Happy Halloween means a Slutty Strawberry Short Cake, a customer drenched in blood, and my conversation about how we forgot that Kobe Bryant is a rapist

She is vile, twisted, and demonic, and not a thing at all like you thought she was going to be. 

She is a slutty Strawberry Short Cake for Halloween.

The assistant manager makes lurid comments about her outfit to you.  He says things like, "I sure would like to take a bite out of that pie."

You tell him you are confused.  You tell him that strawberry short cake is not pie.  The assistant manager then says things about Strawberry Short Cake's bosoms.  "Her cleavage looks tasty."  He says.  He also tells her, "The boys aren't going to be looking at your face today." When she asks if she is wearing too much make up.

She is not used to wearing a dress.  Her bosoms are exposed to you every time she bends over to package up groceries.  She does not remember to cover herself so at least 3/4 of her breasts get exposed.  You do not see nipple.

She curtsies and twirls around in her dress like a six year old ballerina does.  She is trying to fool you.  She is trying to tell you that she is just trying out the devil temptress persona.  Just to see what it feels like.  She is not serious about it.

"How can you be serious in green and white stockings?"  She asks.

She fusses with her new skirt. She is a kid playing grown up.  She smooths the fabric.  She is tying the ribbons on the front of her dress.

Then she tells you about all the hearts she breaks of the boys she knows.  You know these boys too.  And you know that she is telling the truth.  She is also telling the truth when she says that the one heart she can't break is the one boy who always breaks her heart.

You agree.  And then you tell her that she is heartless and mean to all those boys.  And then because you have talked too long about her you tell her that, "she can't break your heart."

She looks like she is going to cry.

"Are you serious?" She asks.  "Am I really that mean?"

"No."  You try and reassure her.

"I was just kidding."  You tell her.

And she turns her head  and maybe she wipes some moisture from her eye.  And you respect that little movement away from you.  You respect that she is going to keep that all inside her.  She is not going to burden you with the knowledge that something you said may have hurt her.

And then maybe it is your heart that begins to break.

"It makes me want to read more." 

Her words manage to break up your thoughts for a moment.

She has read a few of the things that you have given her to read.  But you know she is lying about wanting to read more.  She is not very interested in what you write.

"Oh?"  You sound surprised and you tug a bit at your ear.  You have tugged at it all day, and now whenever you look at it in the mirror it appears red like it was infected.  But you are not running a fever, so you don't think you have an infection.

Slutty Strawberry Short Cake should not be trusted with children, small pets, or the elderly.  She is a liar.  She sleeps with boys.  She plays with your affection.  She is always asking for favors from you.  When she asks for favors she wiggles her face a bit and she leans into.  You can get a good look at her bosoms when she does this.  She catches you peaking all the time so she thinks she has you.

You would like to write, "and suddenly it did not matter anymore what she thought," but you cannot.

"When did people forget that Kobe Bryant was a rapist?"

You like to ask random questions like this.  Which aren't really random questions to you, because questions like this are always running in the background whenever you talk to anyone.

"I am not... sure."  She pauses and then she asks "Is he?"

"Yes." you answer.  "Basically, at least."

"I mean he admitted to something.  He admitted to rough sex, or to keeping her against her will.  He admitted something.  And then he paid her a lot of money.  And then he bought his wife a 2 million dollar ring." 

You get interrupted by a customer who provides you with fodder for your next rule that all customers should follow.

The customer is bleeding from the mouth.  He has a large wad of toilet paper pressed to his gums.  The paper is bleeding through and is quite red.

"I am going to make a rule."  You think to yourself. "I am going to make a rule that says that all my customers should stop their bleeding before they enter my line."

You are proud of yourself.  This sounds like a common sense rule if you have ever heard of one.

You have done some strange things in your life.  But you cannot fathom why the old man is bleeding from the mouth, yet seems so intent on purchasing 3 lemons, a candy bar, and six cans of soup.  It seems to you that this purchase could have been put off.

The customer wants to hand you his club card for you to scan. You head the customer off at the pass, by picking up your wand at scanning the card without touching him or it.

The customer tells you that he thinks "Kobe Bryant had to do some kind of community service."  He has to remove the wad of tissue from his mouth in order to communicate this idea to you.

"You can go to jail for 2 years for ripping the heads of chickens."  You tell the the line of customers that stand around your check stand.  "But you can rape a chick and only get community service."

You shake your head at this and look down back at the scanner and into the beam of red laser light that shines at your eyeballs.  The beam momentarily blinds you and all you can hear is the clicking and beeping of the register as you scan the purchases.

The folks in line are starting to get a bit uncomfortable with where this is all going.

"The next thing you know Kobe is back to starring in commercial for McDonald's. "  You tell the customer who mops a bit of blood from his chin.

You take his receipt and hand it over to him.

Then you hunt for the anti-bacterial lotion that sits under the counter.  You turn your back and splash a bit on you.  You hope no one notices that you needed to use anti-biotic medicine to dislodge the AIDS virus from the packages you were forced to touch by the bleeding customer.

You can't explain why you feel sorry for the old man and his bleeding from the mouth.  You are just super sensitive you guess.  You can imagine his private pain, the embarrassment that the old man would feel if the customers behind him saw that the clerk needed to disinfect his hands after he left.

You hid the disinfecting from the others without thinking about it.  You are always thinking about people like this, putting them ahead of you by anticipating their needs.  You hate when people feel the need to ask something from you.  They should know that you have figured it out already.

You think people should try to read other people's minds more.

Detach

The man chugged a small soda and thought things over.  He wanted to detach from his life.  But he was not sure how you went about doing that kind of thing. 

He thought about not paying his internet bill.  He had already stopped paying his phone bill.  Other things he had detached from included: a car, and most of his utility bills.

He was getting rid of things. 

Rather, you could say he was ridding himself of possessions.  Was he also ridding himself of an attachment to material things?  If you saw it that way, then you might say what he was doing was a good thing. 

Only he was not getting rid of material things because suddenly he did not want them.  He had not converted to Buddhism.  He was the kind of ordinary person who could tell you the difference between the iPhone 3g and the iPhone 3g (S). 

The man took a sip from his soda.

When the man drank, he drank from a straw. It was an idea that he got from his dentist. The dentist told him that he could limit the amount of tooth decay in his mouth if he drank from soda from a straw, rather than from straight from the bottle.

The man had no girlfriend.  So the man sat alone on his couch and drank his soda in a bottle from a straw.

The man did have a few friends.  But he pulled back from them.  He did not follow the successful career paths they chose.  He did not end up in a 3 bedroom brick town home.  He did not end up with any children either.

The people on TV, the advertisers, and the business executives in China who sold things to the discount stores he shopped at.   They all wanted him to want things. 

