Misanthropaea

Toilet Paper and Aliens

Very much against my better judgement, I finally caved in a few weeks ago and took the constant nagging advice of a long-time friend and turned my fruitless, pathetic and embarrassing search for unrequited love to the internet. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of, mostly because it feels like defeat. Oh yes, I know – all of those precious Match.com, eHarmony, and Zoosk adverts make it all look so perfect and brilliant and the best possible thing you could ever do for yourself, full of smoking hot and inconceivably single women and tanned, well-chiselled, and tousle-haired men resting comfortably on their six-figure incomes, but the truth is those particular case studies in perfection are, at best, anomalous and, at worst, utterly fantastical. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

It felt like defeat to me because it occurred to me, whilst filling in the little forms and agreeing to various terms of agreement, that I was doing this because no-one I know or have met recently really appears to think of me as anything more than a drinking buddy, presuming, that is, they even think of me at all, and would prefer to keep me at arm’s length and would be especially thrilled  if they could only make their arms grow just a wee bit longer out of sheer convenience. It felt like defeat because it seemed as if I had exhausted any notion of meeting someone through traditional means and was now turning to a faceless and emotionless intermediary with at best only a superficial understanding of who I was. And I don’t mean my name, age, race, gender, education, occupation, or if I like puppies and long walks on the beach. I do, but that’s irrelevant. And anyway I haven’t been near a beach in more than twenty years. What I mean is all those odd, scattered, random, often contradictory and frequently idiosyncratic bits which make a person who they are and the sorts of things to ultimately connect you to someone else – like do you put the toilet paper over or under and will this be a cause of some distress and potentially lead to an argument if done incorrectly?

Granted I am not going to sit with someone on the first meeting and blurt out that I believe that we as a species have a greater antiquity than mainstream science wants us to know or that the internal architecture of the Great Pyramid or places like Puma Punkhu and Tiahuanaco raise practical questions about their construction that defy current definitions (and I’m not saying it was aliens… but it was probably aliens) – although I have actually done that, sadly – because most people will sit like animals trapped in car headlamps and start to inch nervously away. Trust me. But at some point those scary bits are going to sneak out, whether it’s toilet paper or aliens, and to the uninitiated who aren’t aware of these curious predilections or to those who don’t know you well enough or to those who don’t share a similar interest, you’re simply going to appear mad. Like some strange person who lives alone with cats. Which I do. And, again, that is irrelevant.

But mostly it felt like defeat because it seemed to solidify the feeling that I’ve become nothing more than some sort of Jay at The Desk to most women: empty as the plot of Twilight and as invisible as the talent of Milli Vanilli. 

Considering the fact that my friend hadn’t exactly had rousing success with her short on-line dating experience (before meeting her current boyfriend on a blind date set up by a co-worker), I couldn’t understand why she pushed and pushed so hard for me to do it – or why I was even toying with the idea – but her argument that ‘You haven’t met anyone yet have you? What’s the worst that could happen?’ finally made me give in and try. I opted for a couple of places offering both free profile placement and free browsing of the profiles of others only to find that if you wanted to send a message to someone you found interesting, you had to pay for it. So much for ‘free.’

Probably the worst aspect of it all was the almost daily email alerts of so-called ‘new’ members with whom these sites rather bewilderingly imagined you would be a perfect match…  

…or the constant bombardment of ‘messages’ from the potentially compatible love interests who’ve investigated the contents of your profile and have, you are told, expressed a desire to learn more…  

…and absolutely none of whom live even remotely within the vaguest parameters of the geographic location you specified, making the likelihood of a face-to-face meeting with them – barring a windfall in lottery cash or finally getting that novel published – virtually nil.

So on it went, week after week, the relentless flow of email alerts filled with farfetched suggested companions with whom I clearly shared nothing apart from being the same general species; the subtle intimations that if only I would upgrade to the next status level and pay the extortionate monthly or annual fee I would, at last, experience the rich power of the type of deeply committed relationship only money could buy; and a flagrant lack of possible matches in, and thus an inexorable disregard for, my stated terrestrial preference which finally culminated in receiving this:

Seriously? I thought. Obviously on the surface it all seemed very innocent and mostly harmless, but I had some issues with it. The glamour shot notwithstanding – because I’d seen plenty of them intermingled amongst ridiculous cartoon graphics and loads of especially bad self-portraits snapped hurriedly in lavatory mirrors – I could see no clear reason why anyone who looked like this would find anything of even the tiniest bit of interest in my profile. Though there are two types of women in this world I am uniquely attracted to – brunettes, redheads, and blondes, in that order – and though I don’t consider myself to be a Quasimodo, this recommended love connection seemed to be almost as fanciful as if Kate Winslet or Anne Hathaway had finally responded to the hundreds of pleading emails I’ve sent them.

Compelled by curiosity, naturally, I logged in, read the ‘I’m intrigued’ notification she had purportedly sent – which stated simply ‘I’m intrigued’ and was the only allowable bit of ‘free’ communication members could have until they paid for the full privilege of unfettered contact – and then followed a link to her profile. There I discovered that she was a 38-year-old single mother, nominally Christian, somewhat apolitical, held a Master’s, and was the owner of a design studio – in California.

Perhaps the oddest thing, however, was that she had quite craftily buried an email address amidst rather a lengthy paragraph of personal information in the About Me section, thereby circumventing the monetary requirements of the site.

After a moment of consideration, I sent Vanessa74 an email wherein I thanked her for being ‘intrigued’ but politely explained that the nearly 2200 miles between us rather tended to undermine the probability of having a nice chat over a pint or few and then apologised for the fact that the doggedly obtuse web site continued to ‘match’ people of widely disparate compatibility and geographic locations. But thank you for playing.

Three hours later I received a reply thanking me for thanking her and yes how silly it was that these impossibly thick sites can’t get anything right but – since you’ve gone out of your way to respond, which most people wouldn’t do – why not tell me a little about yourself? She went on to briefly outline some of the same general information from her profile and added that she’d got her ‘BA in Landscape Architecture from the University of Edinburgh and my MA in Interior Designs from University of Central Lancashire’ and that

I am sorry if I misled you with my profile which says I am in Manhattan Beach, Ca. I have someone looking into the area for me. Manhattan Beach is somewhere I would love to have a property when I get back to the States. I will be coming to the States after taking care of a few things that is somewhat personal at this point of our communication, as it concerns my birth father.

The first of many red flags which immediately went up was the utterly appalling lack of proper verb tense – ‘a few things that is.’  How does one operate their own business, much less graduate from the University of Edinburgh or hold a Master’s Degree with such abhorrent English skills? Taking the chance that perhaps she was only just typing quickly (because not everyone can be an English major) and with some trepidation, I sent a brief reply which, very vaguely, sketched out why I had joined the dating site and asked her to elaborate, providing she felt comfortable doing so, on just where she was and why she was out of ‘the States.’ Roughly a day after she responded, explaining that

the reason why I registered on the website is to get to know someone I might end up meeting and start a serious relationship with. Presently, I am in Ogun State, Nigeria. I followed a thread from Essex, UK to Budapest,  Hungary on the quest to search for my birth father. You probably wont understand why this is so important to me but I will tell you later, if later ever comes. I gathered he owned a brewery, textile company and a few oil blocs here. I was born Hungarian, lost my mother at birth and my father put me up for adoption. I was raised by another family in Scotland. I lost my (Scottish) parent a few years ago. I have been on the quest to find my real father all my life but I decided to get back to this after loosing the people I cared so much about. I am an only child to both family, so I am all by myself with my son. While here I was contracted to decorate the interior of some govt. hotels and apartments, and quite a number of offices, ahead of the festive season. I have been on a few trips abroad to get the things needed for the job and will be returning to the States after finishing the interior decor job! :)

She went on to describe how her husband had been killed in a car crash in Greece a year or so after the birth of their son, Jimmy (also called Billy which, I presumed, was short for ‘Jimmy’) and that she’d finally located her birth father somewhere in a small town in Italy where he, too, was dying of an undisclosed illness. Why she was in Ogun State, Nigeria if the parent she’d searched for all these years was dying in Italy or, on the other hand, what her father was doing in Italy when he had ‘oil blocs’ and other holdings in Nigeria to maintain, was not an issue I necessarily wanted to pursue. Over a year ago, Professor Sanuse Lamido – or Dr Pat, as he apparently preferred to be called – from Lagos had wanted to wire me $12.4 million from the Federal Republic of Nigeria  providing I would submit a vast amount of personal information to him via email and I politely declined. So I was not especially eager to follow this particular thread to its preordained conclusion.

I sent a short response wishing her well and thanking her for her time and thought that would be the end of it. Another day later I received a lengthy message about how she had hoped we could maintain a correspondence, how she felt that we had some sort of connection, giving me an enormous soliloquy on what she wanted in a new relationship and enquiring as to what I was searching for.

My return email cautiously asked if she’d actually read my profile, as most of the questions she had were answered there. Her answer was that she’d been so busy of late trying to wrap up the ‘interior decor job’ that she’d not had an opportunity, plus she had closed her account because she wanted to spend more time getting to know me and was not interested in anyone else.

By this point I was increasingly suspicious and a forest of red flags were now flapping wildly in the wind. The same bit of back and forth lasted a few more days until she sent me an urgent message at 1am EST on a Sunday (or 7am West Africa Time). I was still awake at the time, having only been home from work  less than three hours, and I get my Gmail messages in real time on my mobile. She pleaded that I get on Yahoo chat as quickly as possible – sending me her screen name to type in – as something horrid had just happened.

Mm-hm.

I found her on Yahoo in seconds and asked what had happened. It was horrible. Just awful. Jimmybilly had taken ill late the previous evening (or roughly 5pm EST) and, because ‘The Driver’ had taken the night off, Vanessa had been forced to drive herself into town to acquire vital medicines. Here she was robbed at gunpoint and everything was taken from her. A short while later, Billyjimmy was rushed to hospital with a case of gallstones but the mean, wretched doctors refused to do anything for him until she made a substantial down-payment for his life-or-death operation and could I please just wire her a few thousand dollars to help?

Not wanting to sound insensitive, I enquired as to whether it was possible for her to  withdraw the money from her savings. Granted the thief had taken her purse and her wallet but surely she had placed the needed telephone calls to her bank to stop her credit cards being used but she could still have them issue a cheque for the required sum. Or perhaps she’d be able to convince the government to pay her for the decor she’d done for them.

No, no, it was all tragically going pear shaped and Jibillimy was going to be the next important person in her life to die and oh can’t you please send me something? No, dear, I can’t. Firstly, it’s one o’clock in the morning and I’ve no means of doing so. Secondly, had you in fact read the bit of personal information I’d sent you, you would be aware that I’ve got nothing to send to you even I did have access to means of wiring you cash – at one o’clock in the morning. And have I mentioned yet that it’s one o’clock in the morning here? On a Sunday?

‘OK,’ she wrote. ‘I hope things get better for you. Bye for now.’

And that was the last contact I had with her.

About two weeks later, just a few days ago as of this writing, I received another of the typical daily email alerts regarding the many ‘new members’ who had recently joined one of the the sites and with whom I might take a fancy and, of course, a few of them had visited my profile and been ‘intrigued.’ Amongst those so smitten was a familiar face with an entirely new name and profile – apart from the now easily recognisable glamour shot. I sat and stared for quite a while until, once again compelled by curiosity, I logged in, read the ‘I’m intrigued’ notification she had purportedly sent  and then followed the link to her profile. There I discovered that she was a 38-year-old single mother, nominally Christian, somewhat apolitical, held a Master’s, and was the owner of a design studio – in Washington DC.

And, just like before, buried amidst a lengthy About Me segment was a craftily-placed email address.

Doing a short internet search for ‘Nigerian money scams’ and cross-referencing both of her email addresses, I quickly learnt that this person had more than 75 identities scattered across the web. I provided a copy of this information in a bemused email to the administrative contact of the site in question and reported her profile as fictitious. After that I closed all my accounts. But I also sent this email:

My Dearest Vanessa,

I’m so glad to see you are still intrigued by my profile and that you haven’t given up on our special new relationship! Thankfully it seems you’ve managed to get out of Nigeria and move back to the States, but did California not work out after all? Did you finally get paid for your government decorating job? Did Jimmy or Billy finally manage to struggle heroically back to health after his tragic brush with death? Did you finally get all of your financial troubles sorted out?  Are you still called ‘Vanessa’ this time? Oh my god I was so worried!  Please write soon!    

