Mixed Emotions

This whole move thing has me filled with mixed emotions.

On the one hand, I will not miss the noise of the street behind the apartments. This street is more like living next to a raceway than living in a residential neighborhood.

The only time that street is quiet is between 2:30 am and 2:45 am any other time it’s an endless parade of cars zipping along, motorcycles, and modified drift car wannabes roaring by, and various larger trucks rumbling along. 

Sirens and ambulances scream by at all hours of the day and night.

After a while you start to ignore most of the road noise.

The Apartment complex is an older one and has older people in it. Ambulances and paramedics roll up at least once a day to cart some unfortunate person off to the hospital, or the morgue.

2 Zen living room

This is a plain no extras complex and it’s showing it’s age. The walls are paper thin and the windows single pane. You can hear everything. People having conversations in the parking lot, some of the younger folks are still sexually active and so you hear them pounding away on creaky beds. The tenants that are hard of hearing will let you enjoy their movies, music, or operas at all hours of the day and night.

It’s not restful and it’s hard to sleep.

We’ve just had 4 weeks of tree removal. They came through and took out all the grand eucalyptus trees that provided shade and put a sweetness in the air. Now we’ve been dealing with plumbing issues and the sidewalks are all torn up with the attendant heavy construction crews coming in at 6am to haul away broken concrete jackhammer up more sidewalks and generally yelling across the parking lot at each other. 

It’s been a dusty noisy environment and parking is a nightmare. 

All that being said, this was my place. Things remained where I put them and I was in complete control of my little space. It has been home to me and I’m not really looking forward to sharing my space with another person again.

The plus side of the mountain hose is that it’s quiet

HoardingI have a monumental cleanup task waiting on me at the house in the mountains. Part of that task is a creation of my own in that I haven’t been there with enough energy to clean out the stacks of frankly un-necessary paper left in my office on my desk. I’ve already had trouble putting my stuff back in the house because the other person that lives there is a major packrat.

Before I got this place, I had been feeling compressed into smaller and smaller space. My absence has compounded the problem. I can’t get to my workout bench anymore, There’s no way I can get my motorcycle out of the garage and I can just barely fit my car in the 2.5 car garage. The basement storage area is a fucking disaster with barely a path between junk that hasn’t seen the light of day in 10 years, longer if you count the time pre-fire. I know I have stuff in the basement that needs to find it’s way to the trash heap, I can’t find my stuff that needs to go away, because of all the other stuff that’s been stacked around it. That all has to change, and it’s going to be a battle.

This is a battle I’m not looking forward to.

There will be hurt feelings  and passive aggressive anger and I’m sure it will be an unpleasant time. But I need to focus on trimming down all the shit because a longer term goal is my future. If I find a position with a company outside of California I want to be able to make a clean break of it. I want to take all my shit from well defined areas and put it in a truck and be done. I don’t want my stuff in 3 or 4 different places I want everything in one place Easily accessible, defined, labeled, and movable.

The storage facility I just rented may provide a space in which I can move, sort, trash, and store my stuff.

2014 04 20 15 45 131I suppose I’m getting to a point where I don’t place the same value on sentimentality that I once did. Things don’t matter all that much to me, Stuff is an anchor that makes it hard for you to move literally and figuratively.

I’d like to be able to haul anchor and go. I want simplicity

It’s been a long haul

Wow, December since the last entry.

A lot has happened, and yet nothing has.

I’m still at the same shitty job, hope is fading. I still don’t know what to do about the other half situation and the odds of finding another job seem very low at best.

As to my future I haven’t a clue.

There have been some bright spots. I’ve been able to play a couple of times sexually and those times have been enjoyable.

Apparently due to a clerical error, I’m now at risk of losing my job which led to me having a major panic/anxiety attack this morning because I was going to be late to work. You’d think that wasn’t cause for a panic attack, but here’s how it went down.

