National Fuck Your Job Day: 2006

Thursday: Spend hour and a half writing article I will never publish. Last half of first draft interrupted by night time call from my girlfriend. “Do you want to do something crazy?” she asks.

Nothing too crazy. Only a late supper. Or an early breakfast, depending on one’s perspective and considering what we’re having. A date, and a good one at that. We meet at My Fair City’s one-and-only known all-night waffle house. I order a Strawberry Belgian, side of bacon, and a chocolate milk shake. For her, a veggie omelet with hash browns. Milkshake: strawberry. And all is right with the world.

Lat night bus schedule dictates we must eat our break quite fast, or else face the long walk home with full, rolling stomachs. We wrap our left-overs in tin foil and huff it, both sated and drowsy with digestion.

We get home and I smoke my last cigarette. I fall asleep in my lover’s arms and wait.

Friday: Pay day. I open the article I’d left in situ the night before. I find it’s suffered and died during the interim. I’ve lost its thread somewhere, somewhen.

Fuck it, I think, leaving to pick up my pay check.

It’s a ninety minute commute to my place of work. My cube farm in the Silicon Forest. I get there and receive the third degree from my manager. “Were you scheduled today?” he asks.

The scheduling program is open right before his face. I can see myself there, and the blank space that is Friday. For two months I’ve worked four, ten hour days for the explicit purpose of keeping Friday to myself. I’ve not worked a Friday since July. Since my birthday, in fact.

“Well, you were scheduled today, and you’re already late.”

Bullshit. The word rushes up through the breakers of my mind, whole, rabid, wanting nothing more than to build a home in my boss’s ear.

Instead I say something far less articulate. “Nuh-uh,” or somesuch like. “My schedule, it just says, ‘Off’. I’m always off on Friday. I’ve already worked my forty hours.”

Bullshit, indeed, but to say so would not be polite, now would it? And it would certainly not fall into my plan of keeping the mask in place. We all wear our masks in public, do we not? I certainly find I must…to function if nothing else.

“No, look, it says ‘Nine-to-ten-thirty, off.’ Then ‘ten-thirty to noon, off’. So you were scheduled from nine to noon and you’re already late.’”

The hell I am, fool, I think to him. Unless your dumb ass is about to pay me over time, ‘Off’ still means ‘off’ in my part of the English language. “Off,” as in, “I go home, you stay here.” “Off,” as in, “this time is my time.” “Off,” as in, “You will cease to pay me for this amount of time, and I will cease to think a single, blessed thing about you, you managerial monster.”

So for ten minutes my boss and I dance a dance of ignorance. Apparently, a good number of my coworkers misread their own schedules and failed to show up on this fine Friday. I am not one of those workers. Ten minutes, a quick walk to my desk, and a comparison of schedules later and my boss, he says, “Don’t worry about it.”

I smile. Oh, don’t worry, I think to him, but do not say. I won’t.

I don’t say it because his eyes are wild and spinning in their caves. His mind is haggard and thrown to the four winds. He must do the work of twelve now, to make up for the missed work of five. He has no pension, no savings, and no plan beyond the coming weekend which, for him, will be exactly one day long. He is a poor, small, frightened man and I do pity him.

But I’m not about to worry for him. Not one damn bit. His accusation, mistaken though it may be, stung a deep and very Protestant part of my brain. The part that honors its obligations and tells me, Work. And save. The part that drags me from my girlfriend’s side every morning and brings me to that awful place and now realizes it doesn’t matter. That I am, once again, guilty until proven innocent. After all, the call center employee is a useless jack-about, unsuited for even the simplest unsupervised task. They must be watched and called to task at the slightest provocation because the entry-level call center employee is little more than a half-bright animal really. Child-like and sad. Their sloth and laziness really can’t be helped, you see, though it is the (white) Manager’s Burden to eternally try. Through goading, through promising, through careful persuasion. And, if all else fails, through bald-faced accusation.

So I won’t worry about my boss, or “it.” No. Instead I’ll worry about the fact that I call in, by God, when I’m gonna cut work. And how much of a fool does that really make me?

As I leave, another six-hundred forty-four ill-gotten dollars in hand, I think of the long, odd causal chain of association that must flourish inside my bosses head. After all, he assumed (1) that I was scheduled to work, despite the evidence before his face (2) that I then skipped work for God-only-knows what reason, before ignorantly (3) stopping by, and walking right to the man’s desk. What kind of fool cuts work, only to show up with his hand out a few hours later?