‘If you can make a girl laugh, you can make her do anything,’ Marilyn Monroe once said. I doubt Vanessa is is laughing but, then again, neither is anyone else…

Alia Ratio Absentis

Although I had originally intended to save part of this post for an alluded-to ‘another time,’ it tends to mesh very well with – and runs somewhat parallel to – elements of the recently posted Trilogy of Terror you skipped over because it had nothing to do with Bobby Flay, so I felt that sticking it here as an ‘afterward’ might be appropriate. Part of the reason I chose to do so is that I happened to stumble across an episode of Food Network’s tedious and cut-rate version of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares called Restaurant: Impossible starring Robert Irvine as Gordon Ramsay and it struck a bit of a raw nerve, and thus I share it with you.

The episode itself, like most of Restaurant: Impossible, is irrelevant but, just in case you’re interested and feel the need to fact check, it was the episode in which the most intrepid celebrity chef tries to make over a ‘dive bar’ in Wilmington, Delaware called Scrimmages Restaurant & Sporting Pub (ridiculously described as a  ‘Mexican Sports Bar’).

What matters from the episode, what’s relevant here, is that there were four people involved in the business: one person who had the knowledge and experience of years in the restaurant business who ran the day to day operations and three investors – or silent partners – who knew nothing about what was happening, had no concept of how things worked, and who sat in their offices at their day jobs and whined about how the ‘revenue stream’ they’d invested in was drying up and all the while made no tangible effort to amend the situation. Robert Irvine quite correctly pointed out to them that ‘silent partners’ are pointless because they have no investment in a business apart from cash – and ‘investment’ means your own personal hands-on involvement in and commitment to the success of the business, not just expecting someone else to pour their time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears into it and provide you with additional income. The working partner was criticised by the investors for not, in their limited view, understanding the basics of ‘Restaurant 101’ and they, in turn, were told that  frequently dining out does not make them particularly knowledgeable of the industry either. In the end, Robert Irvine had the best comment of the programme when he told the investors,‘You guys may be great at what you do at your own business, but you suck at this business.’

The situation depicted at Scrimmages had a similarity – or simularity, if you cannot enunciate correctly – rather eerily reminiscent of the situation I’d eventually found myself in at the coffeehouse; a situation which, along with several other elements, helped precipitate the oft-mentioned spectacular unravelling. I don’t want to travel too far afield of the present subject and detract from the promised Coffeehouse-Only Post (or posts which it could, in all likelihood, be) but a smallish bit of background is in order to put this into the proper context:

In what could be considered a classic It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time move, we (that would be me and my other now former partner) took on, at rather a difficult period, a ‘silent partner’ or investor in the form of Orson Cart. The long details of that decision are not important here. Orson, as we had been lead to understand, had – once upon a time – attended an unnamed hospitality management school in some unnamed area of Switzerland where he had enjoyed being a member of the swim team. I say ‘attended’ because I honestly hadn’t a clue if he’d actually graduated from this place or not. I also hadn’t any idea why it was he attended school in Switzerland, though I believe, after having  ‘worked’ with him for a while, I can better understand.

There was a certain air of artifice round Orson – and to a lesser degree round his wife and daughter, all three of whom had been previous customers of our shop – which I’d always found irritating and vaguely suspect but I opted to ignore at the time because we needed the help. It manifested itself, this artifice, in sort of a wide-eyed, convivial, grandfatherly, doddering old nutty professor affectation which, after some time, I was only capable of stomaching for short periods or, more frequently, not at all. Orson had gone pair-shaped in many ways over the years, the Swiss swim team member now lost inside a portly middle aged body. He sported tiny round wire-rimmed glasses, a grey pony-tail which hung down to below his chubby buttocks, a long grey beard, and – perhaps worst of all – a serious funk. And I don’t mean in his mood. Rather it was the deep-down unclean fragrance one might usually associate with the Amish; an old sweat, dry urine ammonia-like, stale corn chip, wet horse stink which made your eyes water if you got too close. And his feigned professorial demeanour would very often drift into an arrogant condescension which was not only an affront to most people on the receiving end but simply incredibly discourteous. I thought it perfectly obvious he suffered delusions of Godhood which did surprisingly little to endear him to others – most especially me. And if you haven’t noticed it just yet after all the years of blog entries on the very subject, I’m not particularly fond of people with entitlement issues. 

Orson, like the investors at Scrimmages, not only sucked at the coffee business but often criticised (and, to be fair, not entirely without reason) the management of the  shop – and that would be my other business partner – and complained regularly about the diminishing revenue without actively participating in putting that finely honed Swiss swim team training to use in solving the issues. ‘Polishing the silverware’ as his wife described it – which meant an excessive amount of time fiddling about with utterly counterproductive trivialities – was Orson’s speciality, as was pontificating about how I, personally, wasn’t doing nearly enough to ensure the success of the business.

There came a point (the specifics of which I hope to enlarge upon eventually) when Orson ceased being even a peripheral participant in our business and, for want of a better term, simply vanished. And to clarify: ‘our’ business means the coffeehouse. Orson had, on his own, struck up a deal with a local church to provide a ‘coffee cart’ for them during special events. (They had frequent concerts and a large following for their Open Mic night and, being an all-ages sort of place, had need of such a service). I had provided Orson with my own catering-sized travelling espresso machine for this purpose and he organised arranging the set-up.

As another aside, you must bear in mind that the full rich details are being left on the editing room floor for the moment. The enormity of what was happening at this time was absolutely staggering. It is said that you have to pick your battles and, as I was beginning to sink into a mire of embezzlement, lies, deception, cheating, indifference, loads of passive-aggressive behaviour, and theft – plus the fact that I was  managing a Dribble & Whizz store 50+ hours a week and then, shortly thereafter, searching for a new job rather abruptly after 15 years – I had quite foolishly (I will admit) chosen not to take on this small skirmish with Orson over his little ‘coffee cart’ because it seemed, on the face of it, and given the grander scheme of things, to be relatively innocuous. At first.

There were a number of issues which arose, however. One, we – the coffeehouse as a business entity – soon stopped seeing revenue from the coffee cart. Two, a number of very loyal customers (and some very good personal friends of mine privy to much of the ‘inside information’) began calling me or sending me emails to complain about the horrid drinks, ridiculous pricing, and astonishingly poor and profoundly malodorous service they were getting at ‘my’ coffee cart at whatever venue they would encounter it – because it had apparently begun to travel away from the womb of the church and  had suddenly been staffed by people I had never heard of. People, as it turned out, from competitive coffeehouses. Yet another issue for later…

Though I made numerous attempts to contact Orson regarding this situation as the complaints came in, I received silence in reply. And, as I said, one must pick their battles. By October 2008, as the doors of the coffeehouse closed for the final time, I had – apart from two occasions – not seen or spoken to Orson in nearly four months, but not for a lack of trying. It was clear he’d been sneaking about, however, as there were several occasions where we would arrive at the shop to discover product had gone missing or – as we were starting to clear the building for our inevitable closing – that he had come round to fetch whatever might have belonged to him whilst we were away.

And that was the end. By the 2008 holiday season I was officially the Greatly Vilified Honky in Residence at one of the Liqu-O-Rama stores in The Hood – because I had the audacity to have taken away a job that so many of the locals could have had (if they had, you know, only thought about actually applying for it or anything) – standing in a potential shooting gallery behind a cheap, spit-covered Plexiglas (and therefore not bullet-proof) panel and my life was generally falling apart at the seams.

It seems Oolon Colluphid and I have long shared the same burning question: Who is this ‘God’ person anyway? We tend to ask this question because many religions and Paul Simon will gladly tell you that

God only knows

God makes his plan

The information's unavailable to the mortal man

And, well, frankly, that’s not really a sufficient answer. What sort of benevolent deity sits back, does nothing, and watches with a contented smile as good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people? Either way it seems a bad lot for the good people because they do, after all, finish last, do they not? And apparently ‘the last shall be first’ only after they have provided years of side-splitting amusement by clawing and scratching their way through a thankless existence and are dead. So, sure. That seems fair. Thanks, God. And I mention this because of what comes next…

Flash forwards (oh, yes, you’re most welcome) to early March 2011. If you read the Trilogy of Terror, then you know precisely the state I was in – mentally, emotionally, financially, and physically. One fine cold Tuesday morning around 10am, I got a text off an old friend I’d not heard from in more than a year – Helena Handbasket (a name perhaps familiar to both long-time readers). It said:

So I Took a friend to work and ended up taking kegs and pizzas to C2G₁... Orson is there with Dragon’s Keep₂ teas and coffees. With the labels right on them!

I stared for a very long time at the screen on my phone.

A very long time indeed.

And then I exploded.

I kicked things over. I threw things. I broke things. I went on a right screaming and considerably violent rampage.

When I was finished, I got on Facebook – because I knew I could not make it through a telephone call with anything even remotely approaching civility – and searched for Orson. (No, odd as it may seem, we were not Facebook friends. My contempt for him and his underhanded methods negated any reason I could have possibly had for being his ‘friend,’ even a pretend one on the internet). Once I located him, I sent a message to him, including in it a copy of Helena’s text message and expressing my outrage at his behaviour and astonishment at his presumption. I fully acknowledged that I had neither been in contact with him since the closing of the shop – but, then again, he’d certainly not bothered to contact me in any way, even in the months leading up to the closing – nor had I given a great deal of thought as to the present whereabouts of my portable espresso maker (certainly a lapse on my part, I admit) but I’d been rather preoccupied with fighting foreclosure on my home, facing bankruptcy, job loss and, generally speaking, far weightier and far more pressing issues. Honestly, had he even the slightest modicum of integrity he ought to have returned the espresso machine to me of his own volition and not expected me to come fetch it. Additionally, I made it abundantly clear that he had no legal right to sell product or conduct business of any kind under the guise of the former business – especially without my involvement – any more than I had a legal right to sell Starbucks for my own benefit. Finally I wrote that ‘Unless you intend to include me, as the owner of the business, in your current venture, you need to immediately cease operation.’

Two days later I got this response:   

Geo,
How surprised I am to hear from you after all this time.
Yes, I still do a concession for C2G for 4 hours once or
twice a month to provide the café atmosphere for the venue.
There's not really any money in it but it does let me keep
my hand in. I'm sorry to hear of your recent troubles.
I Acknowledge and will address your concerns shortly.

You condescending fucking prick, I thought.  Was this supposed to be some sort of consolation to me that it was just some little thing he was doing a few hours ‘once or twice a month’ as if it was a favour to the church? Needless to say he did not address my concerns, shortly or otherwise. After days of waiting and getting only silence (as usual) I wrote again, essentially reiterating my point and flatly demanding that he respond.

He did not.

As you might recall, I previously mentioned people getting their dream jobs handed to them on silver platters. One of those people – a friend for more than 30 years – just so happened to have landed a posh position at C2G, because that’s how things work, isn’t it? Carl Jung’s notion of Synchronicity made breathtakingly manifest. So I called him and explained the situation as succinctly as I could. ‘What I want,’ I told him at the end, ‘is to be let into the church so I can get back my property.’  The inevitable mewling and wringing of the hands on his part came down to this: they really hated Orson – I mean really completely utterly despised him and his foul odour and his snail’s pace – and the public complain incessantly about him and his terrible drinks. But, darn it all, he’s the only option they have at the moment and they just couldn’t ‘change boats in mid-stream’ so if I wanted to get the espresso machine back I would have to talk to Orson sometime when the church was open – for example right before a concert or something when he’s setting up shop. And anyway, they just didn’t want to get involved.

It had already been a bad winter. On top of all the other things, a new coffeehouse was preparing to open in the original location of The Keep – a building I poured my heart and several thousand dollars into only to get totally sodomised over later – two other coffeehouses had recently introduced ‘new’ items which they didn’t even have the decency to thinly veil as being directly stolen from my menu (in one case almost a word for word plagiarism) and this snivelling feckless behaviour from the church and the swaggering arrogance of Orson was just about too much for me to tolerate.

So on a Friday evening, about an hour prior to a concert, I arrived at the church to confront Orson. As I swept past my friend’s office he came toddling after me with a look of horror on his face and begged me not to cause a scene. I assured him that I would not and reminded him as politely as I could that he had rather submissively pissed away his chance to avoid this encounter.

Orson saw me approaching and skittered away like the perfect cockroach into the safety of the Staff Only area. I stood quietly at the serving counter, watching him ‘polish the silverware’ with his back to me for about as long as I could manage in all good conscience – perhaps ten minutes – and then finally, sharply, and yet not too terribly loudly so as not to cause a scene, barked: ‘Orson.’

He very nearly leapt from his Birkenstocks and spun round, wide-eyed and confused. ‘Oh!’ he feigned surprise, pushing his glasses back up his nose. ‘Why hello, Geo. I was wondering if you would show up tonight.’

