I found my old bike seat; someone turned it in to art supply store's front counter. Now I have two: my old one, and my crappy new one. So, the blind, idiot god mooshed me after all. No shocker there, I guess. But, when I look at my nice, old bike seat, I am happy, because I no longer have to deal with my shitty, new bike-seat. One can always look on the bright side. That fact is a bit disturbing in what it reveals: happiness is a delusion that clears away the bitter, grey, corrosive haze of reality.
I would like to go to richmond on one of my days off and look for a job that's not as unbearable as corporate retail. We lower-echelon employees, who are cashiers, stockers, shelf-arrangers and customer-ass-kissers, are also expected to be little willy lowmans and hard-sell to customers a bunch of shit that they don't need. 'i see you're buying a paintbrush. Would you like a nice easel with that!?' this conflicts with my ethics, if you buy that I have any.
Four or five days a week I embark on a $6.20, three-hour commute to a low-paying job I can't do, working with people who don't like me, and whom I don't like. Also, I know nothing about art supplies, and can't answer a single question intelligently, sometimes not even 'in what aisle can I find x?'.
I have to leave in about half an hour for my next shareholder-fattening session. It turns out we employees get a bonus -- $.25 for every hour worked in the month for which we met our sales quota; our own little version of profit-sharing. In my case, this would amount to about $30 for a month's worth of pandering; not worth the price of admission, so to speak.
Most of the other employees are a pleasure to work with. My enemies are only the guy in receiving, the general manager, boob-girl, and possibly now my original hiring manager, who has turned a bit cunty now that she's come to realize that I'm incompetent, and maybe not as madly excited about the job as I appeared to be during our interview, when I became possessed by some bizarre and cheerleader-like demon.
Almost certainly contributing to the cuntiness was an incident yesterday regarding my wal-mart velcro sneakers: my achilles tendon was being rubbed-raw by a sliding heel, and I took off my shoes while standing at the cash register. Michelle flipped out, and snapped 'that's totally unacceptable. We can't have you hurting your feet'. I said the first thing that came to mind: 'but I have a blister!' 'i don't care'. now she thinks I willfully disobeyed the rules, and is beginning to dislike me.
I'd forgotten about the OSHA regulations demanding covered shoes on the job, just as I forget about so many things at work (where I put my stocking cart, little procedural cash-register minutiae, where things are located, what size cuts a customer needs on a foam-core board, etc).
I'm sure people at work think I just don't care. Even if you don't buy anything else about my brain damage-symptoms, I insist that you buy the memory problems -- these deficits are probably the most measurable.
I've told three managers about my brain damage, but no-one has paid too much attention, seems to care, or treats me any differently. This is a big contrast to the bike shop in Maryland, where telling my managers about my problems amounted to being treated with understanding. And here I thought california was supposed to be all hippy-happy, left-wing, accepting, etc. I guess not. Sometimes, I wish I were back in Maryland, working at the bike shop. The only problems were that I earned $6 an hour, and worked about 25 hours a week.
It might be time to start seriously considering applying for SSDI, but i hear that one has to be unemployed for a year beforehand. I don't want to go back to Maryland and spend another year in my mom's house vegetating on the cable modem.
Back to discussing my job.
I have no product-knowledge. When I'm approached by a customer with a question, I either start spewing bullshit, say 'i don't know -- let me call someone over', or run off to ask someone for help, then come running back. So, I've started avoiding customers. I hope an upcoming quiz on art supplies helps my dismal art supply-knowledge, even if it doesn't help my feelings on salesmanship.
If I were to approach marketing intellectually and as a game played to see how many people I can rip off, I might enjoy and be pretty good at it, until I went to hell. I think many (all?) marketing geniuses are totally cynical and know that they're basically hypnotists and thieves who enjoy herding sheep.
