Masks and Anniversaries

My grandmother died today. Well, six years ago. But today was the day. So, today was pretty much scheduled to be a bad day from the get go. At first, it was just a bad day, period. You know the kind, like it doesn't really need a reason to suck. It just does. Then after a few hours, she reminded me that today was the anniversary. So I had a couple of all new reasons to feel miserable. I couldn't decide which made me feel worse: the anniversary, or that I hadn't given it any thought until she told me. And then I was angry at myself for not really caring as much as she seemed to. Seems to. Miserable day, for both of us.

So I've spent most of the rest of the day thinking about her. My grandmother, I mean. I'm not usually given over to sentimentality, or nostalgia, or whatever you want to call it. She believes in heaven, an afterlife and all that stuff. I don't. I wish I did, I really do. I wish I had her faith. Everyone around me seems to have it. Not me. I used to, maybe, when I was little and couldn't think for myself. I sort of miss that, a bit. It was easier. I think sometimes that's why everyone else believes, because it's easier. But I know that's not why, not really. They really, honestly believe it, I think. Maybe it's just never occurred to them to question it like I did. But question I did, and it all fell apart. Like a house of cards attacked with a shovel.

I think I probably shouldn't be writing this thing. My thoughts aren't really coherent enough for anyone to enjoy reading, and getting them written isn't really doing anything to solidify them in my head. I hoped it would. Maybe I just haven't been doing it long enough. Give the medicine time to work, she'd say. My grandmother, I mean. Actually, she wouldn't really say that; she never said that or anything like it in her life, at least not to me. But that's the sort of thing you expect grandmas to say, isn't it? Little pearls of wisdom that are really just common sense, but since it comes from someone older we instinctively think 'wow, that's really smart' or something.

Damn stream of consciousness.

I was driving into town today, digging on the radio for something to help pull me out of my funk, and I heard part of a commercial. It was for some local clinic or something, and it's hook line was 'We treat you like family!'. I thought to myself as I sat at the next red light, why would anyone want that? Being treated like family? Part of me recognizes that that's supposed to be a good thing, that family is supposed to treat each other better than they treat other people. That's the rational part of me that doesn't really give a damn about my feelings.

But the feelings part of me thought it sounded horrible. In my experience, being treated like family means being ignored. It means going to holiday meals and sunday lunches and being largely shoved out of the way for everyone else. Being treated like family means feeling like you could vanish from everywhere and nobody would give a damn. Because everyone has their own things to deal with, their own problems, and you're never that important anyway. It means being excluded from birthday parties and family milestones, because we didn't think you'd really be interested and you don't really matter anyway so what are you getting upset about? And it means that when you've got troubles, well, you've got troubles. Not them. They're doing fine, thank you, good to hear from you sorry you've got it so bad but don't worry, you can be certain we're not going to lift a finger for you, good luck with that.

It wasn't like that when she was alive. Grandma, I mean. They were, sure; they haven't really changed a bit, but she wasn't, and she was enough to make me feel like I had a family. She made me feel like someone cared. Now all I have left is her. She fades a little more each day, and it's an endless fight to keep her spark from failing completely. The others still don't care. Fine. Fuck them. I don't need them. I don't need anyone. I'll carry this weight on my own, for as long as it takes. It's just heavy sometimes, that's all. Not impossible.

Goddamn stream of consciousness. Joyce was an idiot, and so are his fans.

I suppose they might find this. I don't care. They might not understand why I feel like this. I don't care about that either. Maybe they'll never know. I'll never tell them, that's for certain. Keep that mask in place, man. Masks for everyone, and everything. Never let them crack. Never let them see. It hurts sometimes, a lot. I just want to scream, lash out, revenge myself upon a world that neither knows nor cares about what I've lost. A monstrous father. A fading mother. Beloved grandparents, lost just when I was really getting to know them. Relatives so closed off they may as well be on Mars. Abandoned by old friends. Ignored by new ones. The walls close in, and no way out appears like all those Imovies and cartoons of my childhood said it should. A lifetime spent as a slave to other people, chained down and taunted, teased, tortured with the inevitable promise of freedom that will only come now when it's too late. What happens to a lion when it's released from captivity into the wild for the first time? Nothing good. It can't fend for itself, because it doesn't know how. It was never allowed to. All I can do is fend for others. I know it won't be returned in kind. Never is.

Still, gotta keep the masks in place. Don't let them know. It's my pain, not theirs. She couldn't handle it. They wouldn't want it, or understand it. You probably don't care. You probably won't understand it, either. That's fine, really. I'm not really writing this to share it with you. Sometimes, the mask just has to come off for a little while. Sometimes, one just has to breathe. That is absolutely something she would have said.

I miss you.

Starlight Wonderings

I live out in the middle of nowhere. Well, maybe a bit off center, but pretty damn close, anyway. The sort of place where, on a good and windy day, if you scream as hard as you can in just the right direction, your neighbors might be able to hear you. Maybe.