‘Were you? So you have my machine ready to go for me, then?’

‘Well, I’m afraid you can’t have that,’ he said rather darkly. ‘Not until my investment is returned to me.’

And it deteriorated from there.

There’s a scene in the film American History X where someone is told to lie down in the street and place their open mouth on the edge of a curb at which point they are kicked in the back of the head, an act which destroys their mouth and shatters their skull. That scene played out in my head in glorious slow motion Techicolor® wide screen each time he spoke.

I explained to him that, as an investor, he gambled on the success of the business and lost. He lost because he sat on his copious backside and did sweet fuck all no matter how much I pleaded with him for help, no matter how often I reached out to him with  thoughts, ideas, and suggestions. He lost because he knowingly and wilfully chose to perpetrate and maintain a conflict of interest by providing goods and services – for his own personal benefit – to several other coffeehouses (under the pretence of what he classified as ‘advertising’) to the overall detriment of the business with which he was, at least in theory, partnered. ‘You forfeited your rights as both an investor and business partner,’ I told him, ‘the very second you disappeared and started fucking us over.’   

I had nothing but questions: How are you running what is ostensibly my business with no officially registered DBA₃?  Better still, how could you have a proper, legal DBA for Dragon’s Keep Café when that DBA and the attached Corporation were both registered in my name three years before you became a partner – paperwork, I might hasten to add, upon which your name appears nowhere? How are you claiming taxes? Are you claiming taxes? Do you realise that, because you were a ‘silent partner’ whose name is not associated in any legal way with The Keep, that you are creating a liability for me, both personally and legally? Whose Tax ID are you using? Is it the one I paid for and registered with the IRS? Are you really so fucking retarded and so gallingly obtuse to believe that unless you stop what you’re doing right this instant that I’m not going to find a way to grind you out of existence the very second I have the chance?

In short his answer was, ‘I’ve got to get set up, Geo. The doors open in about fifteen minutes and I’m just so far behind because of this. I’ll contact you, though, and we can discuss this at a more apropos time.’

And he turned his back to me and once again set about the pointless task of polishing the silverware, leaving me to stare in disbelief at the back of his large bovine head and watch his metre-long grey pony tail swish from side to side.

And, quite unfortunately, there is no satisfying ending to this tale. It stands now just exactly as it did that day in March. Because, though it may likely come as some shock to discover, Orson has not bothered to pinpoint a ‘more apropos time’ just yet. Apart from two more attempts to get a response from him via messaging, I have opted for a more subversive route – posting a wee tiny bare-bones version of this account to the Facebook groups in which he has some active involvement and requesting that they not continue to advocate and support a fraud. Why? Because I can. And also because I can’t afford an attorney, after my bankruptcy, to fight him through the courts.

I did, however, ensure that my former company – and the DBA – have been dissolved legally (and also the web site and the old MySpace account have been dismantled) and that the original Tax ID is no longer viable. Just in case.

A returning reader recently contacted me and expressed amazement that I can keep fighting after all the shit that’s been piled on me over the last few years. It would be disingenuous to say I don’t really think about it, because I do. A lot. That’s part of the reason this blog exists: it’s my Time Out Chair, my Wailing Wall, my own particular brand of cynical, sarcastic and inescapably dark Primal Scream Therapy whether anyone out there chooses to play along or not – and usually they don’t, as you can often see or, rather, not see as the case may be. One long-standing axiom of mine, something I’ve mentioned before, something taken from one of my all time favourite film soliloquies is that ‘maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.’  So, for whatever strange and curious reasons, I keep on tilting at those windmills. (Did you need a tissue?)

But humans are, despite what we like to think, just animals. Most animals go happily or indifferently about, busying themselves with the day-to-day business of whatever it is animals keep themselves busy with – foraging for food, building a soft cosy place to live, licking their genitalia – but when they get backed into a corner, even the most docile of animals will hiss and spit and go all feral on your ass. And I’ve been backed into a corner about as much as I’m willing to take these days.

Of course humans aren’t satisfied with merely the survival of the fittest. It’s not good enough for some that the slowest or the weakest get left behind to perish. No, humans are really the only species in which certain members actively seek the best possible ways to make absolutely sure that the slowest or the weakest are not only left behind, but that they are made all the more miserable, exhausted, and destitute for it before they perish. I think Sigourney Weaver sums it up best in the classic James Cameron film Aliens when she says ‘You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.’

Notes:

1.  Come 2 Go, more popularly called C2G amongst the ‘in crowd,’ is the somewhat silly name of the church.

2.  Dragon’s Keep – for those just joining the party – was the name of the shop. It was named as such because I have often been called a dragon due to my somewhat short and flaring temper. It was also modelled, after a fashion, after some of my favourite coffeehouses and pubs in Scotland and England (a big shout out to Liz at The London Tavern in Carlisle!) and was combined with my own often obscure brand of humour. The name, I felt, embodied the concept I was after.

3. Doing Business As, if you weren’t sure.

Ratio Absentis Treis

So anyway…

When last we left this tale, I had been weighing the advantages and disadvantages of the potential job offered to me by Big Box DIY over the uncertainty of a prolonged and tedious game of UnemploymentVille and, after some consideration, had accepted the position of Shipping & Receiving Team Member. And though accepting the job seemed like a good idea at the time – or at least felt as though something was finally going to go well after months of struggle – I honestly had no idea what I was in for.

As much as I had felt like a lackey at Liqu-O-Rama, it was nothing compared to the appalling serfdom I found myself in at Big Box. Despite being told by the Shipping & Receiving department manager – henceforth ‘The Wigger’ (and, yes, I use that term with as much pejorative venom as humanly possible) – that I would be able to work ‘as many hours’ as I could handle during their Big Spring and Summer Season™, the reality was that, no matter how often I requested as many hours as I could handle, I typically received about 20. However, because payroll is based solely on how many actual dollars the department generates on a daily basis, I was more often than not sent home early, once after being there for only 30 minutes.

It was also clear from the very beginning that The Wigger – a twenty-something punk with loads of tattoos and little tell-tale holes for a plethora of idiotic facial piercings – was enjoying the power trip of trying to make me his bitch by saddling me with every shit job imaginable, very little of which had anything whatever to do with the notion of Shipping & Receiving. Whether he was doing this because he knew I’d come from a previous position of management and, being weak and fearful, he perceived that as a possible challenge to his authority or simply because he had to assert his dominance to the rest of the team and prove himself the Alpha Male, I don’t know. But there was nothing I could do about it. There was no way to quit and go back on the dole, so I bit my lip, played along, and continued my rollicking game of UnemploymentVille at any and every available opportunity.

To make a very long, detailed, and mostly unpleasant story as brief as possible, the final straw – the day The Wigger finally got what he apparently wanted out of me – came on a bright sunny May morning during the last week of the spring term (and, so, just before Finals) when I was told to ‘power wash the bird shit out of bay13.’ Said bay was a 50x75 storage area, open to the ‘Outside Lumber Yard’ on one side and to the store, via a colossal glass and metal garage door covered in dried avian splay, on the other. It took better than four of the five hours I was scheduled to manhandle the damaged and leaking electric power washer and 150-foot garden hose about as I slogged through ankle-deep muck (because the bay sloped ever so slightly towards the store in a spectacular display of ignorance of design concept), spraying bird shit off the door and washing sticks, grass, plastic candy bar wrappers, food, bits of gravel, various sized cigarette ends, dead birds, grease, dirt and all manner of putrid debris into The Yard. And in the end, with one arm aching from holding the power cord out of the water so I wouldn’t get electrocuted, the other numb from the vibration of the sprayer and my shoes, socks, and clothing soaked and reeking of raw sewage, I went home and had a breakdown, understanding at that moment just why it is some people choose to suck on the end of a loaded shotgun.

Though I’ve willingly done my fair share of miserable and messy jobs throughout the years, power washing the bird shit out of bay 13 wasn’t merely the final straw in how I had been treated by The Wigger at Big Box, it represented the culmination of over five extremely dark months and the moment that I came to recognise as the point ‘when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get.’

Allow me to elucidate…

In part one of this big sprawling saga attempting to summarise the reasons behind what turned out to be a fairly lengthy absence from the blogosphere because you are fascinated by the minutia of the traffic accident I call my life, I explained that things fell into three distinct and invariably linked categories. Trust me. No need to go back and look. And whilst the past school term (1) and the seemingly endless search for a decent job (2) don’t necessarily appear to have any obvious correlation, there were, as I also mentioned, aspects of my personal life (3) which wove in an amongst these two themes and roughly bound them together.

The primary bonding agent had its genesis during the spectacular unravelling of my coffeehouse. And though I said, in the second instalment, that I would perhaps delve into the finer details of that particular subject at the ambiguously described ‘another time,’ now is not that time. Whilst that tale looms large, I think it needs a post of its own to really stretch out and make itself comfy. As I wrote in a recent email to the gracious Jillian Madison of Food Network Humor (who contacted me regarding my strangely popular Next Food Network Star ‘recaps’), words such as ‘quick’ and ‘short’ do not frequently find a home in my written vocabulary, as weary readers will attest. Suffice to say for the present that one of the minor bits of collateral damage from the aforementioned spectacular unravelling was an overwhelming sense of defeat which left me battling a reasonably mild depression. And though I appreciated the people who patted me on the back and told me not to feel like a complete failure for what had happened, those things are far easier said than done.

It didn’t happen all at once, the depression; mostly it undulated and festered like an irritating parasite, gestating uncomfortably during the nine months of job hunting after I was first rather curtly cut adrift from Dribble & Whizz in February 2008 and prior to finally getting hired on at Liqu-O-Rama in early October of that year just as the doors of the coffeehouse got closed for the last time. During that revelatory nine month period of getting to see just how useless it was to have fifteen years of business management, six years of military experience, and a virtually spotless work history dating to 1982 but with no college degree, I chose to take up President Obama on his desire to see people pursue their education – because without a degree, it seemed, I would be forever relegated to asking people if they wanted to super size their meals. So to combat the suppurating depression and the incredible loss I was feeling over the demise of my business (and the demeaning fact that I had been forced to take a giant step down in both pay and position by accepting the job at Liqu-O-Rama), I sat down in early 2009 with an advisor, after they’d unearthed my file from the bunker, and I returned to university.

By the following year, the start of the 2010 fall term, I had settled into an uneventful rhythm of work/school/homework – a cycle broken only sporadically to include Ina Morata – and, believing my life was slowly returning to something close to ‘normal,’ the depression had generally subsided to just a minor nuisance lingering off in the  background. Unfortunately, also at the beginning of the 2010 term, I found myself in a writing class called Composing the Self, a crossover of upper level English Comp and Women’s Studies – which, in hindsight, seems somehow ironic. This particular course, chosen voluntarily because I’d nearly exhausted all my fiction writing options, struck my interest because it dealt with, as one would imagine, introspective writing. What I had not expected, however, was that it would soon tap into my depression and force me to confront the hydra of my malaise straight on for the rich bounty of a mere three credits.

Thus, in late October of 2010 when I was unexpectedly rather curtly cut adrift from Liqu-O-Rama, I was already in a relatively pensive frame of mind from having many of the badly healed scabs of old psychological wounds oafishly ripped away, and the run-around I was starting to get from The State over my unemployment benefits and the hideous lurking fear that in eight weeks I could be living in a cardboard box under a bridge only fuelled the start of a new downward spiral. As if these weren’t sufficient, I was also, at the start of November, just three weeks away from filing bankruptcy, a subject I approached with both relief and resentment. The relief was, obviously, that I would no longer have to be burdened with evading angry creditors or not answering my telephone or staring in dejection at the ever-increasing stack of official-looking documents scrawled in ruthless and labyrinthine legalese and, most importantly, not seeing the little money I had going to pay an attorney. The resentment… well, that’s a bit more complicated and perhaps better left for the eluded-to coffeehouse-only post. For the moment it’s enough to say there were the previously-stated feelings of defeat and failure coupled with the profound sense of loss for something I’d worked so hard for. I was – and still am – completely aware that the radical swirling of our economy  round the event horizon of a massive financial black hole left millions of others in a similar position to mine. I get that. But getting that did little to quell the pain or the humiliation.