Marketing is all about knowing what a given person wants, and then pandering to it. Substitute 'person' with 'demographic', and you have a business plan. Most people want to be smart, beautiful, respected, powerful and loved. So, you subtly and underhandedly convince them that they will be smart, beautiful, respected, powerful, and loved if they have your product. The details of the subtle, underhanded convincing are many and varied. I can't share them with you here, but if you paypal $199.95 to barnacle@freeshell.org I'll be happy to send you a starter kit, and you're guaranteed to earn $300 to $400 THOUSAND dollars a year!*
*not really.
During yesterday's 3-hour sales meeting, employees took a test: each of us was to scribble down as many add-on sales as possible for a given item. it was like a game of scattergories. I was excited, because it was somewhat scholastic, and I thought I might be able to do it well. As it turned out, I only avoided coming in dead-last; I'm almost never as smart as I think I am. The winners of the contest (the top three, I think) were awarded some damaged merchandise.
This evening I told hanna that my goal is to 'null all that is'. This is my fantasy of a resume 'objective'.
Objective: To Null All That Is.
Resume 'objectives' have fallen out of fashion, because it was realized that they're idiotic. An applicant's objective is always to be hired at the job in question. So, seeking to be hired as a software engineer at a small software company, an applicant might write as his objective, 'creative position as software engineer at a small, innovative company'. Well, duh.
I had to explain to hanna what the verb 'to null' means -- I told her that it means to erase, to wipe out of existence as if it never were. Not to destroy in some melodramatic way, but simply to blink out everything. Where there was, there now is not. I can't really explain it any better than that; space, time, matter, energy, mind, the universe -- everything -- is instantly erased. There is nothing now.
Her response was, in her down-home, sort of sing-song czech lilt 'but you cannot do that!' I replied 'unfortunately'.
Yesterday while I was at work, my bike seat was stollen. This is extremely, perfectly, deliciously ironic, because I always take my bike seat off after I lock up my bike, to foil thieves. As I mannishly explained to a girl-manager, 'if ya see two bikes, and on o' them has a seat and th'other doesn't, then which bike'r ya gonna take?'
I have to fiddle with my lock after parking, which requires two hands. So, I throw my seat and attached seat-post on the pavement in front of me. You'd think I'd see it as I walked past it, but no. This has happened to me twice: I throw my seat-and-post on the ground, and walk right by it. The first time, another employee, arriving after I did, took it inside for me. This second time, some malicious berkeley resident picked it up off the sidewalk and scuttled away with it, like a little ant gathering bits of food for the colony.
In the act of trying to prevent theft, I caused my seat to be stollen.
So, from work to the BART station, from the BART station home, and then from home to the BART station the next day, I rode my bike without a seat, for a total of about 3 miles.
It's not as impossible or horrible as it sounds -- one just gets a lot more tired a lot more quickly, since the bike has to be in the top gear the whole time. Descending full-body weight on the pedals provides so much torque that, if he were to stand and pedal in a low gear, the rider would feel almost no pedal resistance, and his feet would spin wildly around on the crank-arms. It's just impossible not to deliver a lot of energy this way. So, when standing-and-pedaling, one goes very fast, and gets very tired.
To rest and coast along on a downhill, sans seat, one balances one's feet on the pedals while the crank-arms are both parallel to the ground, like a trapeze artist. This must look somewhat unnatural to a passing motorist. Of course, a seatless, moving bike probably looks pretty strange to begin with.
Hanna picked me up from work today, since she was in berkeley anyway, hanging around in mark's house cleaning things, feeding the cat and playing with the computer. We drove past a bike shop where I thought I might get a seat, but it was closed. Back in concord, I called REI, which was closed. Sears didn't have an bike seats. Some place called 'copeland sporting goods' told me they sold them, so I drove there. It turned out that they sold seats, but NOT seat-posts. So, that was useless.
The 'copeland' mechanic, who was a bit of an ass, told me that 'performance bicycles' (!) would likely carry seat-and-seat-post assemblies, but that one would cost about $50. When I got back to the apartment, I called the 'performance' in walnut creek, who confirmed that ball-park price.
