A Convenient Escape

Today, for the first time in years, I had cable installed so I could watch college football. Autumn is already beginning to leach the luster of our lawn and for those of you who know me, I can rarely go a weekend without watching at least two games. It's a horrible, slovenly addiction and I know I should be out doing other things like hiking, biking, or pretty much anything outdoors to seize the fleeting moments of sunshine from the murky maw of the approaching northwest winter. However, by some unfortunate twist of fate I grew up in Nebraska where the physically and emotionally barren nature of that landscape has caused me to habitually hibernate from reality for 7 hours a week over the next 4 months by the glow of a television. Now that I'm several years removed I've tried to avoid it but much like moths to the glow of a porch light, it's simply instinctual and I can not resist the sweet siren's song that is NCAA football. Part of me is fascinated with the laughable nature of the BCS and how changes to it will likely be pushed through Congress ahead of national health care reform. Part of me feels as though it satisfies some primordial masculine desire for violence and destruction and serves as my own personal Fight Club therapy session (sans actual threat of bodily harm). Deep down in the children only wading pool that is the depth of my soul, I know it's just a place of denial I visit in order to retreat from the Sisyphisian nature of my work, mundane responsibilities that I've allowed my life to become, and the long hard road to get to where I feel I belong. In a world of increasing absurdities and difficulties, there's nothing more soothing, albeit a little mind-numbing, than watching other people clobber each other in a game that combines the complexity of chess with the brazen havoc of the battlefield. Unfortunately, the prospect of sitting in front of the television for seven hours a Saturday was proving to be far more difficult than I'd assumed. Twice I'd made appointments with the cable company and twice I'd rushed home from work and been heartbroken to discover that for one reason or another the installation couldn't be performed.

"...you're a renter? We're going to need to see written confirmation from the home owner that it's okay to drill holes in his property. The earliest we can reschedule is in three weeks."

"...sorry sir, the appointment was scheduled for 3:oo PM."
"But it's 2:55 and I'm two blocks away."
"Yeeee-aaah...I'm going to have to pencil this in as a 'no-show.'"

Today, the technician was supposed to meet me at my home after work and fearing that I might have to devote yet another weekend to watching games in the smokey bar near my house (where everyone chastises me for asking to turn the one black and white television in the far corner of the room to something other than bull riding or NASCAR), I took off an hour early, tossed caution to the wind as I sped home, and pulled up to the house with a triumphant grin on my face where a portly man in uniform and tool belt was surveying the cable drop. I jumped out of my car with all the excitement of a game show winner. "Hey! Thanks for making it out," I greeted him too jubilantly, "the last two times I tried to get this taken care of it didn't work out as planned and as pathetic as it is, I really can't miss another week of football so I really appreciate you making it out here." The frumpy, overweight cable guy did nothing to acknowledge my existence and ignored my glee-filled greeting. He just shook his Chris Farley-esque head in a mixture of denial and frustration at the giant tulip tree in our front yard that enshrouded the phone and cable lines in a labyrinth of branches, leaves, and mischievous squirrels.
"I always get the easy ones," he mumbled to no one in particular.
"Oh, that's unfortunate. These old houses--"
"I can guarantee," he said loudly with a slight pause to ensure that I knew he was cutting me off, "that the last two installers didn't want to have anything to do with this house because of that clusterfuck of a tree up there." He started to run his dirty hand through his sweaty, disheveled hair but even this seemed as though it was going to be too much of a hassle and halfway through, he clenched his fingers into a fist and left his sweaty locks in a crumpled crown of self-pity. His eyes, beyond exhausted, looked as though he hadn't seen sleep in weeks. This may or may not have caused him to show zero resemblance to the image on his name tag. As we both stood there on the crunchy autumn leaves of the front yard, I wondered if he stood agape at the mess of branches and cable or at God himself for giving him yet another day of misfortune. In a verbal cocktail consisting of equal parts apathy and disdain, Farley explained how involved the project would be and detailed the necessity to remount the existing cable drop in order to coincide with our current internet service. He continued on with a whole slew of other technical jargon that served as a painfully obvious plea for sympathy. When he finally finished mapping out every minuscule detail of his plan, he begrudgingly went to work unlatching tools and ladders from his truck. Still excited about the prospect of watching football from the comfort of my home, I hoped to lighten his spirits and attempted to change the subject by asking him about the perks he received for working at his company. I stepped back and half-smiled at my own genius, fully prepared to listen as he described a near mythical land of free 3G networks, premium movie channels, and crystal clear High Definition sound and picture quality. Surely these things overshadowed the labors of his work. But as I am lately finding is so often the case when I don the ill-fitting hat of optimism, I conduct conversations pretty much the same way I play chess:

