Man-o-man. This “blackout” post got some interesting personal responses. None of them really made their way into the comments section, and that’s okay. It’s strange, but I’m not quite sure where to draw the line on it. Wide spread on the variety of reaction. Some people are honest with themselves, some people have exceptional reading comprehension skills, and some people are both honest and perceptive. Some are neither, and that scares me more than any blackout I may have experienced.
But, I won’t dedicate any more type space to that discussion, as the only real interesting result was my own mother calling me after reading and before even saying “hello”, she immediately butted in with “are you DRUNK right now?”
And then she waited for a sincere answer. It was around 4pm on a Saturday. I was writing at the time.
Am I drunk? Shit, I wish. Are you fucking KIDDING me over here?
She gets this idea from four areas:
1. Whenever I visit my hometown, Houston, for holidays and whatnot, I always catch up with my friends who live there. These are people who are still very much involved in the social scenes, which are heavily doused in booze. I always get home long after last call, and I am usually stinking drunk because that’s how revelers get when they only see each other three or four times a year (if that). So whenever I visit home for a weekend, I am absolutely uselessly hung over for at least one of the days there.
2. Whenever I tell stories, and I enjoy telling stories, there is almost always an element of alcohol involved. This is because the probability of something noteworthy occurring increases significantly with the addition of alcohol. It’s fucking science for christ’s sake. It’s not ridiculous to understand that if I love to tell stories where I end up looking like an idiot, that those stories will involve consumption. It is also necessary to point out that I tell the same four goddamn stories over, and over, and over again. It’s not like I have a new one every three drunken days.
3. On my last, and hopefully final family vacation, taken last March, I got absolutely shit-housed in Brussels. Long story short, I got lost in the streets of Brussels after 5am, stumbling drunk and making friends with everyone I came in contact with (except for a really creepy car that followed me for a ways, but I lost it by ducking through creepy-ass dark alleys, which kinda sucked). My brother was with me for the first half of the night, but decided to retire when he deemed himself too drunk to enjoy himself. I was not that drunk yet, so I kept on it, along with another fellow whom we met at a bar, who also happened to be from Austin. Strange coincidence indeed. Short story long, I got home smelling of various bar trays and talking nonsense, totally out of sorts. Everyone but my brother and I went on a goddamn 7am morning tour of some Belgian something-or-other, because neither of us were fit to tour. My mother repeatedly referred to her disappointment for the remainder of the trip, every goddamn time I threatened to order a delicious Belgian beer, as if a single drop of the stuff would send me on an immediate werewolf-like train of destruction and drunken mayhem. I got to hear “you aren’t going to go out and do THAT again, are you?” A-lot. Far more often than any rational person deserves.
4. She reads my writing out here on the interweb. For this, I take full responsibility. I’m not yet good at portraying myself in an even light. I don’t talk about my investment strategies, much of my efforts at health improvement, charity donation schedules, or my moves to obtain higher degrees of education. I consider these things to be important to me, and of no benefit to anyone else. I discuss what a douche (typically under the influence, sure) I can be for the sake of a) anyone reading who unwittingly feels the same and needs some reassurance that there is nothing wrong with them, and b) everyone else out there who is so self-righteous as to believe that they AREN’T a douche, when they so obviously ARE. I know, it isn’t the most efficient means of helping to explain to the population that we’re all hopelessly flawed but infinitely fascinating characters who shouldn’t be so goddamned paranoid about what the other douches think of our douchey selves. But, it’s all I got right now. And until I get my own weekly talk show with international distribution, I’m rolling with this right here. For better or worse.
So, well, I don’t really know where this leaves me. I mean, I honestly don’t know if I’m a drunk or not. No one can know that. Just like no one can know if they’ve got AIDS, cancer, or type II diabetes until symptoms lead to tests, and tests lead to absolute results. All you can do is consider the empirical evidence and work with the results. And me drinking WHILE ON VACATION (Houston, Brussels, NYC, wherever) hardly supports alcoholism. Neither do the distantly linked collection of drink stories I have otherwise.
All I’ve learned is that I am not safe from the stabbing and obnoxious rulings from highly biased sources of judgmental vitriol. Which sucks dick because it’s my own family.
My word, I have dedicated FAR too much effort to this discussion. It’s like a real blog entry or some shit. You know, the ones where the writer just babbles on and on about some really personal shit that no one else probably cares about.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Out of Bounds
“NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!!”
He just kept repeating this alarm in my face, swinging his arms around as if he was trying to ward off a bear in the wild. It was working, I could tell, because I was frazzled and backing up. I backed all the way to half court, and crossed the half-hash, soliciting a whistle and eventual turnover call from the referee. After I crossed the line three times.
“NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!!”
I could smell his sweaty breath as the waves of his mouth-heat violated my face. He had freckles, which was relatively rare for a black man in our neighborhood, and one extra-yellow front tooth. Not gold, mind you. Just yellow. Like butter. I assumed it was a replacement of some sort. Possibly carved from driveway stones.
“NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!!”
Coach was less than impressed with my complete absence of skill under pressure. After all, my opponent was merely barking at me. He wasn’t making much of an effort to actually TAKE the ball. I was simply being yelled off the court. A weakness of character which would eventually have to be ferreted out and killed, if I were to ever be able to accomplish even the slightest of goals, later in life. A life which ever since, has been full of bellowing, unskilled side-liners who just want to see someone else run away. To ALSO run away.
They wanted me to score points. That’s where the whole “point guard” name came from. I was to bring the bouncing orange ball from one end of the court, to the opposing end, with the intent of a) setting up plays, and b) helping to avoid making everyone else look hopelessly pathetic and incapable of playing organized basketball by single-handedly scoring a shitload of points. Pretty straight-forward job description.
But I was a seventh grader of questionable mental capacity. Plus, I was harboring a previously unknown but crippling fear of public competition.