A freeway transition was closed, forcing me to divert to another freeway. I got off at the next exit and tried turning around because I was going in a completely opposite direction from the direction that I needed to go. As I got off the freeway, the inbound entrance (going in the direction I needed to go,) was closed.

OK, I started trying to take surface routes from where I was, to where I needed to be. No joy! One dead end after another, and of course the navigation system was telling me to head back to the freeway (that was closed) useless!

So I pull over to the curb, fire up the maps program on the phone and start looking at the roads, trying to chart a course that would get me to work. I was after all, only 4 miles away. Trouble is, the dead ends are because there is no direct way to get where I needed to go. To traverse the 4 miles I was going to have to go 15 miles. Okay fine! I put the car in gear and there’s this grinding noise as I make yet another U-turn.

What the FUCK???

I put the car back in park, get out, and see that as I pulled over to the curb there must have been a traffic cone lying on its side which is now firmly wedged under the car. GREAT! Just FUCKING GREAT!

I have less than 10 minutes to get to work and 15 miles to go not counting delays caused by the invariably poorly timed lights in San Diego.

This isn’t going to work! I’m going to be late! If I’m late they’ll give me an occurrence, if I get another occurrence, I’m gonna be fired.

And that’s when the meltdown began.

Rage! Burning bright, roaring in my ears, my chest heaving and heart pounding. Panic set in and I fucking lost it. I’m crying, I’m laughing, I’m cursing. Head pounding, tunnel vision setting in and I’m fully out of control.

I do the math in my head, if I call to say I’m going to be late I get an occurrence, If I call out for the whole day, I use up one of my last sick days, but I don’t get an occurrence.

I call out for the day.

1st Problem solved.

Now I have time to address the next problem, how do I get this fucking cone out from underneath the car?

I need more clearance between the street and the underside of the car. A car jack comes to mind. Yep! That’ll do the trick…

My car has run-flat tires, there is no jack in the trunk. DAMN IT!!!!!

There are no gas stations as far as I can see, So limping into one and using a floor jack is out of the question!

Still in the waning grip of the anxiety attack I’m suddenly very tired and very depressed. Mentally I kick myself for being such a weak fucked up pussy.

I lean against the hood just about to start really sobbing, furtively I glance around to see if anyone is going to see my second meltdown in 20 minutes.

As I glance around, I notice the driveways into businesses are all very steep. It’s characteristic of San Diego where you’re bound to damage your front end trying to get to an ice cream shop. Gotta keep the paint and body shops in business right???

Humm,

I get back in the car pull across the street to the steepest driveway I can find. Slowly, I back up the incline stopping where I guess the largest distance between the bottom of the car and gutter in the street will be. (As an aside, did you know that some cars won’t let you get into reverse if the fucking driver door is open? “For your safety and convenience… MY ASS!

My guess is a good one. There’s enough gap to yank the offending cone from under the car. I don’t see any damage to the car. Of course, I’m looking in the dark using my phone as a flashlight, where the fuck is my Maglight?

2nd Problem Solved 

It’s 35 minutes past my start time.

If I worked for a real company, I’d have made my way to work, gone to the men’s room, washed my hands and gotten to work.

I don’t work for a real company. I work for a bunch of shitheads who are more into punishing their employees regardless of the situation, and making the workplace as hostile and stressful as they possibly can, within the limits of the law.

I tell the navigation system to take me back to my apartment. 40 minutes later I’m closing my front door taking my clothes off and crawling back into bed.

It’s warm and cozy and I drift off to sleep.

After a couple hours sleep, I wake, jerk off and begin contemplating the 3rd Problem, while sorting clothes for a trip to the laundry room.

The 3rd Problem is a bit trickier. I need a job, but at what cost?

Jobs are supposed to be simple exchanges. I provide a service you need and you pay for that service. My politics, personal situation, and buy-in to your company politics or anything else should be irrelevant.

I work, you pay, end of discussion. If I don’t work, you don’t pay… THAT’S the punishment for me not being there.

