Headlong...

Been a while since I have posted anything here. It’s not that I haven’t been inspired to write, I guess it has more to do with the fact that no one seems to be reading. I have never been any good at diary writing, writing down the thoughts in my head for later reference just seems silly since I have been loath to access them for any insight at a later date. So I blog. I blog for me but also with the hope that someone, out there, may be reading. Patience is a virtue, but my virtuous side has been under fire as of late. I feel myself slipping in isolation, back to the cloistered child I was when I was 19. And so this cry in the dark.

So many things happen on a regular basis, so many things personal, political, internal and external. So many minor (and major) frustrations, so many little triumphs and major tragedies. I wrote before how Katrina made me feel, helpless, unimportant in my own struggles and silly and trifling in my personal needs for more than what I have at the moment. Well that feeling remains still, with the earthquakes, hurricanes and terror threats my needs feel less and less important. With the balance of the supreme court hanging, my issues seem childish and boring. With the imminent layoffs at Delta, Northwest and now Delphi http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2005-10-08-delphibankruptcy_x.htm?csp=24 I see my own abysmal financial state as pitiful yet minor.

I guess its just another phase, another bump in the road. But I am not terribly inspired to write because everything I want to write about seems miniscule in importance by comparison.

I’ve been finding it difficult to reconcile a lot of things lately, my increasingly wandering eye, my need to flee this place for something more comfortable/more familiar, my need to fix what is broken and my feeling that a lot of it should be done by someone else.

I’m getting old, too old to be living the life of a young man. Too old to be dealing directly with “customers” who see me as less than human. People like the woman I dealt with last week, who in her haste to vacate the establishment I work for made her checkout more difficult by muttering her haste. And then I did the unforgivable, I made her wait more. I am constantly amazed and sadden when someone feels the need to hump my ass like a baboon, establishing their dominance over me by speaking to me in a way no person should speak to another. The method she employed was all the more maddening because it was indirect.

When I made an error which caused the entire sale to be wrung up MANUALLY, she about lost her mind. Grabbing her cellular phone (another constant source of anger inflammation within me) and began to speak inappropriately loudly into it asking her husband to pick up her kids because the “ineptitude” of the cashier caused her another 5 minute wait, I about lost it. I broke the first rule of customer service, this woman was NOT right. Not right in her indirect name calling, not direct in her haste to leave the store after casually shopping it for over an HOUR and not correct in assuming that I was neither intelligent enough to know the passive aggressive game she was playing nor in the fact that she believed I would not respond to her insults.

Why do people feel compelled to use those in retail as the “pressure valve” for the frustrations of their daily lives? Why dehumanize another person for the sake of your own ineptitude in the area of interpersonal communications? And why the goddammed hell are people so rushed? Kids are overscheduled, people race by me on the road “fighting traffic” and exceeding the speed limit only to meet me, gripping the wheel, at the next light? Why?

It makes me wonder what people are rushing to. Are we driven to kill ourselves in order to cram as much “life” into our lives as possible? So much importance is placed upon being prompt that everything else is a blur. We have scheduled and re-scheduled ourselves into an automaton state. There are no roses to smell because they only exist as a blur on the side of the road, and nobody except the poor and mad walk anymore.

Headlong into the abyss we ride. We push ourselves and by extension everyone around us into a frenzy by wanting more, more MORE, faster and better when most of it is the same repackaged shit. I have lived my life as a mess of major mistakes and minor triumphs, have given of myself without asking anything in return and now as I see everyone has moved on from the idea of  cooperation and mutual struggle to make life “easier” and in the process become, and have made life harder.

I have become “harder” as well. Some say that this is the process of growing up, I say bullshit! The process of distinguishing yourself by choosing among a limited number of options, hodgepodging them together in a limited number of ways and calling it “unique” is not distinguishing at all. We push each other so hard, and for what? To achieve the same empty existence of our forefathers? To further distance ourselves and in doing so, from the rest of humanity? Why?