Being involved in any competitive stage, no matter how peripheral the part, is horrifying in and of itself. Because you aren’t dealing with the standard Man v. Man trial that everyone assumes it to be. Oh no. If that were the case, everyone would be involved. Everyone would compete. Because there would be no mystery to competition beyond the combination of practice and inborn skill. The only thing that might preclude one from participating in EVERY available competition (under these idealized conditions) would have to be overlapping schedules. Otherwise, all games would include everyone. It would be math. It would be robotic. It would be predictable.
But most importantly: it would be a theatre of the bored.
In reality, everyone on a competitive stage, whether alone (platform diver) or on a team (gang-bang porn-off), must do battle with themselves as well. Multi-tasking. It’s about confidence, courage, perseverance, “heart”, and all those other obnoxious words that headline shitty inspirational posters. In order to beat any other person, one must be able to beat themselves. We all have to find some way to overcome our overwhelming sense of incapability. No matter how trivial the contest.
And in seventh grade, there is nothing trivial about a basketball game. Watch Teen Wolf. Again. The final sequence of that movie sums up quite nicely, just how much pressure can be brought down on little dudes who have probably named all eight of their newfound ball hairs.
To make matters worse, I grew up in a relatively ghetto-ass part of Houston where my Middle School basketball team contained guys who could dunk, dudes who would later go on to college football as lineman, and really ambitious fellas who sold crack during class. Imagine being thirteen and playing Our competition was similar in form to my teammates.
I, on the other hand, had the look and build of your average toe-headed teen who still played with Hotwheels and probably continued to clutch the erroneous belief that his dad was a real goddamn superhero. To say I was physically overpowered by my (sort of) contemporaries would be a gross understatement. I wasn't in some of their age, let alone size bracket(s).
I just wanted to survive the end of the game. The humiliation. The dropping of the balls.
Fourth quarter, and my third-string, bench-warming ass was called in to finish off the game. We were down by several hundred thousand points, which was really the only time I ever got to play, but I was somehow “needed” in order to multiply our bigboard standing.
“NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!!”
Surprise, surprise. I went out of bounds instead.
He just kept repeating this alarm in my face, swinging his arms around as if he was trying to ward off a bear in the wild. It was working, I could tell, because I was frazzled and backing up. I backed all the way to half court, and crossed the half-hash, soliciting a whistle and eventual turnover call from the referee. After I crossed the line three times.
“NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!!”
I could smell his sweaty breath as the waves of his mouth-heat violated my face. He had freckles, which was relatively rare for a black man in our neighborhood, and one extra-yellow front tooth. Not gold, mind you. Just yellow. Like butter. I assumed it was a replacement of some sort. Possibly carved from driveway stones.
“NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!!”
Coach was less than impressed with my complete absence of skill under pressure. After all, my opponent was merely barking at me. He wasn’t making much of an effort to actually TAKE the ball. I was simply being yelled off the court. A weakness of character which would eventually have to be ferreted out and killed, if I were to ever be able to accomplish even the slightest of goals, later in life. A life which ever since, has been full of bellowing, unskilled side-liners who just want to see someone else run away. To ALSO run away.
They wanted me to score points. That’s where the whole “point guard” name came from. I was to bring the bouncing orange ball from one end of the court, to the opposing end, with the intent of a) setting up plays, and b) helping to avoid making everyone else look hopelessly pathetic and incapable of playing organized basketball by single-handedly scoring a shitload of points. Pretty straight-forward job description.
But I was a seventh grader of questionable mental capacity. Plus, I was harboring a previously unknown but crippling fear of public competition.
Being involved in any competitive stage, no matter how peripheral the part, is horrifying in and of itself. Because you aren’t dealing with the standard Man v. Man trial that everyone assumes it to be. Oh no. If that were the case, everyone would be involved. Everyone would compete. Because there would be no mystery to competition beyond the combination of practice and inborn skill. The only thing that might preclude one from participating in EVERY available competition (under these idealized conditions) would have to be overlapping schedules. Otherwise, all games would include everyone. It would be math. It would be robotic. It would be predictable.
But most importantly: it would be a theatre of the bored.
In reality, everyone on a competitive stage, whether alone (platform diver) or on a team (gang-bang porn-off), must do battle with themselves as well. Multi-tasking. It’s about confidence, courage, perseverance, “heart”, and all those other obnoxious words that headline shitty inspirational posters. In order to beat any other person, one must be able to beat themselves. We all have to find some way to overcome our overwhelming sense of incapability. No matter how trivial the contest.
And in seventh grade, there is nothing trivial about a basketball game. Watch Teen Wolf. Again. The final sequence of that movie sums up quite nicely, just how much pressure can be brought down on little dudes who have probably named all eight of their newfound ball hairs.
To make matters worse, I grew up in a relatively ghetto-ass part of Houston where my Middle School basketball team contained guys who could dunk, dudes who would later go on to college football as lineman, and really ambitious fellas who sold crack during class. Imagine being thirteen and playing Our competition was similar in form to my teammates.
I, on the other hand, had the look and build of your average toe-headed teen who still played with Hotwheels and probably continued to clutch the erroneous belief that his dad was a real goddamn superhero. To say I was physically overpowered by my (sort of) contemporaries would be a gross understatement. I wasn't in some of their age, let alone size bracket(s).
I just wanted to survive the end of the game. The humiliation. The dropping of the balls.
Fourth quarter, and my third-string, bench-warming ass was called in to finish off the game. We were down by several hundred thousand points, which was really the only time I ever got to play, but I was somehow “needed” in order to multiply our bigboard standing.
“NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!!”
Surprise, surprise. I went out of bounds instead.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
As Usual, No Cups.
My guess is that he was actually brought in for this exact purpose by the investors. They knew this time would come. And they knew they wouldn’t be interested in first-handing such things. They would need a vehicle. A vessel. A wretched harbinger of truth: that no man is above any known reckoning. They needed him to utilize his methods. His “cures”. To find a way to usher us into oblivion. We needed to be out of their way.
