Did I tell you about my plan to get out next summer? I probably didn't tell anybody except my therapist and my cat or something, so of course you don't know. Thing is, I hate very nearly every single day here, just find it grinding and grating and disappointing -- in myself and the management and the behavior of customers -- and the idea of getting out is seriously the most exciting thing going on in my head for possibly several years. So. August 2011, get used to the sight'a my backside, or a cloud of dust, or an empty porch swing wheeling forlornly on the wraparound, because homegirl is outta here. Only ten months left. Ugh.

Man I hope no one actually reads this blog.

UGH.

Naturally I got here late, just at the crisp of 9:30 when we're supposed to open, despite having left the house at 8:15 which seemed like enough time. Not plenty of time mind you, had I really been trying and thinking about the welfare of the store like it was my goddamn useless baby I woulda left at 8, or even minutes before 8! Such is the devotion necessary to swaddling and keeping safe a crazy house such as this one.

UGH I HATE MY JOB.

The cleaning man who is nearly a thousand years old and very congenial but who I have of course soured to is very keen on saying "Should I open er up?" as he leaves in the morning after his weekly cleaning routine, meaning he is exiting through the front door and is kindly offering to unlock the outer door on my behalf; the only problem being that I am or Sarah is on occasion (most of the time) still setting out money in register trays or fixing pieces of paper in their proper places or god forbid mixing granules of sugar into a sour cup of coffee, and of course my weak protestations to this effect do not deter Cleaning Man Sam, he is just so excited at the prospect of unlocking a door on his very own and being The Guy Who Opens The Store that no gail forcewind will prevent him putting key to lock. I just want to punch that guy in the face. Go out the back door, old man.

And then, new contemplative paragraph, I feel bad being an asshole to the aged cleaning man, his adjective and noun being both factors in that feeling though perhaps moreso the noun as I don't want to be classist, sniffing at the actions of the help so to speak, but in truth we are all in some social subservient service work position here, and also sometimes you just don't like somebody regardless of their social position, so it is.

And I was and perhaps still am a hair's breadth from sending an annoyed and most likely annoying email to be upper-boss to the effect of "Make him stop doing that!!!!" but after all that is unwise I guess because didn't Upper Boss say a while back that part of this job is managing people, duh, and I oughta not be so uncomfortable with that? Didn't?

Ugh. If I were Geena Davis I would tell this job to suck my dick.

I wonder if I can just run the fuck out of here without anyone noticing.

1. People who shop at this store are annoying as shit. They can't find anything. I want a job where I don't have to talk to these assholes.

2. Admittedly I am not well today.

3. That does not change the fact that this job sucks. Apparently there is a study where thirty percent of people are going to leave their jobs when "the recession" "ends." It might be twenty years but I am leaving next July, you can bet on that.

It's like I have some kids, and they are disappointed in me.

Christ, the internet is confusing. You can follow me on twitter under the name seldomavailable. When I say "you" I mean about three people. Two of which already know all that. Good lord, what is the point.

You know what movie I really enjoyed? "Withnail & I." I am having a sneezing fit at the moment.

Orders of Business:

1. Not everything is my fault.

2. Fuck you, place where I work, I'm allowed to take two days off in a year when I worked all the extra days you asked me to, I came in on my day off after I had to take a fucking standardized test I didn't even want to tell you about, so I can apply to something else and get the hell out of dodge; I can take two days off to visit my best friend and not have to make up one of them on my day off, thus giving me a six-day work week coming up, the shittiest of fates. Oh, wait, I can't? Okay, sure, I guess I'll work that day, too. I don't care what fucking program I get into, I'm leaving you.

3. Diplomacy implores me to go back and take out some of those fucks, but, hmm, no, I think not. I'll take out those fucks when you learn that it's not beneath your other employees to operate a cash register, when you decide that maybe you could hire enough staff to cover for my TWO DAYS OFF oh no, that's asking too much, that's when I'll take out those fucks, that's when.