But they were the kind of people involved in making sure there were harmful particles in plastic baby bottles.  The man supposed doing such a thing was not good.  He was not an advocate of placing harmful chemicals in plastic baby bottles.  

The man would not buy plastic baby bottles.

He would not worry about warming the bottle of milk in the microwave.  He would not worry about testing the temperature of the milk on his skin.  He would not worry about how the chemicals from plastics were released at the cooking temperature his microwave oven produced. 

No bottles. No baby.  He saw no reason for a wife. 

Not having a wife was an advantage.  It meant he would not have to worry about all the decisions a wife would want him to be involved in.  He did not want to give his opinion on things like candles.

The man got rid of things, but it was not a moral decision.

The man was out of money. With less money, there were less things, and with less things, came less people, and with less people, there was less a reason to stay attached to the world they belonged to.

The man noticed how those things related to each other.  He did remark upon them.  He did not decide them for himself.  "It simply was the way things are." He thought to himself. 

The internet was his final link to the people in the world.

It was not always that way.  At first he used the internet to avoid people.  He used the internet to chew up time.  He used the internet to silence the mind's voice.

He was not certain how the voice in others minds worked.  His worked like the narrator in a film from the 1950's.  It told him things that he already knew.  It told him he stood in line for a movie.  It told him he was interested in seeing the movie.  It told him he was supposed to feel excitement.  But the voice never contained any excitement itself.  And he did not have any other voice. 

He never felt the excitement he saw the other people in lines at movies showing.  Maybe they were faking it too.  Or maybe their voices were not voices, but just the jumping up and down of excitement.   Like the big blasts of laughter he heard from boys dressed in costumes and make up that stood in line.

He could not be sure.  He felt funny asking other people if they felt the things they said they did.

He felt it was better to not ask.

Looking for love, in all the wrong places

There are days when all you search for is comfort.  Like when you used to stay in bed all day.  Craving the darkness like it was food, you bury your head under your pillow, and wrap the sleeping bag you've used as a blanket since high school around you so tight that you think you'll suffocate, even though that would be a relief from  the uncomfortable stabs of adrenaline your chest keeps telling your brain about.



But most days you get out of bed.  And when you do no one wonders about the red splotches along your forearms, or the cloudy, yellow eyes that stare back at them.  No one is for certain when they became accustomed to your slightly disheveled look.   You don't pretend to try and pass off your ill fitting clothes, or the stained undershirts you wear under your work uniform for fashion.  You have long since lost the neurotic worries that come from wearing your work uniform on the bus.

Now you sit on the bus and forget to pull in your stomach whenever an attractive women gets on board.  You watch her face carefully for all the familiar signs as she begins her mental assessment of you.

At first there is always The Hope.  We are programmed to give the benefit of the doubt to strangers.  So at first the eyes widen and you trail her vision as it does a quick take.   Up then down.  You notice the slight frown, or maybe it is just a relaxation of terse muscles.  Her unconscious brain sends her signals.  She is giving up on you.

You fiddle a bit with your ear phones and adjust the wire to your MP3 player.  This break in eye contact gives her time to sit down and throw a fake half-smile at you.  The smile is supposed to mean something to you like, "it's not as bad as it seems."

You are caught up in the unseasonable late afternoon heat of October in Arizona.  The heat of the mid-day is still a sweat inducing 91 degrees.  But the Metro Valley Bus driver has long since abandoned any pretense at keeping you cool.  The air conditioning has been turned off by the bus operator for some unknown reason. Maybe the bus driver has been told to save money, or maybe the bus driver was cold when he started the bus at 6 am.  The crisp morning air still brittle with moisture.

But by mid day the driver's decision is all wrong for the vacillating conditions that mark the beginning of winter in the desert.

Now the only air circulation on the bus is one or two small windows that decorate the upper side of the bus.  The windows are half open and provide some relief when the bus is moving, but mock you during rush hour traffic, or when the bus lurches suddenly and sharply backward to stop for eager passengers.  You feel their bitter disappointment as soon as they board when the door opens for them. 

All the passengers look back at the driver in hopes that the heat has gotten to him.  That he will take pity on them and turn on the air.

A few of the younger riders curse at their luck and wonder aloud why they have to pay $1.75 to ride in the heat.  But the driver just keeps driving.  He knows better than to get in a back an forth with them.

You know the driver has been driving buses for some time.  He is confident behind the wheel.  He tells the young couple sitting at the back of the bus with their feet propped up on the cushions to "take their feet down."

People do what they are told on the bus when the driver speaks with authority.  He has the purple uniform, and the pepper spray, and he decides if your expired bus pass needs to be replaced, and "No, not by that ticket, that ticket only gets you a ride on the light rail, you need to buy the other ticket."

So the mistaken patron runs over to the ticket selling kiosk again.  His blue bag in tow, he rumbles through the bag for his change, and coming up short manages to find his credit card.   He plucks the card from his wallet and mumbles under his breath a bit all the while taking sneak peaks back at the driver, hoping the driver does not drive off before the departing time says.

According to the kiosk he has 3 minutes before the bus departs the main bus depot, and belches a black stream of diesel smoke and chugs away into the middle turning lane leaving the twice luckless expired bus pass boy to curse the driver and stick his middle finger defiantly up at the rest of the bus passengers as he watches the bus pull away.

The boy chases for a bit, hoping to get in front of the bus.  So that the bus driver can feel his ire.  But the driver puts on a little more gas, enough to show he means business. And the boy lets the bus continue down it's path.  Choosing not to martyr himself completely.

The Atonement of Romius T.

He had an old computer that was slow to respond to his fingertips, or to the commands he made using his mouse.  He knew in theory there must be a way to make his computer run faster.   But he did not know the answer.

He tried not to let his lack of knowledge about computers bother him.  Computers were a subject that few people knew much of.   He tried to remember that he was not much different from anyone else.

But he still felt like a failure.

So he tried the only trick he knew to stop thinking about his failure. He started thinking about other people, and how they were failures.

He picturing the ineptness of the average computer owner at home, fiddling around with wires and connections, anxiously clicking on files and programs, half hazardously, as if in their sleep, unable to identify the source of why they kept getting viruses.  He pictured the exhaustion they experienced when they discovered all the money they paid for wireless internet was not worth the slow dial up speeds they experienced when online.

He went through the trouble of mentally picturing all those people because he needed something to balance out all the growing feelings that he had against the tide of pathetic people he saw on a daily basis.  The fatties and unsavory types that he saw through his work at the grocery store.

He saw how even though their guts were bursting, they would open packages of Little Debbie snack cakes, and make jokes with the him about how they, "just couldn't wait to get home before they ate one."

He also saw parents and children.

He knew the parents did not change out of their dirty work pants, before they went to the store.  The children he saw never stood still.  The roughhoused and wandered into nearby check stands, and never stood next to the basket as their parents commanded them to.   Yelping children raised on food stamps who typed on messenger phones he could not afford.