Problem was,with regard to bankruptcy, State Law requires that your worldly wealth held on reserve be no more than a combined total of $350 between your savings and chequebook account (or accounts, if you should have more than one) on the day of filing. So when I exited Liqu-O-Rama with extra cheques for unused ‘sick days’ and the small amount of vacation time I had amassed, I couldn’t deposit the money in my credit union. Neither had I been able to direct-deposit any of my paycheques nor the untapped portion of my student loan. I could also not claim that I had this money, so it had to be stored ‘elsewhere.’ This was a trick my attorney advised me to pursue as a means of skirting the $350 maximum allowable assets rule and a marginal glimpse into the greater workings of our sham of a legal system in this country. You will note that the pertinent wording regarding account balance is ‘on the day of filing.’ This means you could have millions in the bank just prior to filing bankruptcy, however the moment that petition is filed, your combined holdings must be equal to less than $350. Of course you must have a very sound and rational reason for the abrupt disparity should you suddenly decide to move large sums of cash, but the trick is that – on the day of filing – you appear to subsist at or below the level of poverty. The next day you can legally dump those millions back into your account and no-one would bat an eye. And stashing money away, outside of a bank, would not typically be an issue unless you are trying to pay your bills. Hardly anyone takes cash these days, it seems. And, perhaps in some small way, the fact that my unemployment claim was subject to an ‘administrative inquiry’ relieved me of the complicated burden of juggling two accounts.

On Monday, 15 November, I had a call from my attorney who said she would be ready to file my petition – likely on Thursday – and reminded me to be sure my credit union account was under the $350 allocation by that time. She would, she said, co-ordinate with me later in the week just prior to filing to be certain we were ‘on the same page.’ I asked if she could wait until Friday, as I was waiting for a number of bill payments to  clear (which would then put me well below the allocation) and she said that would be no problem. By late afternoon on that Friday, when I hadn’t been ‘co-ordinated’ with as promised, I rang her to determine the situation.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Did our paralegal not call you yesterday?’

‘Yesterday? No…’

‘It’s been filed,’ she assured me with sort of a breathless laugh. ‘I got it to the clerk’s office just before closing yesterday.’       

In a frenzy I accessed my account history on line and discovered that only one of the scheduled bill payments had cleared by Thursday leaving me with a final balance, on the day of filing, of $348. Seems to me I drank rather a lot that evening. Early in the following week, I received a nicely official letter from the courts extending their warm regards on my impeding bankruptcy hearing, which they had conveniently scheduled for 9am, Monday, 6 December, my birthday. And, yes, that makes me a Sagittarius, or Ophiuchus if you follow that sort of thing. Yet another reason I am still single. Then on Friday, 3 December, I received another letter from The State informing me that I would be eligible for unemployment benefits after all – in about ten days.

The enormity of my relief over the latter issue was, unfortunately, eclipsed later that same day when my attorney left me a voice mail (I was nowhere near the phone at the time) to ‘co-ordinate’ with me again and to remind me of the things I would need to bring along with me to the hearing on Monday. Amongst the items was a copy of my November bank statement indicating that I did, indeed, have less than $350 dollars to my name on the day of filing. She had left the voicemail at 4.45pm. I discovered it nearly an hour afterwards around 5.45pm. My Credit Union closes at 6pm on Friday. Thanks, Nice Attorney Lady, for waiting until the last possible moment to deliver this information. Couldn’t have called at any other possible time during the week or any time earlier in the day…

Fortunately, through the miracle of on-line banking, I had access to that information and was able to print a copy of my statement – that is, after making a trip to Staples to purchase a fresh cartridge of black ink, as the one presently inside my printer decided that this particular Friday night was really the most advantageous time to run dry and just further compound the frantic irritation.

Monday, 6 December, my birthday, was a grey, windy, rain-swept, utterly miserable day. Because I had never previously needed to know the location of the bankruptcy court, I had to do a Google search on the address – and a Street View of the building was enormously helpful. To my consternation, though, Google had the wrong location and I was told by the large irritated black woman behind the Plexiglas that I needed to go across the street. As I marched through the downpour, I thought to myself that, for people who are extraordinarily well compensated for the minimal amount of effort they need to exert, the State and Federal employees I had been dealing with of late were a cross and unpleasant lot.

In the courtroom, a cramped area with a low, water-stained drop-ceiling, ugly blue carpet and cheap plastic chairs reflecting the harsh fluorescent lighting, I sat alone and isolated, clutching my raincoat and required paperwork. Although I wore khaki pants, a white shirt and a tie, it was clear that I had over-dressed for the community meeting at the trailer park. After watching as a seemingly endless parade of greasy, tattooed, corn-rowed, slipper-shod, sweat-clothed, food-stained, dentally challenged people went through the expected motions before the Judge, it was finally my turn. My attorney (from out of nowhere) settled in the seat across from me and the Judge, apparently bored, grilled me with questions which veered far afield of the ones I had been told he would ask – the very questions he had asked of the unwashed masses who had teemed before him ahead of me. It was an embarrassing and unwanted scrutiny through which I struggled to keep my answers brief and direct. When it was finished, I was told to relinquish the entirety of my 2010 tax refunds so at least some money could be dispersed amongst my creditors and to file those taxes as quickly as possible. Should those taxes not be filed and delivered to the court with 90 days, my bankruptcy would be reversed. My attorney hadn’t seen that coming any more than she had anticipated my public flogging before the great unwashed. Probably because we hadn’t ‘co-ordinated.’ Happy Birthday to me…

Shortly before noon I was back home, where I sat in utter silence, staring at the floor, humiliated and feeling mentally and emotionally drained. In my head I kept hearing Richard Dreyfuss in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: ‘Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get.’ Unfortunately, it was still only early December so things hadn’t got quite as bad as the could reasonably get. Yet.

I decided to give my classes a miss that night, lacking the energy to be even just the slightest bit social, and, instead, worked on the finishing touches to the final writing portfolio for Composing the Self which was due that Wednesday. And that seems an appropriate segue into a small matter briefly allude to in the second part of this epic saga: One of the wounds laid bare in Composing the Self, and conveniently done so the week after I’d been rather curtly cut adrift from Liqu-O-Rama, had to do with the nine years I had spent working at The Library. (Lest you think Composing the Self was a thinly-disguised armchair psycho-analysis class, it wasn’t. Yet it does seem that I just happened to choose one of the hardest possible times of my life to take such a class. The teachings of Carl Jung, however, will tell you there are no coincidences, so, in some way, maybe it was something I needed and just didn’t know it).

Being an avid reader and lover of knowledge, working at The Library was a job I truly enjoyed. Problem was, as it was another Federal institution riddled with an impassive bureaucracy, I could not – not matter how often I tried – get full time hours and, so, I made an ill-fated decision to leave (and not really in the most delicate of fashions) in 1993. And after languishing nearly18 years in (primarily) the liquor industry, that momentary and yet monumental lapse in judgement still plagued me.

Encouraged by a few friends – a couple of whom still worked at The Library and who’d explained that a massive systems upgrade in early 2006 had lead to the purging of all records more than five years old– I decided, as I was abruptly in the market for a new job, to take a chance and re-apply. Due to the time of year (early November) and the still wretched economy, the positions available were, to say the least, slim. Much to my surprise, however, the week of 13 December (the same week I was finally able to receive unemployment and just a week after the bankruptcy hearing) I had a call from Human Resources who wanted to know if I might be interested in a Branch Liaison position just opening up. I said I certainly was and then enquired as to the hours. There was, it turned out, a marginal conflict with my class schedule on two of the days where I would need to work at 1pm rather than noon but, if that minor adjustment could be made for just a week until the Fall Term was finished, I was at their complete disposal. No, was the short answer. These hours were carved in stone and could not be altered.

And I never heard from them again.

In fact it reached a point where, after applying for literally dozens of positions as they became available over the following months (including my former job when it became vacant) they no longer bothered sending me email acknowledgements indicating they had received my numerous applications. In late February of this year when a position opened at a branch managed by a former co-worker of mine (and who is also a close friend of Ina’s) I was informed – after I told him I’d applied – that my application did not appear anywhere in their system-wide data base and a search for it found nothing. As I was fairly deeply mired in playing UnemploymentVille at the time, I simply lost it. And so, frustrated by the wall of sheer silence, angry at the ridiculous games being played by yet another faceless institution, and disgusted that a Federally-funded establishment could be allowed to operate in such a contemptible manner, I washed my hands of The Library.

So with Composing the Self to help poke sharp objects at the lumbering demons of the past, losing my crap position as lackey at Liqu-O-rama, and suffering the humiliation of bankruptcy which left me with no credit and little money, the once nearly dormant depression came shambling out of the darkness fully revitalised. Add to that the long winter months of constant rejection and no viable  prospects of employment – not to mention moving straight away into spring term and the albatross of The First Three Minutes with Dr Giggles – it felt much like being trapped in a 24-hour advertisement for Cymbalta. The various temporary agencies I had eventually resorted to using had done nothing for me, the unfulfilled promises and the so-called ‘stimulus package’ of the Obama administration had clearly given me a miss and the portion of it which was supposed to aid small businesses had been far too little far too late. And to add a little dollop of creamy goodness to the shit sandwich I was already choking on, I got to sit back and watch as two friends – one in a position roughly similar to mine and another one who really only ever seemed to have a nebulous career as The Guy Who Smoked Pot – g0t their dream jobs literally handed to them on silver platters. Though it’s nice see friends accomplish things, it was the endless gloating Facebook posts about My Fabulous Life and I Am So Blessed that made me want to fucking scream.

Of course the endless search for a job wasn’t the only place I faced constant rejection. It manifested itself in my personal life as well, becoming the secondary bonding agent and the final prod that the big skulking ogre of depression needed to really get going. Upon returning to university in 2009, I very quickly learnt that I was The Old Guy™ in most of my classes which, frankly, had done absolutely nothing for my already floundering sense of self-esteem or the acute self-consciousness over my lingering weight issues. And although I had lost just over 60 pounds during the first year back I was not, by that time – nor am I currently, due in large part to a combination of the aforementioned reasons – a ripped, tan supermodel and compensated endorser like the happily transformed fatties on the various NutriSystem or Jenny Craig adverts. Consequently, I went almost entirely unnoticed – except on the few occasions I was mistaken for an instructor – and nothing gives your self-worth a better pommelling than being invisible. As such I tended to (and still do) keep mostly to myself, sensing that any discourse with the plethora of twenty-something women on campus might illicit a Creepy Stalker Guy alert. I can deal with that because, barring the occasional geeky types for whom I have a fondness, there’s very little common ground there to begin with and I simply don’t have the interest or the patience.

What I have found much harder to deal with is that, amongst the women I do know, I seem to have fallen into the Not If You Were the Last Man On Earth category. There’s a very peculiar irony to that – at least to me anyway– especially considering that, for example, according to the weekly analytics I receive on this pointless little Time Out Chair, more than 70% of the readers here are women between the ages of ± 30 to 40  (precisely the demographic that finds me as riveting as Eric Forsberg’s performance in Mega Piranha) and I have at least the same percentage of female friends. That’s a lot of disinterest. And it’s a dichotomy which makes little or no sense to me. Recently a friend of mine – a woman, not surprisingly – asked me, possibly jokingly (or maybe not), given my propensity for things like cooking, gardening, home renovation (not to mention all of the other things one can find over to the right under the title About, just above the profile picture), if I was sure I wasn’t gay. I assured her that if by ‘gay’ she meant was I a lesbian trapped in a man’s body, then yes, because, with some clear exceptions and notwithstanding some of the nightmarish oddities I’ve seen trawling through Walmart on objecting motorised buggies, I am very attracted to the all of the appropriately soft and roundy bits and generally find women perfectly intoxicating, providing they don’t resemble Rod Steiger in The Illustrated Man or have the sort of piercings which could potentially lead to a bloody and disfiguring accident given the right circumstances. This same friend also, in the course of conversation, referred to me as ‘safe,’ which felt rather a lot like being called ‘inconsequential.’

As if being labelled by one person with the hideous Tweedledee and Tweedledum of Safe and Inconsequential wasn’t enough of a blow – making me understand how it was Arthur Dent must have felt knowing the Earth was considered amongst other worlds as ‘Mostly Harmless’ – I very foolishly set myself up a short while later to let Ina take the final kill shot. As the musical wisdom of Michael McDonald teaches us, What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away, and what I believed I saw with Ina led me, in early March, to do A Stupid Thing™ and very timorously dip my metaphorical toe into the turbulent waters outside of the rigidly undefined area in which I resided and it was made clear that I ought not to have done so. So sometimes when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours it just means you’re both weird.

And with all of the cumbersome weight of five really bleak and calamitous months sitting on my shoulders like two very bleak and calamitous things, writing, which had always been my one escape, was suddenly a firmly closed door to me – one swollen from the humidity and refusing to budge no matter how strenuously I twisted and turned the knob and swore profusely at it. I struggled to articulate the mush churning in my head to absolutely no avail and found myself often staring at stories I’d written the previous semester in Fiction Writing – two rough pieces taken out of context from the novel I’d been procrastinating on for ages and third one I’d been meaning to work on when I had the time – and wondering why it all looked so completely alien to me. I’d toyed with the idea of posting them here to see if some responses from the Outside World would help get things going again but, well, that never quite happened.