Modern American Businesses don’t see it this way. They seem to think that you’re supposed to feel privileged to work for them, and part of that privilege is that you’re supposed to allow them to run your fucking life. “Oh sorry you can’t take that day off because we need you. Oh You had a vacation planned? Sorry you’ll have to cancel it.

Did I earn that vacation time? Yes? Then I’m taking it! Do I understand and accept that I’m taking a day off without pay? Then Shut the fuck up!

What? You mean you don’t enjoy being abused by management, and our whiny, perpetual victim-class clients, who we’re charging a shitload of money for our product? What’s not to like? You can buy stock in our company… but you’ll never be able to spend it. What is wrong with you?

Ahh there’s the crux of it… In the end, the company wants you to feel that no matter what, it’s your fault. If you buy into it being your fault, then you’ll also buy into their right to punish you for your “Failings”.

WHO IS JOHN GAULT?

No company or corporation is your friend. No Manager, Supervisor, Vice President, or CEO is your friend. You are not their friend, you are a FREE PERSON.

Friendship predicated on gain, is not friendship. Your life, your joy, and your sorrows, are yours alone. It is not up to your employer to punish you, if you’re not at work, the only right they have is, not to pay you.

As a FREE PERSON, you are responsible for your creations and owe them to no one. You are not obligated to sing the praises of a company or a god that you don’t believe in. You are not obligated to give anything to anyone that you do not choose to give. That includes your time and energy. Likewise, you are not owed anything you have not earned. 

I do not like panic attacks and I don’t ever wish to experience another one because I fear what a company or manager will do.

The only way to win this game, is not to play

3rd Problem – Solution Pending…

Ya Know…

Ok so there’s been all this hubbub about Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation that Brett Kavanaugh did something sexual to her 30 years ago.

If the woman was raped I’m sorry about that, rape is always inexcusable.

That being said, the fact that she’s so fuzzy about the event gives me pause.

Before you get your undergarments in a twist because after all “HOW COULD A MAN know anything about abuse or harassment?”

I can tell you I do.

I clearly remember being 18 years old. I was working my second job at a typesetting house.

The bosses wife was one of the head honchos. Her name was Carolyn. She smoked like a house on fire and always had the stench of bad booze about her. She was thin, almost skeletal. I remember her hair was never attractively styled and she called me “Dumbshit” from day one until day 58 when I walked out of that office never to return.

I learned some interesting things while working at that company, so it wasn’t a total loss. Some of those skills have served me well throughout my career.

But I have a very clear memory of her walking up to me about an hour before quitting time. She said, “Dumbshit, we’re behind so I need you to work overtime tonight.”

I said, “Sure thing,” and asked if I could use the office phone to call my mom to let her know I wouldn’t be at dinner.

The call made, I went about my work, I said goodnight to the other workers, and Carolyn’s husband, as they left.

I kept the machines I was responsible for churning out their galleys. Each galley I took over to the light table and cut into the appropriate lengths so that they could be mounted to photo boards.

I was also cutting and pasting edited lines into the completed galleys while keeping an eye on my machines.

Yes, we were busy and behind and I was happily using new skills and doing the best job I knew  how to do.

Carolyn called me into her blacked out office. I knocked on her closed door and waited for her to tell me to come in. She often was doing titles on a small film system.

In those days we didn’t have scalable fonts or the ability to print a PDF and send it directly to a typesetting machine. You had to create a title, character by character by exposing a film strip. Then you used black & white photo development to create the title line.  After that, you measured and manually pasted the title line into the galley.

So, if her door was closed, you knocked and waited for her to secure whatever title she might have been working on, otherwise you would incur her wrath because opening the door would destroy whatever she’d been working on.

There was a muffled “Come in”

I opened the door, walked in and asked her how I could help.

She said, “You’ve been catching on quickly Dumbshit. But not quite as quickly as I’d like. To make it up to me I want you to fuck me.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me, FUCK ME or your FIRED.”