I was prepared to suck the pipe and shell out $50 Monday evening, after two more days of seatless riding, when I got the idea of searching craigslist.org for used bike parts. It's quite a neat site -- go there, if you want to look around; it has sections for different locales. I refuse to post links anymore, because it's too much work.
I searched for 'parts', 'seat', 'seat-post' and 'seat post' in the bicycle section of san francisco craigslist, and found about five people who offered a variety of cheap, used bike parts. Most had email contacts, to which I sent a form letter asking for a cheap seat-and-post. One guy gave a phone number, and indicated that he was in concord. I called him, and he told me that he had a spare seat-and-seat-post, and that he would part with it for $15.
He told me to call him when I started out, and I replied that I'd be over just as soon as I'd gotten mapquest directions. He lives about 5 miles down the road from me, and I found his place with minimal trouble (i drove around in a good-sized apartment complex for a bit). He found the correct-sized post, I chose a seat from his selection, and he put things together with an allen key. I asked him if $12 would be ok (i only had a ten and two ones). He said 'sure'.
The original plan was for hanna to pick one up for me at REI (there were all sorts of problems with this, including but not limited to hanna being unable to find the store), which would have been disastrous. She would have bought a seat without a post, and even if she somehow came up with both, then it's likely that it wouldn't have fit my seat-tube. I had told her that all bike seats fit all bikes, which was totally naive and stupid.
So, now I have a seat and post, with very minimal effort. I thought to myself as I was going home, 'every once and a while, god smiles on me'. Or, 'every once and a while, the monster-god's belly is too full for it to devour my flesh'. Or, 'the blind, idiot god planted his great, crushing foot elsewhere'. 'blind, idiot god' is from h. P. Lovecraft, and it's a phrase that always gives me sublime chills. Unfortunately, I believe a 'nu-metal' band has co-opted the name. It's a tragedy, really.
This got me thinking. Why am I giving thanks to the great spirit for providing me with an easy replacement for my bike seat? Why didn't the stupid great spirit just not have it stolen in the first place? It all reminded me of a time, in minnesota, when I was walking along with my grandmother. A car swerved out of my way, or skidded to a stop in front of me, or in some way perhaps almost hit me. Or, it may not have been that much of a close call; I don't remember.
My grandmother said to me 'we have to thank jesus for being there, and stopping that car from hitting you' (paraphrase). Well, why did jesus send the car in the first place?
In other words, one can very easily choose a world-view in which there's nothing to be thankful for. For instance, instead of thanking fate, luck, god, whatever or whomever for winning the lottery, the winner might just say 'well, why didn't mother nature just make me rich to begin with?'
Intellectually, I'm still pretty skeptical about giving thanks for the easy-acquisition of the bike seat, seeing as it was a pretty miserable turn of events that lead to the possibility of such a turn of luck. But emotionally, I was pretty smiley-faced on the way back from the parts-dealer's house, and there's some value in that.
It's discouraging that there has to be a torturous climb up a mountain before one can slide playfully down the other side, so to speak. I suppose it goes to show that there is no objective goodness, and that what we experience as such is all relative to badness. I'm not sure whether this is horrifying or comforting. It sort of sounds like a postmodern call for the nulling (ha) of objective reality, but I refuse to go there.
The other thing that happened recently was that I went to wal-mart and bought a pair of shoes, some non-white socks, and two collared, short-sleeved shirts. Everything was pretty spiffy, believe it or not. At first I thought that it would be spiffy in a kitsch, flowered-hawaiian-shirt sort of way, but I genuinely, and without a snide, campy smirk, like the articles I bought.
I remembered my texaco shirt (with a 'carlos' name-tag), and how cool it looked with the collar cut off. I began to get ideas about my shirts. Luckily, I only did it to one of them (a turquoise and yellow flowered job). I had recently shaved off the bulk of my hair, and the flowered shirt draped softly on my shoulders, without a collar looking like a big, flowered bathrobe. A goateed, shaven, grinning head poked out the top. I looked like a mental patient in some kind of hospital robe.