So on that bright sunny May morning during the last week of spring term, I stood in a cold reeking pool of bird shit and other incomprehensible detritus realising that I had come to the last straw, the tipping point where things had, for me, generally got about as bad as they could reasonably get. And five months of misery came crashing down, leaving me gutted and angry.

‘You just have to say, “No, I won’t” one more time than they can say “Yes, you will,”’ John Sheridan says in a pivotal scene from the fourth season of Babylon 5, and I was determined that I was going to say ‘No, I won’t’ to The Wigger, even if it meant I would be living in a cardboard box under a bridge with no job and no money. I don’t know if he saw the hate and the loathing and the contempt for him in my eyes the next day or if he understood that, given the opportunity, I would visit unbelievable physical pain upon him, or if having finally broken me down had taken all the fun out of it for him, but near the middle of the shift he told me I was going to be transferred the very next day to the Paint & Wallcoverings Department. And for the remainder of the shift he was suddenly Mr Congeniality. 

Since the transfer, things have generally got better: I’ve been given a relatively more stable schedule with considerably more hours and have only been sent home twice in three months due to payroll issues; I’ve distracted myself, when I’m not working, with all those presumably ‘gay’ things which make me Safe and Inconsequential; I’m sort of writing again, or at least blogging, and the depression has mostly slipped back into the background. That or the breakdown simply left me desensitised.

As to whether there is an Amy Farah Fowler to my Sheldon Cooper, a Scully to my Mulder, a JoAnne Liebeler to my Dean Johnson, a Joe L’Erario to my Ed Feldman… Who knows? The increasing likelihood is that there isn’t one. But, whatever the certain Wessonality is that I clearly fail to possess which would make me a viable choice for a relationship of any kind I more than make up for by being a great Drinking Buddy®, or so I’ve been reliably informed. No need for all that messy and silly emotional or physical nonsense when a perfectly good handshake will do, providing that it’s done reasonably quickly and exhibits no warmth or compassion of any kind.

And I don’t really mind if I’m nothing in your eyes, it’s no surprise to me , say the amusing alternative group Wheatus. So maybe that just has to be good enough.

For now.

Ratio Absentis Duae

The continuing saga continues, lest you believe I’d forgotten and just left you clinging on perilously after only addressing the first issue you weren’t that interested in…

The Monday just prior to Halloween last year (that would be 2010 for those of you playing along at home) I walked into the liquor store to discover I no longer had a job. I’m still not completely certain just why it happened (but I have some ideas), though in retrospect I don’t particularly care. My brief two-year stint as a lackey at Liqu-O-Rama had been largely unpleasant and, as long time readers may recall, eerily foreshadowed by major aspects of my life crumbling to dust all round me like some great crumbly thing.

The coffeehouse I’d owned unravelled quite spectacularly (for reasons I will perhaps go into another time) and left me with close to a quarter of a million dollars in debt and two suddenly very absent ‘partners’ who left me holding the weighty financial bag entirely on my own.  Shortly before the height of my life’s dream coming to a slow, agonising and painfully catastrophic end, I had been a manager at Dribble & Whizz, a competing liquor chain and long time rival of Liqu-O-Rama. I had been there for fifteen years. And then one dreary and grey February morning in 2008 I returned from making the bank deposit to find one of the owners waiting anxiously to tell me that I no longer had a job because, as he explained it, they had somehow found themselves in the somewhat  unenviable position of having too many managers and not enough stores and so if I could please just hand over my keys and toddle on my merry way as quickly as humanly possible that would be just great.

In that the precedent for being rather curtly cut adrift had already been set, being let go from the shitty gig at Liqu-O-Rama didn’t leave me reeling the way it did the first time round from Dribble & Whizz, though I was still a bit shocked at the untimely and obscure nature of it. Because I’d not taken the small vacation time I had amassed, nor used the three paid ‘sick days’ I was allocated, I exited with a couple of decent ‘extra’ cheques which, when added to the remainder of my student  loan for that term, meant I would have a fairly small albeit reasonable financial buffer prior to unemployment cheques beginning to trickle in.

However, shortly after I had filed my unemployment information, I received a letter from The State requesting ‘additional information.’ They were unsatisfied, it seemed, with ‘no reason’ as a reason for my abrupt departure from Liqu-O-Rama despite the fact that this is an ‘at will’ state – meaning that you can be rather curtly cut adrift from any job at any time and for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Because of the need for additional information, my request for unemployment assistance would be placed in suspension pending review. And if I could just get that additional information to them within the next ten days, that’d be just great.

The problem, however, was that I found myself at something of a loss, as I would be later when submitting numerous job applications, as to just how to respond to this request . Should I simply proclaim that I had worked for an unimaginably thick and backwards company that embraced mediocrity and rewarded sloth and ignorance? Or should I explain that, because I am typically a Type A/B personality, my fundamental desire to maintain a store that was neat, clean, and well organised, and one in which products are both properly and correctly priced and thoughtfully merchandised, had run counter to company policy? 

There seemed to be no concise or simple method of fully encapsulating the ridiculous sequence of events between March (when I assumed control of The Party Store from Nardo, the previous manager) and October 2010 which seemed to suffice. After a day of contemplation, I decided that ‘Store not meeting projected sales goals’ would have to do. Because my faith in the US Postal Service has rather sharply diminished over the years, I went to Staples and faxed the completed additional information request to the Secretary of the Department of Workforce Development and, sometime later in the day, called the telephone number provided on the request to ensure the fax had been received. I was told to call back in a couple of days, as there appeared to be a backlog of faxes and no-one was readily available to sort through them all just now.

So I waited the requisite ‘couple of days’ and rang again on Friday. As it was a Friday, it was explained to me that it’s one of their busiest days – ‘because  we close early’ – and so if I could try again on Monday that would be swell. Needless to say the chaos of Friday was nothing compared to the tumult of business on Monday and it was hours before I finally got through:

‘I don’t see your fax in here,’ I was told by the disinterested State Employee who had just enjoyed a relaxing weekend off. ‘You sure you faxed it to the right number?’

As it was the only fax number provided on the information form, and because I have more than just a passing familiarity with the operation of facsimile devices and, by extension, the attached telephonic equipment, I was reasonably certain, barring a parsing error in the fax/modem handshake, that I had dialled – or, rather punched – the correct number: ‘Pretty sure I did, yeah.’

‘Well, you might want to try it again. Use this number….’

I copied down the number given by the disinterested State Employee (which, to no surprise at all, was precisely the same number as the one on the information request form that I had used the first time) and mentioned to her with some concern that there was a clearly-stated ten day deadline for receipt of the form and that all of this fiddling about waiting had taken up at least half of that time. She recommended that I ring back again later in the day after I’d re-faxed the information request to ensure it had been received just like I did the last time.

The joyful carousel of merriment had come full circle and I returned to Staples and re-faxed the information requests form, waited a couple of hours, and then rang up The State offices again.

‘Yes,’ a completely new and less bored-sounding voice assured me, ‘that information was entered into the system last Friday. Why did you send it twice..?’

About a week later, I received another letter from The State informing me that they would be contacting Liqu-O-Rama for verification of the information I had provided, a process which dragged out for approximately two weeks. When I called Workforce Development in late November to determine the status (because I was being blocked from accessing my information on the The State internet site pending review) I was told that ‘administrative inquiries could delay the process for up to eight weeks.’

I explained to the woman that if this dragged out the full eight weeks I would be living in a cardboard box under a bridge. She assured me that, should things become dire, they would try to expedite matters. Unfortunately the Obama Administration had initiated policy changes to the unemployment system and these sort of checks now happened with more frequency. On the positive side, however, if you weren’t put on hiatus pending an administrative review, the Obama Administration had also initiated policy changes to expedite the unemployment process so that a recipient would wait no more than four weeks for the first of their cheques to arrive and thereby negate the potentiality of  them having to live in a box under a bridge.

Our government inaction…

On Friday, 3 December 2010, almost six weeks since I’d been rather curtly cut adrift, I received yet another letter from The State informing me that Liqu-O-Rama had not offered any response to (and so did not contest) my explanation for termination and, thus, I would be eligible to receive Unemployment Benefits. Well except for just one smallish thing – nothing, really – but I would have to wait an additional week before I could begin filing because I had received an extra paycheque from the little bit of  ‘vacation’ time I had accrued.  And, just one other thing – hardly worth mentioning – but the first week of filing will be factored against that other extra paycheque for the three sick days I’d got paid for.

Finally, by Monday, 13 December, I could begin filing regularly. And if it hadn’t been for the unused portion of my student loan from the fall term and the fact that I’d been excruciatingly frugal with what little savings I had, I would have been living in a box under a bridge. At least The State only require that you submit three job searches per week, because by the time I was finally eligible to file my unemployment vouchers I’d already submitted some two dozen applications and was well stocked with a backlog of information.     

The bigger problem was, I hadn’t heard anything from any of the places to which I’d applied during the early weeks of November other than the occasional perfunctory email acknowledgement of receipt of my application. After having been rather curtly cut adrift from Dribble & Whizz at the beginning of the massive economic meltdown, it was nine months before I finally landed the gig at Liqu-O-Rama. During that time I had very quickly discovered just how much the job market had altered after fifteen years, and the rapid downward spiral of the country certainly wasn’t doing me – or anyone else in a similar position to mine – any favours. At that time I had created profiles on all the major job search web sites, including The State sanctioned site (mandatory for unemployment beneficiaries) and of course the much-advertised and yet completely worthless local site ShitTownHelpWanted.com – ‘Long Name, Amazing Results. And By “Amazing” We Mean the Amount of Cash We Rake in on Advertising Revenue, Not Because You’ll Ever Find a Job Here Amongst the Plethora of Bogus and Out-dated Listings!’

So, I set about the tedious task of updating all my information on the various sites to include my recent tenure at Liqu-O-Rama, including the carefully considered ‘Store not meeting projected sales goals’ (and only when it was absolutely necessary to do so), brushed up my résumé as best as possible and began the irksome undertaking of marketing myself to every place imaginable. On the downside to all of this concerted effort (and that is presuming there is an upside to any of it), because virtually every company has now moved to the cold, faceless, and impersonal process of internet submissions and an applicant is given no follow-up contact information or is highly discouraged from contacting companies with statements implying that attempting to do so ‘may result in unduly hindering the selection process’ (meaning someone would actually have to read your application), a hopeful candidate is often left with no other recourse than to wait.

And wait.

I think the overall process would make a fabulous new game for Zynga to market to Facebook users. It could be called simply UnemploymentVille! And because of the inherent constraints in the nature of game play which, by necessity, would rather limit the abilities of the players, the rules would be fairly straightforward and easily recognised:

In it, a player, known as the Special Human Interface Tool (SHIT), would start off either by losing or not having gainful employment and so would be tasked with attempting to find said gainful employment in a stark and joyless netherworld known as the Deliberately Unpleasant Metropolitan Precinct (DUMP). The player would attempt to search for work via Persistent Livelihood Enhancement and Advancement Duties (PLEAD) which would be easily accomplished by frequently prostrating themselves before the mysterious, oppressive interface called the On-line Resource and Workforce Engagement Liaison Link (ORWELL) which, in turn, would be accessed by the Beneficiary Enquiry Generator (BEG) where a player would then be forced to utilise the Calibrated Remittance of Allocated Weekly Lot (CRAWL).

Almost continuously through each stage of the game, the player would be inundated, entirely at random, by helpful and informative pop-up dialogue boxes which would, naturally, guide them through the DUMP and would often suggest alternative courses of action:

Once a player has gained sufficient confidence in navigating the sometimes difficult and uncertain terrain of the gaming matrix and has managed to accumulate a large enough quantity of self-respect points after utilising the demoralising and demeaning BEG, PLEAD, and CRAWL functions, they could sometimes be presented occasional opportunities, special offers, or perhaps one-time promotions which, needless to say, would not be without their restrictions:

So as not to completely discourage players, and just to keep things lively, alternative and less costly solutions may be recommended. After all, where’s the fun if you don’t keep playing?

…Anyway, as winter turned darker and colder and stretched out interminably into the early months of 2011, nearly fully displacing the anticipated rains and wistful breezes of spring with bitter winds and radical temperature swings, I plodded on through the treacherous minefield of UnemploymentVille, submitting  some 150, possibly more, applications and all the while grappled with the nemesis of The First Three Minutes as inflicted by the evil Doctor Cyclops – as the intrepid reader might recall from the previous instalment you weren’t interested in reading either. Other than one telephone call in mid-December (from The Library – and a story for another time) the months slipped away without the tiniest hint of response from anywhere.