But the mental imaginings did not always work.

Sometimes it did not matter what he pictured in his mind.   The mild anxiety, the butterflies, the creepy feeling of disembodiment always returned.

Not only did he have those feelings again, he had The Guilt of Atonement. 

His thoughts were mostly reactions to internal  hypothetical situations, and though the situations were hypothetical, and though the situations were internally derived, whenever he insulted others he felt a need for atonement.  He needed to punish himself for the situation he created as if it existed in real life.

His guilt causes physical problems too.  It caused him neck and shoulders ailments.

He hurt sympathetically to counter the wounds he delivered to people who did not exist, or if they existed, they existed only inside his thoughts, so that his atonement, which they would never know about, which could never be expressed to them, not in words at least , not worlds they would understand, because every thing would be lost when he tried to explain to them, the strangers  he thought about for hours, writing about them in his journal, describing their sweat stained shirts, photographing the dark marks on their underarms with his mental camera, the stains they should have been embarrassed about, but never were, because there was always some who would ignore the pit stains, and out of either poverty or character defect would never buy bleach or chlorine, and even when they did the shirts were torn to pieces in the wash, tattered by the powerful enzymes that remove dirt, so that they clothing instead looked like it was attacked by a plague of moths, and was unfit to wear.

So you see, it was not really his fault that he did not see the dignity of the individual.   Dignity was never anywhere he happened to look.

Were we to look where he looked, we would notice the fact that dignity had gone out to lunch, had forgotten to leave a sign that it was out to lunch, so that the empty cubicle that dignity worked at would appear abandoned, and we could only hope that a supervisor would notice the abandoned cubicle, and put up a help wanted sign, to get somebody to work on getting things back to normal.

Not that he was sure anyone sure we should get things back to normal.  It was bad enough when people went about their business.

If their business included things like getting so drunk and driving to the store to buy more beer, so drunk that he could not sell her alcohol, and so then he told her that if she tried to drive home he would be compelled to call the cops on her, and she forgot to pay her bill, and walked out with a six pack of beer, and walked out to her car, where she got greeted by several police officers, and her only reaction to that fact, was that she hoped he would forget about it, hoped he would forget about how the policeman offered her a ride home, and how she thought about getting indignant about the offer, but then she thought better of it, because she hoped some glimmer of rationality would radiate out at him through her blood shot eyes.

And she hoped that her semblance of rationality and her comment that "this is the first time something like this has  happened to me" would be enough for him to "forget this little incident," and maybe they could "go get a coffee some time."

But he had a hard time "forgetting" how she was 45 and divorced, and that she had spent 2 months in jail for driving drunk to the middle school where she worked , where she somehow managed to avoid hitting any of the school children who would have been walking to school that day, only because it was Sunday.

Though he supposed the view of an approaching SUV would have "sobered" the kids up right away.  Which he figured would have been okay.  As that was the only lesson either one of them could have taught anyway.

If you have badly bleached blonde hair, think about getting a better dye job, or at least consider going back to your natural hair color, as your bad looking bleach job is highly distracting to me

Who does she think she is with that bad bleach hair do, and the fat ass, and those giant grapefruit titties?

I mean I can understand the fat ass, since all the black guys that she went to high school with kept feeding her cheese fries, kept feeding her whatever fucked up things black men say to black women, so that black women have big old egos, and a wonderful sense of self worth, even though they have giant asses, giant asses like the asses you see on National Geographic Specials, where the African women  stuff pillows and couch cushions into their skirts to look like they have the giant asses that they see American women have, because American women have access to things like cheese fries and second helpings, which is an unknown thing in Africa, due to all the starving and the pestilences, which god keeps sending their way, all over the fact that they don't know a thing about Jesus yet, which is ironic if you think about it, because all black people in America love them some Jesus, even if they also love them some deep fried chicken and big asses, which is something as a white man I will never understand I guess.

Though I do understand about the chicken thing, who doesn't like friend chicken?  But a big ass?  Please.

My manager is giving me a look.  And I don't think I like it very much.  Just like I don't like her badly bleached hair.  I can't understand how a woman can have such a bad bleach job when the woman makes as much money as my manager does.

I know she cares about her personal appearance (you can tell because she applies so much make up, any woman willing to cake on that much make up obviously cares about her appearance, and we haven't talked about the fake titties, only because I am not a big fan of fakes ass tits.)

I go to strip clubs once a week.   And I can't tell you how many chicks I see with fake-ass tits, and how they think they invented cleavage, and want me to ooh and ahh at them, when all I can think about is how those things are a pin prick away from silicone rupture city, baby, and that's one place I don't want to go.  Ever.

Like I said I think my manager is giving me a look, and I don't know why she did, and I don't know what I did to deserve it.

I'm not even on the clock yet.  And yet I look over there at the check stand and my manager is giving me a scowl.  Like it is my fault we are so busy that she had to interrupt her busy schedule of reapplying the blue 1970's eye shadow found in every high school year book from that era.

It's not my fault.  It's the god dammed customers.  And I still have 10 minutes before I have to clock in, and I would like to buy my Gatorade and my Twix candy bar in peace, and not have to think about why the hell a woman who earns well over a hundred thousand dollars a year, can't buy a 6 dollar bottle of Loreal to match her roots.

I think it has something to do with her actually cultivating the look she has.  Like she really wants to be thought of as the 23 year old Jersey gal whose boyfriend drives a blue tinted Camaro, and he smokes pot, and she smokes clove cigarettes, like that makes her fashionable, and not at all like the rest of her friends, who smoke camel 9's because they like the pink box it comes in, and how in a few years they will all be smoking Virginia Slims, because they hope to stay skinny, and how a few years later they will stop pretending, and stop buying Virginia Slims and Capri cigarettes, and start smoking something like Winston Light 100's, because staying young and beautiful is just something the cigarette manufacturers promise, and it is not something that they really ever deliver.

But I want to believe that my manager already knew that.

But I can't.  I can't say that I think my manager really is one of those literate MFA  grad girls who took a job at  a grocery store just to make ends meet, and to research, to see what it "feels like" to be one of "them" and get a bad bleach dye and spend a few hundred dollars a month on maintaining said bad dye job, (I have never seen my manager with a full head of blond hair, and I have never seen the full natural head color she has, so I am guessing that indeed she must be spending loads of cash at some trendy salon getting the 1987 Jersey girl, and going home after buying a gallon of blue eye shadow and the various brushes and utensils that are needed to apply such thick and luxurious coats of eye shadow all across her eye lids), because as I have said the hair color is the same every day of every week, and the more I think about it, the more that I get pissed off about that.

I take personal offense to it.