I very clearly recall my brain rebooting.

I also recall feeling humiliated, and embarrassed, I was deeply hurt because I had been doing everything she asked and was keeping up with her output.

We were behind due to several machine malfunctions on the other side of the house where the typists were doing the input. The IBM technician had ordered parts but they’d been slow to get to the West Coast.

Granted I’d made some mistakes but I’d always stayed late to rectify them so that we’d start fresh in the morning.

I was completely unprepared for this ultimatum.

And I was conflicted. Conflicted because I was an 18 year old male. A stiff breeze could make me hard.

I looked forward to getting home each and every night to stroke my dick. This condition of terminal horniness wasn’t helped at all by the fact that the company had taken on a big contract from a publisher called Penguin Press.

Penguin Press at the time published a lot of pornographic stories. Imagine an 18 year old male scanning the pages of graphic porn while at work and that was his job.

Needless to say I’d taken to wearing looser pants, not because I was ashamed of being hard (I was) but because tight pants were just plain uncomfortable.

So here I was, hornier than hell all the time and there’s this woman telling me she wants me to fuck her. That was the first time in my life a woman had ever said she wanted my dick. It wasn’t until I was in my mid 20s that I heard a woman I was dating tell me she wanted to get naked and have me inside her.

But looking at Carolyn, her cigarette ash hanging from the latest in the chain of cigarettes in her mouth, I thought, “I’d really like to fuck. I’d really like to get off, but with the bosses wife? Is that a good idea? What happens if he finds out about it?”

Then I looked at her again. She’d been pretty once, but that ship had sailed years ago. Now Carolyn looked haggard and her personality was throughly unpleasant.

The part of my brain that so wanted to fuck, whispered, “Do it, close your eyes and pound her, it’s a free pass, no dinner, no begging, no promises to respect her or love her. It’s just a pussy that wants to be plowed.”

The rational part of my brain said, “Whoa there cowboy. Down this path is slavery. If you do this once she’ll use the threat again. She’ll add the threat that she’ll tell her husband you fucked her and she’ll probably suggest that you were the one that initiated it. All in all, a bad outcome for you.  Besides you can’t lie worth a shit. What are you going to say to your mom  when she asks you how work was. What are you going to say? It was great mom, I fucked the bosses wife.”

The fuckhead part of my brain suggested, “Fuck her then quit, you don’t want to jerk off again tonight. you want to blow thrusting and hot and wet.”

The rational part of me asked, “What about pregnancy?”

That was the question that made my decision easier.

In my heart of hearts, I absolutely knew that I didn’t want to even risk having a baby with the nasty piece of work that Carolyn was.

I knew that I wasn’t paying rent, I knew that while I was living at home I had the ability to quit this job, I knew that I didn’t want to risk having a baby with this woman.

So I said, “OK then, Goodbye.”

I grabbed my backpack and walked out the door. I never looked back but was frustrated and angry. Too angry to wait on the fucking bus. So I started walking. a couple of hours later when I got home my mom said, “I thought you were going to call me when you were done.”

“Um yeah mom, I just felt like walking.”

My Mom is a wise woman who knows her children well.

“Okay, honey what happened?”

I related the story and at the end, my Mother was shaking with anger.

“Honey, you did the right thing. I put up with that shit while you were growing up. Here we are in 1979 and people still think they can get away with it. It was wrong when I was a single mom and executives thought they could bully their way into my panties, it’s just as wrong now that some woman thinks they can take advantage of you.”

My mom put a big pile of spaghetti on a plate for me, then handed me a beer. “Here sweetie eat something but don’t drink all the beer in the fridge.”

She left the room and I remember hearing the tires of her car chirp as she hit the pavement leaving the driveway.

I wondered at the time if she’d even catch Carolyn at the office.

I ate, drank my beer, rinsed my plate and put it in the dishwasher.

I went to my room, took off my clothes and jerked off a couple of times then fell asleep.