Although I am an honest person – sometimes to a fault and almost always to my own detriment, it seems – and cannot abide lying and deception, I started second guessing myself and became concerned about using Liqu-O-Rama on my applications, thinking it was a death knell, forever dooming me, and part of the reason for the rousing lack of response from prospective employers. And, though it ran counter to my very nature, I opted to delete all references to it on all of my on-line job profiles, omitted it on all subsequent applications and adjusted my résumé accordingly, slightly doctoring the closing date of the coffeehouse to fill in the void. I felt fairly horrible about doing it, but I was feeling even more horrible about not having a job for so long and living on the dole. 

Finally, after months of deafening silence, I was contacted in early March by UPS. It was a ‘pre-interview’ call to determine if 1) I was willing to work second shift hours of approximately 3-9pm (I was), 2) was I capable of lifting 20-35 pounds frequently and up to 75 pounds occasionally (I was), and 3) I had any experience operating a forklift (I did not).

And I never heard from them again.

Oddly, just two days later, I was contacted by FedEx. The very chatty woman I spoke with said she would ordinarily do a telephone pre-interview, but felt my work history and qualifications negated such a silly formality and if I could just go ahead and come in for a real-life sit-down interview within the hour that would be just great. I dropped everything – and by everything I mean the remote control for the TV – and dashed to change. The interview seemed to go exceptionally well, dragging out to well over an hour, and Linda (the very chatty woman and assistant district manager) and I got on quite nicely. But after jumping through the requisite hoops for her amusement like a gaily painted circus poodle and being told with a wink and a nod she would be making a decision ‘very soon,’ the only response I got was a terse email some ten days later explaining that due to a lack of management in a key area at the facility to which I’d applied, there would be no further hiring at this time, but if I wanted to go ahead and re-apply some sunny day when they were hiring again that would be awesome. Thank you for playing.

By this point, well into the fifth month after having been rather curtly cut adrift from Liqu-O-Rama, I was beginning to reach a point of desperation and exasperation from the silence and felt as though I would slide further into insanity if this ordeal went on much longer. To compound the problem, many of the job search sites (like Monster, for example) were sending me weekly ‘alerts’ about exciting new jobs available in my area such as Shift Leader at Dairy Queen, Sandwich Artist at Subway, Hourly Manager – I’m Lovin It! at McDonald’s, or Geophysicist (Depth Imaging and Time Processing) at Petroleum Geo-Services in an undisclosed location in the US. It seemed as though I could have written my résumé in crayon on a piece of construction paper and drawn bunnies and rainbows on it for all the good it was doing me. Although my desire for work (and to live on more than just the embarrassing pittance I was getting from The State) was nearly all-consuming and sometimes drove me to apply for positions I may not have ordinarily considered under traditional circumstances, I was not yet ready to admit defeat and go wear a paper hat.

In the early evening of Tuesday, 29 March, I had an unexpected call from someone I had sort of vaguely once known called Lyndsey. She had been a teller at ‘The Bank’ where I made our daily deposits when I worked for Dribble & Whizz and was now the Human Resources Co-ordinator for one of the local Big Box DIY Megacentre  locations. She had seen my application on their company website and, thinking my name sounded familiar, she thought she might ring me up and see if I was still interested in talking about a job. I told her I most definitely was and, by 8pm, I was sitting across from her in the ‘back office’ (a large table tucked behind padded partitions at the far back of the store) discussing the various options for employment Big Box might be able to offer me.

It was advantageous, Lyndsey explained, that I had applied when I did, as March and April were very nearly the only months Big Box did their hiring due to the necessity  for getting all new personnel trained in time for The Big Spring and Summer Season™.  A slight disadvantage – and there is always a disadvantage – had to do with the fact that Big Box only hired for part-time positions, though the hours varied depending upon the needs of the given departments. The advantage was, she said, that they had several part-time options available from which to choose and any future full-time positions to become available were always filled with part-time staff. Another of the disadvantages, she told me, was that all staff were required to work at least every other week-end. The advantage, however, was that they were paid a ‘Premium’ of an additional $2.50 per hour for their trouble.

Finally she outlined for me the presently available options. Only one of them fitted easily into my current university schedule – Shipping & Receiving – and I met with that department manager who then elaborated on the finer points of the potential job.  Turned out, he explained to me, they were very short-handed at the moment and, because it was ‘the nerve centre’ of Big Box and ‘unlike any other job,’ not only did it pay slightly more than the other departments but I could easily ‘get as many hours’ as I was willing to handle during The Big Spring and Summer Season ™ – so how did that sound?

I considered my options and weighed the advantages and disadvantages. Honestly, after having sacrificed nearly every holiday, week-end, and birthday for the better part of fifteen years to the liquor industry, the disadvantages presented by Big Box were seemingly minimal compared to the even greater disadvantages of continuing to play UnemploymentVille for some indeterminate length of time. And if I had done my calculations correctly (and many of you know by now my rather spotty history with mathematics) it appeared that I could potentially make more with this one part-time position than I could sitting idle at home suckling on the meagre government teat. Certainly nothing could stop me continuing to look for another part-time job or, for that matter, a much more lucrative full-time position whilst employed there, so, after a few moments I said:

‘Sounds great!’

And by ‘great’ I meant ‘apparently I wasn’t listening…’

Ratio Absentis Unus

Needless to say I had been absent from posting for some time. It wasn’t intentional and certainly not something I had planned to do. There are many reasons why, of course, but most of them fall into three distinct and invariably linked categories:

1) The past school term

2) The seemingly endless search for a decent job and

3) Aspects of my personal life

Why do you care? You don’t. However it’s often far more entertaining to vicariously discover just how much your life doesn’t suck and also to read actual words strung into some moderately coherent pattern as opposed to just staring at a blank page or reading one of those ponderous blocks of meaningless text you often find filling up space in a blog template –

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, adipiscing elit. Nullam dignissim convallis est. Quisque aliquam. An ego coquendo domus faciendum? Tantum est flumen, tantum est flumen. Fac meum sub odorem casei. Papilla mihi praemium libenter.  Ecce do eam ut pergam…

For the present, let’s focus on the first reason on the list. Seems a good enough place to start and, conveniently, it is labelled as Number One so there ought not to be any sort of confusion. 

As one or both of you might recall, I am breathtakingly poor at mathematics. It’s not something I am particularly proud of but, after recently re-reading some discussions on the theories of the late Carl Jung regarding the basic methodologies by which most people tend to learn, I don’t feel so bad. In essence, and without drifting too far afield, Jung stated that there are people for whom numbers and their complexities can come very easily, and those for whom they do not. I fall squarely into the latter category –often referred to as a Visual Thinker – and, thus, learning anything to do with maths has to be done on a more philosophical and theoretical level for me. More recent  adaptations of the methods of classification, such as the BTSA, place me generally in the category of a Front Right thinking style. Either way, I can empathise quite easily with Jung as he wrote in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

‘I felt a downright fear of mathematics class. The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn’t even know what numbers really were. They were not flowers, not animals, not fossils; they were nothing that could be imagined, mere quantities that result from counting. To my confusion, these quantities were now represented by letters, which signified sounds…Why should numbers be expressed by sounds?…a, b, c, x, y, z, were not concrete and did not explain to me anything about the essence of numbers…’

Because the university programme rather irrationally seemed to insist that I needed at least three credits in mathematics for my degree, I felt that I was destined for the dreaded Short Bus to mingle buoyantly amongst helmet-wearers, mouth-breathers, and window-lickers. Not that I necessarily have anything against window licking, per se. I have seen Midnight Express. And providing that on the opposite side of the glass there is a photograph of an eager Anne Hathaway smiling demurely I will gladly lick a window if need be.

The problem is, the last time I’d taken a proper maths class was during… oh, I believe the Ford administration, and I struggled through it (the maths class, not the Ford administration) like a crucifixion victim with a painful back itch just to scrape by with a very low D. Once the manacles were sprung, however, I escaped into the creative, nurturing warmth of theatre and journalism and never looked back. Only years later, sitting for a placement exam, was I forced to confront with horror and confusion the dark shambling phantasm of algebraic formulae. I recall simply closing the exam booklet, my eyes darting quickly from side to side, and then sitting quietly, toying with my Number 2 pencil until the time was over.

So when my advisor recommended two years ago that I could very easily ‘skate by with some basic algebra to knock out those credits’ I was honour-bound to explain that I hadn’t any background in it at all and that without the advent of the electronic calculator or having worked in liquor retail – where I’d quickly learnt to multiply by 7s, 8s, or 9s (the traditional number of beer cases on a pallet depending upon their given shape or style) – I would, in all likelihood, still be using my fingers. Frowning, she then recommended I take three ‘remedial’ (and thus non-credited) courses to prepare me for basic algebra. I nodded and said I would look into them as quickly as possible. I didn’t, of course, and that’s where our story begins.

During the run-up to this past Spring Term, knowing I’d put off maths longer than I ought to have done, I dutifully scoured the course listings for some alternative to the recommended remedial classes and managed to find a subject which satisfied both the maths credit and the more theoretical style of learning that suits me better: Physics 135, The First Three Minutes, which, as the name implies, concerned itself with the early moments of creation directly preceding the Big Bang. It was described as ‘a course for non-maths majors’ and only required a basic knowledge of High School algebra.

Despite my apprehension, I felt it was worth the risk and so I enrolled in the course. Besides, being an avid fan of The Science Channel, The History Channel, Discovery, etcetera, and having read numerous books on String Theory, quantum mechanics, and physics in general over the years, I knew I wouldn’t be walking in completely unprepared.

From the outset, it was made abundantly clear by Professor Wernstrom (who was teaching this class for the first time) that ‘This will be unlike any course you have ever taken.’ What he meant by that, it turned out, was that he was a firm believer in the so-called Socratic Method of teaching (which I can appreciate, as it is a method which often plays to my Visual Thinking). He was also a staunch proponent of the correct use of language to properly convey your thoughts; to say what you mean in as clear and concise a manner as possible.

Though I am not often known for brevity, I believe I do, at least to some extent (being a Grammar Nazi notwithstanding), have a reasonable command of the language and can, when need be, wield it convincingly enough. So I felt fairly confident that I would get on just fine.  And at one point during the introduction to the class when Professor Wernstrom suggested he was a Luddite, I laughed appreciatively and then was quickly called upon to provide a definition of ‘Luddite’ for the class and to explain to them how it applied. I did so with the caveat that, with no prior knowledge of Wernstrom’s personal specifics, I could only provide a generalisation as to the application of the term.   

He then went on to explain that there would be three tests and a cumulative final exam (fairly typical) and at the end of each class period we would have ‘homeworks’ to do – one at the end of class on Tuesday (due on Thursday) and two at the end of class on Thursday (due the following Tuesday) because we would presumably have nothing better or more important to do with our fee time. At the end of the term, he would discard the ten lowest-scoring ‘homeworks.’  As for the tests, if we got low marks on any one of them we would be allowed to take home a fresh copy of the very same test to re-take (from beginning to end) using whatever sources we wished – a repechage – and he would copy down in his ‘Book of Life’ the balance between the two tests.

Needless to say, many of the whitened, horrified faces I saw round the room that first day did not return for the second day. In fact, with each successive week, the once full contingent of 34 students winnowed slowly to a small core of twelve students by the end of term. The curious religious symbolism did not escape me.

But why, you might ask, would so many people abandon what, on the surface, quite clearly appeared to be The Idiot’s Guide to Simple Science? Primarily because Doctor No had not taught a 100-level course before – or at least not in decades since he’d got tenure – and seemed not to understand that there is a strong corollary between the retention or comprehension of a subject and the method through which that subject is presented. For example, we would spend an entire class period discussing the use of Cepheid Variables as a ‘Standard Candle’ and how a Classic Cepheid or a Population II Cepheid can be differentiated from an Eclipsing Binary Star and then be sent home with a sheet of homework with questions like this:

If we had a sample of NaCl that had 10 million independent particles in it, i.e., that each NaCl molecule is an independent particle, and we mix it with a sample of AgOH that also has 10 million independent particles in it, resulting in a mixture of AgCl and NaOH, how many independent particles will be in the final mixture? Explain.

If you are wondering how the two subjects correspond, welcome to Physics 135 as taught by Fritz Huhnmorder.  If, like me, you would think this question is more to do with logic and reasoning, your answer would be that there are, in the final mixture, 20 million independent particles. And you, like me, would get 3 points out of a possible 10 because you would, in fact, have 10 million independent particles of AgCl (silver chloride) and 10 million independent particles of NaOH (Sodium Hydroxide) and you did not bother mentioning that NaCl (sodium chloride) and AgOH (silver oxide) share a similar chemical structure and, because of the ionic attract ions, the AgCl (Silver Chloride) solid adopts the structure of NaCl and blah, blah blah – and you are left to ponder just what this had to do with anything.