4. I'm gonna start writing poetry again, that was the only thing that made anything worthwhile. Kinda.

5. Seacrest out!

6. I might also have the flu. Still I'mma leave in all those fucks. Also I don't blame B. for any of this; he deserves days off too. I'm just saying, there are other people in the world, and maybe some of them could help out from time to time. JUST SAYIN.

7. http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2010/02/learning-to-write-the-mfa-poem-by-nin-andrews.html

SCENE.

When I do something stupid, the problem is that I know I am always always always going to do it again, later on.

1. It annoys me how "the current economy" conversation makes me feel like I should be excessively grateful to have a customer service job. Because it's a job, everybody says, and not everybody has one of those! And while I do cling to my weekly paycheck, the eight hours daily that bring it about sometimes make me want to kill myself just a little.

2. Then I wonder if it's really classist of me to dislike customer service so much. Because lots of people do it for a brief period, and lots of people do it forever, and they don't complain, right? Or maybe they do, and nobody listens. Or maybe they devise a system in order to not hate everything every day. Or maybe they get married, and they go home to their spouse and pet the little lambs and look out a window or something. Or maybe other people just have a better attitude, and I am a jerk. But you know what makes you a jerk? Being unhappy and resigning yourself to it.

3. And aside from whether this feeling is or is not more classist than other activities in my daily life, I think maybe I'm just not suited to it, this kind of work. (Like other people are? Well, maybe.) I see coworker R. buzzing by every now and then, and she's always smiling and even when the most annoying customers are thrown at her, she's listening and going "Hmm, good question, let's see!" and swishing by and improvising. I heard she used to be in computer programming or something. Maybe she's "project-oriented." But when somebody asks me for a recommendation, my mind just goes blank. And it doesn't help that I'm not really allowed to leave the desk, so I never see the shelves and sections people are talking about. But maybe the larger problem is that I'm not a person who likes to talk to just anybody, and especially not the everyday volume of people standing at a front desk necessitates. I'd rather shelve quietly by myself. That kind of isolation bothers some people, and I'd love to trade jobs with those exact people.

4. For a period of an hour or two virtually every morning after coming in, I am really mad. Like, grumpy and annoyed and generally fuck-you at every single person in the room. I think this is because I am realizing daily that I have come back to this benighted place! And I get mad about it. Then by 2pm or so I feel fine, and kind of embarrassed that I was so mad before. I know it's an office cliché, but sometimes a cup of coffee makes me feel less hateful toward everybody.

5. This one guy looking for Harry Potter books with his child was super-nice just now. My ire is largely irrational.

6. No, my ire is not irrational. I will not stamp your fucking stamp card, get out of my face. You are not entitled to everything you think you are entitled to.

Creepy pincers.



Some more SALE-motif advotainment.

We got all these postcards and then suddenly the event was over, so I tried to use like two of them for something useful.



Flying eyeball has a long and sordid cultural history, so I heard.

Huggy Ferret loves you.

Rex Rankin sings it like it goes.

Dear blague,

Partly I really want to read that new Patti Smith book about her and Mapplethorpe hanging out in New York at the end of the sixties, being crazy kids and loving each other and making art and being bohemian poor and all that, and partly I don't, because I think it'll make me sad. I read a few pages when it first appeared, and oddly there was a scene very close to something that happens in Red Dragon (the book & movie, though it's omitted from Manhunter, go figure), in which Bob Mapplethorpe steals a Wm. Blake print for sale in the gallery where he's working, and then he feels so afraid of being caught that he shreds it up and flushes it down a toilet, which is pretty close to shredding it up and ingesting it, depending on how you think of bodies. I liked that part, but anyway I feel conflicted about reading the book because that camaraderie thing, that being young and foolish and loving somebody thing, that just gets me feeling sad because hello, I live with my parents in what are supposed to be the foolish & exciting years, I average one poem every six months if I'm lucky, and I don't even get in any impressive fights like Bukowski. Not that I really want to. But in the other part I read, Patti Smith said how she had come home early one day when she & Mapplethorpe were both unemployed (how they managed to keep the heat on is beyond my imagining) and made her special soup for him, which was just chicken broth with lettuce floated on top, and it's meant to sound kind of sad and sweet and raga--

Let me just interject, I don't know how my coworker gets to be sitting down and not answer the phone right now; the unspoken agreement is that if you're sitting and somebody else is standing, the least you can do is field all the phone calls and leave everybody else's hands free. But maybe that should be a spoken rule.

