Token Reflection Post

To Hamlet, His

The campus cafeteria is a place of dull revelations, coffee spills, and the occasionally meaningful conversation. I’m reading some of the criticisms that Signet has taken the liberty to include with the edition of Hamlet I purchased. Signet, one of the biggest publishers of world classics also shares the name of the company with which my father is employed—Signet Electronics. One of major focuses in these critical essays is Hamlet’s relationship with his father. Yes, they each seem to agree, Hamlet fits into some mold of the Oedipal Complex, but to what extent and flavor is up for debate.

I mark up the sides of the book with a pen, agreeing, disagreeing, and drawing the occasional stick figure. I think we can abstract Hamlet’s relationship with his father as much as we like, but the bottom line of analysis is that we only understand Hamlet in the absence of his father. Hamlet, I would argue, has lost a point of reference for masculine identity. I guess this falls into the ‘looking glass self,’ or another psych theory. I consider finding a passage which shows this as the focus for my explication. I’m already overdue on emailing the selection to my professor.

I turn my phone back on. After leaving it in my passenger seat the night before, the cold sucked the life right out of the battery. But like a newborn spider, it will recover solely on heat alone without having to recharge it. I’ve missed a bunch of texts from friends, asking why I disappeared from library, why I disappeared from the lounge, and (most concerning) why I missed the nightly coffee run. I reply, just stating that I was sick, sparing details. One of the text messages was from my father.  I assume it’s some discourse about being careful during the three-hour drive home.

I open the message.

Years ago during the 4th of July I threw you on the ground. I wanted to say sorry about that.

In personal memoir, I write a lot about struggling with self, and I try to say as little as possible about my family. I’ve never been in an abusive situation with my father. Whenever there was a little tension it was usually the result of some immature action on my behalf. (My adolescence is littered with those).

I replied immediately upon reading the text, telling him that it was alright. I had to let him know that I understood. But what prompted him to send the apology? I look at the timestamp and I can see he sent it in transit that morning.

The event in itself is pretty vague. I threw a water balloon at him. He threw me. This was what, eight or nine years ago? I can put myself in his shoes and see why he’d be stressed during that little chunk of memory. But how long has he been dwelling upon it?

Since I’ve been in Mass for spring break, we haven’t mentioned the text exchange to each other once. I am worried—I don’t want him harboring any assumptions that he’s hurt me in some way.

The two of us are taking a drive Wal-Mart. The store is a sea of unhappy faces. Nobody looks excited to be here. Canned soda is on sale beside the display of imported coffee makers. We’re having an intellectual debate over what type of dish soap to buy. I recommend the eco-friendly one, but my best argument is that the bottle looks a little more enticing than the generic brand. There’s no tension in our exchanges, just the unexciting, sometimes meaningful words.

In the electronics section we’re looking at Ethernet cables. He’s explaining to me how his job demands that he makes them on the spot. I believe him, but he seems eager to show me.

Back in the Gorman household (oh, God) he takes a spare Cat-5 wire from the basement and stretches it out against the paved floor. I wonder how small the cats need to be to run back and forth through the wire. Cat-6, he says, is bigger, but you can’t fit in the heads of the Ethernet jack. I watch him cut the wire, only to reveal a handful of smaller colored wires underneath. The smaller wires are striped, each holding a dominant color, which signifies how you identify it in the row. He arranges the wires in a specific order, lining Orange-White against White-Orange. When he finishes, we test the cable. It works. With his hands, which have undergone four surgeries, he made a connection.

I decided to leave Hamlet and his father alone. While the material is rich, I’m going to settle for another thesis. Act four looks good. Scene four. Hamlet’s confrontation with the progress of Fortinbras. I typed out a vague thesis for the presentation—something about thought and action. Of course… at this point I’d been through a few cups of Captain and it makes little sense. I emailed it regardless.

Snowman

It’s snowing. No. Not snow. These are little death-crystals descending from the sky. They exist only to slash up my face. I’m seeking shelter in the health service office with a friend, trying to keep out of the storm.  A few days of sunlight and fair weather perverts the senses. Winter’s grasp is here still—tightening.

 

I take a small pamphlet from the wall beside the transparent bin filled with brightly colored condoms. The pamphlet is smaller than a playing card. Each picture and text box is a light shade of purple. The target audience doesn’t need to be questioned. The title fits clumsily on the purple, stating If someone in your life is hurting you… you are not alone. Buzz phrases like it’s not your fault spark images of a frail female caught in a violent situation. It’s easy to sympathize, but impossible to identify.