The kind of fool foolish enough to voluntarily work my job.

To that end I realized I do not hate my job, but I will soon. It won’t take long and when it comes it will come a’ sneaking under the invisible seams along the side of my face. My mask will slip as surely as Vic Sage’s did when he took up smoking. (Filthy habit, kids. Don’t ever pick it up.) I can feel this happening already, during the long, slow progressions of my ten hour days. It’s the trapped-animal feeling that always comes to me whenever I’m forced to do something I do not wish to do. Do not believe in. Do not care for, with, or about. When I’m doing any job, in other words, that is not this, my real Work, the writing.

What else?

Saturday: I write. I drink. I do not smoke.

Sunday: I do the same, with reading thrown in for good measure. Because those without time to read do not have time to write and that’s a fact, as the video game says.

In between I nurse my girlfriend, who’s come down with what, at first, she thought were allergies. Now her eyes water and her nose runs and its day two of these “allergies.” She and I both know there something else. “Don’t get to close,” she warns me. This I ignore, as I ignore so much good advice.

Monday: I wake at 4:16 a.m. The voice in my head tells me, Call in sick. It is the calm, still voice inside my mind and this is the first time its woken me up in the middle of the night. In the past, I’ve dismissed it as a hallucinogenic fantasy, a paranoid delusion, or something worse. But at four in the morning its words carry more weight…a weight I feel creeping slowly through spaces in my head that are usually empty.

Not their clogged. I can barely breath. Swallowing is a godly effort. My head feels twice as large as I know it should and I think, Maybe the Magic Voice is on to something here. Yep, sure seems that way.

Restless sleep takes me back into itself. In my dream I call in sick and am summarily fired. I call in sick and my manager screams down the line, the Wicked Witch of the South West. “How ‘bout a little fire, Scarecrow?” he asks in his new high keening Wicked voice.

My alarm rings. Its seven a.m. A ninety minute commute stares down into my gullet but I am just asleep enough to remember Friday. And the voice. Separately, the two would be forgotten and dismissed and I would be waiting for a train home now, miles away from my computer. But taken together, the Magic Voice and bitter experience have led me to declare this National Fuck Your Job day.

So I did. I dialed the Sick Line number, handily provided on the back of every employee badge. I negotiated the Byzantine automated phone system that answered my call, story primed and at the ready for the inevitable questions. “Why are you calling in sick, D?” Well, it’s like this: the little voice in my head woke me up at four a.m. to tell me to. Because it hates your guts, and all you stand for. Suck on that, you mistrusting bastard.

“Thank you for calling ——‘s Automated Help Line. No manager is available to take your call. To leave a message, press—”

I press one, speak my piece, and crawl back into bed with my beloved, head pounding, voice cracked and spent.

Hours later I wake to the sun in my eyes and think, I can’t waste this day. Oh, no. The old Protestant part of my brain would never allow that.

So I scan the classifieds, plan out bus routes and chorus lines, and format a short story I plan to send to Asimov’s. Within hours I’ve located another call center, less than thirty minutes from my home. They’re hiring, and on my way from the post office.

I consider myself lucky, despite the way daylight stings my watering, salt encrusted eyes. Despite the way bus fumes and screaming children make my head throb. The receptionist doesn’t seem to mind. She hands me the sheet, times me on the typing test, and within thirty minutes I’m back out the door, spent, but happy.

Fuck work. I’ve lived today. And someday, God’s willing (har har) I’ll make the difference very clear to a certain boss of mine.

Then we’ll see who worries.

Scratching the Congressonal Record

Reading the daily brown flow of rhetorical muck that rushes from our nation’s capital swamp in the oh-so-blithely named Congressional Record can be both a Herculean challenge and a monumental waste of time…often both, simultaneously.

And yet, given patience, good people, and the correct motivation, even the stuffed-shirted sycophants who supposedly “lead” this country can turn a choice phrase or three, and even put together a nice routine.

Within the Empire presents one such, from today, in this exchange between Senators Harry Reed (D-NV) and Dick Durban (D-IL):

Mr. Durbin: Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. Reid: I will be happy to yield for a question.

Mr. Durbin: Can the Senator refresh my memory? Was Mr. Bremmer the recipient of a gold medal or something from the President? Didn't he receive some high decoration or medal for his performance in Iraq?