Whatever, my point is I find young unpretentious love stories depressing, especially when it's forty years later and the remaining half of the couple is still way cooler than everybody.

And then again, "unpretentious" is a malleable concept, because I know if I met somebody my age right now who was hanging around Rimbaud's grave and talking all mystical-poetry business, I would be like OH SHUT UP, because when it's somebody you perceive to be like you and not everybody's chosen punk-rock elder god, it's annoying. I guess my definition of being unpretentious is having highfalutin tastes that you don't tell anybody about, because you're doing it for you and not to impress anybody. But really, trying to impress people is a part of life, and so is talking to people about things that interest you, so what do I know.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2779/4016280877_d268b46b31_b.jpg






LATER I REALIZED THAT WASN'T A SENTENCE

I was trying to copy this picture of Marlene Dietrich looking surly while watching The Piano Teacher. What is up with that movie? I am still trying to figure it out. I think that is the point, that it is unsettling. All's I know is, I don't want to be a person who doesn't like that movie. I was thinking, also, how there is this movie trope of the icy blonde; Hitchcock was all about that, and he loved to abuse them in his movies. Especially when they weren't keen on his advances, so I hear. But watching Haneke I was thinking, fuck that, the icy redhead is a much better trope. Isabelle Huppert is so tiny and quiet, and yet so scary. Her face is like a closed door, and you know behind that door is a guy tied to a chair with a rag in his mouth, getting the tar beat out of him.

I stole that sentence! Nothing much to say. Waiting for a return phone call; what a thing to do. End transmission.

An all-around shitty day. Good show, outside world, good show.

Sometimes this week there's nothing for dessert so I make brown sugar frosting and eat it out of the pan -- or sometimes a bowl! even! -- while watching television. Also this week I discovered that watching Californication alone before going to bed is satisfying tv time but ultimately depressing. Nobody is ever happy! They just keep having sex and being rich but damnit, the overwhelming sadness of it all! Life and Hollywood conspire to break our clammy souls!



Good show.

If I post more crap, the good ones will really seem good.

Wait, good ones?

I just remembered how one time at camp a bunch of us gathered a circle of canvas chairs around someone's tent and sat around having a mid-afternoon drink and a chat. Somebody had a boombox and I guess the batteries for it, so I got there first and flipped through my available music and finally put on a Marlene Dietrich CD. It was from a 2-disc set actually called "Cocktail Hour," maybe it was a series, and it had all these terrible cartoony pink drawings of lipsticks and sassy microphones on the faces of the CDs. It was funny, how it was a bright clear day in the woods and we were a bunch of anarchopunk-flavored kids in foldy chairs and Marlene, high-femme foreign archetype that she is, fit in so smoothly. I envy her that. Somebody said it was good music for our cocktail hour, and I felt satisfied. Classy as shit, I know: drinkin' in the woods, queer Germans of times gone by.

Anyway, I am going through all the old CDs I can find and putting them on my new computer so as to banish their physical selves to some far reach of the attic or under-bed, and I came upon that set, which makes me stop and think, How recently have I considered this "my CD collection"? I mean, it's got Beck and shit, and we haven't talked for some time now, whereas Marlene and I are on intimate terms these days. I think I dozed off and missed my connection, is all.

I remember at camp that time, we were all drinking soda or juice drinks from a cooler we desperately kept filled with bags of ice from town, mixed with flavored vodka or whatever it was. Probably flavored vodka, I can't imagine anything cool being there. Somebody had a frosted bottle of something reddish. After Shock? Is that the name? And it had a violent cinnamon flavor, and I remember we all passed it around to try and made various faces and moved on. The person who brought it seemed shy, and this was a way to break the ice. It was still daylight, not too warm, and what a nice memory it makes. I don't remember; we probably talked about music or social justice or something.