I threw away the mangled shirt. I think maybe it wasn't that nice to begin with, but it's still a loss of $10.
I'm happy about my new bike-seat; I wanted to call performance and say 'HAH! YOU THOUGHT I'd COME IN AND BUY A $50 SEATPOST. WELL, FUCK YOU! I EMBRACED THE BARTER SYSTEM AND ELIMINATED THE CORPORATE MIDDLE MAN. I WILL NOT FATTEN YOUR SHAREHOLDERS!'. Then I realized that the salespeople at performance don't give a shit.
Here is the chain of command: shareholders, who want to make money. The corporation, who is legally obligated to do everything in its power to make said money. Corporate executives, who ensure that such money is made by pressuring those beneath them. This pressure-upon-pressure system continues on down to the salespeople, who absolutely don't care if, say, 'the art store' earns a profit or not, except that if it goes out of business they will no longer have jobs. This is extremley unlikely, and even if it does happen, it won't be because a few employees didn't aggressively market paint tubes to a bunch of college students.
The general manager might get a dirty look, slap on the wrist, or maybe even replaced if she consistently saw her store's sales decline. But, cashiers aren't going to get in trouble if the store doesn't see a profit, nor do they, themselves, see a profit if the corporation sees a profit. It's unlikely that a given corporate retail associate is a shareholder in that corporation. So, we cashiers truly don't care.
This is ironic, because we're the ones who deal directly with the people who directly fatten the shareholders: the customers. So, if the customer has a problem with something ('x costs too much!', or some version thereof, usually), he or she bitches at us (the associates), who absolutely could not possibly, in a million years, care less. I've even been known to say 'i didn't write the register software', or even 'it's not my store'.
I made the mistake of going to bed at 9:30pm last night -- I will simply never learn. The options were to hang around in hanna's apartment staring at the wall until 11:00pm (a reasonably safe bedtime for me, even though it doesn't always work), or to go to bed, knowing that I'd wake up at 4:00am. Actually, I woke up at 2:00am. I would have had to keep myself occupied for an hour and a half had I chosen to stay up, and now I have to occupy myself until I'm sleepy enough to go back to bed. At least this way I can start a new date and blog the time away.
The main problem with hanna's food is that it's not fresh. She likes to buy food in enormous bulk, cook huge amounts of it, and then store it away for untold weeks. She must use everything up, but doesn't necessarily wait before all is used up before buying more food. So, stuff accumulates, and meals become bigger and bigger as well as less and less fresh. Someone once said that the universal secret to good cooking was 'fresh ingredients'. California is a nice place for this -- it's too bad that I have to miss out.
A solution would be to ask hanna to buy food more often and in lesser quantity, but there are some cooking directions she's not able to follow, including I think this as well as 'please don't make so much food'. As it is, my meals are pretty enormous. What the fridge and freezer need is a good cleaning-out; they're stuffed with plastic containers full of some fearful object, liquid or paste.
Of course, I prefer this to the alternative, which is fending for myself, food-wise. I did that for two weeks or so before hanna arrived, and I bought pasta and sauce as well as several cans of chef boy-r-dee products (beef-a-roni, mini ravioli, spaghetti-and-meatballs -- that's basically the selection). I got a bag of oranges and a bag of potatoes, thinking that I'd reform my ways and eat both. As it happened, the oranges started to ferment and cancerous growths began emerging from the potatoes. I threw several pounds of fermented oranges in the dumpster, and I think maya ate my potatoes.
I'm like most men: I like to cook as an occasional festival of creative and artistic expression, but I absolutely hate slaveship-style maintenance cooking. I'm sure women hate this too, when they think about it, and that they do it out of cultural obligation. But I think having a family to cook for makes maintenance cooking more bearable. Maintenance cooking for one's self is simply intolerable. So, when on my own, I end up with a lot of chef boy-r-dee, pasta, and frozen burritos. I wonder if someone's written a 'cookbook for those who have to feed themselves, day after day, and absolutely hate to cook'. If not, then that'd be a sure-fire hit.
