Monday, November 28, 2005
Since my ability to get work seems compromised here in central KY--and also, because I hate it--I find myself thinking more and more about heading to New Orleans or the Gulf Coast in general to seek employment as a laborer or nursing assistant. The funniest thing about this is, when I was in that much-rued RN program six years ago (as far as I know, I can't go back b/c they think I am a terrorist, and that is just about as funny as what's coming), my plans--inasmuch as someone as lost and unformed as I was then was capable of making any--were to seek my first nursing job in New Orleans. Back when it was New Orleans, and the most immediate threat I could identify was getting wasted with the wrong person and finding myself at the bottom of the river.
Like so many, I'd read a lot about the city . When I'm up to music, that's the music I choose to steep myself in, and forehead-tattooed weirdo that I am, I half-thought, half-hoped that I might find a decent fit there without New York's pretentions and basic cost of living. (I don't actually have a tattoo on my forehead. Not that its absence makes much difference.) James Lee Burke and the first couple of novels of Poppy Z. Brite--genre whores, both of them, but in a good way--have done a lot to shape and color my visions of the place. Those line up pretty well with the photo/video imagery of the area--as it was, though. As it was. This place I'm thinking of going sounds sort of like the Wild West, with sludge.
And that's acceptable. Okey-dokey. I have my own sludge to bring to the picture, or perhaps I'm naive enough to think on some level that it can be worked out of me, like very thick sweat. My talents are limited--nurse aide, psych tech, animal care worker, warehouse drone, proofreader, copy editor, cage dancer (I was 20), student. At this last, I am best. If I could somehow line up a Klonopin provider (first things first) and transportation and lodgings, I'm pretty sure, right now, as I type this, that I'd be gone.
One of my mother's little horses, Charger, is nine years old. That's about as long as I've been here. I got to see him the day he was born, and I will probably miss his death by a matter of hours, maybe a couple of days. His laminitis, complicated by any number of painful things, seems to have taken him around that curve beyond which life is inexcusable. So I'm drawing parallels where remembrance is due; typical, I guess some ppl would say. (And in response, the ego: but not really, you just don't get it, you're generalising again. I don't know if my living has become inexcusable and am not begging anyone to confirm or deny it. I just think, childishly, concretely, and truly, that the little horse and I have done our time here on this hard earth.)
I've cried enough for myself; now is the occasion to cry for something else.
If anyone can get me started on some kind of orderly path to the Gulf, I'm all ears.
---gone when the dead wagon comes,
c h
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Unlogged, where are you? Have you changed addresses again, b/c Thursday's e-mail to you was returned to me today.
Pls let me know.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Thanks, Howard. Can't say why I am having a harder time with this ambiguity and anxiety than usual; maybe it seems more threatening, or casts heavier aspersions upon me. There is nothing in the newspapers--and yeah, the holidays have registered here--and I wish I knew more specifically what's going wrong apart from, or in addition to, my awful work history and miserable interpersonal skills.
Wishes aren't horses. There are, however, horses, and the two miniature foals are in the process of being weaned. Coming up on the tail end of that; last night, the little colt seemed to experience a shot of hormones in a big way, racing the length of their enclosure, kicking and twisting and scaring the pants off his softer sister. They're neat creatures. My mother intends to sell all but four; developments encroach on her property, and I suppose she's been paying through the nose to feed the horses, in addition to feeding me.
I guess what's making me sick, and there is a physical element to my unrest, is that I've not been completely honest with the parents--they don't know that my binge eating has been acting up, and they certainly don't know that I've supplemented my nightly pharmaceutical ration with beer. Here it is: they've given me money and I've misspent it in ways that have contributed to my present situation. Maybe 'contributed' is too weak a word here; 'defined' seems to fit better.
Won't someone, somewhere, hire me? If there was someplace to stay on the Gulf Coast, and a doctor to write for my Klonopin, I'd beginning to feel that I'd have been there. Which is always easy to say. More of the truth, though, is that I'm sick of where I am, physically as well as the rest of it, and can't escape the notion that this geography is a precipitous representation, a damn good map if you will, of my life to date, all forty bloody years of it. Rock and hard place, indeed: if I can't get work, then I pretty much won't be able to have my medical transcription work paid for, and if that doesn't happen, how will I be able to support myself in order to write? I don't know a thing about journalism, which seems an obvious stopgap if not an end in itself.
