Working your job

I stopped at the McDonald’s drive-through this morning.  It was 6:40am and the world was just coming to life.  I had good tunes playing on the iPod and the air still had that cool, crisp feeling of morning.  That nice breathable air that exists just before the daystar violates the horizon.

While waiting in line I watched a man cleaning the parking lot.  He had a broom and bucket and he was sweeping up the trash people left behind.  He wasn’t a teenager but still not old.  Probably just a few years younger than me.  He wore his uniform well and I noticed he was pretty thorough, reaching down to pick up the debris that wouldn’t respond to his broom.

It came time for me to place my order.  The mumbly sad voice on the speaker did nothing to increase my appetite.  In fact, it was impossibly difficult to understand.  I asked for a coffee and a burrito.  The voice of apathy gave me my total and told me to pull around to the first window.

The sweeping man is now behind the bushes picking up trash from places that no one can see.  He is bending into the shrubbery and pulling out many small bags of trash.  The entire time, I notice he has a calm, placid look about him.  He is not giving any outward appearances of being unhappy in his work.  In fact, there is a small hint of a smile on his face at all times.  ”It’s just part of the job, something that must be done” his face seems to say.

I get to the window and I am disturbed to realize that the drive-through speaker was not the cause of the incoherent voice.  A frumpy teenager in a hooded sweatshirt and a sideways ballcap holds out his hand for my money.  He mumbles something under his breath that I can only assume is the total of the bill.  He takes my money, hands me a receipt and in the clearest voice, unlike his previous mutterings, tells me to “have a blessed day”.

Before I drive off to begin my day (blessed or unblessed) I take one final look over at the man sweeping up.  I imagine he is new to the job.  Sweeping the parking lot is probably the lowest job they offer.  His next chore is probably cleaning the bathrooms.  But he looks so… accepting… of the tasks before him.  I’m sure he wants more, one day, he’ll work his way up to being the guy who sits in the window and takes my money.  Will he still exude the same calm and resolve?  Or will he become jaded and mumble throughout the day like the kid in the hoodie?

As I make the turn around the corner, he looks up and smiles at me.  I nod back at him and offer him a great big smile in return.  I wonder if he knows how much he inspired me today…

Hey, you know all that talk yesterday about how I was going to unload and make all of you hate me?  Well, I feel better now.  Unrelated and amazingly insignificant events conspired to steal my burning hatred away.  So, no self-destructing blog post coming any time soon.  I’m not deleting what I half-wrote, I still firmly believe it all and I may want to spew at some point in the near future but for right now… right now I just want to give each of you a hug.

That’s fucked up right?  Coming from me?  I’m not the hippie-type but I’m having a few hours of unexpected (and unexplained) happiness and I just don’t feel the roiling anger beneath the pores of my skin.  Not right now I don’t.  This wasn’t the result of seeing some accident or burn victim and remembering that most people have it worse off than I do…  I hate that kind of emotional hijacking and it probably would have fueled my raging post more than spoiling it.  No, this mild temperament is nothing more than a few wildly random and totally unrelated occurrences that just made me calm down for a little while.

And don’t worry about what topic I was going to alienate you with.  It wasn’t anything personal, just a bunch of things some of you were likely to take personal.  We all have our pet topics, I was going to step on every single one of them.  The problem is that when I finally get upset enough to rage about something, the last person to remind me of the problem always thinks they are the only person I’m upset at.  No, if it’s only one person, I can deal with it.  It’s societal trends and mass behavior that normally gets me upset.  If it were just YOU, I’d probably ask you about it or I’d ignore it…  And besides, you’ll probably see the blog post soon enough.  But maybe I’ll write the rest of it from a calm state of mind rather than the chaotic fist-on-keyboard banging I was doing the other night when I began writing it up.

So, enjoy the weekend, try to smile a little bit.  Call someone, visit someone, live life before you die…

I was working outside with a contractor on Monday.  We have to escort contractors any time they are on property.  When they took a break, they asked if it was alright if they smoked in the area we were in.  I said it would be fine and they took their break.  After a few minutes one of them asked, “I thought you smoked.”  I told them I wasn’t feeling very well so I wasn’t going to.  After this went round and round for a few minutes it turns out that none of them could believe that I wasn’t going to smoke today.  Any time I’ll be working outside for a while, I enjoy smelling my cigars and they had seen me smoke with them the last few times they were out here.  But this week I’ve been feeling under the weather and chose not to aggravate my body any further.  In fact, I haven’t smoked anything since New Years Eve.  These guys just could not believe that.