Like she is trying to out me like she is trying to tell me that whatever ironic stance I think I have found in my journals is nothing compared to the ironic blend of Jersey girl made good, blue eye shadowed, bleach jobed, fat assed, fake tits, Halloween costume, that she has thought of, and I can't wait to read all about it in her next book of poetry coming out from some small liberal arts college.

Dye your fucking hair bitch! It's fucking distracting me.

I lost my phone on the bus, or the Self Help Guide to being a Quiet One

If you want to be one of the quiet types, you should just shut up about how you lost your phone on the bus ride home from work.

You don't make a big deal about it to your customers, just to get them to feign a little sympathy for you, because you like feigned sympathy, because it is so much more interesting to you to see the pained looks on the faces of strangers who wonder why you have shared your dilemma with them, like maybe you are accusing them of something, when all you are... is tired of making small talk about what a great deal you have on sacks of red potatoes.

If you want to be the quiet type don't bother posting it on your facebook, or cry about it on your blog like a little baby.

Why cry at all when you weren't all that upset about losing the phone in the first place?  I mean maybe you were a bit upset.  And sure you kept thinking about it all day.  But mostly you just thought about "what an idiot you were" for losing the phone the way you did.

It's better to think like an adult.  Sit back with a little perspective, or rather try leaning back in a dirty undershirt on a folding chair and gain some perspective.

Perspective like you can't afford the payments on your phone anyway.  That you want an iPhone and the EnV3 is just a cheap substitute for what you really want.

And you don't even have the EnV3 you just have the EnV2, or rather you used to have the EnV2.  Now some fat girl on craigslist has your phone, and is debating what to do about all those videos of 18 year old girls giving you lap dances she found buried in the archives of your 4gb memory card.

I say she does nothing, because she will have a hard time explaining to the cops how she got your handset in the first place.

But let's move on.

You're already over the whole loss of phone thing, and the whole being cut off of the internet whenever you leave the house, and the whole staying busy at work by staying on task, rather than by distracting yourself by looking at the display on your phone every three minutes just to confirm that no one has left a comment on your blog, and no one has invited you to go drinking with them, and no one has died or left you any money, and no one likes your status updates on Facebook, and how no phone means no internet or "on demand" video, so no more listening to the news at break time, or determining when the next Cowboys game will be, so you might as well start taking both Sunday & Monday off, because with the government taking all your money and the utility bills sucking all the marrow from your old man bones... what the fuck difference does it make anyway?

Without a phone to distract you on the bus you have started to have fantasies that all the R/C Cola you stopped drinking magically turns you into a six-packed gleaming muscle dude with cheerleaders bouncing off your cock.

Maybe you don't need to stop drinking the soda, maybe you should just do the DRUG, because I hear it is a lot of fun, the kind of fun that strapping young boys have drinking Pabst Blue Ribbons before work, getting oiled up doing push ups, and cycling to work instead of sleeping in their stained underwear, oh wait I am sure they do that, sleep in their stained underwear that is, all men do that sort of thing if they aren't sleeping with a woman.

There is some kind of perverse pride a man takes in leaving streak marks on his bedroom sheet, bedroom sheets that have not been changed since you puked on them the night you thought you could win the battle against Wild Turkey, and then you found out why Wild Turkey is  a REAL MAN'S drink and not some kind of pussy drink, so maybe the idea of drinking a quart of it outside your apartment door that just happens to be open, because you know that your neighbor likes to leave her door open to the cooling temperatures of the desert in October, (a mild 81 degrees outside which is 5 degrees cooler than what you ran your A/C just 1 week ago) and the air cooled wind and Pabst Blue Ribbon is working it's magic, so much that you offer the your married next door neighbor's wife a bottle, but forget that you are plum fresh out of bottles, and then offer a sip of yours like we are six and mom forgot to buy us kids each a Mountain Berry Twist Capri Sun for ourselves, and she grimaces at you like the muppet that lives in the trash can on Sesame Street, and even if you are drunk you can still figure out what that means, you don't even need her to close the door on you, and go back to typing on her portable computer that sits on the coffee table in between plants that look like cactus, but you guess actually aren't cactus, not that you wanted to sit and listen to all the explanations that come out of her mouth about how plants are "comforting" and make the whole place "livable" and what you guess she means by "livable" is that her husband won't spring for a any new appliances, but he has a nice Harley,  and third wives with baggage (you sense you will be told of 3 kids and there whereabouts somewhere in Georgia) settle for a lot less than they admit to, because a toned 40 year old woman should have "value" in the land o' Walmart and fatties, because I am sensing an attitude over there young lady, a bit of the resentment for climbing the ol' Viagra pole now and then with the body of a half marathoner whose kids are living in Alabama, but whatever, for some reason that old man  has made no plans whatsoever about throwing a few hundred dollars around to correct the lime green appliances bought new circa 1973.

"I wasn't even born then."  You could imagine telling her.  Even though you were born then. You were born in 1970. 

But you are not drunk.

Even though you are sitting here on the porch steps contemplating the sinking horizon of your time line here on Earth and what a waste it would be to just keep getting older with no cell phone, no kick ass plans that involve mixing your time up by: working out, getting drunk, and getting laid.

Maybe you should get drunk.

You can't think of any reasons not to be drunk, since you are not going to pay your cell phone bill this month, you might even have a few dollars for a cheap 18 pack of beer, but staying at home getting drunk just sounds more depressing than doing nothing, and as un-fun-like as going to a local bar for reverse happy hour, when reverse happy hour means dollar well, wine and draft, even though the draft at that bar is crap and warm, and not at all suitable for shaking the lazy malaise that inhabits you.

Not that the malaise is much to talk about.  Not so much as sad, or even depressing.  It just feels like someone took all the taste away from you.  Well.  What I mean is like they have "a plan" to take all the taste away from you, but that they started by taking all the salt out of things.  Then they gave you fish sticks with no ketchup.

Fish sticks with no ketchup is what you feel like.   That is no emergency.  Nothing to get upset about.  It's just fish sticks and no ketchup served alongside room temperature ice tea with no sugar.

The ice tea comes in a giant purple plastic tumbler.  24 ounces of blandness that coat your teeth with a dull yellow grime.  You never swallow quickly anymore now that your stomach hurts.  So the ice tea sits in your mouth working on nerve endings in your teeth.  You never think about the nerve endings in your teeth until they start to bother you.

You try swallowing again with just tea to test things, and you wonder what your stomach would do with gin and tonic.  You would order something else at the bar, but you only know two grown up drinks.  Gin and Tonic & Screw drivers.

You assume screw drivers are for mid-day brunches with your fiance and your fiance's parents who drink too much.

You figure your order of Gin and Tonic to a bartender says you are like 60 (and grandmotherly in a dirty alcoholic way), but like I said you don't know too many other drinks that don't involve whiskey, or Wild Turkey, and you never liked the taste of hard liquor anyway,  you always like beer, because that's just the kind of simple guy you are.