I need some wood to chew on.
anxious; cribbing
Just have to get this out, although I know that I'll probably worry more as a result--worry begetting more of the same.
I haven't been doing well as far as finding work goes: have interviewed for three stocking jobs and one entry-level rent-a-cop thing; none of the stocker employers wants me, the guy at the security agency has a boss himself, and she won't call me, and I can't get back on at amazon. com as a temp, regardless of my knowing more about the job I'd do than the several hundreds of ppl who will be walking into their warehouse off the street during the next few weeks. This Friday, applied at UPS and Fed Ex; nothing in my inbox to notify me of an "appointment", or initial interview. I should expect this week to be slow, slow--but I made the mistake of calling this so-called outreach 'worker' in Lexington today, and when I told her that I'd run my food card into the ground again with bingeing, she threatened me with something next to unspeakable.
I'd asked her if she could run me to God's Pantry again tomorrow, the time at which I expected to have returned. She wanted to know why; I told her; and her immediate response was to mention something about moving into a group "home". Like with what goes on upstairs from me, except with women. Ya know, I. DON'T. THINK.SO. Let me reiterate: I. DON'T. FUCKING. THINK.SO. Now, I'd work in one--been there, done that, years and years ago. And I would accept the services of others who deal with street people, but no, Ingrid, there is a Santa Claus--and snow, apparently, where your brain should be.
For what it's worth, she accidentally threatened me with having to go to a 'day program'--another familiar work situation--back this summer, when I was loathe to use the bus system and basically stayed inside five days a week. So, if this response, which may have not yet reached 'threat' status (she said this, apparently, b/c I'd get 3 meals at such a place a day and my bingeing would be restricted; a threat to evict would have worked quicker and better and been far less insulting in the end, but WE DON'T ALWAYS THINK BEFORE WE SPEAK, NOW, DO WE?
All of this leaves me in a grim space, though: I'd originally planned to go back to the Lex tomorrow, Tuesday afternoon. I'd have access to a bit of money, half of which is earmarked already for trazadone, but I cannot tell you what I'd do with the rest. Living across from that inconvenience store, where things are marked up 300%, went a fair distance toward me overspending my card; but if the food were cheaper there, I may well have purchased, and eaten, more.
I'd like to think that a simple word from Our Lobster would have sufficed. Now she's gone and gotten me upset, all for nothing. Or for something--I might be a candidate to be moved elsewhere, or I might get some kind of work, somewhere (the lack of which, and its implicit rejection, seems to drive the present activity), anywhere, doing anything. I've false-started, yes, and I know it, but knowledge isn't that valuable a thing for me when it comes to anxiety-laden subjects. I wish I could just turn this on over to the Lord, yes, this after having snarked about old Ingrid, and snarking is a sin, and yes, I sorry:
: but I really don't want to go back to Lexington tomorrow afternoon anymore, even though the alternative is to try to sit through a holiday dinner--almost as much the trigger to binge as being left basically alone with a little money and a waiting snowfall and the lonelies with nowhere to go. Oh, and this--these ppl don't drink. I haven't gotten around to flat-out quitting again, 24/7/365, but since nothing else, and I mean nothing, I think, has worked to save my sorry stretchmarked hide, not drinking might be worth a shot. So I believe I will stay here, if my folks will have me.
Regardez.
Know that this post belonged on another page, but no one reads it.
No I have not mistaken this for a message board; I just don't know where to find one right now
and the horses are getting crazy, the foals, I mean
Monday, November 21, 2005
Going at it bass-ackwards, of course, I'm not impressed enough by the previous post to be depressed by it either. One of the books I'd brought over here with me is called Unholy Ghost, an anthology of essays on that variant of mood disturbance, almost all of those by writers whose work I knew, and those thereto previously unknown, their work a series of astonishments next to which my potherings on darkness pale.