 

I flip through the first few pages, watching it break down abuse into three categories: Physical, Emotional, and Sexual. Can you break a person or a relationship into three categories? They’re too vague. Is there no physical or emotional investment in sexuality? Are there no physical or sexual stimuli to somebody’s emotional condition? And are there no emotional or sexual catalysts that determine our physical actions? They’re more like three primary colors of a relationship, not categories. Or maybe I just don’t get it, or can’t get it. I’m a man, I think, and this pamphlet isn’t for me. The affiliates tell all: WomanSafe, Woman Helping Battered Women, and Woman’s Crisis Center. Each one gives me a different story, a different horror that I’ll never know and understand.

 

I’m drinking a cup of Blueberry Coffee. It’s delicious, but I could get away with dumping some more sugar in. I pocket the pamphlet, taking it back to my room to dissect. I consider how much information I’ve already gone public with. I’m not out to ruin anyone’s character or compromise secrets. I save those in folders scattered throughout my computer

 

When the sun sets I turn back to the pamphlet when I should be taking notes on the final acts of Hamlet. I think I’m looking for an answer or something, but it isn’t here. Like literary theory, it only proposes questions, not answers.

 

Has your partner been physically abusive?

I take a black pen from my pocket and start circling different bullet points. Patterns. I enjoy patterns in books, patterns in writing, and patterns in art. Not life. I can sit in class and argue about Hamlet’s mother and how through her patterns of speech, we can see is being manipulated by Claudius. Claudius speaks through her the way Polonius speaks through Ophelia. These aren’t only fictional characters, but they’re not males. No, the role of the male in this pattern is the abuser—the disruption of harmony in their partner’s quest for self-actualization.

 

Has your partner been emotionally abusive?

 

I remember sitting on one of the flimsy tables in one of the classrooms, whispering secret screams. Guilt, maybe shame, held my words back.

“Society,” my listener responded. “Makes it more challenging for a male to identify an abusive situation.”

But that’s part of Masculine identity, right? The challenge—the conquest?

“We need to talk somewhere you feel comfortable crying.”

Crying. Cry. CRY. cry C-R-Y c. r. y.

Three letters that form a symbol. A pattern is a measurement, maybe an attempt, to comprehend the reaction of these symbols.

Cry: verb (used without object)

1. to utter inarticulate sounds, especially of lamentation, grief,or suffering, usually with tears

Where is cry in the pattern? Recurring.

“Man up,” she said. “Stop Crying.” Cry = An absence of Manhood?

Man doesn’t inherit the role of the tear-bearer. It challenges masculine identity.

Has your partner been sexually abusive?

 

I still continue to type out (maybe obsess over) the patterns. This, I considered, is writing for self. Nobody has to read what I have to say.  I isolate moments in the pattern, kissing them with the bitter twist of memoir.

“If you can’t give me what I want, I’ll get it somewhere else.” And she did.

What is the role of the insufficient man?

 

Man: –noun

1. an adult male person, as distinguished from a boy or a woman.

Oedipus provides the sphinx’s riddle with the answer ‘man.’ That which what he embodies becomes the answer. Can we solve our problems with who we are?

In Symphony of the Night, Count Dracula proposes the question of what is a ‘man?’ This prompts the protagonist to consider an answer that doesn’t humanize that which he sets out to destroy.

 

But the pattern writes back. I lie through my teeth. I haven’t been too busy to drink—too busy to think. No, this is writing against self. In the safety of public, I can write these musings on the pattern. But in the documents I find little messages from one self to another, reminding me that this descent is my fault.

 

If each of these categories is part of the same origin, somewhere in the muted pits of self, then when they’re damaged they probably each retract there. You can’t heal one by trying to satisfy the other. The answer, had there been one, is at the core.

 

 

I’ve told friends that abusive situations are more about the individual wrestling with themselves more so than the partner. With this, I’ve also stapled phrases about trusting each other with ourselves. If you try to wrestle your insecurities alone they will consume you. Our insecurities are many, in all of us, like white blood cells trying to protect the body from a risky contaminant. We need them, but we have to understand them. Or something.

 

Grace. Reconciliation. Peace. I won’t find these in a bottle of rum.

 

Coffee, Dragons, and Writing

I’m sitting in my parent’s kitchen. The table has worn green tiles, and in my absence they’ve invested in a new coffee maker. It’s beautiful, but I can’t make it do what I want it to. Such is the plight of all men. There are compartments all around its silver frame; one for water, one for the beans, two just to fuck with you, and a bunch of buttons that I will never have the discipline to understand. My mother, being just an avid coffee-drinker as I am, thought this would be a great investment for the house. It’s snazzy, standing out amongst our tattered appliances, but something just irks me about it. The older one still held its own. Yes, the hotplate was going to shit and every time I put a filter in, it became a vacuum for the grounds, dumping them all over the counter. But there was just something natural about leaning on the table and listening to it work, something about not having to dance through a bunch of façades for something I want. Natural, not simple. This one shrouds the clockwork in silver. I don’t trust things that feel the need to hide from me. Not often.