During the day, it's like living anywhere else, I guess. Except, you know. More distant. But at night, it feels like living on a different planet. On clear nights, the stars shine with such an amazing beauty, it feels wrong to try and describe it with words. I sometimes feel a little ashamed of myself, because I'm not always as completely overwhelmed by this incredible celestial wonder as I maybe should be. It seems kind of bizarre to think I can live surrounded by something so fascinating, and yet only notice it every now and then instead of being totally enraptured by it.

I have a dog, a little one. A Chihuahua. He's not very bright, and he's too small to navigate the steps on the back porch. So I have to pick him up and carry him down on the ground, where he invariably bursts out of my arms and runs around the yard like a little black and white, four-legged rocket. In the fall when the dead leaves carpet the ground, it sounds like machine gun fire when he runs through them. And in winter, those rare seasons when ice and snow actually touch the ground, he's too scared to actually run, so he sort of pads his way around the yard. A dog scared of snow. It'd be funny, if it weren't so damn stupid. I guess it's kinda funny anyway.

He needs to go out about two or three times a day. When I take him out at night, that's when I end up sitting outside for an hour or two sometimes. Looking up at the moon, and the starlight. There's no other light around, not really; like I said, the neighbors are all too far away for the lights in their windows to shine too bright, and the county's emergency light only shines one night a week or so, so there's almost zero light pollution to obscure the night sky. If it's warm enough (pretty much from March until November, around here), I'll climb up on the roof of my car and lie back and just watch the stars twinkle. Chasing satellites, and tracing airplane lights, imagining distant alien civilizations. Composing stories of brave astronauts, thinking about all the scientists our there sending signals into that great black. Wondering if ever they'll maybe get some kind of answer back.

And contemplating how all those stars formed, each one starting as nothing but a little speck of hydrogen or helium, the miniscule gravity of those little clumps of matter slowly attracting more and more matter onto themselves over the course of countless millenia until finally their mass and their weight under all that increasing gravity sets them to spinning until they start getting so heavy, so dense, that the matter in their cores start to generate nuclear fusion and they ignite into enormous spheres of glorious light that will burn and shine for hundreds of millions of years.

(If you read that whole thing out loud, take a breath before you pass out.)

And I look up, and I wonder about humanity. Will we ever leave this world, really? Will our kind ever travel into that big black, the way we hop from continent to continent now? Will we ever, ever put aside our petty, childish differences long enough to work together to accomplish something so amazing? We could, I know it. If everyone woke up tomorrow and decided they were tired of all the bullshit, if we all could just put our minds and, yes, hearts, together, we could fly out into that unknown and make it ours within a lifetime. Not just like we've already done, a few manned space flights and a couple space stations and who knows how many satellites, but really conquer that wild frontier. We could find or build whole new worlds, create a whole new age of humanity.

I don't know. Maybe that's stupid and childish all on its own. Probably is, if someone like me thinks it's a good idea. But it seems to me the world needs this kind of stupidity a lot more than the kind it's already got. Can't hurt to dream, right?

Anyway. That's what I think about, out under the stars. While I wait for the dog to shit.

Backroads to Anywhere

I was driving home from town the other night. Nice night, warm. Quiet. Kind of makes me think maybe everything is all right, after all. Not much traffic, but what there was was the considerate type: low beams and speed limits, all the way. Cruisers. Cool for it, far as I'm concerned. That Eagles mood didn't last the whole ride, though; almost never does, and that's fine too. About halfway home, I was on this stretch that curves and rises over this hilled sort of area, and the piece-o'shit-mobile is doing its usual coughing and wheezing as it struggled to make the climb, when this hot-rod wannabe comes tearing up behind me. Feels almost like he's gonna zip right through my tailpipe and pop up outta my engine instead of just passing me, but he stops almost dead on my tail lights. Rides behind me for a good three or four minutes. No big deal, I guess; probably just some kid just got his license, wants to see how good he thinks he is at precision driving. Nothing I never tried myself, so I give him his shot. He stays back pretty close, but not too dangerous. Thrill rider. Asshole. Part of me smiled.

But his headlights. Fucking high beams, slamming into my face through the rearview mirrors and almost blinding me. Not cool, man. I dim the top and turn the outer mirrors away, so now the light is just casting out over my car. It's like I've got extra headlights of my own, now, offset and illuminating spots on the road I don't usually get to see at night. It looks cool, seeing things like that. The extra light played on the bushes and the trees and the garbage bins and the house-number signs, and it felt like I was driving a completely different road than normal. Before too long, hot-rod boy pulls into the passing lane and motors on. The effect is lost. But for those few minutes, I was somewhere else. Just one of those rare treats in life, where something mundane turns into an adventure. Even for a few minutes.

Rusty Chains

I used to work for Wal-Mart, not so long ago. Started the job in high school, as a cashier. By the time I graduated college -- the second time -- I'd moved up to working in the electronics department. I hated that job. I hated the structure, and the shifts. I hated putting on that damn vest, always a couple sizes too small because god forbid a fat guy work with the public. I hated my badge, this cheap little red white and blue piece of plastic with name, rank and bar-code number plastered on the back, my own little private shameful reminder that while I wore it, I was owned. Store property. I hated punching in at the time clock in the back, squeezing in between a dozen others in a cramped hallway that had no business being stuffed with so many fucking filing cabinets and still being so damn narrow.