Step 1. I make a move with little or no forethought.
Step 2. The opposition does not counteract in strict adherence with my ill-perceived strategy.
Step 3. I spend the rest of the conversation/game backpedaling in despair.

Like clockwork, the best of my intentions detonated the the worst of his emotions and within minutes of meeting this guy, I caused him to erupt in a litany of obscenities about the meticulous protocol and red tape that bound his position.

"I don't even technically work for this company! I'm subcontracted out to them for close to pennies an hour! It's damn near slave wages! And the perks? There aren't any perks! However, rules on the other hand, they have rules for everything! If I lose a tool, I have to pay for it! If I lose a ladder, I have to pay for it! If a traffic cone goes missing, it comes outta my pocket! If I don't wear these damn nonslip, steel toe work boots, I could be fined! If I don't wear this harness, climb up there in that tree and fall and break my back, well that's on me too!"

Perhaps I'm unsympathetic or maybe I just agree with "The Man," but really, everything Farley was complaining about seemed like reasonable rules a company might establish to protect their employees and hardware. Nonetheless, this man possessed the power to provide me with the opiate of college sports, so I tried to sympathize with his despair. Throughout the duration of his rant, he forcefully and impatiently yanked at an extension ladder off the top of his pickup. I offered to help him but he snapped at me like a rabid pitbull. "They have rules against that too! At least when I served in Iraq I knew what I had to do and how to do it!" For a second the impact of his delivery nearly overshadowed the weight of his words. It had not occurred to me that Farley could have been a veteran. It had not occurred to me that his frustrations were misdirected from some other experience. These thoughts were partially eclipsed as I watched him extend the ladder 25 feet into the tree where the cables draped between the telephone poles and a haphazard quilt of tree branches. He clumsily flailed the top of the ladder stays against the cable in an attempt to grasp them. The scene caused me to prepare myself for my first whiff of crisp human flesh. I asked him if what he was doing was safe, half-hoping to suggest that what he was doing was clearly not safe. He grumpily replied, "that's just the thing!" I don't know that this answered anything and jokingly offered, "well, I'm going to go inside and pre-dial 9-1-1 on my cellphone just in case it isn't."

I walked inside, promptly forgot my resolve to dial 9-1-1, and bolted to the office where I spent the next 15 minutes relaying the whole ordeal to my friend Ben on instant messenger.

ME: There's an Iraq war vet with PTSD who's installing my cable and I'm half-expecting that he's going to electrocute himself since he's leaning a metal ladder against power lines in the front yard.
BEN: Dude, you should totally pre-dial 9-1-1 on your cellphone and go watch and see if he gets electrocuted.
ME: Yeah, that's what I told him I was doing.
BEN: Did you?
ME: No, I'm chatting with you.

Being both a recovering Catholic and lover of words, this is what I do. I speak as though nothing is sacred. I say things for shock value, and say things that maybe I don't necessarily agree with but say them anyways in fear that they might go unsaid. Then I immediately feel a tide of guilt and remorse for fear that I might have offended someone which is only resolved by my re-realization that organized religion is ridiculous and that humor has always been my saving grace. This has a varying degree of success as I often possess more sympathy and introverted reflection than I allow myself to admit. I am convinced by adroitly compartmentalizing my thoughts in the fashion of a well-organized tackle box, I will be able to absolve myself from this condition.