Many of those essays mentioned medications by name, like cultural icons if not exactly old friends. Several spoke of the "cocktail", a basic idea in postmodern psychopharmacology--or "buckshot," if you will, fired from at least three different rifles at once. I've been speaking of Seroquel a lot lately; it is an anti-manic, atypical-antipsychotic compound that my psychiatrist can give me in sample form, to address an ancient and relentless insomnia that has chased me about since the age of ten or so. (What she usually gives me costs money I don't have right now. Am I repeating myself? Have I been?) This Seroquel serves to slow everything to a subterranean tremor. Where there was thought, an imprint remains, begging refill. Think of Jell-O. Where there was reaction--usually and often, a sharp knee to the chin--there is a vaguely bacterial sheen.
I'd moved away from the hyperbolically intelligent Marilyn vos Savant toward something I knew better: medication. I'd done the logical thing, here, Googled it; and discovered that, among other things, Seroquel can cause diabetes. Diabetes can cause weight loss. My mother is at the door. 'This Old House' beckons; I shrivel. But maybe there is pizza. Pizza is maybe there.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
In today's Parade, a Sunday newspaper entertainment magazine, someone who has been identified as the most intelligent person on earth says that mental illness is pretty much good for nothing.
Neither cognitive nor emotional unrest is much fun. I've been there, lived there in fact. But this so-called "most intelligent" individual, a woman named Marilyn vos Savant, has written that mental illness (apparently a single entity in her purview) "...has something in common with an unhappy childhood..." and "...never deserves credit for the things you stand up and do right".
I'm not going to try to assign moral qualities to works of art, but this statement still suggests that Ms. vos Savant has never seen a van Gogh--she's probably wealthy enough to own one; that she has never read Joyce or Woolfe, Plath or Sexton; that she has not heard enough of Beethoven to weigh in on him one way or another; and that she is ignorant of, or may have simply forgotten, this nation's debt to statesman A. Lincoln.
I can't prove that the accomplishments of civilisation's most notable scientists have been motivated by anything other than hubris, or altruism, or some high-octane competition for grant monies. And though I still do not wholly endorse the philosophies said to underly the self-help phenomenon of 12-step programs, I dn't doubt that many persons who thump their Big Books daily have undertaken good works as the direct and measurable consequences of having walked among the pages of the DSM-IV-R (the psych professions' long, large list of criteria for "mental illness(es)").
And what about that old yet immenently flexible saw about needing to travel a ways in the dark before being able to fully appreciate any sense of light? (I suspect that the mileage one logs there may not be necessary to the appreciation of light, but I also suspect that it flavors such an appreciation in ways I'm not able to understand.) Because I have some kind of emotional dis-ease that tends to get in the way of sleeping, I consumed a medication last night that sometimes tends to get in the way of thinking, or at least it does for me. I had to do the math, and this was what I woke up with, an opinion on a subject that is my intimate and my familiar.
Its presence in my family of origin still thunders at the walls of its closet. It has caused a lot of pain, not only for me. I do concur with vos Savant's opinion that one should not "blame" disorders of mood on an "unhappy childhood", but regret that someone as widely read (and quoted) as she has chosen to look away from the role that science now attributes to biochemistry in the development of these phenomena.
Here, we see biochemistry being bad: no doubt I could have put all of this better, and perhaps some doubt as to whether or not I even know what it is that I am trying to say. I'm not glad that I am apparently so easily describable in the DSM-IV. I'd rather this not be so. But if I bear out my intention to stay in this mess for the duration, I may be able to make and later identify some positive contribution to some life, somewhere. Maybe entering into the effort to defang the stigmata accompanying problems of thought and mood is a place at which I might begin.
--or not. And I did have a rough night of the worry machine, worrying about my chances of finding work in this world, ever, and some guilt also, this not far removed from matters of money.
Post, publish, see how this thing scans.
Monday, November 14, 2005
Under the familiar limits, I actually put together a half-way decent essay over in the 'puke' blog. It didn't have a lot to say about that act--no gruesome descriptors or worrisome suggestions. I don't know who reads what anymore. This shithead coming out of the second-story elevator practically raced me to the log-on terminals, and won. I muttered a few things at his homeless-smelling ass as he returned to wait for an elevator to take him upward; then I got slick and opted for the stairs. I walked a lot today, and am still a little out of breath. As for the shithead, I don't see him, smell him either.