In his most previous life, they called him “The Hatchet Man” due to his disturbingly amoral ability to dissolve entities into sellable splinters with deft and swift swings of hardened greed. The fucker was good at it. He liked it. It made him feel useful and important. Fed his rampant vanity like nothing else. Such the vulture.
Some enjoy soaking their hands in pools of warm blood like that.
So there we were, the three of us, sitting in the open-air atrium of the Renaissance Hotel in the Arboretum. A dozen or so floors of vacuous space above our heads. At a predetermined, toy-ish and absolutely empty café table. Public place. Folded arms. Negotiating our way out of each other’s lives.
It was two against one, and he was visibly drunk from the nearby happy hour that I was unwittingly footing the $1,000+ bill for. It was also, not so coincidentally, a premature celebration of our ousting. The others, drinking themselves silly but blocks away, were wholly unaware of our collective decrepit state of composure. Oblivious to the face-punching reality that we were no longer the combined force that they had been soothed into taking checks from. That we were all, in fact, getting a big-ass divorce from each other. That in all honesty, we were never really a cohesive group to begin with. The deathbed-truth of it was that none of us really liked each other much to begin with.
Knifing each other over the imaginary deck chairs of a ship that we supposedly manned, but only existed in the minds of those who simply wished it to exist in the minds of everyone else, except bigger and more valuable.
So he was drunk. His hair gave it all away. Shocks of separated bang-chunks falling down to sharply-yet-lightly touch his grainy-orange forehead like spider legs cradling the hollowed remains of a bronzed fly. His eyes wouldn’t stay trained. They wandered when he spoke. And he kept readjusting himself in his little tube-steel bistro chair as he threw out ultimatum after ultimatum, trying to cross his legs in different respect-demanding patterns, but never quite able to get comfortable. Never a full threat, but always the promise of producing one if pushed. A solid summary of our entire relationship, this interaction.
We two, his paying-problem/reason-to-be, had no idea what to expect from this man. Nothing beyond his typical inebriation. We also knew that he was quite the clever negotiator, even when hunched-swearing drunk. He often played the part just to seem vulnerable. Begging the unwary to assume him in Achilles position, taunting them to try and make a move on him. Quick stricken. The wounded rarely figured out how stuck they were until far too late. Until they were incapable of escape.
The slow bleed seemed to please him.
Lots of cash talk. Who would owe who and under what circumstances it would be most advantageous for all involved. Scenarios on top of scenarios. As if he were but a mere mediator in a process which was beyond his control, yet left to his discretion. “The wheels are already in motion. I’m just trying to help you help yourselves off the ride before you’re thrown off. I’m not your enemy here, this is just how things are. If I were you, I’d cut a deal and avoid any nasty business.”
Bag-man tactics, with the cookie-tossing of every first round. Motherfucker.
We weren’t prepared to play this kind of ball and he knew it. No cups. He’d had us sized-up the first day we’d met, over a year prior. He had been testing us for the entire period between, knowing that this moment was inevitable. He didn’t even need to be sober for it. To him, this was like spreading warm butter over a toasted muffin. A mindless tableside activity which he was capable of executing without the aide of a clear mind or legal support. Try as we might, he had our balls firmly gripped in his wine-stained palm.
And as usual, we had no cups.
In his most previous life, they called him “The Hatchet Man” due to his disturbingly amoral ability to dissolve entities into sellable splinters with deft and swift swings of hardened greed. The fucker was good at it. He liked it. It made him feel useful and important. Fed his rampant vanity like nothing else. Such the vulture.
Some enjoy soaking their hands in pools of warm blood like that.
So there we were, the three of us, sitting in the open-air atrium of the Renaissance Hotel in the Arboretum. A dozen or so floors of vacuous space above our heads. At a predetermined, toy-ish and absolutely empty café table. Public place. Folded arms. Negotiating our way out of each other’s lives.
It was two against one, and he was visibly drunk from the nearby happy hour that I was unwittingly footing the $1,000+ bill for. It was also, not so coincidentally, a premature celebration of our ousting. The others, drinking themselves silly but blocks away, were wholly unaware of our collective decrepit state of composure. Oblivious to the face-punching reality that we were no longer the combined force that they had been soothed into taking checks from. That we were all, in fact, getting a big-ass divorce from each other. That in all honesty, we were never really a cohesive group to begin with. The deathbed-truth of it was that none of us really liked each other much to begin with.
Knifing each other over the imaginary deck chairs of a ship that we supposedly manned, but only existed in the minds of those who simply wished it to exist in the minds of everyone else, except bigger and more valuable.
So he was drunk. His hair gave it all away. Shocks of separated bang-chunks falling down to sharply-yet-lightly touch his grainy-orange forehead like spider legs cradling the hollowed remains of a bronzed fly. His eyes wouldn’t stay trained. They wandered when he spoke. And he kept readjusting himself in his little tube-steel bistro chair as he threw out ultimatum after ultimatum, trying to cross his legs in different respect-demanding patterns, but never quite able to get comfortable. Never a full threat, but always the promise of producing one if pushed. A solid summary of our entire relationship, this interaction.
We two, his paying-problem/reason-to-be, had no idea what to expect from this man. Nothing beyond his typical inebriation. We also knew that he was quite the clever negotiator, even when hunched-swearing drunk. He often played the part just to seem vulnerable. Begging the unwary to assume him in Achilles position, taunting them to try and make a move on him. Quick stricken. The wounded rarely figured out how stuck they were until far too late. Until they were incapable of escape.
The slow bleed seemed to please him.
Lots of cash talk. Who would owe who and under what circumstances it would be most advantageous for all involved. Scenarios on top of scenarios. As if he were but a mere mediator in a process which was beyond his control, yet left to his discretion. “The wheels are already in motion. I’m just trying to help you help yourselves off the ride before you’re thrown off. I’m not your enemy here, this is just how things are. If I were you, I’d cut a deal and avoid any nasty business.”