Suddenly I heard Farley enter the house. He asked if he could use the restroom and I told him where it was. After he finished, I heard him walk back towards the living room but oddly enough his footsteps stopped on the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Thinking he might be thirsty, I offered him a glass of water. He politely declined but I heard no sound that would indicate he was leaving and returning to work. I peaked over my shoulder to see what he was up to and saw that he'd stopped and was looking at our photos on the fridge. For some reason this made me uncomfortable despite the fact that that is exactly what they are for. I guess it was because I'd rather open up to people than have my kitchen appliances do it for me. What must he have been thinking as his eyes swept over images of smiling long-haired college friends crowded around a bowl of liquor, happily panting dogs amidst golden autumnal aspens, giggling nieces in front of Christmas trees, post cards of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the sunset on a beach in Hawaii, grinning couples in front of the Grand Canyon, Lake in Hanoi, and mountains in Colorado? What line of fiction was he using to connect those scenes? After a long period of time in which his distant gaze finally swept over the last photograph, he sighed deeply and turned back to the living room where I was comforted to hear him resume drilling holes and snaking coaxial through the newly formed outlet.

After a few moments he finished and called me into the living room for a tutorial. I found him sitting on the floor in front of the television sweating, slouched, and disheveled from work. He programmed the remote in his right hand as it rested on his slightly bent knee and explained how it would be a few minutes before all the information downloaded to the box and a continuous image reached the screen. I began to feel that sense of remorse creep over me for having relayed the story to my friend and laughing at the mans expense. "Tackle box! Tackle box," I tried to remind myself as I thanked him for all his work. Again, I thought to say something that would brighten his afternoon, "well, I hope you have a nice relaxing evening. Maybe go home and have a beer and just chill for a while huh?" "Fuck no!" he yelled back in what seemed to be a seamless continuation of his earlier rant. "I have at least two more of these things today! That's how they get'cha. It's damn near slave wages and there are so many damn rules! Some days I wish I was back in Iraq so I could just pick up my gun and go to work!" He must have sensed my immediate emotional recoil or suddenly realized the gravity of what he had just done by associating the devastating purpose of a gun to a word as harmless as "work." Without looking at me he just stopped speaking and stared at the television. His reflection in the smokey grey glass of the screen was blotted by the staccato images of Rachel Ray which started to tap out like Morse Code. I probably should have feared for my own safety and asked him to leave but in our fragile communion of silence I could see tears welling in his eyes and for a moment he looked like a scared, overgrown child. There have been so many times when I have failed as a son, and a brother, and a boyfriend, and a friend to offer some meaningful words of sympathy, or consolation, or simply an empathetic touch of a shoulder when an emotional situation could not indicate its necessity more clearly. This time was no different. We both sat silent for a moment before he finally got up and politely asked me to sign some forms. I obliged and in a soft almost apologetic voice he simply thanked me for my time and quietly left.

A few hours later, I found myself smoking an uncharacteristic cigar on the front porch watching the cold fall wind send tides of wilted leaves from our yard tumbling into the street. I like the transitional seasons best. I'm certain it has to do with my inability to stay focused on one thing for too long. I thought about a conversation I recently had with a friend concerning my desire to make the right decisions and how I often distract myself from doing so and am relegated to time making them for me. I wondered about Farley and how a man transitions from wearing dusty fatigues going door-to-door looking for terrorists to wearing a tool belt going door-to-door installing digital cable. I began to construct my own fiction to fill in the blanks of what I knew of him. Farley had given me new perspective--tuned my focus in such a manner as to see things in myself when the reason why he came in the first place was to enable me to escape from doing so. I selfishly shelved all concern about Farley's mental health as the thought of a week night college football game, already underway, crept into my mind. I rolled the glowing ember of the cigar back and forth against the edge of the terracotta pot that sits on the edge of our stoop. The cooling ember fell harmlessly into the potting soil and I walked inside, collapsed on the floor, and fired up the television with the bracing anticipation of a heroine addict. One drug, and then another.