So far I haven't done too poorly. Today, I mean. Called the Vocational Rehab counselorette at 9 a.m.; she'd be on the clock if there were indeed a clock to punch, and when I got her, I belabored the point that I remain unable to apply for a UPS job on-line, b/c a certain, central piece of identification of mine has been lost, or placed elsewhere. Last year around this time, I turned the same job down, crying that its hours would interfere with some kind of therapy group I was in. Now, I don't know diddly about that same group, if it exists or does not, but I do know that 24 hours a week of pretty much nonstop lifting is far preferable to laboring weekend nights in the dark of the Goodwill dropoff station. And why can't I work Christmas Eve? Why the fuck not indeed? Because it may not be much, and because we may even secretly hate one another, but I have family in these parts. I'll avoid their middle-American potlucks, with fold-out cardboard tables lined up like so many dominoes, and the children's table itself overrun by a small-talking cabal of married young adults: I'll beg off sick on Christmas Day itself (which always was, is, and will be anticlimactic) or go do some volunteer thing somewhere. I can't stand that stuff. Odd woman out for the nth time and counting. And where is my lover? And which one of us is the man? No freakin' thanks. I can't do that. But Christmas Eve is different, special, even as it stands for all of those occasions I never got one fiftieth of what I'd wanted. It's Grinch time--the cartoon, thank you. It's The Night the Animals Talked. And now that I think about it, snug as a bug in my earplugs today, I can almost hear them, murmuring among themselves as they graze the meagre pasture of my parents' land.
Before I cream myself, there was something else--a few words, in an envelope, for me, from my sponsors. I owe them x, and then y, and a little bit of z. I must have all of this paid up by the eighteenth of this month, or possibly face a 30-day notice of evicction. (Hey: the real world is back, and has sunk its jaws into a dimply chunk of my ass.) I didn't think they could do that, me being on Section 8 and all. So I made three phone calls, getting the dimly efficient financial manager each time, until I reached the Executive Director herself. I apprised her of my employment situation. Made assurances that I wished to pay her once someone paid me. As far as I could tell, she was conciliatory, and acknowledged that I was making sufficient efforts toward getting back in school, for something useful for once. We agreed that I was not disabled, but rather differently so: someone who could easily catch up on their financial debt to society from the privacy of their own home. I suppose I represent a class of individuals which is capable of working--some of us to considerable financial gain--outside the limits of the workplaces known to this culture. (What culture? Indeed. Good question. And the only answer available to me now is the one, in all its permutations, that renders the sad sadder, the different more estranged, the capable impotent, the open-minded shut, and the soldaten armed, steely of eye, cartridge belts slung at the ready.)
Now what the fuck was that all about? I may be inching closer, or I may be lying on a parched sidewalk somewhere, waiting on rain or the big boot from the sky.
flora and fauna forever
i do not know how to handle optimism. it tastes better than tequila, but is less filling
Saturday, November 12, 2005
What a vacuum. I suppose I should read more.
Despite last night's Seroquel and a tall boy, I awakened today at eight a.m., which is a pretty strange thing for me to do. So strange that I took a Klonopin just to go back to sleep. Eight a.m. is a reasonable hour any day but Saturday, when children's programming dominates the only channels I receive. (I'd like to think that the Saturday morning fare of my day--Warner Brothers, the Disney on acid, or so it's been widely said--was more intelligent, despite its ongoing riffs of cartoon violence, than what today's kids, those without cable, anyway, are subject to. I never could stand to look at it long enough to make a concrete determination.)
Falling off to sleep always feels good, almost as good as the first rich spasms of infatuation. No, I'm not infatutuated, with any one or any thing; I just enjoy sleeping the way other ppl enjoy chocolate. I bought some of that with my food card, Hershey's Kisses, wrapped in red and green tinfoil. In the absence of yellow, those two colors, seen together, entertain a frightening resonance that tops off the angst and more than occasional belly flops into the business of finding work. The business is not going well.