Bag-man tactics, with the cookie-tossing of every first round. Motherfucker.
We weren’t prepared to play this kind of ball and he knew it. No cups. He’d had us sized-up the first day we’d met, over a year prior. He had been testing us for the entire period between, knowing that this moment was inevitable. He didn’t even need to be sober for it. To him, this was like spreading warm butter over a toasted muffin. A mindless tableside activity which he was capable of executing without the aide of a clear mind or legal support. Try as we might, he had our balls firmly gripped in his wine-stained palm.
And as usual, we had no cups.
Monday, April 24, 2006
1000 Robots Totally Kicks Your Ass
I got a book in the mail earlier this week from Brother Nick. It is BAD ASS. It’s called 1,000 Robots, and it’s a book that catalogues tin toys from the WWII era-forward. I’m into mostly the 50s – 70s stuff myself, and Ava loves all things Robot.
THANKS A BILLION BRUTHA NICK!
The thing about these toys is that the recently produced ones are designed to evoke some sense of nostalgia. Oddly enough, I feel that nostalgia for them even though I never had any when growing up. Odd that I would link myself, my childhood, and my free-wheeling dipstick days to variety of toy which came and went several years before my life was sparked.
Is this marketing at its best? Or is it that some crap (like, say, some really simple and not-very-fun-to-play-with painted-tin toys) actually taps into some shared-consciousness that transcends generations? Shared memory? Collective nostalgia for a “simpler time” which never, never-ever existed in the first place?
If so, it would help to explain why these things are both "collectible" and really only of interest to grown folk. Beyond the pretty colors and possible antiquated wind-up "movement" any these tin-cans might have, children seem pretty unaffected. Good thing, too. 'Cause even the replicas aren't cheap, and I don't know if you're aware, but kids BREAK shit. Constantly. Especially if its not theirs.
We kids are cool like that.
Regardless, the toys are mad-cool, and this book is mad-cooler.
Milk shakes make me poop nowadays. And that’s splendid.
THANKS A BILLION BRUTHA NICK!
The thing about these toys is that the recently produced ones are designed to evoke some sense of nostalgia. Oddly enough, I feel that nostalgia for them even though I never had any when growing up. Odd that I would link myself, my childhood, and my free-wheeling dipstick days to variety of toy which came and went several years before my life was sparked.
Is this marketing at its best? Or is it that some crap (like, say, some really simple and not-very-fun-to-play-with painted-tin toys) actually taps into some shared-consciousness that transcends generations? Shared memory? Collective nostalgia for a “simpler time” which never, never-ever existed in the first place?
If so, it would help to explain why these things are both "collectible" and really only of interest to grown folk. Beyond the pretty colors and possible antiquated wind-up "movement" any these tin-cans might have, children seem pretty unaffected. Good thing, too. 'Cause even the replicas aren't cheap, and I don't know if you're aware, but kids BREAK shit. Constantly. Especially if its not theirs.
We kids are cool like that.
Regardless, the toys are mad-cool, and this book is mad-cooler.
Milk shakes make me poop nowadays. And that’s splendid.
Friday, April 21, 2006
Phone Doody
I used to work for this non-profit profiteering company when I was in college. They had this truly dreadful “mission statement” that read something along the lines of
Or some shit like that.
The main problem with this organization, as good-intentioned as it might have been, lay squarely in the management of the “mission”. To begin, it was a weak concept, full of emotional potholes, pointless vagaries, wispy platitudes, and hair-trigger issues. And the controllers of the inflows/outflows of resources weren’t down with the cause. They weren’t terribly interested in actually making good on any promises, because those shifty promises were not only fraught with plan-less loftiness, but executing on them would surely spell out the outright financial demise of the organization itself.
Non-profits are nothing if they aren’t self-perpetuating.
So the books went into full-on profit-hording mode. Fuck the “clients”, as they were pretty much screwed no matter how you viewed it. Might as well shelve as much cash as possible and treat the non-profit like a real business: invest long-term, buy property, start other satellite for-profit businesses, and keep up a good face for the donating public.
Actually DOING any good is just too fucking hard, apparently.
I knew all this because I worked in the accounting department. I saw all the money movement. Sure, it was all fair and legal, but none of it matched the true spirit of the organization, or the intent of its “mission”. Out of the thirty or so employees, I would estimate that only three, maybe four were actually dedicated to resolving anything remotely related to the stated purpose of the organization. The rest of us were there to either bring in revenue, or count it as it came in. Our contact with the “clients” was limited, if not non-existent.
Except when you worked the phones at the front desk. And man, how I fucking hated doing that.
Customer service has never been an interest of mine. “Sales” and the “customer service” that go along with it directly equate to “bullshitting” and “defending the bullshitting” in my mind. For some reason, answering phones in any scenario, whether it be in a call center, midnight message service, or acting as a receptionist, is all “customer service” to me.
Man, fuck that noise.
Answering people’s rambling-ass questions about whatever-it-is-that-they’re-senselessly-confused-about is not my deal. I don’t have the patience for that nonsense. Oh, but I’m highly hypocritical about it. I have no qualms about being on the OTHER end of that phone, calling up my cellular provider to ask shit like “so, my plan says I get 100 text messages free, which is fine. But I’d like 1,000 text messages free, for free. Is there like, a button you can just push to do that? ‘Cause like Easter candy, I’m both cheap and stupid.”
While I was counting beans in that job, as a lowly bookkeeper, I would get assigned this “rolling” receptionist duty. The full time receptionist, bless her heart, would want to eat lunch at some point during the day, which inevitably left the front desk, along with the phone lines, abandoned. So three or four of us lowly workers would have to take turns covering phones over that period.
Understandably, none of us had any interest in the activity. First of all, we would have to have our lunches extra-early or extra-late on those days to accommodate. Second, it fucking sucks to sit retard-prone by a crappy fax machine and sketchy-internet-connection computer terminal for an hour, praying some half-wit from bum-fucking West Texas doesn’t call in to make you miserable with wandering questions about shit you aren’t equipped to answer questions on. Third, and most important, to sub for the receptionist is to pretty much admit that your position is actually LESS important than theirs (your job can wait, you need to go do some truly important work like answer phones or paint your nails).