"Third and goal. Ganz fades back to pass, looking for an open receiver. Fires a rocket--" the announcer's voice is silenced as the screen abruptly goes blank. Instead of seeing a cornerback heroically bat down the ball or a receiver reel in the game winning touchdown, I see my own pathetic reflection. I stare in awkward silence just as Farley did with the same deflated look of self-pity just a few hours ago. I should go cook dinner, start a load of laundry, pay some bills online, and go through the otherwise robotic motions of my afternoon. Tomorrow on my lunch break I'll have to call the cable company and reschedule a fourth appointment to have our cable installed correctly. They'll ask me why and I'll attempt a long-winded explanation of the failed mechanics of the initial installation while I silently contemplate the moral weight of Farley's frustrations against my own. I'll be a bit humbled and a bit ashamed at my lack of action and my lack of patience when I realize I'm missing yet another game and yet another opportunity for a convenient escape.

On Manhood (and testicles)

Back in the day, I lived in a rural Mennonite township in the heart of Nebraska whose population failed to exceed 1,000, probably including livestock. I’d tell you the name but then you’d just say, “Never heard of it” as though there were a chance in Hell that you’ve heard of any of the countless agricultural communities that pepper the desolate plains. I was both a local and transplant. Local because my Vietnamese parents immigrated and gave birth to me in the state and transplant because soon after, we had left for California only to come back after years on the coast. Having lived in what is now the hip “OC,” I hated what we had returned to. The crowded skyline once filled with corporate high-rises and planes taking off at sharp angles from the abbreviated tarmac of an airport named after an actor who gained fame for his portrayals of Old Western heroes were traded in for silos, grain elevators, and endless fields of corn and other unglamorous remnants of that Old West that no one cared to remember. Likewise, my life had been transformed from that of your typical adolescent in the upper middleclass suburbs of Los Angeles to that of a complete alien to the life of an agricultural community that fanatically worshipped a religious sect referred to as Cornhusker football. In rural Nebraska, hard agricultural labor and above all, competing in high school football, were true marks of one’s manhood. Being the undersized son of a doctor, rather than a farmer, and being prohibited by my uber-paranoid mother and that doctor to join the football team, I had a whole lot going for me.

In order to make enough money to visit my friends in Southern California as well as cast off the physical abuse an adolescent alien endures in a homogenic, mentally monotonous landscape where his “manhood” is constantly in debate, I would work a number of odd jobs through the winter and spring shoveling snow off driveways, mowing lawns, painting houses, and hauling irrigation pipe. No it wasn’t just a single large irrigation pipe. “Pipe” is plural in agricultural communities for the same reason why there could be a “hunnered or so” and you could even use them to “warsh” with “warter” from the “crick.” One season I spoke with Ted, one of my very few friends who was related to many farmers in our community who were known to pay good money under the table for mindless, hard labor. After speaking with his Uncle Rondelle, we were offered a job that promised to pay $25 an hour and accepted the job before we learned the exact nature of the work. The next morning, not wanting to be late, I woke up at 4:30 and made my traditional “working man’s” lunch of leftover fried rice, a pouch of shark fruit snacks, and a gallon jug of ice water. Ted pulled into the driveway at 5am and I could hear his rusty red pickup squeaking and creaking up the driveway. It was, in all respects, a piece of shit. However, this particular piece of shit had a name and it was Old Pete, after the man he had purchased it from. Pete was an elderly man who barely had the energy to sign over the title to the truck before collapsing into his grave and Ted thought it was the least he could do to commemorate the man by naming his truck after him since it seemed to be following the same fate. In accordance with our protocol, I lowered the gate which made a loud metallic screech in protest as my Labrador pup, Cassidy, jumped into the box with Ted’s two German short haired pointers. I begrudgingly climbed into the cab and tossed my sweat and dirt stained leather gloves on the seat where Ted was smoking a cigarette through a shit-eating grin and listening to BTO’s “Taking Care of Business.” The song was almost inaudible as it piped through the distorted dashboard speakers that were caked with dust from miles of driving country roads with the windows down. Ted claimed to listen to the song as a joke meant to chastise the integral yet mindless performance of our functions in the American labor machine but I knew it was much less of a philosophical statement than that. He genuinely enjoyed the song and often hummed the corny labor mantra throughout the day to goodheartedly spite me and my disdain for it.