The next morning, I heard the normal morning sounds of my younger siblings being rushed to school.

After the house quieted, I got up. I was hungry, so I pulled on a pair of shorts and wandered to the kitchen.

There on the table was a cereal bowl, my favorite cereal, the newspaper and a check from the company for the week I’d worked and an additional 2 months pay.

I still recall the details vividly. Time has not diminished the memory of that humiliation and I doubt it ever will.

I was fortunate, I had someone who was in my corner. I had my Mom, she’d been through it. She knew what I was feeling and also knew there was very little she could do to make it better. But she got me my paycheck and bought me some time to get another job.

While my story is not nearly as sever or traumatic as rape. It is illustrative of the clarity that comes with some situations.

I recognize that women are far more likely to be abused than men, when they are abused, they rarely have a support system to fall back on. But the women I’ve known who have been raped, and  or abused are never fuzzy about the details.

They’re very clear and they can tell you grizzly details of their assault 40 or 50 years on.

So you’ll pardon me if I’m somewhat skeptical of Dr. Ford’s allegations thus far. We’ll have to wait and see what her testimony reveals.

And just because Kavanaugh might have been at the same party, doesn’t automatically mean he sexually assaulted her.

Hell if being at a party where an assault happened is the only test, then I might also be guilty using the same broad brush strokes.

Shit happens, it’s bad, of that there is no doubt. But bringing up something that happened 30 years ago just because someone is famous seems a bit contrived doesn’t it?

After the bad shit happens, the best you can do is deal with it and move on. That’s what I’ve learned from rape and harassment victims that I’ve known in my life.

That’s what I’ve done.

Well the Doc says I’m on the mend…

Yeah, I wussed out. I went to the doctor yesterday. I’m still running occasional low grade fevers. In fact I went into the office and my temp was normal, 15 minutes later when the Doc saw me, I was running a low grade fever, and my temp was climbing.

The Doc bled me, so he could run all the tests for sexually transmitted diseases and a variety of other things. He wrote me a note to keep my employers off my ass for a couple of weeks and told me to go home, rest, and not to go to work if I was running a fever.

I just got  off the phone with him, and the tests came back all negative. So on the one hand that’s good news, I don’t have anything really nasty, I don’t have any STDs and hey since I’m clean… I’m open for business! Anybody wanna come over and make a guy feel better?

Still no explanation about what I actually had, but the Doc seems to think I’m on the winning side of this and should start feeling normal in a few more days. 

I didn’t go to work today and I’m sure there’ll be hell to pay for that but I’ll burn that bridge when I fucking get to it. I’ll go to work tomorrow and Sunday then I’ll go back to trying to be a good little boy (A.K.A. a Slave).

But for the next two weeks, if I have a fever I’m not going to that shithole.

I was very tired yesterday when I got home, but this morning in addition to the fever I was also awakened by a man’s best friend. No, not a dog… Every man’s BFF! I take that as a sign that I’m getting better.

Hopefully when this passes, I’ll be back to my normal crotchety self and not have any lingering effects.

Well that was completely UNFUN!

So my weekend plans were completely trashed!

I came home Tuesday after work and was looking forward to my two days off.

I was feeling unusually tired, but didn’t think much of that since we still have mandatory overtime in place.

UntitledI get the concept of mandatory overtime but don’t get the concept behind punishing you if you’re unable to meet the ever changing mandatory overtime requirement.

Anyhow, I laid down on the couch and then I was chilled. It was 78º at the time. I pulled a light blanket over myself and napped. Later that night I woke up shivering. The kind of shivering that I’ve only experienced when I’m really sick. I’m talking a fever of 104º or higher.

(Yes I know adults aren’t supposed to run fevers that high. Well you can talk with God about my many design flaws.)

I was shaking so bad and muscles cramping that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get off the couch to get to my bed. After a long time I managed to coax my body to be compliant enough to get to the pantry and grab a bottle of water then made it to my bed.

