearly, those girls were way smarter than me.

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Closed sign swinging in the window of a liquor store
You’ve got to love 88.3, the radio station that I’m listening to right now: one second they’re playing Meat Loaf, “Let Me Sleep on It”, with the famous play-by-play backdrop, which then insanely bursts into Huey Lewis and the News. Is someone messing with my mind? That does not seem far from plausibility. The Meat Loaf track you really just have to love, though. What may appear ostensibly as some completely obnoxious puritanical rant is actually, on further inspection, a horribly sinister attempt at “getting some” by saying what needs to be said. And then hilariously "wishing for the end of time" once certain promises are made, and the getting has been got. Pretty complex stuff at work there, you have to admit.

The first day of work, which also coincides with the nicest day of this spring. That is something, really: it has rained for what seems like a week, and now this, when I have to be sitting indoors, with not even a window to look out of. What my current employment scenario involves is sitting before a computer and scoring 4th grade essay exams, as part of some completely futile testing concern for the state of Massachusetts. We have been told at the outset that these exams do not figure into the students’ grades, and as you creep up into the higher grade levels, you see the complete lack of caring, little doodles and elaborate explainations of how you, the scorer, are a total “jack-off.” It’s pretty demoralizing.

Today’s questions is all about salmon, and how they’ve been displaced in the Sacramento River, in Asia. Years of pollution has sent the fish from their homes, and now they are attempting to reintroduce the salmon population to the dirty river. The scoring criteria is so low that most students receive at least some kind of score point for saying basically anything. But then, inexplicably, there are always those students who feel the urge to totally ignore the actual question, offering you instead some random digression which has nothing to do with anything, some kids foraying into the far off territory of exactly how much they like fish. That’s kind of nice, though, too, when you get an imaginative reply. Sometimes it’s as though they just cannot resist the urge, when the gears of imagination whirr up, and it’s not entirely their fault that they feel so totally compelled to tell you how cute salmon are. The days are long, and you these types of distractions. I hear a co-worker say, contemplating the clock today, “It feels like 20 minutes, and only 3 have gone by.” And it’s rough like that. I have to admit, though, I feel some vague amount of relief about this job, for ten more minutes. The carefully conscripted rationale for existing, which just does not present in the righteous declarations of, I didn’t nothing today. I have something now, an excuse.

The correct answer for the question, it turns out, is that the salmon will make it back up stream, and successfully integrate back into the river ecosystem. It’s not a hard concept to grasp, and it’s all pretty obvious. The student doesn’t have to say that, but that’s what they’re getting at. It seems like kind of weird plight, but there are probably worse ones. This is what I do all day. This is how I will be spending my time for the next few weeks. Think of me tomorrow, where I'll be wishing for the end of time.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

I know that a lot of what I say has been lifted off of men's room walls
I feel every bit the after-school special commercial that I’m representing today. Or alternately, the archetypal model of those anti-drug campaign commercials that were so popular in the 1980s, some half-bearded miscreant hanging around in his boxer shorts in the mid-afternoon, waving away the plumes of drug smoke hanging in the air, as someone makes an entry. It is, I am sad to say, a sordid and sorry scene. I hit people up with text messages all day, which only goes to confound our already convoluted relationships; they, usually at work and totally unable to fathom or deal with exactly what the hell I’m talking about: bizarre song lyrics and quotes, and things which can only really be determined on some Freudian level. It is, I have to admit, pretty fucking absurd, this existence I’m living. Any minute now, I know, some television camera is going to make an entry, or the law enforcement officials, like some Kafka short story, and I will be indicted on crimes against humanity.

That’s the whole thing, really. There’s that famous Lester Bangs interview, where he’s talking to Richard Hell, and he’s quoting Nietzsche, saying how blithe people laugh at everything and they don’t have emotions. As a child and thereafter I remember thinking everything was astoundingly funny, for whatever reason. And even now, this is how I work it. It’s easier to laugh than to cry, and a lot more fun. I do not know how other people work it. But I guess in lieu of all my hilarity, everyone seems startlingly serious. Or just plain sad, really.

Some girl I was talking to recently was telling me about how she didn’t sleep at night, because she was trying to maximize her free time by offsetting the time she spent at work. This had the added effect of being really tired in the daytime. I understand this point of view. I don’t know about other people, but I tend to conceptualize whatever you’re doing for 8.5 hours a day as your life. It seems pretty much statistically true that if you’re working 8.5 hours and then sleeping a recommended 8 on top of that, that means, excluding weekends, you’re only left with a little under 8 hours a day, and most of that time is probably spent running bizarre errands and standing in line at the post-office. I understand what she’s saying. You’ve got to take the power back, as both Chuck D. and, I believe, Iggy Pop said. But then, that’s really tiring.

Being ideologically opposed to other people sets up a dynamic of insecurity for others, especially when your point of view happens to reside in the minority. I experience this every time I go to someone’s house who happens to eat meat. “Oh, no, thank you,” you tell them, as they go to hand you a bib for the steak they’re preparing. Telling someone you don’t eat meat then segues into exactly why not, and this sets off the chain reaction which has them questioning their own sense of values (or the startling lack thereof). Laughing at other people’s lifestyle choices is the same thing. And living a life which is not in accordance with the way other people live, on any level, is the same thing. It calls into question they way other people spend their time.

I start scoring exams again on Thursday, which is what I do sometimes. I remember the last time I worked there, whooping it up with the people around me and getting yelled at, actually moving the woman who sat in the immediate vicinity to wear ear-plugs. It’s OK to do for a while; it’s something. I still don’t know I want to do with my life. I may never figure it out, but that's less funny now.