A similar thing happened to me a few years ago in Chicago.  When I was on the road I used to smoke clove cigarettes because they smelled good and they were much quicker than a cigar.  I’d take the contractors outside at 3am in the freezing cold and they had their cigarette breaks.  In those conditions, you don’t want a nice 30 minute cigar, a quick cigarette does the trick.  One time I was out of the cloves so I didn’t light up.  One guy offered me one of his regular cigarettes and was confused when I turned him down.  Almost to the point of being offended that I wouldn’t accept his offer.

Another guy I worked with in Miami was surprised to notice that I didn’t smoke on my travel days.  Teresa hates the smell so I wouldn’t smoke for two days before I went home.  I wasn’t hiding anything from her, she knew (but did NOT approve) of my little road habit I picked up.  This guy refused to believe that I didn’t smoke all weekend when I was home.  ”Yeah, but you sneak one out in the backyard or the garage right?”  No.  I just don’t smoke.  He then went on to make fun of me for the rest of the time we worked together.

These people are giving me shit for NOT smoking…  What the hell?  Guys, the bad decision is in lighting up at all.  I know it every time I flick that lighter…  When one of you gets the right idea and decides not to, you should be congratulating him, not dragging him back down into your stinky ashtrays.  I smoke like I drink; I’ll indulge, have fun and then I’ll ignore it for months at a time before going back at it.  For Teresa’s party in September we bought two cases of beer.  Everyone drank the margaritas and we still had one and a half cases of beer left over.  It’s been over four months and I still have one full case.  Half of what’s gone was offered up to guests, two were used in cooking shrimp and brats and Teresa drank one…

Maybe I just don’t have an addictive nature but seriously, I was beginning to smoke pretty regularly while I lived in Chicago.  I had a room on the smoking floor of the hotel, the window was open and I just sat there writing and smoking every day and all weekend long.  Every two weeks I’d crush out my last one on Wednesday night.  Friday morning I’d fly home and I wouldn’t smoke again until Monday afternoon after getting back to O’Hare and I’d pretty much smoke continuously until it was time to fly home again.  When I finally came off the road, the brand of cigarettes I was smoking were banned so I just quit.  It was just that easy for me.  Hell, I didn’t pick up a cigar for over a year and a half after that.  It’s just not addictive to me.  I know it is to most other people but why am I catching hell for this strange “superpower”?

I don’t get it.  It’s like they are afraid one of us is going to get away.  As if lung cancer is lurking out there like a zombie in a room full of people.  Like they think they can hide from it in a large crowd but as the crowd thins, their chances of getting hit go up?  I have no idea what these people are thinking but I have run into enough people that think like this that I’m starting to think it’s some kind of strange cult where they won’t let you quit the gang or something…

Just when I think I’ve got things back under control, they go askew again.

Control is an illusion, I’ll never have things truly “under control” but I can usually at least gain a sense of “normal”.  I’ve been ill since Thursday.  I feel fine but I’ve got a horrible hacking cough and there is a complete drain of energy.  Along with that has come a complete lack of coherency in my brain.  I have done absolutely NO writing this weekend.  Saturday and Sunday mornings are usually my best times to write but I just couldn’t get my fingers moving.  I opened a page and I’d slam out three or four sentences and they sucked.

I couldn’t even pull off a cogent blog post.  Yesterday was my mother’s birthday and I’ve had this fog of an idea of writing something about mothers in my head.  What better time to post it than on Mom’s birthday right?  I sat there for an hour and couldn’t get three words to make sense together.  So I said, “screw it” and went back to bed.