You could just be a beer guy who lost his phone today and who went out to drink the dollar specials at the neighborhood bar.

But you aren't.  Today you are not drunk and out having adventures.  You are just thirsty for a soda.  Today is just like every other day, a day you forgot to drown away with beer,  a day where you spilled over a bucket of sunflower seeds, and left them to rot on your bedroom floor, a day you don't even have the desire to wish you had wished away, so I guess that's why you got today.

Because a guy like you, knows that a guy like you, always gets what he deserves.

It's morning already *note: edited for more awesomness on October 18th

When I close my eyes I dream I work at Red Lobster.

In my dream a giant lobster claw is waving at me.

I think my dreams are animated by clawing, because I can't breathe at night.  I get woken by fits of coughing. I  swallow hard, clearing my throat.  It takes a few seconds, but then I can breathe.

Usually.

I am burping up the acid reflux.  I am tasting the chalky residue of antacids I chew right before bed.

My jaw is clenched.  I think I forgot to brush my teeth tonight.  When I rub my tongue along my teeth I notice they lack the slick polish they receive from the tooth brush.  Nighttime forgetting to brush my teeth "again" has turned into 3 months of not brushing at all.

My skull is pounding.

The membranes in my head are draining.  One sinus is always stuffed.  Whatever is blocking my sinus likes to follow the physiological path down to my ear.

My ears are pouches of white flaky skin that I press between my fingers to turn red.  The redness looks just like an infection from a poorly done piercing at the mall.

The internet tells me that there are 14 possible causes for itchy, dry earlobes.  The syndromes that cause it have scary sounding names.  Most of the syndromes involve exposure to the cold.

But my extremities do not suffer from contact with the cold.  I live in a desert.  The temperature gauge in the hallway indicates that the air is 87 degrees in my apartment.   I note the date is October 14th.

I am not awake because of the heat.   I have insomnia. I would try to sleep during the day, but I am forced to wake early, because my bed faces the sun in the morning.  The mattress I sleep on is crooked and no matter which end of the bed I lay my head on the balance of the bed tilts my neck lower than my hips and feet.

When I can't sleep I watch late night reruns of a TV show where a curmudgeon doctor makes obscure diagnoses.  He finds these possibilities in random encounters of the banal.

I should try to sleep, but I force myself to stay awake.  I know the Gastric Reflux Disease likes to work at night when I am relaxed.

My relaxed epiglottis peels back which allows  stomach acid to pour down the chimney of my esophagus.  Saint Nick like.  Delivering presents to the needy school children in David Copperfield.

Unconsciously it causes me to suck air in and cough it back out.  I think that drags stomach acid in to my lungs.  My heartburn spreads outward from my chest to make my fingers tingle.

It is morning already.

It is the morning of the big healthcare protest. I need to decide if I am going to allow myself to be arrested at the protest.

There is a cute girl on Facebook who wants me to get arrested with her.  She promised me a protest t-shirt if I go to the protest and get arrested.

We would hold hands together and block sidewalks, and the police would have no choice but to arrest her.   And to arrest me.

I have seen protests before.  At community college I saw a woman protest date rape.  She had her mouth taped shut with masking tape.  A silent protest.

I always worry I will get a cold if I do the silent protest.   I fear my death will be like that of one of the characters in the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest.   I will die with tape around my mouth.  With sinus fluids blocking my nasal airways.   Desperately sucking for air through my nose.  But nothing comes.

I know this sounds crazy.

But I don't worry about a normal death.  A death brought on by a lifetime of eating too much chocolate.  The slow tango of heart disease.

I do not worry that chemotherapy will emaciate my pudgy waist line until I spill over into a bowl of Count Chocula, my bald head bouncing on the table smartly.
The dumbstruck cocker spaniel in the corner of the dining room, next to the antique sewing machine, staring up at me, wordless and panting- from his morning run with my young wife- who continues to shower, not knowing what has befallen me.  So I am not handed baby aspirin.  And no one calls 9-1-1.

My last thoughts revolve around worries that if  I soil myself,  "Does anyone know we recently purchased baby wipes with aloe 100% alcohol free?"

I make it 7 straight days without drinking a Coke, so God infects me with the h1n1 virus

Here I am with nothing to do again.  Not even a beer in the fridge to keep me company, and by company, I mean hit me over the head with a bucket of blackout sex and debauchery.

I stay up past 8 am, but it isn't THAT kind of staying up late.  The kind of staying up late that involves drinking.

The kind of drinking that fuels cocaine binged nights spent cyber stalking the middle-aged crew-cut next-door-neighbor's-wife who leaves her door open for the reason I choose to believe must have something to do with wanting to be bitten during rough sex.

No, my late nights have something to do with publishing rough notes on some garbage ideas I have about modernity, theology, and philosophy.

Which just goes to prove that you can talk yourself into believing anything, if you can talk yourself into believing that a giant of philosophy like Soren Kierkegaard can be turned into a rationalization for the pathetic, inauthentic, life that you lead.

Ice cream flavored kittens.

I am not drinking soda.  Seven days in a row.  And it is the kind of thing that fatties in the supermarket get excited about.

I think I told some one of them that I lost 3 pounds, and then I told them how I was going off to a protest for universal health care on my next day off.

I guess if that is the kind of thing that gets you off then you can go ahead and feel proud of yourself.  You know like you are doing something other than following the latest news about how Miley Cyrus has deleted her Twitter account which is nothing like the terrible cycle of abuse that follows the girls that work in the deli department around here.



The Self Help Center Guide to being punched in the kidney.


If you get punched in the eye and leave to Texas, I suggest you don't listen to your boyfriend, don't listen to him tell you how much he loves you, and can't live without you, so much so that he attempts to run over the security guard on patrol in her electric scooter car, run her over on purpose, because when you get home... he's just going to punch you in the kidney, and we have all seen girls that we could punch in the kidney, and watch them die on the dirty bathroom floors, kicking their legs out from under them, screaming that their kidneys hurt, and "Oh, I think you hurt my kidney this time."

REALLY? And not just your dignity like when you got punched in the face. (And why I gotta ask you twice bitch?... ain't that joke still funny?)

All those black eyes that you don't bother to make excuses for anymore, you just keep your head down and stare straight at the time clock whenever I see you at work.

Thank god I am not the one asking you questions as you lie kicking in pain on the bathroom floor that is decorated with the pink ankle socks from some other woman, left from the night before you got there, (and somehow you still don't know better than to ask him questions  after all  you've been told...)

If I was there I would try to tell you get out, and to stick it with me, that there is something going on here between us, and that everything is okay, that all this random stuff is awkward, but not a friendship killer for us, if you know what I mean.

And I think she does.

"God hates me!" I know she would tell me, but "I just got infected with H1N1" I would tell her back.  

See?  We all got our problems.