I hated the busy work that so often filled our nights, straightening and refilling shelves with merchandise I more often than not couldn't afford. I hated having to stand at attention on that stupid red line near my register whenever I was actually caught up with all my work, on the off chance that one of the big-wigs came by on a surprise inspection. I hated the smile I was supposed to wear, cheerful and sunny and about as real as tits on a porn star and nowhere near as pleasant. I hated the fact that for six to ten hours a day, I had to chain myself down and pretend to be this tame, supplicating servant. 'Oh yes sir, that's one of our best models, you've got great taste.' 'Of course, ma'am, it's very easy to operate, I'll be happy to show you.' 'Yes sir, that can be a little complicated to figure out, let's just see if we can't get you set up over the phone.'

When all I really wanted to say was, 'Read the goddamn instruction manual.' Honestly, so many of the customers I dealt with, so many of the problems I solved were so damn stupid, I seriously wondered how some of these people could walk and breathe at the same time, let alone complete something so complicated as a financial transaction. Some were humorous, like the time a woman came in with a digital camera filled with nude photos of her boyfriend, desperate to have them erased before her, ah, 'other' boyfriend found them. Some were disturbing, such as the time a man asked how to delete his internet history so his wife wouldn't find out about his porn addiction (this was back in '02, when Googling wasn't *quite* so ubiquitous). And some were just downright stupid, like the woman who wanted to know where to find (I shit you not) the 'any' key on her keyboard.

After six years, I could count on two hands the number of times I was faced with a genuinely challenging problem, something that really required me to fire up a few brain cells and apply some critical thinking. I fucking loved those times. It felt like I was actually doing something, I was helping someone who really needed it. It felt good. And I actually wanted to be polite and helpful to those people, because they had proven themselves, in a way. They didn't just take the equipment out of the box and poke at it with a stick, like most of the primates that passed for my customers; they experimented, they read the manual, they showed a kind of simple, everyday courage and faith in themselves that I feared was fast becoming extinct in this world. They were problem solvers who found a new problem, an interesting one, and I was happy to join them, and sometimes guide them, on the path to understanding.

And then there were my coworkers. Most of them were alright, really. None of us really wanted to be where we were, but we were there, and we tried to help each other make the most of it. I'm pretty sure one of us would have snapped and brought a rifle to work eventually, if it weren't for our sense of humor, dark as it may have sometimes been. We made jokes about everything and anything. Stupid customers, broken equipment, sick family members, politics, religion, anything. Inside jokes and below-radar smartassery were the currency of our workday. I think we looked at ourselves as soldiers who'd been drafted into a war against stupidity, outnumbered and outgunned, just hunkered down in our foxholes passing the time until we got our chance to get out.

Well, I got my chance a couple years ago. I cleaned out my little cubby locker, left my vest and badge, and strolled out of that store for what I dramatically imagined would be the last time. And for a long time, it was. I stayed out for nearly six months, shopping almost anywhere else but there. But eventually, I wound up having to stop by to pick up a couple of necessities. It felt weird, as though something about the place had changed, just a little, but it didn't want you to figure out what. I shrugged it off, stopped and chatted with a couple of my old coworkers, then got my things and got out. Alright, that, surely that, would be the last time I went in there again.

And again, it was. For a long time, nearly a year this time. Then Thanksgiving went and snuck up on me last year, and I had to drop by to pick up a few things again. That feeling was back, a change in the air in the building. This time I realized what it was: some of the old guard were gone. People I'd known, worked with, joked with, argued and fought with, weren't there anymore. That felt...unsettling, a little bit. I had worked there for nearly seven years, and it had become a sort of unwanted but comfortably familiar monument of permanence in my life. Like a creepy old tree in your backyard that's been there for years, with its branches all gnarled and tangled in the powerlines above so you can't cut it down easily, and then suddenly one day you come outside and see that it's lost some of those branches.

I went there again today. First time in months. And again, I noticed there were more people missing. New people in their places. There were still some of the old people there, of course, the ones that deep down I always sort of knew would never leave, but today they were seriously outnumbered by the new folks. I didn't really talk to any of them today; they were all busy anyway, and so was I, and what do you say to someone you never really had very much in common with anyway? As much as I hated that place, I was a part of it, once. And as long as the others were there, I felt like I'd always be a part of it, whether I wanted to be or not. But now, they're gone, more every week, and I'm not a part of it anymore. I don't really know how I feel about that.

It really hit me when I was walking through the parking lot, back to my car, that things had really changed. One of those moments you realize all over again what they mean when they say 'you can't go home again'. There were these old, corrugated metal corrals that we used to use to hold the shopping carts, with this rusty old chain that ran across the center for a make-shift barrier. We used to race the carts, slam them together, and send them sailing as fast and hard as we could into that chain, and it made this oddly satisfying *clink-clank* sound. You can probably imagine. I looked over at the corrals as I was unloading my things today. No more chain. Now there was a bar, thick and sturdy-looking, criss-crossing the empty chutes. After I finished unloading my purchases into the trunk, I gave the cart a solid kick and sent it sailing into the corral, for old times' sake.

Clink-clank.