So. I am in possession of chocolate, 200 calories' worth, and should probably throw the remainder in the trash. I'd have to eat several pounds of the stuff, and I believe that I could, to have a taste of the benefits that some neuropeople associate with that substance. Today is one of those homeless days--hard blue sky, warm enough to be out, about and stinking; the line at the Salvation Army should be forming now, and with just the right amount of Seroquel in me, the amount being moved through my arteries at this moment, I think I can tolerate almost anything.
I can look at events that would otherwise trouble me beyond the reach of words. These words may not, are probably not, be adequate enough to address them. I interviewed at the Goodwill on the bus line--poorly dressed, not at all prepared, face blotchy and voice gone to paper. I can remember that, and the harsh aspect of the interviewer (who did contact the little job counselor about me) and the how she broke off the interview--twice--to answer questions of employees in the area. I hope right now that she doesn't hire me: less than six bucks an hour for every weekend on the calendar, and why can't I work Christmas Eve????? Drugged as I may be, I'm still amazed at that one, that someone would think a person sorry enough to apply for a position that pays about fifty cents more than the minimum wage would want to spend the evening hurling bags of old clothing about, sorting and hanging same, instead of reaching out to family or others, if those persons do indeed exist. My parents exist. And that may be it: somebody down enough to work a job that sorry is, or very well could be, by themself on this planet.
Conundrum. Thesis. Antithesis. No, b----, I don't want to work Christmas Eve, or Christmas Day either. In itself, that doesn't mean that I want to go to any big family dinners, where food and social anxiety will both be in abundance, but I do not wish to spend that particular holiday in Lexington. (If my brother and his brood decide to go to my folks' house for Christmas, that may change things: I try hard, so hard my head sometimes hurts, to pray to lose the black bile that rises where my sister-in-law,and law only, is concerned; and I obviously fail at that; and with every day dead and gone the chance to relate to my brother in some way other than this one becomes less viable, weaker. I appreciate his--their--kids, and the fluffy mother-in-law. That's it. I wish it were not, but I don't see any horses.) Dialectic: if they come to this state from Atlanta, I will stay in Lexington and work at almost anything, including a hard blackout buzz if that is possible. If they do not, I would very much appreciate sharing a no-frills, cards-only Christmas with my parents and the animals. Also, I hope that I do not miss 'The Grinch'.
Dang, I don't know what it is. There's something else I should be angry about, if experience serves me correctly, and I'm just not angry. Feel a bit like roadkill, maybe, every bit of me flat and lifeless, but I received some bad news yesterday and the only thing I did in response was drink a beer and go to sleep. There is this fellow, J. (I use that initial often here; I might choose another if I should ever need to mention this guy again.) He's a paralegal. Real bright guy, could probably practise law himself and raise no eyebrows for awhile. Two weeks ago, he'd indicated his employer could get a completely negative reference erased, thus bettering my chances for employment. All I had to do was show up at a six o'clock AA meeting at the Dungeon in Gratz Park, on a Thursday evening.
The whole day was of the sort that demanded I stay inside. (Well, I had to go out in order to purchase a couple of forties first.) I just sort of suffered greyly through the light part--there wasn't much of that to speak of, light--and when four-thirty rolled around, I knew I was probably too intoxicated to get the bus and go on downtown to meet him. So I took a pill and went to sleep. And as it emerges, I would've been home free--checked out the letter he (the paralegal) had written, a cease/desist, and thereby been able to proceed more confidently in interview situations, because this week, the guy's boss, the attorney, had questioned the wisdom of writing a letter for someone he had never met, and who furthermore, might be able to get him into trouble through drunkenness or some such related thing.
No letter. End of story. The old man who runs the computer lab where I am right now is practically yelling at the dude he's trying to help. The old tech guy is of the opinion that I'm 7/8ths loony as far as noise is concerned. And this guy makes a lot of noise. I feel bad for his partner, if he has one. His dog; likewise. I've been warned, so I'd better sign off here. I didn't write much, and it took me an hour to do it.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
The Stinking Man.