Mine comes to me in the form of commercials that I hear all day at work.  The commercials go something like "what gives a kid butterflies in his tummy?" And of  course I go, "sitting on my lap."

So then my problem becomes the young lady friend of a boy from work who's thinks I make up songs about children sitting on my lap "getting butterflies," and now she thinks to call me creepy, but in front of her dad, so she say something like this guy (meaning me) is creepy, and dad asks if I am creepy like... "something unintelligible" is all I hear and I try and play it off like "ya that's funny who ain't?" and then she says no, "it's like he likes young girls" and then daddy is like "well at least you don't hide it."

Which all sounds so weird to me, but not really when I am surrounded by 18 year old girls at the chicken wing bar, wiping greasy stains in my lap, my face burning red all because I can't find a cream that reduces redness on the face, or anything to reduce the shame and embarrassment that stutters out of me, along with the coughing  acid-reflux from lungs filling up with swine flu that my brothers ex wife has given to me, "just to let you know all the kids in school have it so you have it!"

Oh, shit.  Somebody get me a wet wipe.

The Sociopath Next Door: Why Atheists Hate God.

In case you missed it.

A few days ago THIMSCOOL left a comment in one of my favorite posts. His comments and my responses have become  interesting debate.  Well. At least his part of the debate is interesting.

I won't be regurgitating much of the actual debate here. If you are stimulated by anything you read in this post, then I suggest you go to where the debate is at and read the comment section.

The post is I Hate My Life. The text of the post mainly deals with how I my Google EXGF treated me. The subtext of the post anticipates an upcoming meta-theoretical exploration of my life.

I applaud the commenter for finding it and for "arousing me out my dogmatic slumbers."

THIMSCOOL diagnoses the pathetic misanthropy of this blog for what it is:

"Well, it is quite clear from this post (or any of your posts) that you have as much compassion for your neighbor as for yourself, which is to say, precious little."

"But really, you have no actual loathing or fear of them or you; more of a, 'we're all in this cesspool together and so we all stink kind of attitude..." [My Emphasis]

Be glad you don't have my personality, the only thing more frustrating than eavesdropping on my life is actually
living it, while the dreariness you so accurately diagnose in this blog is nothing more than the uncompromising feeling of frustration that adopting my world view [of resignation] would provide you.

THIMSCOOL is not happy about all this frustration. He wants me to be rid of it.

"You resent God. You resent the world. You resent your birth. You resent me. That is what you have to correct, the resentment... the unfounded notion that you deserve better. That will cure the hatred, and open the path to love."

I can't say I blame you for telling me to get over being resentful. I don't want to be resigned to it. But then again, I did not ask to be born either. But here I am.  
Suffering.

We can interpret the suffering of being born in modern times through the theology of Søren Kierkegaard. Every thing one needs to know about life can be understood by studying 15 pages from Fear and Trembling. [pages 65-80 in the most common translation.]


I will break Kierkegaard's theology into two parts.

The first part is Life as a gift.

And since life is a gift, we must be grateful. Furthermore it follows since life is a gift, there must be a giver.

I think there are too many easy arguments against the Christian supposition that God-Father gives you life and therefore he can do with it as he pleases.

So does THIMSCOOL.

Instead he offers what I call Nice-Guy Deism:

You may think of God as benevolent but inept aliens, advanced future beings, an amorphous spirit, or perhaps simply the essence of the entire world around us. Nobody knows what God is, and if they say they do, then they lie.

Either way we have a giver of life. And we have the gift from a giver.

The second part of Kierkegaard's theology we will call the Paradox of Living.

Life is suffering. The Buddhists' know this. So do the great theologians. Even Christian apologists like Kierkegaard understand that living mostly involves pain.

But if God is good then why is there suffering?

It is a paradox. Most people seek to resolve paradoxes, because constitutionally they cannot deal with the psychic pain paradoxes bring.

Kierkegaard gets around the paradox of suffering by proposing several coping mechanisms.

The first mechanism is slavery to Empiricism.

The Hedonistic Man abandons reconciliation with God. He seeks only pleasure and avoidance of pain.

In other words Man only goes after what he can expect to get. He is the man of commerce. He is the prudent shopkeeper of early Capitalism. He is the prophet of new-age feel-good self- esteem.

He is personified by Ivanka Trump. 

She has written a self help book. I recommend the read, because we all can benefit from a, "how to pull yourself up by the boot straps" book by the daughter of a multi-billionaire.

The book jacket copy should suggest that if you finish the book you may need to chop off your head due to the possibility that your head will explode.

The Knight of Resignation.

The knight of resignation
does not abandon identification with the ideal. Instead, the infinitely resigned, understands that "not in this world, not in this life" will his love be found.

The Knight of Faith.

The knight of faith is just like the knight of resignation, only the knight of faith reconciles the paradox of suffering by accepting that God will provide.

"I believe nevertheless that I shall get her [communion with god], in virtue, that is, of the absurd, in virtue of the fact that with God all things are possible."

I have simplified the arguments here to an absurd level. I am in the process of deconstructing/writing a very detailed proto philosophical argument.

The next stage I will attempt to write (in the style of the old master) a love story that corrects the mistakes I feel Kierkegaard makes. The story will be modern and therefore pornographic.

Conclusion.
 

The mistakes I see are self evident. 

The ethical human does not proceed to stage 3. The knight of faith does exist. The paradox of suffering, The paradox of living, is not resolved. There can be no identification with the ideal because the infinite most likely does not exist.

If he does exist he does not allow for us to know him.

Resentment: the unfounded notion that you deserve better. 

"That will cure the hatred, and open the path to love."

Below is someone who is resigned:


Anybody else just really tired of trying, I mean fuck, I've worked my ass off for almost 20 years and I am still barely just scraping by. WTF?

My resigned response to people who suggest that the poster start volunteering: 

What if you don't like volunteering? I mean what if you get no "good feelings" out of it. Maybe you can appreciate (intellectually) how helping others is good for them or society, but you get no satisfaction of helping others...?

It was viewed as sociopathic:

What if you don't care about others? What if you're a sociopath? I mean what if your idea of "helping" is putting people's pets in front of stopped school buses and watching their life get slowly squeezed out of them in front of innocent children, as the bus pulls away?

Right... I don't think "volunteering" in the form of signing up for Habitat for Humanity or something is necessarily the point of the post, but the idea of doing something different to better one's surroundings and, through those same actions, yourself. "Volunteering" could be painting pictures of cats and handing them out on street-corners - whatever in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD that gets you off, without costing an arm and a leg.

That said, Habitat for Humanity is really awesome - you get to do some good, honest, physical labour and help a needy family build a home. Nice.

"Tell me why you resent the world, Romius."