As we bumped and bounced our way for several miles down gravel roads, watching the sun rise through the bug stained windshield and enjoying morning smokes, the dogs barked and whined with anticipation. I caught a glimpse of myself in the dusty side view mirror and realized how far I had come from the days of cruising BMXs with my buddies through endless SoCal strip malls and finding trouble on beach boardwalks. Despite the fact that I’d ditched my baggy shorts and Flojo sandals for irrigation boots and Carhart pants, I still felt like more of an outsider than a local. God knows I was still treated as such. I wished I could be as excited as the dogs but then again, they didn’t know any better. I wished I didn’t know any better.
When we finally pulled up to the farm, I realized that we were going to be put into a high risk situation—something I should have already assumed when wages were set at $25 an hour under the table. We were, after all, on a cattle ranch and I hate--absolutely hated--working with livestock. I knew from previous experiences that chickens could be deafeningly loud, horses could toss you around like Christopher Reeve, and pigs, when packed like sardines into a concrete mile-long feedlot, could bang you like a screen door in a hurricane. And cows? Yeah, I was guilty of watching TNN. I’d seen them buck, stomp and pulverize the genitilia of chap-clad hicks in vindication for their relatives who went to the slaughterhouse only to be carved into delicious steaks and succulent burgers.

Our boss, Rondelle, approached us holding a large plastic bag which the dogs assumed were treats and jumped and revolved around him like carousel horses to the tune of a pipe organ. They were whining and barking in anticipation and made it hard to hear his greeting to Ted and grimace of disgust towards me as we followed him over to a pasture where 12 polled Herefords were grazing. Those are cows by the way. I have two years of mandatory agricultural education to thank for that. After removing some of the contents he tossed me the bag and inside I found hundreds of thick rubber bands. Walking straight towards his first victim, we were shocked as he nonchalantly grabbed the cow’s testicles. I don’t care who you are or what your sexual preference is but anytime you see anyone grab anyone’s testicles, the first thing that goes through your mind is shock. Was this some kind of rural rite of passage? Were we about to pass the threshold from childhood by handling this animal’s manhood? I remember a weird sensation coming over me which can only be described as both a loss of physical and moral balance, something here was deathly wrong. We watched in horror, as he wrenched the animal’s testicles with Herculean force and instructed us to castrate the remaining 11 animals by wrapping the rubber bands, as he did, repeatedly around their scrotums. “The idea is,” he explained, “to cut off circulation to the suckers so they just plum fall off.” Despite the cow’s wails and dangerously powerful kicks in protest, Rondelle remained steadfast as he worked, spoke, and castrated. His purpose was clear and his hands were steady. He would not rest until he was sure that the rubber bands were wrapped around that cow’s nuts so tight that they would literally fall off from lack of circulation. The animal writhed as he wrenched its masculinity away. Before our boss had completed the instructions, I remember falling into a deep state of disbelief. It was as if I could no longer trust even the simplest of truths or matters of my existence. It was as though up were down and down were up and rubber bands were meant for castrating animals. Despite disproving questions of my manhood through hard physical labor, despite needing money to leave what was now even more of an alienating culture and environment, I turned and ran.