What made it even worse was that we didn’t have a full five low-lifers to simply pick up a day of the week for phone duty. At most there were four of us. So we had a goddamn schedule… it was like scheduling lemon-juice enemas. The weeks where you KNEW you’d be working the phones on Monday AND Friday were destroyed well before they actually arrived. You knew those weeks would suck something awful. They were scheduled that way.
After a few weeks of suffering through the same five douche-balloons calling in with questions about services we had promised to deliver, but (surprise!) hadn’t gotten around to, I was seriously contemplating cutting my hands off to avoid further phone duty. The experience, for me, was excruciating. No one else there liked doing it, but I don’t believe they loathed it like I did. I would have preferred to throw myself down a flight of cement stairs, repeatedly, over that very same hour, rather than answer those blinking, crying, chat-chat-chattering phones. Man, FUCK those phones.
So I set myself to finding ways out of doing the work. In life, it’s important to figure out what you like, what you don’t like, what your fetishes are, and how to avoid doing any sort of god-awful bullshit that you hate more than the poetry of lame teens.
Lucky for me, I was in the accounting department, where the money got counted and organized. And like I explained a bit earlier, we weren’t an organization that focused much energy on shit like “justice”, “fair work environment”, or “equality”. In the accounting department specifically, under the direction of our most-frightening CFO, such quaint phrases or concepts were more of a hindrance in our march to amassing the wealth of the free world in a “building fund”. And since I was counting the beans that would eventually add up to the girth of that stalk, I received some special treatment.
Short story long: by explaining to the CFO that working the receptionist desk over lunch was impairing my bean-counting abilities, I not only got out of slaving away in that wretched desk, I also got more smoke breaks.
This, understandably, made me a target for many complaints from my fellow low-lifers, as it was obvious what had gone down. But I like to think that in reality, they were just hating on my self-made fortune because I no longer had to smell the stankin’ ass mouthpiece of that phone while desperately trying to explain to some Prime-Number-Of-Chromosomes from Tyler that “even if we did receive your request for reimbursement of expenses for the last Director’s Retreat, it wouldn’t matter because you aren’t a Director, and you weren’t supposed to be there, so we won’t be sending you or your four cousins a check. So fuck off.”
And I will read this post as a reminder to myself of what has passed, so that I may again respect what I have at present…
Our mission [brilliant opener] is to deliver the best-of-breed services to our clients and their families in order to maximize their efficiency as productive members of society, and to fight for their rights to establish themselves as such.
Or some shit like that.
The main problem with this organization, as good-intentioned as it might have been, lay squarely in the management of the “mission”. To begin, it was a weak concept, full of emotional potholes, pointless vagaries, wispy platitudes, and hair-trigger issues. And the controllers of the inflows/outflows of resources weren’t down with the cause. They weren’t terribly interested in actually making good on any promises, because those shifty promises were not only fraught with plan-less loftiness, but executing on them would surely spell out the outright financial demise of the organization itself.
Non-profits are nothing if they aren’t self-perpetuating.
So the books went into full-on profit-hording mode. Fuck the “clients”, as they were pretty much screwed no matter how you viewed it. Might as well shelve as much cash as possible and treat the non-profit like a real business: invest long-term, buy property, start other satellite for-profit businesses, and keep up a good face for the donating public.
Actually DOING any good is just too fucking hard, apparently.
I knew all this because I worked in the accounting department. I saw all the money movement. Sure, it was all fair and legal, but none of it matched the true spirit of the organization, or the intent of its “mission”. Out of the thirty or so employees, I would estimate that only three, maybe four were actually dedicated to resolving anything remotely related to the stated purpose of the organization. The rest of us were there to either bring in revenue, or count it as it came in. Our contact with the “clients” was limited, if not non-existent.
Except when you worked the phones at the front desk. And man, how I fucking hated doing that.
Customer service has never been an interest of mine. “Sales” and the “customer service” that go along with it directly equate to “bullshitting” and “defending the bullshitting” in my mind. For some reason, answering phones in any scenario, whether it be in a call center, midnight message service, or acting as a receptionist, is all “customer service” to me.
Man, fuck that noise.
Answering people’s rambling-ass questions about whatever-it-is-that-they’re-senselessly-confused-about is not my deal. I don’t have the patience for that nonsense. Oh, but I’m highly hypocritical about it. I have no qualms about being on the OTHER end of that phone, calling up my cellular provider to ask shit like “so, my plan says I get 100 text messages free, which is fine. But I’d like 1,000 text messages free, for free. Is there like, a button you can just push to do that? ‘Cause like Easter candy, I’m both cheap and stupid.”
While I was counting beans in that job, as a lowly bookkeeper, I would get assigned this “rolling” receptionist duty. The full time receptionist, bless her heart, would want to eat lunch at some point during the day, which inevitably left the front desk, along with the phone lines, abandoned. So three or four of us lowly workers would have to take turns covering phones over that period.
Understandably, none of us had any interest in the activity. First of all, we would have to have our lunches extra-early or extra-late on those days to accommodate. Second, it fucking sucks to sit retard-prone by a crappy fax machine and sketchy-internet-connection computer terminal for an hour, praying some half-wit from bum-fucking West Texas doesn’t call in to make you miserable with wandering questions about shit you aren’t equipped to answer questions on. Third, and most important, to sub for the receptionist is to pretty much admit that your position is actually LESS important than theirs (your job can wait, you need to go do some truly important work like answer phones or paint your nails).
What made it even worse was that we didn’t have a full five low-lifers to simply pick up a day of the week for phone duty. At most there were four of us. So we had a goddamn schedule… it was like scheduling lemon-juice enemas. The weeks where you KNEW you’d be working the phones on Monday AND Friday were destroyed well before they actually arrived. You knew those weeks would suck something awful. They were scheduled that way.