The Theology of Romius T.
What you call resentfulness, I call confirmed resignation. It will be noted by the author that Existentialism is a philosophy that is in eclipse.  We have nothing more to say.  We live in a time of transition.  From the old times and reliance on God to whatever comes.  Be it robots, be it supercomputers taking over the world, be it aliens revealing themselves.  

But we do not inhabit such a world.  We do not have access to such a world.  We have only the here and the now.  We are creatures that live only in our time of resignation, until some new eon, or our destruction which we are most assuredly deserving of.



I have not explained what I mean by resignation.

I will have to explain things like Existentialism, K's view of individualism, etc. If you wish come back here often to see if I have updated this post.  I think I will.  These are basic outlines of the argument I have yet to write.
"Faith is precisely the paradox that a single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but as superior…"
""The tragic hero does not enter into any private relationship with the deity."

"Had he sacrificed his beloved ones to obey a Godhead without any higher ethical purpose, no one would understand him and no one would admire him."

From WIKI Things to consider:

It is also important to note that the difference between these ways of living are inward, not external, and thus there are no external signs one can point at to determine at what level a person is living.

"A person who is in the ethical stage would not give up on this love, but would be resigned to the fact that they will never be together in this world."

"The knight of faith does not have the whole nation behind him. His act is not even public. In fact, it is strictly between him and God."
See Here for source of quotes.
Negative aspects of Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith on modern world:

The ethical individual in Christianity/Kierkegaard is above the morality of the system as a social unit.

It is the "resolve" found in the knight of faith to reconcile the finite with infinity (god) that led existentialism from the modern preoccupation with anguish to the ethical superman morality of Nietzsche and Hitler.

Hence "the way of the master" Kirk Cameron is wrong. 




Despair/Atheism/Resignation is not at fault for the violence of modern thinking. Violence is the fault of those whose psychological fragility cannot be cured without the leap into faith.

I get all "Meta" on you & you get a blast from the past from Bathos

I am hard at work on a lengthy post that involves me deciphering Kierkegaard and showing how my philosophy of resignation recapitulates Kierkegaard's Knights of Resignation.

Some of the subtitles of posts I am working on include "the sociopath next door."  Not that you should get too excited.  I have 3 or 4 great ideas about names of titles for posts, but not much written.  I am combining technical philosophy into prose like Camus or Satre, and it is a lot more difficult than I thought.

As many of you know I am better at writing titles for posts than filling that post with content.

I had to work yesterday and the whole day while I cashiered I had a bunch of ideas and some decent sentences in my head, but forgot them by the time I got home.

 So that's why you get this blast from the past from my other blog Bathos for the Misanthropic.  Just for the new readers, or the folks that never check out my other blogs. 

The day after I shot a man in the face was the first time I ever felt powerful, so I guess you can't blame me for scooping up the latest pictures of Miley Cyrus looking like a slut for your enjoyment. I don't like looking at a picture like this because unlike you I am not that much of a voyeur.

I like having a normal girlfriend and a normal relationship life. That is why I am attracted to good looking, funny, and intelligent women.  Not the little girls you like.

But I post these pictures as a service to you so you can jack off to them and stop circling the playground so much and worrying all the soccer moms that got that flyer from the sheriff's office with your picture on it.

I know what you are thinking, if I am attracted to smart good looking chicks what is the problem? Why am I still single? How hard can it be since I like girls who are legal?

I'd like to think it has something to do with how I am picky and I like really attractive women, but I think it has to do with how smart, cute, funny girls have standards and I never measure up well to standards, because unlike pedophiles I never practice trying to pass statistical tests. I am a creative type and we need more freedom and breathing room than the facts and figures can give.

You should think of me like an independent film with subtitles and no plot even though I am an American. I don't open the big screens like Batman does, but every once in a while a movie like me comes along and even though the first part is boring you start to appreciate a film where the character gets developed and the plot moves along in congruence with the feelings and ideas of a flesh and blood person, not simply as the side show for special effects.

I know what you are thinking that sometimes even quirky independent movies suck and you are sick and tired of how all the so called "quirky" characters in independent films are all really the same. That might be true, but sometimes when you floss your teeth they bleed out for three hours, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't go ahead and floss them once a week anyway.

Either way it appears that Miley Cyrus has no idea how to stop acting like a whore despite all the bad press, and I guess that is a good thing for you. It just goes to show you that god had something planned out right when it comes to repopulating the Earth with sluts. Every few years the sweet pre-teen with braces who loves daddy and jumps in the garden sprinkler grows breasts and discovers for herself that empowerment means having power, and since she does not have power in the real world she begins toying with the idea of using her sexual awakening against the pathetic man-boys staring at her through closed windows hoping to get a peak at her nipples when the water begins to work its magic on her bathing suit.

I don't know if you can tell the difference between this post and any other post I have written, but I will tell you that I was totally phoning this one in. The sad thing is I could write five or six of these posts a day and if I added a few more pictures of Miley and Britney I'd end up making a few dollars a week from Adsence.

Instead I work hard all week looking for inspiration because I am stuck with the idea that you are looking for a blog with integrity. Even though I only write when I want to I still get worried that the people who read this blog are bored waiting around for the three posts I write a month, because they have decided that my blog is just not worth it if they are not sure what I stand for.

I think you should give me a break and not force me to tell you in graphic detail what I do here, because if anything that only stokes the disdain I have for the audience which only means fewer posts for you. By now if there is something I should not have to tell you, it's that if carefully defined I have a great deal of integrity.

That's why I am always trying to come up with a new angle to attract someone other than the mid 30's married alternative mom that I can't seem to meet in real life, but only on the net where they are already married and ridden down with offspring, so I really have no hope of getting them to jump ship with me, so I guess I will always be alone, because I live in a town full of crack heads and old people who care more about money than well defined integrity.

I guess what I am saying is that my sense of integrity compels me to point out how wrong it is for a preteen girl to feel OK about subtly using the power of her sexual awakening against a horde of horny social misfits for profit all the while complaining about all the misunderstandings that she is perfectly aware she is creating.

Confusion about your burgeoning sexuality is not only natural, but is inherently a private affair; hence, it is no one's business. Not even a perverts. But the naked manipulation of said sexuality for purposes of avarice leaves one open to critique which is why you will find Miley's photos posted here.

I hope you all appreciate how much I have had to hold your hand here, and explain things to you because then you can then begin to understand how much smarter I am than you. I know how thankful you are for this service, but it only fills me with pity for you. All this anxiety gives me a pit in my stomach that grows ever more hallow.

I am sure you are all the reason I have acid reflux and throat cancer, and one day when I can't breathe from my esophagus closing in on me I want you to have a nice ceremony at my funeral where you engage my blog in the literary theory that you took at community college, which on second thought will probably end up sounding a lot like some small town Oprah Winfrey's book club meeting, so maybe I am having second thoughts on that.

Maybe you could just convince a middling blogger to give me some air time now that it is clear to the world that I am not a pedophile just a hard working social critic.