And ran.

And ran.

And I can still hear the dogs barking in hopeful anticipation for what they thought were treats.

Breakfast Cereal and Why It’s Not Worth My Fucken Time

It’s snowing this morning. Not that fake-ass Portland “snow” where, in between marathon gonorrheal drizzle sessions, a few flakes fall from the sky and everyone is elated and starts preaching with religious fervor about how we should all make a pilgrimage to the nearest window and pay homage to mother nature in all her majesty. No, it’s actually snowing and I don’t want to go to work. I consider calling in, telling them that the conditions are too dangerous and it is just too much of a risk, but the fact is, the student loans won’t pay themselves, bills will pile up, and rent will still be due at the first of the month so I have to go. It’s 5:15 AM, I’m late, and I’m hungry. I’ll eat something quick, go to the meeting, come back home, and give them the icy roads excuse later in the day so that I can apply for other jobs. That’s how I’ll assert myself. That’s how I’ll take pride in my self worth damn it.

Breakfast, they say, is the most important meal of the day. It can provide you with energy and the mental stamina to power you through your workload depending on what you eat. However, many people often skip the meal in favor of sleeping in and it takes its toll on their creative energy and work performance. Personally, I grew up in a family that stuffed their faces daily with any variety of over-salted pork sausages, greasy strips of applewood smoked peppercorn bacon, Jimmy Dean ground this or that, fried eggs, pancakes, waffles, diced fruit and of course, breakfast cereals. Amongst this endless cornucopia of culinary combinations, I am often relegated to the last and least efficient hunger satisfier in the whole bunch due to my time constraints. Cereal is not worth my fucken time. I know that within a few minutes of consumption, I’ll be hungering for something more. Nevertheless, in my haste, I grab for the box of Kashi off the top shelf of the pantry and fill a heaping bowl of hippie grains that are easily three times the suggested serving. Taking out my frustration for showing up to a 6AM meeting for a job I don’t particularly care for, I sloppily douse the entire pile with a gallon of milk which splashes like a tsunami over the sides of the bowl. I slam a spoon into the mulch as though to shatter the entire vessel and maroon a few ill-fated pieces of puffed rice on the kitchen counter. I refer to this childlike physical display of emotion as “establishing the tone” of my day. I feverishly shovel crunchy, heaping spoonfuls of cereal into my mouth with the hopes and prayers that it will not only satisfy my hunger but hit it like an atom bomb launched from a remote location with surgical precision. Satisfy my hunger? I want to nuke the motherfucker right out of my beergut bunker. I want to annihilate any and all memory of its existence so that when someone asks “Hey man, are you hungry?” I’ll be like, “I don’t have the slightest clue what you’re even talking about dude,” and go back to sticking pins in my thigh in the hopes of once again feeling human emotion while screaming out the names of past lovers. It doesn’t work. Shoving the last spoonful of hippie scrap down my maw, I run out the front door so fast you’d think my house was a Walgreen’s and I’m shamefully trying to prevent anyone from seeing me purchase tampons for my girlfriend.

I’m driving to work thinking of all the reasons that I don’t want to go. Upper-level management is incompetent. I no longer feel as though we adhere to our core values. I am over-educated and underpaid. The outlet for creativity is becoming increasingly narrow, and we have monthly meetings such as the one I’m rushing to attend where we accomplish nothing. You’d think I worked at some 9-5 office job pushing pencils, misplacing corporate memos, and surfing Craigslist as a source of therapy. I don’t. I work at a grocery store.