Regardless, there’s coffee in my mug and I’m digging through a bunch of writing. There are some half-written blog pieces I wanted to tamper with, but I spent the majority of my week focusing on a fiction piece. I tried to make a big deal about it, telling Scotty, a classmate, that I was going to live and breathe that story for the entire week, trying to perfect it… but that’s a bunch of crap. The more we talk about our writing the less inclined we are to invest ourselves into it. Now that it’s done (no writing is ever done) I feel like I have some merit to talk about the process. Also, I think there’s something perverse about glorifying our own work, especially if it hasn’t been done yet. We can try to achieve the best, or try to explore the best we’re capable of—only one warrants true growth.

I wanted to concoct a ‘story within a story’ type of frame, but the night before class was when I invested most of my time in the revision. Behind me was a mini-fridge with a few cans of Red Bull—a lover that told me it was okay if things got complicated. We had all night.

Around 1 in the morning, I made the decision that a break was in order. I stuck my pen behind my ear only to realize that one was already perched there. In the span of two weeks I’ve developed a bad habit of keeping my preferred instrument of writing there. I mean, it’s better than meth, but one day a pen will explode and dark ink will run down the side of my face. My break consisted of consuming an energy drink while visiting Scotty and James in the lounge. They were playing a card game, keeping score on a notebook. I considered vandalizing it.

James told us how to hook up with random men on Route 91, flashing our lights at the appropriate rest stop. I tried to toss a can in the crowded trash barrel, missing and recommending this for a road trip. I think Scott believed me.

I’ve been a ghost on the web lately. For the people who said that they missed my writing, you have no idea what that sentiment means to me. Praise makes me feel like a conman, but when somebody tells me they appreciated or took something away from my writing, I feel like I can truly communicate as a human being. Not many people who I talk to on the net have had to deal with me in person. I mumble when I talk and I don’t articulate my thoughts well, or at least not in a coherent way. In a way it’s helped me treasure these moments of communication.

Before I got wrapped up in this short story (which suffered through a 50% cut), I was walking in this shadow of self-pity. I guess this is what spun me on that month-long hiatus, not just from the blog but really from the internet. I really only checked my email and spent an ungodly amount of time whining on Facebook. I want to say that Scotty was one of the people that saved me, but that isn’t true. Sometimes we really need to save ourselves. I was sitting in his car a week ago, neither of us needing to leave campus. He just felt the need to let the engine run. He said it would make it easier for him to start the car later. Out of nowhere I put a heavy story on him, telling him shitty things that have happened to me and shitty things that I’ve done. The entire time he remained silent, listening as we watched the other cars try to sneak out of the snow. After a few deep breaths he turned, giving me the best advice anybody could ask for.

“Breath through your nose,” he said. “We look like dragons.”

We’re all going to be okay.

This coffee is delicious.

Stage Fright & the Art of Removal

I once saw a folded bill lying beside our tomato display. Seeing its red tint, I could tell that it was a ten, with which I could probably have bought eight medium cups of coffee. I knew just how it was folded, too—the way the front of the bill was hidden, uneven and concealing Hamilton’s face. I tried to forget it was there, reminding myself that I didn’t have to get involved with the plight of responsibility. Instead, I started digging through my box of tomatoes. The vine cluster tomatoes give off this yellow-gold dust that causes irritation and can temporarily damage your skin. In the handbook, it’s recommended that employees wear plastic gloves to protect our hands. However, I learn better from watching and acting rather than instruction. It seems that nobody follows this rule. The trick is to just grab it from the base, avoiding the dust. The handbook also told me a lot of things, most of which I’ve forgotten. Actually, the entirety of my produce training brought on a lot of unnecessary anxiety. It became a lot easier to just learn by jumping into the mix than trying to take notes in a dark corner on why Basil and Oregano shouldn’t be stored in the freezer.

“Hey, buddy,” said a man in a yellow polo shirt, interrupting my thought. “I think somebody dropped this.”