(that last paragraph was prescient huh?)

I join the online game Second Life which I think means I should get a third life

I have my windows open for the fourth night in a row.  You can feel the humidity tumbling into my room from the outside.  The whole apartment is silent.  My roommate participates in the conspiracy by falling asleep.

It's hot so I stumble carefully around the dark apartment adjusting the window shades to allow for more air flow into the apartment.

Earlier I watched my favorite football team lose on TV.  Watching my football team lose demoralizes me.   I was born in Texas, so I take football seriously.

I switched channels after the game and caught a show on M-TV that discussed online gaming and internet activity.
I highly recommend you watching the show it kept my interest.  I tried embedding the video, but blogger is acting up.

The show featured a girl who tried to make a living off the web with her own strip tease website.  I was thinking about paying 16 dollars a month to be friends with her.

In the show she gets her 500 dollar a month rent paid by a guy she gets naked for.

Another person in the the docu-reality show was so agoraphobic they preferred to be rock stars in the virtual world rather than the real world. 

Some of the characters in the "documentary" were just super shy and preferred to meet people online in virtual reality games over meeting people in bars.

It got me thinking that I wanted to join Second Life.

It was not easy.  I downloaded the program I needed.  Then I had to adjust my video screen to 32 bits.  Next I had to find out what brand of video card I have.  And then I had to download the latest driver for it.

I felt so fricking TECH savy it was crazy!

After all that I got my second life.  My code name is romius Goldshark.  You should hook up with me if you do the SL thing.

First day in I met a potential nerd girl partner.  And I talked and got dressed by a Vampiress.  Second day I got a job as a security guard in a club that has drugs, sex, prostitutes, etc.

Already better than my real life.

My Blog Review Is In

I wake up when the sun light breaks through the cheap blinds spraying my face with hot white light.  I roll over and fall out of bed.  I march zombie like to the control panel of the air conditioning.  I turn on the air and make sure the setting says 83 degrees.

I go to the kitchen and pour myself a giant plastic  tumbler of ice tea (with caffeine.)  I made the tea from a pot that has the non-stick coating peeling off.

I taste a slight tinge of aluminum when I take a sip.

My eyes are puffy.  I can hardly see.  I stayed awake last night until 7am playing the online virtual game Second Life.  I will be writing a post on the game soon.

I checked my e-mail and followed the link that the good folks over at Iwillfuckingtearyouapart sent over to me.

They reviewed my blog and they loved it! There is a good discussion going on over in the comment section of the review that is worth reading I think for all the readers of this blog.

I am loved on the internets by some tough ass bitches, and I have made 2 friends  (including a high priestess vampire) in my Second Life.

I'm KING of the world!

I am the Roman Polanski of the Grocery Store

Yawning.  Like a lazy alley cat.  My hand stretches out blindly in front of me.  It grabs a hand towel.  I blow my nose into it while still yawning.

After I am done blowing, I take a cursory look into the towel.  I see the cloth now has pale red stains of what I will assume to be blood.  I try not to think too much about that.  There is no need to rev up the hypochondria so early in the morning.

I sit up and slide my feet off the bed.  My computer sits not 6 inches from the edge of my bed, and if I am not careful I stub my toe on the dinner tray that doubles as my computer desk.

A stubbed toe hurts, but a stubbed ingrown toe nail sends the kind of pained shock waves down your body that leaves you doubled over, cursing, and regretting how you choose the convenience of locating the computer right next to your bed (for easy access to e-mail at any time of the day or night) over placing the table at the proper ingrown toe nail distance needed for safely exiting the bed without worry.

I'm awake at 4:55 in the morning staring at the piles of laundry that decorate my bedroom floor.

After the pain stops I reflect on the day I had yesterday.

Yesterday I got called into the office again at the grocery store I work at.  After counting my cash the pudgy Philippino said, "Don't turn your register light on.  I am going to need to see you in the office again."

"Again?"  I asked myself.  "What could it be this time?"

I was sure I had not forgotten to get my customers to sign their checks.  I had been told that "one more missed signature on a check" would mean my job.  And even though I hated the job, I needed it bad.

"Not another WIC check?" I asked tentatively.

"No. Not that." He replied.

What I never could have expected to be told (in the side office that management keeps strictly for yelling at its employees) was that I was a rapist.

"I'm not calling you a rapist."

The manager's face was beginning to build a bit of sweat right above his upper lip.  Like he was one of the villains in the 1940's black & white movies that I rented from Netflix all the time.

I was being written up for some kind of "inappropriate conduct" between myself and a fellow cashier.

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"  I asked.

And then I was told (off the record) that someone witnessed me and a female cashier take a picture together.  The picture was taken at the behest of one of the photographers from the supermarket's weekly employee magazine.

"Are you kidding me?" I asked.  Dumbfounded.

"No.  Some one saw it and said you may have touched Jesse in the breasts or something."

"That's ridiculous."  The ideas was so preposterous I could not think of a better reply. 

The last few days of my life seem more like a Kafkaesque soap opera than the dull working class life it should be.

I am being sued by the government for repayment on student loans that are at least 20 years old. I was having trouble coming up with rent money.  I was worried that a  rise in monthly bus fare tickets would mean I would soon be walking to work.  I am also one mistake away from getting fired.  In addition to all of that my union was about to go on strike.

"And now you want to make me the Roman Polanski of Grocery Store Clerks?"  I asked.

"I can't believe this.  Unlike that dirty bastard I have never drugged a 13 year old girl, or snapped naked photos of one in a hot tub."

The more I thought about his accusation, the angrier I got.

"I've never had the audacity to stick my penis in a 13 year old girl.  I've never pulled out and asked if I could "stick it in her rear" and when she says "no" place the penis back inside her and rupture the inside of the anus until I was done cumming."

Who could resist such an ass?

"I am pretty sure...that's... not..." The assistant manager stuttered. "No one is saying that."  He tried to emphasize how he was sure that the investigation would lead to nothing.

"At most a counseling or a suspension."  He added.  Like that was supposed to make me feel better.

"Has anyone spoken to the girl in question?" I asked.

"No."

"If you had I am sure she would clear up any misunderstanding." I reasoned.

"She is going to have to write her own statement.  Just like you. Then the investigation will decide what course of action should be followed." Came the weak response from the manager.

I felt like his use of the word "investigation" and "salacious pictures" made me into one of the bumbling, hard boiled detectives in one of Roman Polanski's early movies.

I invented his use of the  word "salacious" to describe the digital photo of two cashiers standing next to one another with their arms around each other, because I know big words like that, and assistant managers of the stores that "investigate" these kinds of "crimes" do not.

I just thought somebody ought to build a case for them, since the case they have against me and Jesse is so pathetic.*

*It turns out even though I "raped" Jesse in those pictures she may get suspended too.