The answer to that question is ‘Fuck all.’ It had absolutely fuck all to do with anything we’d learnt to that point and hadn’t any correlation whatever to anything we’d been studying at all. Granted, had I been enrolled in a chemistry course, I would likely have answered the question more accurately because it would have been related to the course of study (or so one would hope).  However, as this was not a chemistry class and we had never once discussed this subject nor even hinted at the chemical compositions of sodium chloride and silver oxide because the subject was extraneous to the material we were studying, I’d no idea what they had to do with the Population II Stars we’d been labouring over or why I only got 3 points from a possible 10 for answering to the best of my abilities a question that simply had fuck all to do with anything.

It was like being on a game show with questions like

In the Bible, Jonah was swallowed by a large sea-going mammal. For ten points – and the game – who directed Ben-Hur?

You would, of course, be mistaken in your immediate response of William Wyler, not only for its succinctness but because it failed to fully address the 1907 Sidney Olcott film adaptation released only 27 years after the novel by one-time Territorial New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace and the lasting impact of the 1925 Fred Niblo version which informed a large portion of Wyler’s later 1959 adaptation which then swept the Academy Awards, taking eleven Oscars (including Best Picture), and for not pointing out that, in all probability, the whale in question would have likely been a Physeter macrocephalus, or sperm whale, as it is often found in tropical and Mediterranean waters, and that Jonah would not have survived ingestion as the sperm whale is not only odontocete but also feeds in deep waters, making Jonah’s presence there quite unlikely.

As I’ve previously stated, Dr Moreau was an advocate of the correct and proper use of language, something I ordinarily do not take issue with. However, his definition of the correct and proper use of language and my definition of the correct and proper use of language became diametrically opposed as the term wore on. But as much as I tend to applaud anyone for rigorously supporting accurate English, there comes a point when grappling with and absorbing difficult concepts must take precedence and his utterly needless pedantry only intensified each week, mushrooming into a bleak intellectual Jabberwock through which a vorpal blade needed quite badly to go snicker-snack. In  one ‘homeworks,’ for example, we were questioned on the mechanics of Doppler Shift and what an observer would hear – and why – as a vehicle moves towards them. I’d answered with something to the effect that each successive sound wave emitted from the moving vehicle takes less time to reach an observer than the last and that, due to the forward motion of the vehicle, the sound waves are compressed in front of it to a higher frequency and, as such, the observer would hear a higher pitch as the vehicle passes. I got points taken off because I used the word ‘passes’ and not ‘approaching.’ It didn’t matter a whit that I’d understood the fucking concept, only that I made the egregious error of writing ‘passes.’   

So when our third test came round and the opening salvo on it was…

Explain how Aristarchus determined the circumference of the Earth

I answered ‘He didn’t.’ And if your answer was also ‘He didn’t,’ you would be right. And you would be wrong. And you would not get the ten points. You would not get the ten points because you failed, as did I apparently, to recognise that this was a typographical error and that what he meant to write was ‘Eratosthenes.’ I explained that when answering the Doppler Shift question I had meant to write ‘approaching’ but still had points taken away for writing ‘passing.’ With no knowledge of what Dr Robotnik had meant to write, as opposed to what he actually wrote, my answer that Aristarchus did not determine the circumference of the Earth was, in fact, the correct answer to the question as it was asked. I still did not get the 10 points even though I’d accurately indicated the little fly in his ointment. On the repechage I also wrote that Aristarchus did not determine the circumference of the Earth, rather that it was, in fact, Eratosthenes who had done so, and then went on to explain just how he managed the task. I also indicated that the curious inclusion of Aristarchus must have been a typographical error.

I got 8 out of 10 points for that answer.

And the answer to that question about Eratosthenes, by the way, appeared on page 12 of Simon Singh’s book The Big Bang.  The downside is that we’d been very deeply concerned with matters of the Paradigm Shift as discussed on pages 323 to 463 and, as usual, never once discussed these early pages in any form other than to connect the argument over geocentric or heliocentric models of the universe with the later Steady State versus Big Bang argument. Never once did the names of Aristarchus or Eratosthenes come up in class discussion. In fact I still have in my notes that the answers to all questions on the third test would have nothing to do with particular names or people, only with key events and concepts presented in the latter half of Singh’s book and the various ‘eras’ immediately after the Big Bang.

And the aforementioned book by Simon Singh had only been assigned to us mid-way through the term when Dr Zalost decided that the original material he’d chosen for the class, The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg and the Oxford Companion to Cosmology, were just too complicated and insufficient for the needs of the course. This decision was made after we had already purchased and read three-quarters of Weinberg’s book.

The essential problem with Singh’s book, though, was that it was a big, long, rambling, chatty history of all things cosmological, chock full of names, dates, small details, and very often generally useless information to anyone just desperately trying  to narrow things down and extract some viable knowledge. Don’t get me wrong, if you wanted to play Jeopardy, it is a great generalised history of everything that has ever happened regarding the development of human knowledge about the cosmos from the time our ancestors first shook big sticks at the Moon in fear.  However, if you wanted to pass Physics 135, it was only a moderately helpful 90-page booklet carefully crammed into 520 pages. And, because there were only five chapters in the book (and even I can do that calculation) Professor Moriarty felt obliged to assign us a chapter per class (in addition to the usual ‘homeworks’) during the final three weeks in the run up to our third test.

During one Thursday morning discussion of Special Relativity, Dr Mephisto stated there were some indications that, at some point in the rapid expansion of the early universe, it seems photons (particles of light) might have travelled faster than light speed and that this was a conundrum ‘we’ (meaning the Borg Collective of Physicists to which he apparently belonged) were in the process of trying to sort out. I pointed out that Portuguese cosmologist, João Magueijo (see here) had postulated only a few years ago that light had to have once travelled faster than its predicted finite speed because, without a variable speed of light, the Big Bang model provides no solution to The Horizon Problem.

Dr Loveless paused, thought a moment, and then walked to the left side of the chalk board and drew three octagons, one inside another. He explained that the central octagon represented the laws of science that have been fully tested and approved. ‘Normally,’ he mentioned in an aside, ‘this would be represented by a circle or sphere, but I like to draw octagons.’ The second octagon, surrounding the first, represented the area of ‘Theory’ and was the place in which dwelt many of the current notions regarding the nature of the universe. Some theories are eventually proved and, so, move towards the centre of the diagram. The third octagon surrounding the inner two represented the area of ‘Speculation’ and, in it, dwelt the makings of most of the good science fiction stories wherein the USS Enterprise can generate enough energy to warp space around the ship and then accelerate to many times the Speed of Light (called ‘C’).

This explanation – which I felt was a not so subtle way of indicating that I was an idiot  – lasted some fifteen minutes. I felt a simple ‘I am not familiar with that theory’ or ‘I prefer Cosmic Inflation Theory’ would have sufficed.

And on it went for 16 gruelling weeks.

On occasions far too numerous to mention, many of the ‘explanations’ for topics included complex squiggles and funny-shaped lines with majuscule and miniscule lettering with a light scattering of periodic subscript or superscript numbers like

F∝ (M (m)

R²

and all I heard was the sound of the ocean.

Unfortunately I could not simply drop the class as others had done because it would have meant returning a fair piece of my student loan and, despite numerous frenzied searches for still open courses (or for courses which might suddenly have openings), I ended up being locked into Physics 135 for the duration. Worst case scenario, I told myself, should I not pass, I would re-take the course in the fall term when it was not being taught by Dr Weird. Best case scenario, I would pass with at least a D and bear the shame.

In the meantime, as I worked through the concepts of how Energy converts to Mass and Mass then converts to Energy at The Speed of Light (or C, as you recall) squared (which to my way of thinking seems to imply that Light can, in fact, accelerate faster than the cosmological limit of 300,000,000 metres per second which the Special Theory of Relativity has imposed upon it) or the Relative Joys of Time Dilation or  Bridging the Five Nucleon Gap or pondering such deep scientific questions as When Exactly Did Parentheses Take the Place of X as the Symbol for Multiplication I also had an Archaeology course to contend with. By comparison, though, Archaeology was a welcome relief.

The difficulty lay in getting away from the crushing enormity of ‘homeworks’ and reading assignments from Physics 135 just long enough to not only get through the Archaeology texts (and there were several) but to also accomplish the two outside projects: a fairly copious ‘Field Study’ of a selected area due at Mid-Term and, in my case, a book review due before finals.  In retrospect I made rather a poor choice in picking John Romer’s recent work The Great Pyramid: Ancient Egypt Revisited if only because the nearly 600-page length and profusion of details meant I was reading and taking notes virtually every waking second.  And when I wasn’t taking notes I was writing. And writing. And writing a bit more.

Where John Romer, whose work I had respected for 20+ years, had suddenly taken on the role of Nemesis (for reasons I will explain later), Sheldon J Plankton back at Physics 135 had become The Grand Inquisitor beneath whom I toiled like a sweaty Judah Ben-Hur in the belly of a Roman galleon.

In what turned out to be an even worse series of unfortunate events, the final exams for both classes fell back to back on the same Tuesday morning: the Physics 135 exam from 8-10 am and Archaeology from 10.30-12.30. I had only just managed to finish the Romer book review late on the Sunday night before and then spent the entirety of Monday mired in attempting to retain 16 weeks of Physics My Way and to determine what malignant, twisted thing Dr Horrible was going to extract from his Heinous Hat of Hideous Hijinks. I also squeezed in a bit of time for a refresher on the Archaeology readings.

Test Anxiety and The Universe both conspired to make that Monday night possibly the least restful night I’d had in years. With perhaps a cumulative two hours of sleep behind me, I drove off to my fate that grey Tuesday with a pot of coffee in a Thermos and a handful of vitamins in lieu of breakfast. The Physics final was, to the general shock of the twelve of us remaining, an open-book exam. Even more shocking was just how virtually impossible it was to look up and answer the ten ‘cumulative’ questions Dr Morbius had in store for us. After listening to pages being angrily flipped, erasers being applied loudly, bereft sighs breathed heavily, and pencils slowly plodding over paper for two hours, one by one ten others left the room until it was down to me and a pregnant woman called Ashton to wait out the very last seconds.

Finally, unable to bear the stress any longer, I crafted a general answer to the second question (which I had skipped over initially), gathered my belongings, smiled slightly apologetically to Ashton, placed my exam on the small pile, and quietly bade exeunt into freedom. I did not feel good about the exam. The questions were convoluted and what seemed deliberately obtuse – and I was angry.

Sitting for the archaeology exam, in contrast, was rather like being the smartest kid on the Short Bus. All about me I saw confusion and dismay at many of the questions. Unless they each had different tests before them, it occurred to me that I was quite likely the only person who’d taken notes and read the assigned material. Although a number of people left the room ahead of me, none of them appeared very happy. I admit that I hesitated at one point over where in the Mexican Highlands Richard ‘Scotty’ MacNeish studied the origins of Teosinte as a ‘famine food’ which lead to its later domestication as maize (the answer being the Tehuacan Valley) but otherwise it was a reasonable straightforward exam.

I was finished and heading towards my car by 11am.

A week later I ventured out to campus and went to the Department of Anthropology (the umbrella beneath which the Archaeology resides) to collect my book review and my final grade for the class. An A for both. I was genuinely surprised. It wasn’t that I’d expected to fail but I certainly had not given Archaeology the sort of attention I felt it truly deserved because of the labour-intensive uphill battle I’d waged with Physics.

And what of Dr Strangelove or: How I Learnt to Suffer Excruciatingly for Sixteen Long Weeks Under the Dark and Oppressive Yoke of Theoretical Physics as Taught by the Raving Madman Caractacus Potts? Unable to continue putting off the inevitable (as I had to register for next term) I finally logged on to my university account last week and clicked on the little icon wherein my Grades awaited my astute attention. With a great deal of dread and a heavy sigh, I finally dragged my eyes up to the screen and stared at the letter.

B.

I’m not entirely certain how it happened (and science is all about answering the ‘How’ questions) but I still think it’s an optical illusion perpetrated by a tenured lunatic who is cruelly manipulating the university web site as a practical joke. I keep returning to the page every so often just to check. So far, it hasn’t changed…

Just a Silly Phase

I don’t typically drag out loads of the deeply personal Nosferatus of my life to watch them writhe and scream in the harsh light of day because 1) who cares? and 2) some people actually read this stuff, at least according to my stats. If I had another blog – for example a Way Super-Secret-Blog®  that I didn’t tell anyone about and just let people stumble upon it entirely by accident to discover all the occasionally cruel and unpleasant things I’d written about them – I would put all the personal stuff there. But I don’t have one of those, so you’ll just have to deal with it here for a moment. Or stop reading now and move on to LOLCats or something more thought provoking.