He handed me the bill, asking if I had seen who dropped it. No, I didn’t. I asked the closest customer, an older woman who looked disinterested in our selection of Romaine lettuce, but I knew that she’d entered the area long after I had first noticed the bill. She just shook her head and pressed on with her shopping.  I looked back to the man in anger. It’s not that I didn’t want the temptation of the ten, or that I wanted it to return to its rightful owner, I just didn’t want to be pulled into having to make the choice. I needed right and wrong to be irrelevant. Left with no other option, I assured the man that I would bring the bill over to customer service. I wanted to tell him to just pocket it, saving both of us the trouble, but didn’t.

Walking to the customer service desk is like trying to walk across the interstate. During its quiet hours, you hear the melody of squeaking carriages approaching far off in the distance. However, most of the day consists of customers leaping out of every aisle, eager to cut one another off for a spot in the express line. This death race happens to a mixture of elevator tunes and whatever chunk of popular music the management has selected for the day. You haven’t lived until you’ve experience the chaos of ‘Senior Tuesday’ to a Katy Perry song. After completing this journey, I handed the ten to the girl currently stationed at the desk. She took the bill effortlessly between gold-painted fingernails, setting it aside and turning to an approaching customer. I returned back to the tomato cart, dodging carriages the whole walk only to find one blocking the display.

Despite having to make a decision that affected other people, I was satisfied with the resolution. It was out of my hands. Of course, when the universe was still being programmed, the writers of the code threw in these lines of command called “recurring internal conflicts.” Had the universe been written in Java or C++, we could easily see and identify where the issues are coming from rather that just seeing the error messages they leave onscreen. This error message came back a week ago when I was standing beside our strawberry display. They’re out of season and not even on sale, so there shouldn’t have been any reason for them to sell this fast in the winter. This is where Adam, one of the ‘higher-ups’ that hasn’t quite reached management yet, cornered me.

“There’s money for you in the safe,” he said, making eye contact not with me, but a specific white tile on the floor. “Don’t leave without taking it.” I followed his gaze to the floor, to see that it was indeed a pretty impressive tile. It fit right into place with the pattern formed in its relation to the rest, but damn, what a tile it was. He explained that I had brought a ten dollar bill to the service desk and it became public property after the owner neglected to claim it.

“I feel like that’s… unethical,” I said. No, I really didn’t care what it is. I just didn’t want to make the decision. He assured me that we didn’t have the resources to investigate who dropped misplaced it. I thought of the man in the yellow polo shirt, how I wish I could in turn pass it down for him to deal with, but he was long out of the equation. Asshole.  At this point, I don’t think it was the decision that irked me. The ten was a reminder of something I didn’t do, good or bad—that I didn’t want to have to integrate my decision making into real-world problems.

But the error is recurring.  A few days ago I was driving to the bookstore with my little sister. For some reason the stars were right and our days off coincided with each other. I wanted to purchase a paperback copy of a novel printed over twenty years ago, and for some obscure reason I expected it to cost me less than a full tank of gas. Annoyed and cursing the power of the publishing industry, I settled for a new copy of a Gibson book, with which the discount was disgustingly in my favor. When I checked out, the cashier didn’t give me any percent of the discount that was stated on book’s sticker. I was angry, almost as much as my wallet was, but I didn’t say anything. On the drive back, I pulled back onto the highway and told my sister about the neglected discount.

“Why the hell didn’t you say something!” she screamed, trying to rationalize my lack of action. I tried to explain to her that I have passive tendencies, and I don’t like integrating with the world.

To a degree, I believe that the removal of one from the world is glamorized. The idea of isolation is even present in what’s considered to be a ‘creative lifestyle.’ In my Creative Writing workshop, we were asked (though not many students did) to read Robert Grudin’s The Grace of Great Things. In this book he writes, “To think creatively is to walk on the edge of chaos.”  When this was discussed, the room erupted with students wanting to express their obsession with chaos, each eager to take Grudin’s words out of context. While I won’t doubt that each of my fellow students aren’t afraid to dance with madness and then reflect about it, my understanding that was that for some integrity in the creative process, there must be a willingness to remove oneself from the world to see and understand it.

Though, I think if we remove ourselves from the world for reasons other than analysis and understanding, we’re mistaking it for a hiding place. While just about everything about me can be considered ugly in the Western experience, the worst has to probably be my inability to integrate and become an active and independent participant in society. There’s nothing glamorous about living passive, and I can say that this is no result of the creative process in the least.

So now I’m left with this ten dollar bill. It’s still folded and tomato-irritation red. I put it in an envelope and wrote apartment on the side. While it only has $10, that’s ten more than it had in 2010.