Mr. Reid: The answer is, yes, he received that. I assume one would expect that from somebody who had a throne while he was over there.

Mr. Durbin: Isn't it also true that George Tenet, who was responsible for the intelligence that was so bad that led us into the war in Iraq, got a medal from the President the same day?

Mr. Reid: That is true.

Mr. Durbin: Did Michael Brown with FEMA receive a gold medal from the White House before he was dismissed?

Mr. Reid: I don't think he did. Even though he was doing a heck of a job, I don't think he obtained a medal from the White House.

Mr. Durbin: Apparently, these gold medals were being awarded for incompetence. They missed Mr. Brown, but they did give one to Mr. Bremmer. Will the Senator yield for another question?

Mr. Reid: I will be happy to.

Mr. Durbin: I am trying to recall the exact number -- it was in the billions of dollars -- that we gave to the President for the reconstruction of Iraq; is that not true?

Mr. Reid: It started out at $18 billion. But as the Senator from Illinois will remember, part of that money, stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills, was used by some of the contractors who were sent over there to play football games -- some of these same people.

Mr. Durbin: It is also true, is it not, that the Democratic policy conference has been holding hearings -- in fact, I think it is the only agency on the Hill holding hearings -- on this waste and abuse, this profiteering and corruption at the expense of American taxpayers and even, equally important -- more importantly -- at the expense of our troops?

Mr. Reid: I say to my friend, this war is approaching 3 1/2 years, and there has not been a single congressional oversight hearing on the conduct of the war. This war has now cost us, the American taxpayers, about $325 billion. There has not been a single congressional oversight hearing on the war.

Mr. Durbin: I ask the Senator from Nevada if he might comment on this as well: Are we not in a situation where the President has told us that he wants to "stay the course'' in Iraq, and Vice President Cheney, when asked a week ago, said he wouldn't change a thing in the way they have done this war in Iraq? Is it very clear that unless there is a change in leadership in this town soon, we are going to continue down this disastrous course, exposing our soldiers to danger every single day, their families to the anxiety of separation, and the taxpayers of this country to billions and billions of dollars more being spent that don't make us any safer?

Mr. Reid: I say to my friend, I spent the weekend reading a book. I did other things. I spent a lot of time on an airplane. The book is called "Fiasco,'' written by a man named Thomas Ricks who has spent his life covering the military. He has written books on the military. I don't know his political persuasion. This book is on the best seller's list of the New York Times.

In this book, he talks in such detail about what has happened as a result of the incompetence of this administration to our valiant fighting men and women over there. I recommend the book to anyone. It is a searing indictment of this administration.

Via Daily Kos, BobGeiger and the Congressional Record.

Dog Vomit

Dog parents will tell you, when a dog pukes on your lap it’s really a sign of affection. “She felt bad so she went to you. She was, like, ‘Dave, help me, I don’t feel good.’”

You will believe this.

You will go home and review a superhero cartoon movie, Ultimate Avengers. Because what the hell else is there to do around here? It’s not like you’re trying to combat the rising tide of entropy or anything.

No. Nothing like that at all.

The Tragedy of 9/11 is Spread Upont the Earth and Men Do Not See It

I hope this day will become more than a glass scattering of memory. I hope this day will become more than a day of morning. I hope the nervous, pregnant energy that haunts this day will dissipate in time and it will pass, not just like any other, but better than most. It’ll never be Christmas. Or Easter. Or Chanukah. You only get one Independence Day per revolutionè but c’mon, America. You’d think 9/11 could at least top Father’s Day.

Frank Miller said something today

For the first time in my life, I know how it feels to face an existential menace. They want us to die. All of a sudden I realize what my parents were talking about all those years.
Patriotism, I now believe, isn't some sentimental, old conceit. It's self-preservation. I believe patriotism is central to a nation's survival. Ben Franklin said it: If we don't all hang together, we all hang separately. Just like you have to fight to protect your friends and family, and you count on them to watch your own back.
So you've got to do what you can to help your country survive. That's if you think your country is worth a damn. Warts and all.

Left unanswered is the question no one ever dares to ask.

Is it?

Mr. Miller knows the answer is yes, having never conceived that “we” could just up and have a new country any time enough of “us” decided to do so. It’s happened before, all over the world, as have tragedies destructive as, or more destructive than, the events at New York City, Washington D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on September 11th, 2001.