Food that's too good and too easy to prepare also presents a problem. Six frozen, microwavable pizzas (i consider this to be 'too good') tend to disappear in one afternoon. So, I've had to find some happy medium where my foods are easy to prepare, but not TOO easy, lest I consume a week's worth of groceries in two days. Also, they can't be too good, or prepared in any quantity -- leftovers are an impossibility. I used to make 'chinese chicken', which was actually quite delicious. I would make 10 thighs of it in an enormous pot, foolishly thinking that I'd eat from that for a week or so. Of course the pot was emptied in two, perhaps even one afternoon.
The solution is to either have meals prepared and set up a paradigm in one's mind of 'i do not deal with the kitchen', or become one of those perfect people who prepares simple, elegant meals for his or herself three times a day, and doesn't stand around in the kitchen chowing down on his or her ingredients all afternoon.
Back in gaithersburg, a lot of meals consisted of boilable dry goods (beans and rice, pasta). Sandwiches are out of the question -- 5 get made over 2 hours, and that's the end of my lunch meat and bread. The thing is, my diet of boiled dry-goods was actually fairly tasty, and on it I remain quite fat. Eating hanna's food, because I'm forced into three meals a day, I'm actually losing a bit of weight. I might lose even more if I continue to get tired of it.
I have to go to work today/tomorrow at 4pm. I keep thinking I'm going to have a nervous breakdown at work and start sobbing the next time I can't do some part of my job, even after three weeks of working at it. I hate my job. Even when I'm quite happy, I hate it. Every time I go back to it after two days off it feels like I'm re-entering a nightmare. If you can believe it, I enjoy working jobs that I can do. That's the key: competence. If I'm competent at something, I usually enjoy it. I can't do this job at the art supply store.
When I lamented to my most recent psychiatrist that I'd never make $50k+ a year like so many of my friends, he said 'i wouldn't rule it out'. This is hilarious. I'm 30, and am working the sort of job that a 16 year old works. And not only that, but I can't even do these jobs properly. I think it might be time to go on disability. But, in order to do that, I will have had to be totally unemployed for a year; none of this jumping from menial job to menial job in the unfounded hopes that I'll be able to do one of them.
I don't want to go to work in roughly 12 hours, nor do I want to keep on eating hanna's food. Basically, I just want to be happy and successful.
The bay area stinks. By this, I mean the people in it stink. Specifically, the garlic-breath here is overwhelming. Sometimes on the BART the stench of dozens of garlic-eaters is so bad that I'm quite sure I'm about to throw up or faint. I press myself against the sliding doors as my station is approached, and finally rush out to take in the sweet, cool air through my tortured nostrils. While I'm at work and customers come to the register to buy art supplies, I can hardly stand the foulness spewing forth from their blubbery lips.
Bay area residents, much more than DC area residents, smell terrible. I think it might be that so many of them are foodies, taking advantage of their wonderfully fresh and flavorful agricultural products, cooked in various ethnic ways that most often include saturation with bulbs and bulbs of garlic.
The result is overpowering.
Two thirds of people who approach the cash register at the art supply store smell awful, like hell breaking open. I'm seriously considering wearing a surgical mask while I'm out in public -- it's that bad. The smell at work contributes to my wanting to find another job, along with my failure to learn the cash register anywhere near as quickly as every other employee. More on that later, maybe, if you're lucky.
If the BART is really crowded with the right crowd, I can pick out garlic breath, cigarette smoke, cosmetics, and dirty sweat. If someone is chewing gum, then some spearmint is added to the mix. I admit that I have super-sensitive olfactory bulbs that pick up something like one part per trillion, but I don't think that's all there is to it. Bay area residents eat too much garlic, and then breath their blood-toxins all over my air-space.