Love Letter #1

Dear Insomnia,

When I told you that we needed to talk, I didn’t mean to alarm you. No, this isn’t the end of us. I feel that every so often we should be able to asses our relations… to be clear with our understanding each other—communication is critical for a tricky relationship like ours. Listen, I know you get a little jealous when I run off a few times a week with Sleep, but I need you to understand that it’s not by choice. While I’d love to confess that I would never be seeing Sleep again, I am a simple man who, as you know, falls often to the alluring sirens of the mind. I would love nothing more than to spend these nights with you over good books and warm cups of coffee.

There’s something about you that Sleep could never do for me. You create this warm dimness, in which I still retain control of my thoughts, my dreams. Sleep would never do that. She’s treacherous and loves to whisper unwanted secrets from my core. You never go digging, and I’m glad that we can respect each other’s privacy. Things both dreary and miraculous happen when we’re together. While the balance is nothing short of chaos, I think that’s a fantastic recipe for intimacy. I enjoy these nights we share, whether it’s in the cold of my dorm room or driving together for some 4 A.M. sushi, listening to the soft Jazz that the radio would play for us.

Insomnia, I hope that you can come to love and appreciate me without the changes you’ve asked for. If one of us were to change, then both of us will. I’ve tried to hate you for the red eyes and exhausted lifestyle, but one can hardly hate themselves without consequence.  We’re meant to be!

Very truly yours,

Me

Ps. I’m not trying to make you jealous, but I did see Sleep yesterday. When I did, I stopped breathing again. And she did nothing! I spent nearly an hour disoriented from the apnea. If I had stayed with you and brewed some more coffee, this wouldn’t have happened. You were right.

Robocop: Hiding ‘Self’ in Stories

A few nights ago, I had the luxury to fall asleep in front of a fireplace with a book. I lost my place, but it was probably the best sleep I had gotten in weeks. I woke up somewhere around 5 AM to find my father scurrying around the house. He told me that some of the higher-ups at work wanted him in later that morning, late to him being 7 AM. “Half the day’s over at that point,” he said, looking out to his van. At this point, he had already brushed it off, warmed it up, and turned it off to wait until it was late enough for him to leave. Living with him for twenty years now, I’ve been taught what it means to be an early riser, but I’ve also inherited his sleepless nights. While I may not always embrace the waking race with the sun (while his record is nearly flawless), that sliver of insomnia likes to creep. If the exhaustion wasn’t there and I were more productive, I’m sure that I’d embrace it.

He had spent a few hours the day before in the emergency room. His heart was giving him some trouble, but he planned on waiting out the blizzard before doing anything about it. My mother drove him, and while I was at work during their visit, I probably sent enough texts to be considered annoying, assuming the worst and probably adding pressure that he really didn’t need. Though nothing was inherently wrong, so they sent him home with a monitor. While there still aren’t any answers, he seemed pleased that there weren’t any bad ones.

When I made my way into the kitchen to brew some coffee, my dad tugged the neck of his shirt, showing me some patches and wires that were measuring his heartbeat. I saw three of them, each one twisting down his shirt onto a walkie-talkie mechanism that stores every heartbeat like faithful diary. I told him that he was in the process of becoming Robocop or Darth Vader, the next step being flashy headgear. He laughed and began telling me about his experience in the emergency room, recalling quirky, yet horrific details that brought the story to life.

My dad has always been somewhat of a good storyteller. I remember vividly him sharing the tales of his youth, tidbits of being pulled into fights with strangers wielding lead pipes. These stories encompass everything that he’s told me to avoid throughout my life. While the details are all there, it’s only the things that happen that he seems eager to pass on, never his own thoughts. Sometimes I want to stop him, and ask him how he felt about what happened. But when questioned, he’ll add a token emotion like fear or excitement.

I normally don’t give it much attention, but this story in particular I really wanted to stop him to ask, but I didn’t. The story doesn’t start with, “I just listened to this kid die.” No, he broke it down into pieces, telling me everything that happened from where it was necessary. He started in the middle of things, in media res, untrained and natural. He found himself separated from other patients by a curtain. The color isn’t important as much as the separation. On his left, he saw the feet of a family, gathered around their son in probably the worst place he could be spending his eighteenth birthday. To his right, he told me that somebody was being revived after flat-lining, unlike the woman to her right who’s heart didn’t kick back in. Including himself, this story had four patients, only two of them were alive when he left a few hours later. We don’t often wonder about how our hearts feel as they beat on unconsidered, but these anxieties must change in the emergency room.