They are happening even now, all over the globe, and we are lighting candles in the hope of stopping them. We are doing exactly as we’re told. We are going to work. We are shopping. September 11th changed the world. Five years later, I look back fondly at what I had. It was and innocence. I recognize that now. A high vantage point where I could lob eggs at the “responsible” and pat myself on the back for doing it. No more.

We, the people, have not changed a damn bit for the better. We’ve become paranoid, fearful, even more insecure. We are a nation of perpetual teenagers, crying and destroying furniture because “they” hate us.

“Why,” someone once asked, “do they hate us?” Five years out, it seems like something a Group Leader might at the bi-weekly Abusive Husbands United support group meet-n-great/potluck. We’ve shown them why, as we’ve shown them before, and will undoubtedly show them again if, as I believe must happen, our memories improve.

The War Against Terror has already been fought and won. Ronald Regan declared in his first term, when state-sponsored terrorism became the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy as soon as he entered office in 1981. By 1985, President Regan was denouncing the “evil scourge of terrorism” in both the Middle East and Central America, both of which became hot fronts in a period marked by slowly, but unevenly, heating war. He “won” it the way all wars are won: by building a broad coalition of Third World strong men with murderous thug armies and, occasionally, injecting American troops where needed, in various hot spots…but always on the cheap, always quickly and succinctly. The memory of Vietnam was till with Regan’s war planners.

“We” (that is, our government) is fighting the same war today, with the same tactics, the same ill-laid plans. I realized this when I saw Mohammad Karzai and General Perez Musharraf standing side by side, our “allies” in the war on terror. One a CIA asset, hand picked to lead the still-unreconstructed Afghanistan. The other a General who seized power after a failed war with our other regional ally, India. Who forced the democratically elected president, the president he swore to serve, into exile and retroactively pardoned himself for his own successful coupe. Who’s army and intelligence service have just signed an “agreement” with the Taliban forces camped out along the porous, mountain-cluttered border lands of northern Pakistan. A treaty, the terms of which basically amount to, “You don’t fuck with us, we don’t fuck with you. Try not to have too much fun.”

We cannot stand for “friends” like these. To say nothing of the Saudi Royal Family. But it’s not enough to simply say that. We must tell those we elect to represent us exactly what we think about America’s bestest friends. We should remember that nothing breeds terrorists like the collapse of a Third World Nation. And nothing helps that collapse more like the leadership of an unbalanced, dictatorial ass.

We must inform our leaders that they hold the true keys to war and peace, not the one man in the white building down the street. They have ceded that power for far to long and they must take it back from him.

Once that’s done it’ll be a piece of cake for us to take it back from them. Because until they realize that they can no longer blithely send our sons and daughters, our husbands and wives, our sisters, brothers, cousins, parents and grandparents, to kill and die at a whim, then and only then, will we have begun the long and arduous task of honor the victims of September the 11th.

To do anything less is the real tragedy of this day.

Tale of Minutes

12: 31 a.m.: I give up ghost, shut down computer, sleep.

4:45 a.m.: Alarm goes off. I dress for success in black pants, a United Federation of Planets T-shirt and my black, Vash the Stampede-model trench coat. Haul my ass down the shadowed blocks to the bus stop. The luggage cart I’m dragging beside me sounds inordinately loud as its wheels scrap over the deserted, pre-dawn sidewalk. I feel exposed every time I step into the streetlights. Nicotine and endorphins clear the cobwebs from my head. After three months of Fear, Loathing and Insecurity I’m going to meet my girlfriend at the Grayhound station downtown.

5:09 a.m.: Bus arrives, crowded with early morning commuters. The man next to me is recovering from an operation. The doctors removed a nasty bit of industrial debris from the lens of his right eye. “They gave me Vicodin,” he says to the twenty-something in the red shoes sitting across from us. “But I can’t take that at work. I get all loopy.” The Man in the Red Shoes smiles, nods. “Yeah, that shit fucks you up.”

My own experience with Vicodin is somewhat different. It produced none of the disassociative euphoria of, say, actual morphine, Percocet or Rush Limbaugh’s drug of choice, Oxycontin. Instead I find it gives me a brief (half-hour, tops) excitable head- and body-rush, culminating in a deep, deep crash as my metabolism adjusts to the new chemical input. I chalk this up to some strange accident of my equally strange body chemistry and do not contribute these observations to the conversation going on before me. I’m counting down minutes until my girlfriend’s arrival. And I’m watching street signs.