I tried playing video games, I went to the store, I sat around the house…  Nothing made any sense to me.  I began to fear that something in my head slipped loose.  Today I’m still feeling loopy and I make no promises that what I write will make any sense but I’m posting anyway because it’s been several days since my last…

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Saturday we had to go out to what is left of Regency Square Mall.  I’ve let my conceal-carry permit expire (government job, unable to carry on property) so I was staying alert to everything around me.  It wasn’t as bad as I expected.  We were there about a year ago and I actually felt in danger but Saturday was pretty calm.  As we walked through the food court, I watched everyone.  After a few minutes I started to relax.  I calmed down on my hyper-alert for any immediate danger but I also relaxed some of my regular up-tightness.  I observed two examples of my own bias and bigotry.  Things that I try to capture, examine and minimize.  So I expose them here for you to ridicule me…

Most of you know that I have a pretty bad hang-up about everyone running out to get tattoos and piercings.  It was the cool-hip thing for a while and I despised it.  Most of you know I have dear friends, loved ones and others that have tattoos, some are fully sleeved, and I even have tattoos myself.  Most of you know I spent several years hanging out in a tattoo/piercing shop.  How do I live with this contradiction?  I just do.  I don’t try to explain it, I just accept my double-standard and move on with my life.

But when I saw all these twenty-year-olds with exposed tats and fully gauged ears, I didn’t give my “old man scowl” like I usually do.  This time I smiled.  I’ve been paying attention to all these “occupy” protests and how the numbers are stacking up about how difficult it is to find a job even with a college degree.  I looked over at my daughter, the one with normal looking ears, no tattoos on her exposed flesh and I smiled.  I know it’s my own bias but given two applicants, identical in skill but one has face-tats, I’m hiring the other one.  You can holler at me all you want about how the managers are getting younger and more accepting of “alternative people” but I still say that if you’re looking for a corporate job, or scientific grant or anything other than unskilled labor, the exposed tats are not helping.  Undoubtedly this is changing but in the immediate future, in the age that she’ll be looking for a job, she’ll probably be better off looking “traditional”.

This girl just had a conversation with me the other day about how she went to a party with ten friends.  Nine of them had dyed hair, multiple piercings, gauged ears…  She told me, “I wanted to be different and unusual but after looking at how they were ALL the same, I was the already the unusual one.”  That’s right kid, that’s right.  At 15, she’s already figured out what it took me until my late 20′s to learn.

If you haven’t seen the movie “SLC Punk” and you’re about my age, you should go check it out.  It’s a great slice of 80′s life but there is a scene in it where a girl asks the stereotypical punk-rocker why he’s dressed that way.  (Mohawk, suspenders, Doc Martens)  He says it’s a statement of rebellion, a way to stand out.  She tells him that he looks like everyone else, that he’s wearing a uniform.  Hit me like a thunderbolt.  The day I saw that movie was the day I stopped giving a shit about style and fashion.  And that was late in life, only about 15 years ago.  So all I can hope for is that she remembers just how much “normal” can shift in a few short years.

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So that was a cute story that didn’t make me look too bad.  A little bias against tattoos, a HUGE double-standard exposed.  but I still come off as a decent guy.  I hesitate to expose my next encounter because it exposes something in me that I hate to acknowledge.

We walked into one of the stores and the PA was playing some music.  The last song had ended and the next one was the opening bass riff from the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer”.  We walked past some of the store patrons and one guy was bouncing to the beat and mimicking the bass line.  The reason I noticed and the reason I’m confused WHY I noticed was because he was black.

This wasn’t the first black guy I’ve seen that was into the Talking Heads.  But it is a bit unusual.  It just made me notice.  But then I thought, “Well, maybe some rapper sampled the Psycho Killer bass line and that’s where he knows it from.”  That’s the thought that made me cringe.  Somewhere in my head there is still a line between “black” and “white” music.  This line exists in a brain that listens to Ice-T, Run DMC, Public Enemy…  What would this guy think if I was singing along with “Straight Outta Compton”?  Truth is, I’d get my ass kicked.

There is still a line between white/black music and it’s mostly balanced on the infamous word “Nigga”.  Spell it any way you like, when I come to a stop light and I’m singing along with Easy-E, I stop singing.  So it’s just fine to have this man bopping along with Psycho Killer and I still listen to some of the early raps.  But I think either side is within their rights to notice…