type-a

my class schedule has kept me on campus for many hours every day this semester (that is seven days), which is considerably different from how I spent my time last semester: struggle to make it by 9:07am three days a week to Gil's indulgent fifty minute lecture on baroque trumpets (or on tue/thurs sleep through ear training at eight am and make it to conducting by nine.. maybe), go to the gym, and then go home.  At home three or four hours would disappear mysteriously.  I still don't know where. I'd go back to make a half-ditch effort to practice, and then call it quits ten 'til the hour and go to yoga.
and now I'm on campus all day working, of all things - focusing, finishing things, practicing four hours in a row, going to every class and getting something out of it.  My type-A has been awoken, and is looking sadly over years of disorganization, lack of focused discipline, and wasted time.  I am mourning, and while doing so I am carefully avoiding refined carbs and researching internships and graduate schools and promising myself it's not too late to redeem some of this scattered mess.
This is more real and workable than that eastern "time stands still and 'success' looms eternally on the horizon" bullshit I was getting into

APD

            I managed to piss Arnold off for the second Tuesday in a row, which I figured out from the way he greatly tones down his regularly boisterous goodbye and switches from keeping a list of everything Anthony has fucked up to a keeping a list of everything I have fucked up (burger patties too flat, pizza boxes stacked carelessly, did not remember to immediately begin new turkey thaw). 

            I say “allll righty Arnold, they said they don’t need me downstairs, so I guess I’m outta here..”

            “You gonna put away your shit?” he says.  He is talking about the yellow pickle bucket filled with sugar.

            “Oh.. I was using that to keep the freezer shut.” (The door is fucked.)

            “Yeah, I don’t want the night guys to get confused about where the sugar goes.”

            “Oh, okay, you got it Arnold,” I say and heft the bucket back to where the sugar goes.  The freezer door creaks up a few inches hello.  Fucking crazy but I figure I got to let Arnold redeem his dignity in terms of being higher up on the shelf than me even though we have the same job, because I kind of got him good that day with my keen logic and also he is so whiny when someone upsets him (usually not me).  I can get people good with my keen logic all the time because I catch them off guard and make my escape before they realize it’s hare-brained, but usually I do not direct it to Arnold.  After all, he has been here a year and two months to my two months, and in a sense has been putting in time for decades longer, making a cumulative offering to the food service industry, for which I owe some deference. 

Last Tuesday I pissed him off because we were fighting over who gets the ends of the rye from downstairs – can you fucking believe they normally just throw it away? He was trying to wheedle my contrition saying his wife loves it but I would not be moved, because he works way more hours than me and also on delivery days, so normally when I get a shot at it to myself it is only floppy sourdough which doesn’t do it for me. 

The Tuesday before that I didn’t piss him off exactly but I had just for the first time ever tripped shrooms and I lay catatonic for the whole night before on my friend’s carpet with the entire weight of human suffering on my small frame, and on the morning of regathering he was like “are you going to shut up with the revelations?” because he could not get in an inch of his 9/11 Was an Inside Job rhetoric edgewise.  The brunt of it instead went to the new guy on dish, who doesn’t already Believe.

But this Tuesday I really got him, poor thing.  He was making a list of everything Anthony fucked up, not making tuna brine, stealing patty aprons, to the slap slap cadence of four ounce patty pressing.  Not out loud to me on the dough mixer since I couldn’t hear him over Alex Jones Watch Guard of Civil Liberties anyway but I have heard it enough times to know.  I really hate this radio show.  I have this irrational first world fear of immersing myself in the wrong lecturer because I am smart as a whip and things get lodged in my brain at mostly useless levels of my awareness with absolutely no effort.  I am really worried about picking up the wrong opinions and spitting them out at the wrong time (a place where I am trying to look smart) and Alex Jones has only opinions that alienate you from other people.  Right now he is asking me and other patriots if we are Eagles or Ostriches, if I am registered on infowars.com the only place for networking, news, and dating for defenders of the New World Order.  Am I ready to resist because resistance is victory. 

There is kind of a lot going on in this overheated prep kitchen in the sky – all the smells of food and  I feel sick because I just binged on pizza dough like I always do when I wear the shoes that make my back hurt. I am about to scream because everything is compounding and the Watch Guard of Civil Liberties wants to know have I bought my water purifier straw to defend myself and my family yet and I am like someone call goddamn Alex Jones I think my Civil Liberties are being violated.  This is hour two but over the course of the summer it’s more than the time I spent trying to not listening in summer school Sound Mind, Sound Body for which I earned three units.  Four hours a week of Alex Jones is worse even than fourteen hours of Grateful Dead on weekend shifts downstairs, where the next weed break is always only thirty minutes away.  This is waterboarding!

“Arnold!” I begin reasonably, “Don’t you think it’s dangerous to listen to only one source for The Truth and agree to everything this guy says?”  Arnold assures me he is by nature a defensively skeptical person.  The most skeptical person, he says, I do not trust anyone.  Not even your wife, I say.  “It’s for money, Arnold! They’re writing and selling you ‘The Culture of Fear’ and made in America Diamond Gusset Jeans.”  Yeah Arnold, who has more than once forgotten to rezip his diamond gussets, agrees they are probably trying to make money.  He will not get worked up enough to spew out any fallacies but at least he is cooperating in the deconstruction of the matter.

“When he says the media is the fourth branch of the government, let’s be clear we’re not talking about Anderson Cooper, are we?  If voting Obama is voting for a continuation of the same regime, what should I do instead, cry?”  I continue without waiting for answers, “And how do you know ALEX JONES is not a tool of the government?  For high risk subversives?”

“He probably serves some purpose,” Arnold concedes, “because he has not yet been exterminated.”

“God! You think you are on some special mission along with all these civil defenders to open complacent American eyes.  You don’t even fly because you’re afraid your name isn’t on the No-Fly list after all.  I can’t listen to this crap anymore, I’m afraid I’m going to start believing it.”

And I win, Arnold is pissed off and hurt.  “If you are so AFRAID of the truth – if you are so WEAKMINDED that you are afraid of being BRAINWASHEDS then – GOD help you I don’t know what else to say.  I thought maybe you had an open mind but you’re to self involved to have time for the truth like everyone else. NO ONE can tolerate the truth.  A woman was on here yesterday, a whistleblower, she blew the whistle on the government and she was silenced.  They took her from the airport and held her in an offshore prison for two years.  The government operates on your subconscious.  They have no conscience.  No one listened to Jesus, either.  He went into anonymous for twelve years, when he was 18, no one listened to what he had to say.”  I wonder if he spent his summers in the food industry.

This was gravitating rapidly toward bullshit interspersed with unknowingly repeating Alex Jones Live with a six second delay.  And I’ve said my piece.  So I go downstairs to make a sandwich.  “Arnold is sulking,” I sulk.  “Oh thanks a lot, Nyssa.” they say.  “Get the fuck home and bother someone else.”