A short while ago, someone who used to be a friend of mine and who really isn’t much of one any more but keeps the pretence of friendship alive on Facebook posted this in a status update, attributing it to author unknown:

We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.

About a year ago, I struck up a brief correspondence with a fellow blogger who, like me, had been through some unimaginably rough times. Both long-time visitors here will know, of course, that my life has been something of a train wreck for the better part of almost three years: an unwatchable slow-motion catastrophe leaving a wide swath of destruction in its wake – personal loss, job loss, business loss, financial loss, foreclosure, depression, anxiety, insomnia, weight gain, spiralling self esteem – and all of it unfolding during the worst economic climate in over 70 years.  It’s not been pretty and there are a fair number of people who no longer involve themselves with the tedious burden of friendship, as if the Series of Unfortunate Events of the last 34 months are all that define me as a person, diminishing me in their view and making me unworthy. (And let me tell you, there’s nothing more uplifting to someone who has really been beaten down than to reach out for people who turn their backs). So it was refreshing to commiserate with someone who had some degree of understanding. Though our situations were not at all the same, we did have some very odd parallels, she and I, both in our efforts to put our lives back together with very little support and in the less than stellar success we’d experienced with the Dating Ritual (which, despite the effervescent claims of places like eHarmony, Zoosk, or Steamy Seniors, only seems to get tougher with age).

Probably the oddest parallel was that each of us, having reached the point of just throwing in the proverbial towel and being resigned to the likelihood of a solitary existence, has had someone of vital importance from our past make an appearance after more than two decades. You will note, of course, I said some odd parallels. In her case this particular someone had an amazingly transformative effect and she now has a new and better life.  As for me, well… that would be too easy, wouldn’t it? 

The beginning of 2010, February actually, marked the second anniversary of my dire little life journey and I spent a great deal of time reflecting about choices I’ve made – good and bad. You do that sometimes when things seem bleak. During that period I wrote a post about the pain of knowing that the person you had once perceived as your ‘soul mate,’ that person to whom you feel the strongest attraction and with whom you have the deepest and most profound connection, really wants nothing whatever to do with you. On a curious side note, the irony of that specific entry, I think, is that the person who reacted to it the most (not in the traditionally vacant comment section) is not the person about whom it was written. The person about whom it was written had quite rightfully walked out of my life on Friday, 5 January 1990 (not that I remember that date for any reason) during a stupid argument which I, like an idiot, had started over some ridiculously misplaced jealousy and petty insecurities and, apart from a tiny handful of times, I never saw her again. 

My dark period of introspection in February lead me to many discoveries, some more enlightening than others, and to the understanding that I have made quite a whopping number of really monumentally poor decisions in my life, one of the biggest being not so much letting her walk out as not putting forth as much effort as I probably ought to have done to get her back. 

Confession, though good for the soul, can also be incredibly embarrassing but, in the interests of clarity, I have to explain that I’d already attempted a Facebook search for her and it had come up negative so, shortly after I posted my blog entry, in likely one of the most High School-like things I’d done in a massively long time, I sent her a letter. In it I attached a copy of a photograph I’d taken of her at a party in 1988 (in which she was frowning and giving me the finger, because she hated having her photo taken) and, above it, I wrote a single line, saying  ‘And I have missed that smile every day for nearly twenty years...’  I didn’t sign the letter nor did I bother to provide a return address. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe fear that she no longer lived at her old address and that some angry freak would respond… perhaps stupidity because I already new the admission of fear was a lie… who knows. I said it was High School-like. I’m not proud of it…

Nearly a month after, in early March, pissing away time on Facebook late one night, I typed her name in the Search box once again. And not at all coincidentally, it also just happened to be her birthday. Can’t imagine how that happened. But this time, to my surprise, there she was. After hovering over the Add as Friend button for a moment, I chose to send her a message instead, simply wishing her a happy birthday. That was it.

More than a week later, she responded. To my even greater surprise, it was an actual response, not merely a request that I a) fuck off and b) sort of nowish. My message back to her included a click of the Add as Friend button this time with the caveat that there was certainly no pressure to accept and that I would completely understand if she ignored it. A week later, logging on to Facebook , I saw she had accepted me as her friend. I honestly had not expected that.  

So fast-forward (yeah, I recommended you go see the baby preacher, didn’t I?) and ten months have passed since our first meeting. It’s felt as though the twenty years between us have vanished and we’d picked up were we left off (the childish argument notwithstanding). Our connection has been almost immediate, and very often we find ourselves talking for hours (the longest conversation spanning some 12 hours which started with a day of antiquing and ended in dinner and watching football, a sport she appears determined to make me enjoy despite my ambivalence to it). I’ve had more laughter and joy in the last ten months with her than I’ve had in ten years, even if she did chastise me for the unsigned letter and the photograph. Of course we’ve had our share of deeply personal discussions as well (she knows all about the things I’ve been through lately and is unfazed by them) and we’ve shared not just a few tears regarding ghosts of our respective pasts. The messages sent back and forth on Facebook and the sporadic emails would fill volumes – most of it trivial but all of it attesting to the fact that we communicate endlessly about absolutely anything – and each time she smiles I am acutely aware of why I asked her, twice, to marry me.

And yet… with all that said, there also seems a determination on her part that there is nothing and will be nothing more than the current ambiguity of our undefined though obvious non-relationship. One evening, after hours of conversation over drinks at a small pub, we walked out into the freezing rain and I pulled her close and kissed her. The last time I’d tried that she’d quickly spun her head away like Regan MacNeil from The Exorcist. This time she didn’t and it was like hold the warm glow of the sun. On the down side, she told me days later not to do it again because she didn’t want to confuse and complicate things.

I didn’t really think of it as confusing. I thought it was fairly straightforward. It was no more confusing than her buying things for me on a whim because she thinks I will like them or because they reminded her of me in some way, or that she came to my house on Thanksgiving and stayed for hours when she probably ought to have been with her family. I found it no more confusing than when she secretly decorated my front porch for Christmas one evening as I made dinner or that, as a Christmas gift, she bought us memberships to a local brew pub (in which members get special numbered mugs and discounts and various other things for a full year). It seemed no more confusing than the clear future tense she often uses in conversation including references to what ‘we’ will or ought to do. No. Not at all confusing.

So, much like my aforementioned fellow blogger, it seems after a 20 year separation I’ve reconnected with someone whose weirdness is compatible with mine, someone with whom I can share random thoughts or feelings without reprisal; someone who will discuss the relative merits of Friz Freleng or Chuck Jones, or the odd topics from apparitions to xenobiology; who gets the dry, esoteric, cynical,  peculiar, admittedly infantile and often-times utterly scattershot sense of humour I manifest because hers is precisely the same; who understands the need for more cowbell – and someone who appears absolutely horrified by the notion that we could have any sort of mutual weirdness; someone who might very likely read this one day and be quite irritated with me.

I’m not sure what a good or healthy relationship actually looks like. I don’t know that I’ve ever really seen one up close before. But I do know that the nearest I’ve come to one has been with her, then and now. It’s not been perfect and it’s not been easy, but the way we have fitted together again so quickly after so long, to me, is probably exactly why she has expended so much energy running away. Or maybe it is just me and I haven’t bothered yet to notice. ‘The truth is,’ Bob Marley once said, ‘everyone is going to hurt you at some point. You just have to find the ones worth suffering for.’ And, so far, it’s been worth it.

Ina Morata, if you’re paying attention, yes, I’m giving you The Stink Eye…

Lupercaliafragilistic

I seem to be running into the term ‘soul mate’ quite a lot recently. Probably due to it being Valentine’s Day. Whether it’s been on StoryCorps when listening to National Public Radio or in the cloying artificiality of eHarmony ads on television, I just can’t get away from it. Though I think it’s fabulous that all of these people were able to fill the massive voids they had in their lives, I have to wonder how frequently it happens that your ‘soul mate,’ or the person you perceive as such, once found, turns out to not have any real interest at all in returning the feeling which, from personal experience, is not exactly joyous.

Back in what seems another lifetime, Lyle Lovett recorded an agonisingly beautiful little tune called  Nobody Knows Me, which I often think sums up in three minutes and 3 seconds just precisely what it feels like when the person who knows you the most actually wants you the least.

Yea Valentine’s Day…

Magic Fatlessness

Amy from Fayetteville, Georgia was overweight and felt uncomfortable in her own skin.

I can appreciate that.

But, thanks to NutriSystem, she lost 28 pounds and now has a new lease on life.  She’s healthy and in the best shape of her entire life. Now she’s the ripped, tan supermodel and compensated endorser she’s always wanted to be.

28 pounds.

Not 128 pounds. Just 28 pounds.

I was thinking for a moment that Richard Simmons was going to suddenly appear and push Marie Osmond aside so that he could hold Amy’s hand and they could weep huge tears together about the miracle of NutriSystem.

Now don’t get me wrong, I applaud anyone who has the ability to lose weight and keep it off. I’ve been struggling since the late summer/early fall (as both of you might have read at some point) to get back into shape. And although round is indeed a shape, it is not the preferred shape.

Unfortunately, NutriSystem would appear to have us believe that the transformation of our young and tearful Amy of Fayetteville was one of magical and effortless properties in which she had managed to emerge butterfly-like from an emotionally scarred life of hideous and disfiguring  imprisonment in her dark chrysalis of subcutaneous fat just by eating the pre-packaged food for a mere $11 a day – not including the recommended fruit and vegetables not provided by or covered in the cost of the diet plan and thereby vastly increasing the $11 per day base figure.

And perhaps for her it was.

But, once again, we are talking about 28 pounds which, we are told, she was able to shed in just an amazing 10 or 11 weeks. And if you break that down, it works out to about maybe 2 pounds per week – exactly the same amount of weight a person would expect to lose on absolutely any sensible diet plan. Even one that doesn’t cost $11 a day, not including fruits and vegetables.

As I said, I don’t begrudge Amy her weight loss miracle. What I take exception to, however, are these claims of magical transformations because the reality isn’t typically that dramatic.

After approximately 12 or 13 weeks of radically altering my eating habits (and not having to spend $11 per day excluding fruits and vegetables to do it), riding my bike (weather permitting) and making the effort to do extra walking whenever possible, I managed to lose an amazing 32 pounds, or approximately 2 pounds per week – exactly the same amount of weight a person would expect to lose on absolutely any sensible diet plan.

The result?

[Yes, that’s my girl Lindsay Lohan. Unlike most real women, she can see past the surface]

Not exactly that dramatic. I can wear a couple of my older shirts without straining the fabric to manufactured stress limits and I notice that my jeans are looser. There are no slow-motion walks to the crunch of heavy metal guitars and the turning of wild and hungry eyes for me, though I do sometimes get a curious ‘Did you get a haircut?’ 

At this rate I will reach my target weight in approximately 40 – 42 weeks.

So Amy, when you and Marie drop 100 pounds and another $460+ (excluding fruits and vegetables) then we can all have Richard Simmons come and hold our hands.

Or not.

That’s kind of creepy, actually.

20 Years On

Twenty years ago, in January 1990, I was in a car crash. They aren’t like you see on television. In reality it’s just a dull whooshing sound, the brief scream of twisting metal, and then silence. It’s all over in seconds. My then girlfriend and I went to see what was left of the vehicle the next day after we had been released from hospital.

There is no way either one of us should have walked away from that accident.

She had a bruised forehead and a few cuts on her right hand where she stopped herself going through the windscreen and I managed to get by with a sprained neck and a nice bit of safety glass sticking out of my left eye.

For the last few nights I have relived that accident in some pretty horrific and vivid nightmares and I’ve been pondering why I wasn’t just left as a greasy red smear on an icy winter blacktop.

Was it just to be chained to a thankless minimum wage job and have nothing but a hand-to-mouth subsistence and loads of depression?

Surely not.

That’s all.

Nothing else to see for now…

Invisible

In the 2008 film version of Get Smart, Steve Carell’s ill-fated first meeting with my secret girlfriend Anne Hathaway ends as a delivery man blithely rolls a two-wheel dolly, loaded with cases of Budweiser twelve packs, over Steve Carell’s right foot, prompting him to ask solemnly:  ‘Am I invisible?’

I feel like I’m living that scene every minute of my life lately. Except for the part where I don’t get to be totally shot down by Anne Hathaway…