Separated by the curtain, he heard more of the boy’s family come in. I don’t know which voice the information came from, but he had gotten involved with crystal meth. He described the kid’s father well, or at least his voice. The father told the doctor about how they were going to have fried fish for his birthday, and how he’d lost his other son to electric shock. Some of the details still haunt while I type this. I think it’s in the way he included their screams and tears, thrown at the kid’s body, saying that they warned him that this would happen. My father got really quiet after this part, before he describes his doctor walking in his curtain area and saying that it was a rough day for heart issues. I wanted to stop him to ask how he felt hearing somebody die. But that type of curiosity is too bold and borderline disturbing.

My dad had watched his father pass away a few months ago, and the way he described the scene prompted me to write about it immediately. This backfired because I only had the details to work with, details that weren’t my own. Sometimes what happened isn’t enough for story, at least not the way I wanted to write it. The only emotion he really gave me was that, ‘it was terrible.’ The description of the family behind the curtain was a lot like his recollection of his father’s house. I wanted, or maybe needed, to hear about how this feels and what it has done to him as a person. I want to know his grieving process the way he sees it, not the way I do. I’ve taken more than insomnia from him, and while I may not have the ability to command a story like he can, I think there’s some other links I’m overlooking, like trying to break a wall by looking too hard at another one.

Maybe I’m just being selfish with this whole bit. Sometimes I feel a personal drive to push these stories for the sake of communicating and understanding. I don’t accept that stories are told to pass the time. In a response to one of the criticisms of his plays, I once read a quote where Thornton Wilder said that, “Every novel for sale in a railroad station is the dreaming soul of the human race telling its story.” I don’t think this is only present in books, but I think ‘the dreaming soul’ is ever-present in these little stories I hear in the break room of Chris Luz’s plan to completely revamp The Wizard of Oz. It’s there when I’m listening to my father’s stories. It’s there, but it’s behind those walls. We’re telling our too much of our stories without us. I want to push and understand, but they’re kept hidden. We’re all hoarding ourselves away, some more then others. While it may be as small as denying Oz remake as anything but a byproduct of time. No, it’s too calculated, the individual is too invested. Understanding ourselves through the lens of our truths and our fictions is one of the few ways that we can grow.

One of the Guys: The Life and Times of Socrates

I’m looking at the punch clock. I have ten minutes to wait until I’m allowed to clock in and begin my shift. I count to sixty, but I jumped through the numbers too fast. There are still ten minutes between me and the shift. The door to the dairy cooler is opening. A man about my height is pushing it open with his back; two large hearing aids are wedged in his ears. Despite them, he still doesn’t hear me when I try to exchange words with him in the break room. I back away, leaving him room to put the black milk crates below the punch clock. I feel the sharp breeze from the cooler, from him. Beneath his two jackets he’s wearing the same red shirt as me, and if he moves right I bet I could get a glimpse of it. Nine minutes remain before my shift begins. I’m not one to understand much about aesthetics, but the punch clock contains only dull shades of dull colors. I think this is what makes the rest of the back stand out—dirty concrete is softer on the eyes than an orange trying to pass for a shade of brown.

I push my numbers. I hear the beep. I turn to the right and begin walking down a long corridor. It’s crowded with merchandise, people from the grocery department, and as much holiday cheer as you could possibly find in a grocery store. The intercom interrupts my thoughts.

“…to the produce prep room.”

I didn’t catch the name, but our prep room is only twelve feet and a door away from me. Behind this door, my entire department is walking in through the front entrance. By the entire department, I mean five other people. John Smith motions for me to exit the way I came in, holding a Christmas card for me to sign. A few shifts ago, he had approached a few of us for money, so that we could pool in for a gift for the manager. The present consisted of a Jack Daniels fruit basket and a gift cart to the steakhouse, both of which seemed perfect for him.

After I sign it, we both walk back into the prep room. John is smiling but I wouldn’t expect to see him any other way. Jack, the artist that works in our department, had given him the nickname Colgate because of this. Jack also gave himself the nickname Captain, but I don’t think he ever told me why. Almost everyone who has worked with Jack has a nickname, to which he says it’s supposed to help us connect on a more personal level, to which Bob rolls his eyes and asks which psychedelic Jack is taking. Bob’s nickname is Richard, because we can’t call him Dick in front of customers.

We’re all standing in a circle, looking down at the floor. It’s another dirty shade of concrete with sprinkles of onion husks and bits of greens. It’ll more than likely be me sweeping it tonight. Our manager is telling us about how successful the year has been as we present him with hard liquor. In his speech, he’s handing us each a small red stocking with Dunkin Donuts gift card. Even though our department is small, he would have had to have invested about $150 for all of the cards.  The red stocking is about the size of my palm and smooth to the point that it’s annoying, but I know I’m going to treasure it for what it means.