Since the snow has only just begun, I make my way to the store with relative ease and pull into the parking lot unscathed. I punch my identification number into the clock. 2-5-1-0-8-7-4, the only name my boss will know me as because he is completely oblivious. My stomach is beginning to churn like a cement truck as I brace for the mind-numbing impact of the following two hours. Or maybe it’s the overwhelming amount of fiber I have just ingested minutes prior. Either way, my stomach and my “career” are heading for the shitter. We sit down to the first meeting and within a few minutes I’m already daydreaming about what I’ll do when I get home and holding debates on whether or not to take advantage of the free coffee to wake up or forgo it in order to return to bed after the meeting. Looking out the window, I realize that it is snowing so heavily that it will take me at least an hour and a half to navigate the icy roads back to my house and decide to surrender my lethargic bloodstream to the effects of caffeine. I can already hear my wheels spinning in vein attempts to make traction with the slick surfaces beneath them as I plummet into the ditch. Yesterday my sister called and told me her fortune teller saw me in a horrible car accident. We go over a holiday sales recap, praise our achievements, and discuss where we could have made improvements. I think about suggesting how we could utilize internal movement reports to press margin making products through creative marketing and merchandizing and thereby increase sales through fostering a holiday environment tailored to our specific demographic but stop short of opening my mouth when I come to the realization that if we’re not already doing it and I thought of it, some salaried guy above me is getting paid to take credit for ideas from wage earners like myself. Furthermore, I don’t care enough to draw the breath to verbalize half of what I’m thinking and instead think about how I could have hummed “Billie Jean” better than my friend when we were at his house playing Cranium last week. The trick is to nail the bass line first and then interweave the synthesizer. It takes a little practice, but you’ve got nothing but time and wasted mental resources when you work at a grocery store. Besides, you’ll sound like a fool if you just start humming the chorus without a good falsetto. Trust me.

An hour later the snow is coming down at a hefty rate and we emerge from the “winter of our discontent” that is meeting number one. We conclude the meeting by voting for the employee of the month and I write down the name of the person who sucked the least in the last 24 hours. He is also the person whom I have agreed to vote for if he, in turn, votes for me. Part of me wants to go all Brutus on his ass and vote for myself but I’m a just creature and like I said, he doesn’t suck as much as the rest of my coworkers so, in a sense, I owe him some kind of thanks. I try to be thankful for something everyday.

We make our way to our next meeting as I consider the ironic fact that no snow storm will ever keep me from driving home from work but an hour ago the mere threat of a major snow storm was almost reason enough to justify calling in and telling them I wasn’t going to be able to make it. My stomach grumbles from its lack of satisfaction and I realize that despite getting my allotment of fiber for the next two months in one meal, there is still a void identifiable as hunger. I hunger for something more. I look around at my job. I’m in a grocery store full of food and I can’t find anything that looks good enough to eat.

I suffer through the next meeting just as the last. All of the creative energy I possess that could be going towards a body of work that is self-fulfilling is wasted on identifying innovative solutions to a business that is resistant to accept them. Over the course of an hour I listen to our boss as he rambles on about what could have easily been communicated on the back of Post-It Note in the space below the adhesive. Halfway through the explanation of how to fill out the raffle tickets that will be distributed at the company party, I wonder why you would ever want people working for you who needed this explained to them. They proceed to announce promotions of people into meaningless positions for little or no wage increase and conclude the meeting with “appreciations.” I think how much I’ll appreciate a new job as I make my way to the clock as the meeting drags on.

In my mind I am halfway home and thinking of all the delicious food I would have eaten before coming to work if I had the time, all the other avenues I could have taken in life instead of I5 South to the Barbur Road exit. When I walk out to my car, when I finish the slippery, icy commute through countless accidents and immobilized vehicles abandoned in the snow, when I get home and tell them in triumphant assertion that I am not coming back in for my PM closing shift only to be both frustrated and appeased when they tell me they’re “closing the store due to dangerous conditions anyway,” my wheels will still be spinning in place. My student loans will still need to be paid. I will still be hungry for something more. And tomorrow morning when the snow melts and I have to head back into work, the cereal I eat to satiate my hunger still won’t be worth my fucken time.