After a few weeks of suffering through the same five douche-balloons calling in with questions about services we had promised to deliver, but (surprise!) hadn’t gotten around to, I was seriously contemplating cutting my hands off to avoid further phone duty. The experience, for me, was excruciating. No one else there liked doing it, but I don’t believe they loathed it like I did. I would have preferred to throw myself down a flight of cement stairs, repeatedly, over that very same hour, rather than answer those blinking, crying, chat-chat-chattering phones. Man, FUCK those phones.
So I set myself to finding ways out of doing the work. In life, it’s important to figure out what you like, what you don’t like, what your fetishes are, and how to avoid doing any sort of god-awful bullshit that you hate more than the poetry of lame teens.
Lucky for me, I was in the accounting department, where the money got counted and organized. And like I explained a bit earlier, we weren’t an organization that focused much energy on shit like “justice”, “fair work environment”, or “equality”. In the accounting department specifically, under the direction of our most-frightening CFO, such quaint phrases or concepts were more of a hindrance in our march to amassing the wealth of the free world in a “building fund”. And since I was counting the beans that would eventually add up to the girth of that stalk, I received some special treatment.
Short story long: by explaining to the CFO that working the receptionist desk over lunch was impairing my bean-counting abilities, I not only got out of slaving away in that wretched desk, I also got more smoke breaks.
This, understandably, made me a target for many complaints from my fellow low-lifers, as it was obvious what had gone down. But I like to think that in reality, they were just hating on my self-made fortune because I no longer had to smell the stankin’ ass mouthpiece of that phone while desperately trying to explain to some Prime-Number-Of-Chromosomes from Tyler that “even if we did receive your request for reimbursement of expenses for the last Director’s Retreat, it wouldn’t matter because you aren’t a Director, and you weren’t supposed to be there, so we won’t be sending you or your four cousins a check. So fuck off.”
And I will read this post as a reminder to myself of what has passed, so that I may again respect what I have at present…
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Hollabackcaucasian!
Alright. So my blog was dead for a week.
It happens. Sometimes, the blog gods look down and say: “man, fuck you and your bullshit navel-gazing. We’re letting this crappy online word-vomit get caught up in your work’s firewall, so that someone in upper management can spend an hour cruising through your stories of covering yourself in various human humors and materials. And they’ll read about how you almost seem proud of it, you idiot.”
And then the gods will add, quite obnoxiously, “Ha. Plus you’re a dick.”
And if you happen to be on your way out of town as you receive notice that your place of paycheck has banned your blog site, specifically, by the admin’s own hand-coding into the firewall/gateway software… well, you might go ahead and cloak your ramblings for a minute or two as well.
Now, well, I just don’t see how it matters.
I just got back from Guanajuato today, and went straight into work, wondering whether or not some sort of shit was going to end up hitting some other sort of fan. Instead, I got hit with a rather tremendous project, which my direct boss, quite understandably, is not interested in tackling alone.
Keep in mind that in my job, rarely am I given truly interesting problems to solve. This problem, however, is fascinating. So it appears that me and my little online graffiti board here, are in no danger of being asked to put together a box. Not anytime soon, anyhow.
Honestly, I try very hard to avoid being fired for anything I do outside of work. My place of business is rather conservative, as it should be, so I do my best to keep the brightest and most blinding (read: obnoxious and offensive) parts of my personality in check.
But I don’t check them here. So, as long as they read this with a sense of humor, then I’m cucumber. Otherwise, I’ll be dialing Houston and shit.
Lot’s of insider commentary there. Like Navajo code. But not even close.
Travel journal to come in the next few days. Lots to ramble about. Word be bond.
It happens. Sometimes, the blog gods look down and say: “man, fuck you and your bullshit navel-gazing. We’re letting this crappy online word-vomit get caught up in your work’s firewall, so that someone in upper management can spend an hour cruising through your stories of covering yourself in various human humors and materials. And they’ll read about how you almost seem proud of it, you idiot.”
And then the gods will add, quite obnoxiously, “Ha. Plus you’re a dick.”
And if you happen to be on your way out of town as you receive notice that your place of paycheck has banned your blog site, specifically, by the admin’s own hand-coding into the firewall/gateway software… well, you might go ahead and cloak your ramblings for a minute or two as well.
Now, well, I just don’t see how it matters.
I just got back from Guanajuato today, and went straight into work, wondering whether or not some sort of shit was going to end up hitting some other sort of fan. Instead, I got hit with a rather tremendous project, which my direct boss, quite understandably, is not interested in tackling alone.
Keep in mind that in my job, rarely am I given truly interesting problems to solve. This problem, however, is fascinating. So it appears that me and my little online graffiti board here, are in no danger of being asked to put together a box. Not anytime soon, anyhow.
Honestly, I try very hard to avoid being fired for anything I do outside of work. My place of business is rather conservative, as it should be, so I do my best to keep the brightest and most blinding (read: obnoxious and offensive) parts of my personality in check.
But I don’t check them here. So, as long as they read this with a sense of humor, then I’m cucumber. Otherwise, I’ll be dialing Houston and shit.
Lot’s of insider commentary there. Like Navajo code. But not even close.
Travel journal to come in the next few days. Lots to ramble about. Word be bond.
Monday, March 20, 2006
SxSW 2006: Day Two and The Book
Whoa, snap. I’ve been mad-behind on my updates, but that’s because my internal organs were crying foul, and there are portions of my brain which may be permanently deceased as a result of all that went down this past week.
My word, what a mess. Always.
Tuesday night marked the second day of my SxSW 2006 bender (man, there must be a better way to entertain myself, right?). But in reality, the prior Friday was the first day (where I attended a somewhat lame-ish poetry reading at Deville, where I spiraled into a drunken, confused oblivion by the time the third rhyme-mangler took the stage). Saturday was a clutch of events and parties, which caused me additional drunkitude. I never really got a break between the weekend and the week of SxSW. Sunday night was rather tame, but the dealings of Friday and Saturday were strong enough to keep me soused well through.