5:31 a.m.: Arrive at Grayhound station in the sprawling field of parking lots that is Old Town. Union Station’s blue, neon signage glares down on me from its tower. Scattered lights burn inside the fortress that is My Fair City’s main Post Office. The street is deserted. I enter through the main doors, ignoring signs that proclaim the Grayhound won’t officially open until six a.m. The light dusting of people waiting in line at the ticket counter puts a lie to this anyway.

5:41 a.m.: Wait. And wait. Seconds drag to minutes which drag to hours and seem as days. The tile floors are dirty brown, scab brown and I am waiting. Three months I’ve been without my girl, my partner, my heart, my Imzadi. She left Our Fair City on June 2nd to return to our state of origin, Missouri, and be a councilor at Girl Scout Camp. Among her many (many) loves, my girlfriend has a deep and abiding loyalty to the Scouts and all they stand for. What they are has fundamentally informed who she is and I owe them no small debt for that. My father continues to lump them in with those quasi-fascist assholes over at the Boy Scouts but, as Penn Gillette noted on his show, Bullshit, the two organizations are wholly separate entities. While the Girl Scout’s national leadership has its own set of problems (such as a creepy shift in emphasis toward twenty-first century materialism) at least they’re smart enough to remain covertly homophobic.

5:45 a.m.: I’m still waiting. It’s been three months since I’ve kissed this girl, held her close and told her I loved her. I think of the Founding Fathers, particularly John Adams, who wrote whole volumes of letters to his wife, Abbey, back in Boston while he sweltered in Philadelphia at the Continental Congress. Back then, three months away from your Significant Other was (at best) the norm. Back then, the fastest means of overland transport was a good horse and prayer that the roads hadn’t turned to swamps.

A line of passengers file in through the door with the four foot numeral “3” above it. My girlfriend is not among them.

I wait more.

5:47 a.m.: Door Number Four opens and another line of haggard, travel stiffened people file in. My girlfriend is, at last, among them. She wears a voluminous, multi-colored shirt with more drape in its arms than the suit coat they buried with Biggie Smalls. Beads click between her breasts. A purple bandana holds back her hair. It rides high on her forehead, giving her the look of a cancer survivor. But I’m the smoker in the house and when I have her in my arms she feels trim and fit and wonderfully alive. We kiss beside a stack of her luggage and I don’t think because I can’t. My head is too full of her and the stunning realization that this long, fearful, hated waste of a summer is finally and completely over. At last.

We lash her luggage to the cart I’ve brought and exit through the now-operation sliding doors.

6:09 a.m.: Walk to China town. Dawn is threatening in the east. Gangstars and homeless people begin to populate the sidewalks. We make out, oblivious to them, wait ten minutes and catch our bus home.

6:31 a.m.: Arrive home. Have sex. During the post-coital conversation I try my damnedest to explain the short story I’ve just finished in somewhat interesting terms.

7:15 a.m.: Post-coital snooze.

12:30 p.m.: Wake up to find her unpacking. I stay out of her way, watching all the time for a chance to surreptitiously pinch her ass. I’ve missed that, and a million other things about her. Our nerd-tastic conversations. Our mutual love of Star Trek. Our years-old debate on the right and proper way to bring down civilization. The way she laughs at me. The way she helps me laugh at myself. Her confidence and grace, the light inside her eyes and heart, and the simple, unpretentious way she has of saying absolutely everything, even, “I love you,” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

1:30 p.m.: More sex. More conversation.

3:30 p.m.: Build book shelf in the living room.

6:17 p.m.: Sup.

7:15p.m.: Watch Ultimate Avengers. Realize I still need to write the damn thing up as I’ve completely let And You Thought It Was Safe slip through the cracks for the month of August. But watching her eat ice cream, make jokes and roll her eyes at Captain America’s straight-faced jingoisms I could care less about websites, writing or superheroes. A piece of my life has come back to me. I feel whole again, safe and secure, and all else is gravy from here on out.

9:45 p.m.: Fall asleep in girlfriend’s arms. Realize how much I’ve missed the relatively simple act of doing this.

Sometimes you have to live to write, and not the other way around.