IMG 0853Thus began what my sleep application shows as a 34 hour broken sleep cycle. I wasn’t asleep the whole time, but I wondered at several points if I was going to simply die. I don’t honestly know what the upper limit of high fever is before you experience brain damage and organ failure but I did wonder if I was going to find out the hard way.

When I woke up sometime on Wednesday I cancelled my planned weekend on the mountain. And then I went back to bed. That was how I spent Wednesday and much of Thursday. Late Thursday I got up feeling a little better. I now had a mission, I needed to get to the grocery store, do laundry, and drop by the pharmacy to (Now here’s an Idea…) buy a thermometer. Guestimating from the kitchen meat thermometer pressed in my armpit wasn’t giving me the kind of accuracy this situation required. 

(Hey ya work with what ya got!) Besides it’s washable! I took using the meat thermometer as a sign that either my brain wasn’t damaged and I was thinking about and trying to work the problem, OR my brain was damaged and I was behaving like those folks who take off all their clothes in the snow when they’re suffering from hypothermia.

By the way, I HATE CVS! $14.00 for one thermometer, $56.00 for another? With nothing in between? Are you fucking kidding me? give me the good old days of a standard mercury thermometer. OH RIGHT, we can’t have one of those anymore because mercury is dangerous…

I grew up with mercury thermometers and I think the entire time I was growing up,  there were maybe 2 that got broken. I can remember my Dad putting piece of paper on the floor and using a small bit of tissue to coax the shiny metal onto the paper then folding it up and tossing it in pill bottle. Nobody DIED, and I’m betting if there were such things as recycling or hazardous waste disposal facilities that the 1/2 gram of mercury would have been disposed of properly. It wasn’t, because there weren’t. Turns out that Dad did reuse the mercury to make mercury switches. He serviced electronics, and when he couldn’t get parts for an old piece of equipment he was working on, he’d fabricate the replacement part himself. Back then, repairing something was recycling. I’d bet I could still fabricate a functional mercury switch. Two steel contacts, a glass tube and a blowtorch. DONE! No waiting for 4 weeks for parts to be shipped in from Japan.  

Of course saying that on a blog will probably get me on a watch list somewhere. So be it. You can scrub the internet of useful information (A.K.A. Potentially dangerous information), You can edit the libraries, but you can’t take my knowledge from me.

I digress, It’s just that I’m old enough to remember being taught how stuff worked and that being able to repair something was honorable. This disposable society sometimes bugs the crap out of me. More often than not, the simplest, cheapest solution is one that is also durable and involved repair, not replacement.

Anyhow, armed with my snazzy new thermometer, breakfast in my belly, and some staples from the grocery store, I returned to my apartment which smelled like wild kingdom by this time and went back to bed, where I remained for the next 24 hours.

I didn’t go to work on Friday, I was still running a fever of anywhere between 102.5 to 102.9 and spent much of Friday in bed jackhammering with chills and sweats. Saturday I went to work for 1/2 day (Doubtful that the company will appreciate that) Sunday I was at work for 4.5 hours before the shivering became intense enough to drive me back to my bed.

Monday I flat called out. Sometime around 5PM I had my first normal temp for almost a week.

It was then that I started wondering about the last time I actually ate. Then it hit me. For the previous 7 days, I’d had 2 meals. I wasn’t snacking or anything else I flat out hadn’t eaten. Nothing sounded good, in fact food was the last thing on my mind. That was when I decided it was time to eat something. No wonder my body was pissed off. Not that I don’t have a bit of a fat reserve to burn, but not eating is not good.

Tuesday, I was tired but functional, but I looked rough. Even my normally self absorbed supervisor said I looked like I’d lost weight.

I’m glad whatever this was didn’t kill me, but I’m pissed that I was so out of it I lost an entire week that would have been better spent looking for a new job.

Anyway, now you know why I was perhaps ignoring phone calls, text messages, and the like. It wasn’t personal, I just didn’t have the energy.