This was on a bus, and a tough situation. The Number Four North, Limestone was boarding slowly; whoever was driving that day, yesterday, had left the door open, left a free ride there for anyone who wanted to take it, and gone off with his gold tooth to smoke a cigarette, as most of the drivers do between routes.
There were a couple of late-adolescents seated at the back. A little white lady to the front of me, where I'd taken a seat and extracted from my bag of books something good to read about depression. Then, this man--old fellow, grey skin, a cane--hiked his bones up and onto the bus, and sat down in the area usually reserved for ppl in wheelchairs. Earplugs in place, I started to read, and it wasnt long before I realised that I'd read this book at another time. No matter--I'd enjoyed it then, and I would enjoy it now. Except there was this stink.
The little lady in front of me was breathing into her collar. I hadn't noticed that until the ripe grey smell made its way back and through the narrow tube of bus. I let loose some kind of 'whew' sound; the woman snickered; I got up, and moved all the way to the absolute rear of the bus. It's hot there. Where the engines are. I tried to continue to read, but the two teenagers, a girl, a boy, had started laughing--they watched each new passenger board the bus, assess the odor there, and move past the old man in the handicapped seats, who was stinking.
Most of the new riders seemed to be getting off work--a sort of weary jollity preceded them. But there was the smell, and a short stocky black woman with an outstanding hat squared off to the back of he bus and declared, "What's going on here?" The teenagers, fiddling with the windows that couldn't be opened, really, laughed harder: something had to be done about that smell, its source, its reason de etre'. Surely the driver, a man whose name I don't yet know, would kick him off, the teenagers reasoned.
It was then that I put my two cents in.
I didn't come to his defense, no I did not. I simply stated that he could hike, with his cane, on over to the Men's Hope Center, about eight blocks away, and catch a shower there. He had shat himself, and the warm sick odor of dried urine was on him. At that time, the teenagers were calling for a spray--Lysol, Chanel #5, didn't matter. (I was in agreement, me with my cyclic rerspiratory problems and general aversion to aerosol anything, hugging the window that wouldn't open all the way. I was wishing that the driver would arrive, and evict the poor fellow--for stinking, even though that offense was not listed among those others at the front of the vehicle.)
The stocky woman searched her bag, removed a small vial of aerosol something, gave the back of the bus a hit. Whatever it was, it didn't smell good, but it struck me, this rider, as an improvement. The kids agreed.
And the driver with the fake gold tooth arrived. The riders, or perhaps simply I, looked to him to do something about the stinking man. No one addressed the driver directly; they just made loud comments about the guy, who appeared to have just been released from jail: the aspect of his cheekbone I could see bore abrasions. His pants, like his skin, were dirty. He needed a good bath; I had heard about such baths; and I almost--almost--almost hired myself out to give it to him.
I did not. Rather, I cleaved to the window and its feeble influx of air. I read my book, passengers came, went, remarked upon the smell, which seemed to feed on itself, which almost stubbornly would not go away.
Now, I know this bus, an artery through parts of the Lex that are almost never on display unless someone gets killed there. I sat back, and into my book, an effectively scary treatise against the SSRI class of antidepressants. I knew which way the bus would rock, which way it would roll, all the junctures at which one could be hurled about unnoticed unless someone rang the bell.
Someone did: the grey fellow, the old man trapped in his stink, and (come on: say it) isolation. I know isolation. I've gone out drunk at ten a.m. with asscheeks hanging out of irreparibly ripped jeans and furry leopard slippers, though I've never boarded a bus quite this way. Isolation is my good buddy. One could sexualise this if one were so inclined, but I am not, nor was I ever. I just knew, or thought I knew, the viaducts shivering inside his head. Took out the ever-present cat 'o'nine and whipped myself some, and then it was time to get off. As I did, thanking the driver for some unknown reason--I always do this--he was telling another passenger that there was nothing that could be done about the smell that still remained. In a matter of hours the bus would be taken to the bus garden on Loudon Avenue, where a ragtag crew of cleaners would have at it with antibacterials and solvents. The toothy driver would find his car and drive it home to his woman, his bottle, his bed.
