It’s important that we crack our own code. How our minds and bodies are wired. What traumas still run loops in our minds? Something as simple as eat less, exercise more. Time to rewrite the lines for myself. Update my programming. Retarget my mission by redrawing maps, milestones, and future destinations.
My future self is thinner and more handsome than I am now. Older, too, of course, but I feel like I might be maturing into the best years of my life. I have a few more unlock codes to find, but I’ve untethered from many of my lead balloons. I woke up a healthy bouncing and chubby baby boy in pre-tech-boom Austin, Texas. It was a sleepy college town with a government of good old boys patting each other’s backs about dominating the brown and black communities. The last democratic governor of Texas was Ann Richards. Now, even her daughter, Cecile Richards, is dead. Texas is purple and being gerrymandered into a deep red hat stronghold.
Oh politics.
I can control very little on the national level. Let’s see what I can focus on right here in my own little world. I have suffered and lost. I was born stout and I’m thinning by hard work and discipline. Eat less ice cream. Get exercise. And the counter-intuitive lesson, get plenty of sleep.
Let’s take it from the top down.
Loved
Healthy and fit
Well-rested and alert
Living with ease
It goes well with my kindness mantra:
May you be safe,
May you be healthy,
May you be happy,
May you live with ease.
That’s what’s next for me, the living with ease part. I am evolving out of my current role in the low-wage grocery business. I love the hippies, the pretty women and men, and the benefits. I don’t love the 8-hour shuffle on my feet, initiating again at 9 am today. It’s a hard truth: a full-time job that doesn’t cover my rent. In my case, a mortgage, but I am more fortunate than most of my colleagues. I have a college degree, a career outside of retail, and ambition. I will find my upward draft of wind even as fall is here and temperatures are predicted to get cooler by November.
My birthday month. Ah. 63 is coming. My family is going odd. Son, 25, daughter, 23.
I assume the rushing days of October will provide me with a new job. I’m working hard on it. Interviewing, finding new avenues to be excited about. Putting my AI skills to work rewriting resumes and crafting cover letters, and crafting emails for LinkedIn networking. Everyone is using AI to write their job applications. Then, the companies are using AI to filter the applications. No one is getting hired. The administration’s horrific first nine months are to blame. Time to pivot.
The better job is my current priority. I’m even chatting with leadership at the grocery store to see why our idiot team lead has chosen to freeze me out of the upward mobility he signaled to me after only two weeks on the job. Now, I’ve gotten the 90-day raise. $0.32 an hour more! Woo hoo!
I always feel like I’m whining when I talk about my job, my career, my sad, shuffling job. I’m not complaining. In fact, I’m learning from this job. I’m also aware that I am not special to the grocery store. Regardless of my potential, I’m an older guy who is a flight risk. I don’t really want $3 more an hour. I need 3X more a month. Again, I have a house, so I’m not complaining, just lamenting the current situation that is humbling so many of my friends and colleagues.
I see the “workers” around me every day. Also, in my job, I see the wealthy and beautiful parading by in the mid-morning hours, in pilates gear and running clothes. The parking lot is full of cars that cost more than my house. It’s a wonderful world. Rich with possibilities. Finding my next partner while wearing an apron in the fancy grocery store is probably not a goal. Plenty of flirts, and women who say, “My husband will love this,” referring to some exotically healthy food they are going to prepare for their king. Or perhaps, they are the queen, merely here for a snack before heading home to lunch prepared by Juanita.
I have my own path.
Key to my future joy and ascention will be the publication of this series of books I call hyper-fiction. You’re experiencing it right now. A mix of biography, memoir, and Kurt Vonnegut. That’s my plan. Throw in some Miller, Kerouac, Whitman, and Lawrence, and we’re in business. Weaving my own webby wonder of words, spaces, commas, nuance, and joy. I hope to convey joy. Have a reader smile at something I wrote. I can’t see them, but I occasionally get an email from them. They’re are not buying enough of my books, though. I make about $20 from my publishing each month. I need to put three zeros behind that number. Maybe Oprah can help.
This, then, these strokes on a keyboard in my darkened and nag champa fogged living room, are my bliss. Writing in silence, in a comfy spot. I am going to work in a few hours, but I have this moment. With you… Me and you… Here on a Sunday morning. There was a Saturday Night Live last night with a guy who’s from Puerto Rico and will be seriously trolling the red hat administration. Oh, btw, Puerto Rico is an American territory. Bad Bunny is American. I haven’t watched it yet.
The outrage is funny. Not too funny, as the red administration has shut down the government to keep their massive tax cut for millionaires and, more importantly, billionaires. The red coats want to kill most ACA (Obamacare) subsidies, the only reason many of us can afford health insurance without being handcuffed to our employers. Well, I’ve jumped back into corporate work, on the lowest rung, hourly wage earner. My time is clocked, tracked, subtracted. They are thinking of tracking our 10-minute breaks now. Micro-management for managers with no leadership experience or motivational skills. You track employees’ time according to your level of trust. The high turnover in the retail business means hourly workers are expendable and cheap.
I’m expendable. No matter how exceptional I feel, or how I perform, I’m just a cashier. I’m a replaceable cog.
A few weeks ago I was fired. The Slavic refugee Assistant Store Team Lead fired me for my absences. She failed to check my account, however, because 32 hours of UPT (Unpaid Time Off) were being returned to my attendance account. She didn’t even look at my file.
“I have until tomorrow to submit my paperwork to HR.”
“Let me go check,” she said, leaving the conference room. When she returned, she was undaunted. “Okay, you have 24 hours to fix it.”
I did not say, “Um, it’s not up to me. It’s your system. It’s the reason you have a system.” That was a few weeks ago, and she has never spoken or looked at me again. I’m sure my days are numbered, as she seeks to remove me, a pain in her butt every time she sees me still in the store. She probably doesn’t think about me at all. I see her. Wonder, should I say anything?
No.
Keep my head down. Show up. Shut up. Find a new job.
In the meantime, get rest, exercise, and a new job. Skip the romantic and musical ambitions at this moment. Focus. No distractions. One point of one spear. This. The words that began this quest, a year and a half ago, to find myself, rescue my son from his destructive addiction, and explode into space. I’m still anticipating blastoff, but now just for myself. Both kids are doing well. I am doing well.
I will do well-er.