A dramatic climatic change is marked by a ridge of hills between concord and berkeley, under which cars and the BART drive through a passage called the caldecott tunnel. When I pass through it on the BART, the smell of rotten eggs saturates my car.
In concord, while I bike to the BART station past the honeysuckle trees, they're so fragrant that they smell artificial -- I thought nothing natural produced such a rich, intoxicating perfume. The first time I smelled it I thought it was some kind of laundry detergent. Right now, I can smell the carpet, my own deodorant, my own sweat, a bit of the fresh air, and a smidgen of the weird, ass-like smell that sometimes emanates from the kitchen in varying strengths, and that doesn't abate even with hanna's frenetic cleaning.
I met two SDFers today in san francisco. It was fun; we walked around the city and ate various things at various places. This is pretty much the standard activity in any city, except sometimes city-activites also include shopping for and buying trinkets at little stores. A few pictures came of it, courtesy of our partial-drag-queen waiter (i think he might have been taking estrogen, because he was very thin but had two little boobs). I'll post them here if I can get ahold of photoshop (i think mark might have it), using it to compress, trim and re-size the files.
Something that I've wanted to blog about since I first got here but haven't: bay area bicycle culture. Bikes are common, and both pedestrians and cars are tolerant of them, almost to the point of supplication. They're unambiguously considered to be vehicles, and car drivers have been trained over the years not to crush them.
One may bring one's bike on the BART, and I've yet to hear a complaint or even receive a dirty look when I do, even if the car is totally packed and everyone is standing. People simply fit themselves around the bicycle as if it were just another person.
Bicycles occupy a special place in the bay area: pedestrians are afraid of being hit by them, and so move out of the way. Cars are afraid of hitting them, and so move out of the way. It's as if bikes and their riders are the alpha-beasts of the roads, and even the sidewalks in some places. If one is a rider, all one has to do to transform into a pedestrian is get off and walk the bike. This is useful for crossing roads. Likewise, once mounted, the bike changes to a vehicle, and rolls along with the cars.
I think the universal deference paid to bikes has to do with a very long tradition of their use in commuting about the bay area, as well as a sort of sheepish guilt the pedestrian feels because he or she isn't exercising, and that the motorist feels because they are burning fossil fuels in a 1,500-pound wad of plastic and metal, usually shuttling a single person about.
I've driven a car here a few times, and from that perspective cyclists are positively cocky on the road. They give looks as if they are about to jump off their bikes and knife your tires if you, the motorist, so much as swerve an inch in their direction.
Concord is somewhat different than san francisco and berkeley (where a cyclist can be issued a ticket for riding on the sidewalk) -- in concord, I am literally the ONLY cyclist I have seen use the road. EVERYONE else uses the sidewalk, inching along at about twice the speed of a pedestrian gate, while lazily swerving around them. The pedestrians don't give this a second thought, and move out of the way instinctively.
Instead of dinging their bells when approaching, say, a clot of pedestrians taking up the whole sidewalk, or maybe a woman with a baby carriage, the cyclist will simply slow to an utter crawl, matching the walking speed of those pedestrians until they happen to turn around, or a cross street comes up where the cyclist can swish on past, and continue his (I've yet to see a girl on a bike in concord) jaunt along the pedestrian walkway.
Furthermore, totally without exception, I am the ONLY anglo-saxon I've yet seen on a bike; every other cyclist is hispanic. Anglos drive cars. However, some hispanics drive cars, or trucks with flames painted on the side that tend to peal out at stoplights. I'm the only one who uses the road like a normal cyclist traveling at a normal speed; it's incredibly frustrating to me to crawl along the sidewalk at a walking pace. At that point, why ride a bike?
I am the freak of concord: a white boy in semi-nice clothing and sunglasses, zooming down the street on his way to the BART station, while hispanics in baseball hats sluggishly roll along the sidewalk, and cast half-interested glances in his direction. I do this four or five days a week.