“Despite being understaffed and having hours cut,” he says adamantly. “We’ve outdone all of our competitors this year. Now this includes the recession, Market Basket—“

“And the Super Wal*Mart,” Bob interrupts.

He jokes, saying that we should each take a swig of whisky before jumping out onto the produce floor. And we all laugh, knowing that at least two in the circle will actually have a few before leaving. Moments like this don’t happen in customer service—there are just too many people and too much indifference. I remember synching into an ‘us vs. them’ mentality when conversing with management. I may not have a nickname, but I don’t really feel like just a red shirt and nametag anymore. Though, should it matter whether we’re happy with our jobs or not? At the end of the week, I get the same paycheck as I would have if I completely disliked the work environment. Are the prep room friendships worth the energy? I think so.

The store floor is chaos, but we’re twiddling our thumbs in its face. If it’s not out on the floor, then we’re out of stock. There’s little loading to do, so we undertake small tasks to kill time. Three customers in a row ask me if we have any scallions in the back, I know that we don’t, but I walk back to check for each person, throwing on some fake sorrow that I couldn’t fulfill their request. This is another reason to love the holidays. Besides bringing boxes for the mountain, otherwise known as the banana display, the Captain and I are coming out with the same items on each of our carts, thus we overfill the shelves beyond the Hannaford 2-layer standard.

A woman yells for me from the organic nuts. By yelling, I mean she’s giving me a bitter look and screaming that our PLU machine is broken. I know this already. I pull a piece of scrap paper from my pocket. There’s writing on it, but I turn it over and write the PLU for the sliced almonds that she’s trying to buy. I explain that if she gives this four-digit number to the cashier, they’ll be able to weigh the product with the price and she walks away, only slightly understanding what I told her. In her hands is a piece of my day. I don’t journal in a healthy way—I collect little bits of information on scrap papers that get lodged into books or stored away in drawer full of, well, me. I watched her turn away with a piece of me in her hands. It might have only been something like describing the punch clock, but damn it, it was mine.

Back between the prep room and the cardboard bailer, the Captain and I are talking about education. He’s saying that one of the problems with the institution today is that we haven’t learned how to learn, we’ve learned how absorb. For the most part, I agree with him, adding my own personal discourse on things we’re not being taught. He stops for a moment as I lean on the prep room door. He’s holding the remains of a tomato box in the mouth of the bailer.

“I have the perfect nickname for you,” he says, letting the box hit the bottom. “Socrates.”

After a minute or so of telling him why I don’t agree with the things that Socrates believed about the nation-state, it hits me that the nature of the name is irrelevant, but the fact that I’ve earned one means that I’ve integrated with a group. No, not earned. You can’t earn an identity. It’s a means of understanding our reflection, or how we project it to others. Regardless, there’s still something there. I think about this as I’m wedging broccoli crowns onto the shelf, but the thought follows me from here to the lettuce, with which you can purchase to earn $5 off of the DVD of Eat Pray Love. Defining something like identity has to be active. The process can’t stop. If it does, we stop.

As I leave the store, the Captain tilts his hat at me and says, “Later, Socrates.” It sounds awkward and touching all at the same time. On the way back to my earth-destroying Blazer, I stop at Dunkin Donuts across the plaza. It’s a good night for coffee. It’s always a good night for coffee. The lady behind the counter doesn’t look too happy to see me. I ask her for French roast, but she hands me French vanilla, insisting that that it’s one in the same. It’s not. And it’s spiked with hemlock. I know it.

Love Songs in the House of Wax

In the produce department everything is covered in a thin layer of wax. The training video assures me that it’s digestible and is at no harm to the customer. Before I left for Vermont, a man approached me while I was opening a box of cucumbers. He leaned over my cart to peek in the box; his yellow polo was absorbing a line of water that the freezer left behind. In a rude manner, he stuck his hand in the box and asked if these were any better than the junk we had on the shelf. Slightly alarmed that I would now have to remove all the cucumbers from the shelf, I hurried over to see if they were alright. I lifted and inspected a bunch of them, each was cold and green without anything inherently wrong. As I turned back to the cart only to see that the man had already scoured through the box, the wet line on his shirt had become a damp circle.

“I guess you have a bad load today, huh, Guy?” I hate being called ‘Guy.’

“What do you think is wrong with them?” I asked, pulling my cart away from him.

“They’re different, soft and… well they just feel too weird.”

The cucumbers delivered that morning had little to no waxing and came from a local farm. This is one of the rare cases where they’d be the healthier alternative than the organic choice, which we sell shrink-wrapped in their own separate section. I tried to explain this to him, but he immediately became defensive and told me that he knew what a cucumber should feel like. I had no option but to agree, because the customer is always right. I’m no authority on what a cucumber needs to feel like to it to be a true cucumber. But I do know the wax itself is a little slippery. I often drop them.