Tuesday hit with a relative calm. Still holding down the day jobby-job. So I had the great fortune of being allowed to plod through my absolutely crippling hang over from the night before whilst staring at endlessly linked spreadsheets, pained in a shitty swivel chair, under the humming lights of a fluorescent hell… wondering whether or not my misty perspiration was booze-scented. One never knows how long it takes to stop sweating out the prior night. Could take weeks.
After work, I actually went for a jog. To aid in getting the toxins out of my system. I believe it worked rather well, since I felt like a thrice-used prison condom before the jog, and about a five dollar bill after.
That makes absolutely no sense, whatsoever. Suffice to say, I felt much better after my jog.
After the jog, it was over to Allen Chen’s crib to bag shwag for the Austinist parties. Magazines, stickers, pins, hand-written notes of random sexual description, and other unnecessary budget-sucking marketing garbage which will necessitate the hiring of hundreds more street sweepers to clean off the cobbled tops of our downtown streets.
The notes were written, but only in my mind. And they were REALLY random. Like, bat-on-stryrofoam-duck-decoy sex. Screwdriver-in-light-socket-bucket-of-water type shit. Goat asphyxiation. And I don’t even know what that last one means.
Never got penned though, and that’s assured to be best for the population. Specifically for the individual shwag-grabber, if not the general population as a whole. Plus, there’s the whole Austinist rep to consider. I doubt Allen would appreciate the bat-on-decoy humor if some successful, unfortunately religious label exec were to have been the one to nab and read it along with the newest copy of Urbland Taist magawhatever. Might have been a tragedy.
Allen treated those of us there to stuff bags, by stuffing us with a couple of cocktails.
That sounds like some sort of sexual double-entendre, and if I meant it that way, it would be hilarious. But a blog is no place for inside jokery. It’s a place of mild embarrassment and platitude-laden navel gazing. So there’s no way I’d be talking about him here.
Back to me.
Few drinks into the evening, and I breezed out to meet up with Ceeplus (Eric) over at The Peacock for his pre-SxSW party. When I got in, Richard Henry was spinning.
Richard’s good people. He’s worked with Ceeplus before, and I definitely see him around town. We have a host of friends in common. That, and he’s a founding Feedback partner. Interesting to hear/see him on the decks. I knew he was known for spinning around town here and there, but I’d never run across it.
Starsign (Dave) got up on the tables after Richard, and dutifully did his thing. People weren’t drunk enough to really get down yet, so he was holding it all up on musical merit alone. There are songs that people WANT to dance to, there are songs that people WILL dance to (if: drunk, at a country wedding, or violently coerced), and there are songs people ONLY listen to (usually because they don’t dance at all, or they really, really, really love the song and prefer to kick back and dissolve whilst listening). It’s hard to nail that third variety without blowing straight past it into muzak/background music territory. Takes a delicate touch, and a mastery of music purpose. I could never manage to pull that off, but Dave’s pretty capable. I know he prefers to maneuver crowds that are up and moving, but admittedly, it’s much-much-much easier to keep an already-excited crowd than it is to build one. Them’s just facts.
Cee did his thing, and then Klassen showed up to finish off [my] night. I had to leave in the midst of Klassen’s set because I had reached a level of buzzed where I will talk almost incessantly about a single thing, and what I say about that singularity
Will
Not
Change,
Ever.
At some point in a night of hard drinking, I’d say hour 2, I usually make some unconscious and almost arbitrary decision concerning what pointless topic I will be beating the living shit out of for the remainder of the night. And on that Tuesday, it was my book. The book that I finished weeks ago, but have yet to do anything with.
And that’s what makes it so obnoxious. If the topic I had chosen had been something like “how brittle and useless those fucking apple crates from Fiesta are,” then I’d be alright with bothering strangers about it. But you can’t go around blabbing like a goddamn string-pull doll about shit you’ve either never done, are in all probability aren’t going to do. That’s just insincere bullshit. Unless you’re talking about being a ninja, becoming a wombat wrestler, or how you’d totally take a bulldozer through the drive-through at Popeye’s Chicken if you had a pink one, and that’s perfectly acceptable bullshit. Or, as in this case, if YOU’D NEVER WRITTEN A BOOK BEFORE.
If you’ve never written a book, well, then you’re just lying. And drunk people lie all the time. Comes with the territory. That’s why it’s best to only hang around other drunkards, because they won’t remember what ridiculous lies you slobbered out the night before. That, or they’ll confuse their lies with yours and just chalk it all up to hang over delirium, which is equally safe.
But I was actually chatting with people who actually READ what I write every now and again. They didn’t know it was me, necessarily, because it was out on the anonyrnets, but they had read my shit somewhere online. Then, I go and ramble on about how I’d finished a project which is still, clearly in the infant stages of development.
So now there’s added pressure and shit. Not much extra, but still. I mean, who needs extra pressure for purely creative endeavors, eh?
Goddamn alcohol. You’re supposed to hold me down and help me scuttle my potential, not whip me forward and force me to produce.
Not cool.
Tomorrow is the official beginning of the SxSW reporting thing. It may be here, it may be up on the Austinist site. Depends on my mood, and that of the editorial staff. They may pull what I write. Plus, the material’ll be a week old by tomorrow.
Meh.
Yeah, I’m late, but so fucking what? I haven’t taken a shit in two days. Being blackout drunk for a good three out of seven nights of binge drinking coupled with fevered bouts of half-sleep really, really fucks with the standard operation of even a healthy man’s colon. Whatchu got on that? Huh?
Nothing. You’ve got NOTHING.
My butt hurts.
My word, what a mess. Always.