And the bus, it would smell good, as good as a city conveyance could, the next morning, when another driver would heave aboard and assume command. No radios, no cursing, no eating or drinking, though everyone does. What's a little stink? Ride with it. Nothing else you can do.
oops and probably for the best, the timer is blinking. i wanted to moralise, but could not. just had to get my page in today
c h
Monday, November 07, 2005
You're reading this bass-ackwards, so unless you check out the entry that precedes this one, this won't make much sense.
--uh-huh--
Okay, so outreachin' Ingrid lets me know that the executive director and her pet toad, Dave, are going to inspect my crib of death today. ('Death', because that's what this is coming to if I don't get my ass up and out of there in short order. But I can't do that without a job, and I still do not have one.) I asked Ingrid why; her response was more than simple-minded, verging on cognition's negative space: 'To see,' she said,' if you have enough food.'
(I weigh perhaps a little more than 180, and this woman, who has seen me not once but twice last week, knows that I have food, and eat it often. I'd think her word would suffice.)
Did about two hours' worth of cleaning--all that shit that the organised among us claim can be kept at bay with 10 minutes' worth of effort daily--this morning. Hid the empty forties that had been reproducing in my bedroom closet, and made plans to take my two Hefty bagsfull of aluminum cans down to Baker's, who'll pay you a scant sum for these, this morning. I find everything--surprise--and am out at the bus stop five minutes before it is to arrive. Two minutes after that, Gary Worker comes around the corner, offers a little wave. I could hear him then as well as I can hear him now, despite this asshole to my left's attempts to destroy a keyboard that is not his--motha's poundin that thing like Beethoven at his practise board, only he is doing some kind of PORN chat.
Gary Worker: And yes, there she was, at the bus stop, with Two Plastic Bags Full of God Knows What!?! I thought she was Running Away from Home (hand over mouth and sweet guffaw).
Lobster Rob: Can you tell the court, sir, what was in those plastic bags?
Gary Worker: ummm (IS NOT AN ANSWER!), headless bodies? Bodiless heads? Aluminum cans, maybe? PORN?????
Tomorrow, I'll have to go over to the SSI judge's building and copy the contents of my case to date, to show this maybe-new attorney, a woman who used to work with the old dude who didn't want to take my case b/c he was afraid he couldn't win. I wish that It, They, The Force, God, AND the Ghosts of All Those Needlessly Downed Trees would just quit. Am I being trained for something? Running a really large habitrail, maybe? True, there have been some nice gifts as of late, but with no way to pay for an ISP, no way to use that golden retriever puppy.
Bringing me to this: why is it that when one--meaning me, obviously--has interviewed for some non-executive, marginally-professional job, been determined unfit on the basis of that interview alone (I mean, why check the references of someone you've never met, and who might have all the social expertise of the Hunchback of Notre Dame? I used to worry which came first! Bwaiiii, was I dumb!) I guess that I must either be getting a bad reference on the first call or am being dismissed without further inquiry as to my suitability for That Job at Kohl's in Lexington KY, or for any other. I can't see any other options, except maybe winning the lottery bigtime and having twenty pounds' worth of lipo done immediately: I am fat. But not so fat that I cannot use my weight as the overriding reason why I was not hired at Kohl's, by Randy, or by any other place or person.
If the problem lies with that first reference, a staffing company that deals almost solely with amazon.com, I am fokkered. Because amazon.com accounts for three of the four places I've worked in the last two years. I guess that that would put me back at having to take a PACE or OWL job, just to put a little agreeable distance between myself and said staffing agency. A person of my age just shouldn't have to be going through this quickshit. I mean, it's not as though I'm a felon, a bad mommy, a bad driver, or even own a car. (If I owned a car, I could get to the horse farms, where all kinds of derelicts are hired to work with God's biggest most beauteous best. However, no car. No nothin. I'd even fail at prostitution, for fat girls are usually the ones who have to pay. Or is that a really horrible and possibly stupid statement? I can't imagine anyone paying for sex. Hell, I'd rather drink some beer in my van down by the river.)
I see I am getting nowhere, fast, again.
c h
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rant of career screw-up, social retardate and bad references walking, all grown old
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