Coming back into this department, a lot of the items have shifted around, but everything has that same waxy gloss. The coolers are still maintained between thirty-eight and forty-one degrees. Fahrenheit. I bet the temperature never changes and we’re all just reading the thermometer differently when we do the two hour rotations. I know a few people are fond of 39s. The only difference is that they trust me to do the nightly inventory, and by trusting I mean that it’s more convenient for the department if the closer takes the responsibility.

Tonight, as I was closing with John Smith (not to be confused with John Doe), I heard a song on the radio that struck me. Every song up to this one was something in the Christmas canon, and I can’t remember how many times the disembodied voice told me that I know Dasher and Dancer, Prancer and Vixen. No, I really don’t, Guy. When I listen to music, I don’t pick up lyrics really well. They happen too fast, and I can’t really grasp the theme of a song without listening to it a few times over. I think the only reason that I was able to identify track is because I had heard it once before and some of the phrases pushed me to investigate it a little. The song is called Undisclosed Desires by the band Muse. Despite my attacks on love songs, I actually appreciate this as a statement on what we consider to be ‘love.’

My first encounter with this song was random. I was in the Berkshires, driving back up to school. I heard a loud, metal-on-metal noise that didn’t go away. On instinct, I pulled the car over to check the engine… and as I stepped out of the car I realized that the noise was actually a train passing beside me. Real smart, Guy. When I threw myself back into the driver’s seat, this song had started playing on the radio station. After returning back to the dorm, I forgot about the song until I needed something to procrastinate with—and what better than to lurk on Youtube? After listening to the lyrics in their entirety, my first reaction was no human being loves another like this. Though, I understand the song a little differently now.

What I found to be a little profound about the song is the distinct absence of the word love, with the exception of one becoming loveless. Before I turned to a more mainstream choice on the radio, I was listening to a branch of NPR, which cuts out halfway through the interstate. On the broadcast, somebody was actually discussing a book where they attacked the use of the word love and how it’s always a dry parody of something somebody said once, a gesture that we’re all trying to mimic. The song itself, while there is some wording that irks me, is more of a collection of gestures, responses, and awareness to the core of another individual. I think that if this is how we measured intimacy we’d be a much happier race. What bothers me about the love songs I’ve heard, and I understand that this is being typed from the fingers of a male that isn’t very cultured in popular music, is the abundance of that three word recitation sprinkled with a few metaphors.

When the song came on the radio at work, I dropped the Granny Smith that I was holding. It bounced, bruising immediately, so it was thrown in the cull box. The apple could have been somebody’s dinner, or it could have gone bad from shelf life. Either way, it now doesn’t have the chance. The first thought that snuck into my head was something I remembered reading when I was searching around for the song. Somebody had posted a remix of them singing the lyrics (to which I feel a little guilty that I hadn’t taken the time to watch). In the description, the singer said that every person is longing to hear something like this. I’m usually the first person to say that if love is all we have to live for, then we should end ourselves. But because we’re always analyzing and interpreting the relationships with those we’re both close and distant to, we must be looking for something. Unless we’re not autonomous beings and we only interpret to react, not understand. Unfortunately, I think we too often settle for the parody. This is probably why we don’t know what cucumbers feel like.

 

Love. The word itself is the wax hindering the definition. Only I don’t think the training videos want us to know this.

 

Fruit Salad

A man with 93 years under his belt drove to the grocery store to quickly shake my hand because I’m back in town. I was taking the temperature of the fruit salad cooler (just in case it changed in the span of an hour) when I saw him stumble in, shaking off snow before noticing me. His name is Marcel, and despite his scrawny complexion, he’s got a lot of compassion tucked beneath the tan jacket. We’ve been exchanging letters back and forth after my grandfather’s funeral. Marcel is a dedicated member of the local parish, which entails him knowing my great aunt and uncle very personally. He often wrote recollections of the time spent with my great uncle at many operas, and then would continue to add his own personal critique of how a lot of the new musicals just aren’t for him.

I don’t know what made him eager to see me, and I’m not sure if we even talked for a full minute. The conversation consisted of him asking me why they gave me so much work this semester (I wrote too frequently about Lit courses), and how he’d been in the store earlier today to visit Bob who is just getting over a flu. Bob is a little closer to Marcel in age, only having a rough 20 years difference rather than my 70 year gap.

 

If the world were full of moments like this I think we’d write better books about it.