Tuesday night marked the second day of my SxSW 2006 bender (man, there must be a better way to entertain myself, right?). But in reality, the prior Friday was the first day (where I attended a somewhat lame-ish poetry reading at Deville, where I spiraled into a drunken, confused oblivion by the time the third rhyme-mangler took the stage). Saturday was a clutch of events and parties, which caused me additional drunkitude. I never really got a break between the weekend and the week of SxSW. Sunday night was rather tame, but the dealings of Friday and Saturday were strong enough to keep me soused well through.
Tuesday hit with a relative calm. Still holding down the day jobby-job. So I had the great fortune of being allowed to plod through my absolutely crippling hang over from the night before whilst staring at endlessly linked spreadsheets, pained in a shitty swivel chair, under the humming lights of a fluorescent hell… wondering whether or not my misty perspiration was booze-scented. One never knows how long it takes to stop sweating out the prior night. Could take weeks.
After work, I actually went for a jog. To aid in getting the toxins out of my system. I believe it worked rather well, since I felt like a thrice-used prison condom before the jog, and about a five dollar bill after.
That makes absolutely no sense, whatsoever. Suffice to say, I felt much better after my jog.
After the jog, it was over to Allen Chen’s crib to bag shwag for the Austinist parties. Magazines, stickers, pins, hand-written notes of random sexual description, and other unnecessary budget-sucking marketing garbage which will necessitate the hiring of hundreds more street sweepers to clean off the cobbled tops of our downtown streets.
The notes were written, but only in my mind. And they were REALLY random. Like, bat-on-stryrofoam-duck-decoy sex. Screwdriver-in-light-socket-bucket-of-water type shit. Goat asphyxiation. And I don’t even know what that last one means.
Never got penned though, and that’s assured to be best for the population. Specifically for the individual shwag-grabber, if not the general population as a whole. Plus, there’s the whole Austinist rep to consider. I doubt Allen would appreciate the bat-on-decoy humor if some successful, unfortunately religious label exec were to have been the one to nab and read it along with the newest copy of Urbland Taist magawhatever. Might have been a tragedy.
Allen treated those of us there to stuff bags, by stuffing us with a couple of cocktails.
That sounds like some sort of sexual double-entendre, and if I meant it that way, it would be hilarious. But a blog is no place for inside jokery. It’s a place of mild embarrassment and platitude-laden navel gazing. So there’s no way I’d be talking about him here.
Back to me.
Few drinks into the evening, and I breezed out to meet up with Ceeplus (Eric) over at The Peacock for his pre-SxSW party. When I got in, Richard Henry was spinning.
Richard’s good people. He’s worked with Ceeplus before, and I definitely see him around town. We have a host of friends in common. That, and he’s a founding Feedback partner. Interesting to hear/see him on the decks. I knew he was known for spinning around town here and there, but I’d never run across it.
Starsign (Dave) got up on the tables after Richard, and dutifully did his thing. People weren’t drunk enough to really get down yet, so he was holding it all up on musical merit alone. There are songs that people WANT to dance to, there are songs that people WILL dance to (if: drunk, at a country wedding, or violently coerced), and there are songs people ONLY listen to (usually because they don’t dance at all, or they really, really, really love the song and prefer to kick back and dissolve whilst listening). It’s hard to nail that third variety without blowing straight past it into muzak/background music territory. Takes a delicate touch, and a mastery of music purpose. I could never manage to pull that off, but Dave’s pretty capable. I know he prefers to maneuver crowds that are up and moving, but admittedly, it’s much-much-much easier to keep an already-excited crowd than it is to build one. Them’s just facts.
Cee did his thing, and then Klassen showed up to finish off [my] night. I had to leave in the midst of Klassen’s set because I had reached a level of buzzed where I will talk almost incessantly about a single thing, and what I say about that singularity
Will
Not
Change,
Ever.
At some point in a night of hard drinking, I’d say hour 2, I usually make some unconscious and almost arbitrary decision concerning what pointless topic I will be beating the living shit out of for the remainder of the night. And on that Tuesday, it was my book. The book that I finished weeks ago, but have yet to do anything with.
And that’s what makes it so obnoxious. If the topic I had chosen had been something like “how brittle and useless those fucking apple crates from Fiesta are,” then I’d be alright with bothering strangers about it. But you can’t go around blabbing like a goddamn string-pull doll about shit you’ve either never done, are in all probability aren’t going to do. That’s just insincere bullshit. Unless you’re talking about being a ninja, becoming a wombat wrestler, or how you’d totally take a bulldozer through the drive-through at Popeye’s Chicken if you had a pink one, and that’s perfectly acceptable bullshit. Or, as in this case, if YOU’D NEVER WRITTEN A BOOK BEFORE.
If you’ve never written a book, well, then you’re just lying. And drunk people lie all the time. Comes with the territory. That’s why it’s best to only hang around other drunkards, because they won’t remember what ridiculous lies you slobbered out the night before. That, or they’ll confuse their lies with yours and just chalk it all up to hang over delirium, which is equally safe.
But I was actually chatting with people who actually READ what I write every now and again. They didn’t know it was me, necessarily, because it was out on the anonyrnets, but they had read my shit somewhere online. Then, I go and ramble on about how I’d finished a project which is still, clearly in the infant stages of development.
So now there’s added pressure and shit. Not much extra, but still. I mean, who needs extra pressure for purely creative endeavors, eh?
Goddamn alcohol. You’re supposed to hold me down and help me scuttle my potential, not whip me forward and force me to produce.
Not cool.
Tomorrow is the official beginning of the SxSW reporting thing. It may be here, it may be up on the Austinist site. Depends on my mood, and that of the editorial staff. They may pull what I write. Plus, the material’ll be a week old by tomorrow.
Meh.
Yeah, I’m late, but so fucking what? I haven’t taken a shit in two days. Being blackout drunk for a good three out of seven nights of binge drinking coupled with fevered bouts of half-sleep really, really fucks with the standard operation of even a healthy man’s colon. Whatchu got on that? Huh?
Nothing. You’ve got NOTHING.
My butt hurts.
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