DISPATCH 6: TEMPER TANTRUM
RE: RELENTLESS INCONVENIENCE, TODDLER LOGIC, GEEK LOVE, AND AIRBORNE CHEESECAKE
I saw some post recently that was like “Being a 23 year old girl must feel like having seven billion dollars.” I disagree; so far, it’s felt like being tarred and feathered. Hence why I haven’t written: I know that my loyal following of 15 subscribers has been desperately awaiting my return, but unfortunately I have been fairly busy going insane. I think ‘nervous breakdown’ is just kind of trending this summer. Or maybe this feeling of being knocked down every time you experience hope is just the state of being 23.
The first factor fueling my mentie b has been a string of unceasing personal and family issues, both major and minor. My life has taken on the texture of hitting every red light on the way home from work. Like okay, you just got some bad news about the health of a family member? Let’s make sure you also hit a fence with your car1 and you run out of quarters at the laundromat and you cut yourself shaving and bleed all over the carpet. I’ve been living Alexander and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day except it’s been a month and I can’t tell if this is just the permanent state of my life.
Case in point: last week I ended up at work with the wrong shoes. This is because my boyfriend is nebulously Italian. Like many Americans, his great- or great-great grandparents immigrated here recently enough that he can trace relatives still living in Italy today. It was those distant Italian cousins who were visiting the US for the first time last weekend, so he drove down with the rest of his family to meet them. This is cool and all, except he lost his wallet the morning he was supposed to leave. He couldn’t look for it because he was busy seeing a man about a cannoli or whatever, which meant it was up to me to look for his wallet.
My boyfriend losing his wallet double sucks because he’s already done that once this year, but on the upside, now he has a Tile. Friday morning – the day after he left – he texted me his wallet was at the post office as I was getting ready for work. I was about to do my 4th? 5th? double of the week, so I’d have to go check the post office before work as I’d still be working after it closed. Except the wallet wasn’t at the post office near me – it was at the one in the next town over somehow, because of course it was. And as he texted me this, I made the simultaneous realization that I needed to do my laundry so I could have a uniform for work in an hour that wasn’t covered in hot fudge and strawberry slop.
So I sped to the laundromat, threw my clothes in the wash, drove to the next town over, went into the post office, and asked about the lost and found. Post office worker #1 said, “I don’t even know if we have a lost and found.” So he got his supervisor, Post office worker #2, who leafed through many old photocopied pages before giving me a phone number to call which would supposedly lead to the lost and found. Naturally, the phone number was disconnected. So, I went back inside and asked Post office worker #2 what to do. He handed me a complaint slip, which they didn’t end up taking, and eventually found me a different phone number to call that actually had a working voicemail box. So I called that, sped to the laundromat, threw my clothes in the dryer for <10 minutes, changed into my damp clothes in the front seat of my car in the parking lot of the laundromat, and scrambled to work.
I only remembered corporate was visiting when I walked in several minutes past my in time and saw them poking around for any reason to criticize my managers2. So now I haven’t found the wallet, I’m late for work, my clothes are damp, and oh, would you look at that, there’s my boss’s boss. As soon as I walked in, my general manager walked over to me and asked in a low voice what was with the shoes. This is when I realized I didn’t have my non-slips and was in fact wearing my Sambas.
I wanted to say, “To explain, I would have to go back literally generations.” But what I said was, “It’s a very, very long story. I’ll get my work shoes on break.” This all is like so nothing in isolation. So what if you were late to work and had to wear wet clothes and couldn’t find your boyfriend’s wallet and made yourself look stupid in front of the big bosses? But if it happens in the same week your childhood pet has to be rushed to the vet, you may find yourself having a “why me” cry in a grocery store parking lot. This entire month has been like that: each time I get over some major or minor vexation, another springs up in its place.
Reason number two I haven’t written is that I went through a period of really horrible anxiety in the past month. It feels a little gauche to claim an “anxiety disorder” in this day and age; it feels culturally in the same category as Instagram infographics and millennial therapy-speak. So let me be precise in what I mean: I was experiencing patterns of thought out of my control which led me to sitting in an examination room for my second urgent care visit of the week, listening to a kind woman tell me that what they saw on the x-ray was “not cancer” and actually “just your normal shoulder bone.”3
At this time, I was keeping an iPhone note of all the symptoms I experienced that was more than 40 items long, and included such illuminating personal observations as “ears feel weird” and “itchy one side.” I progressed past WebMD and was reading scholarly articles on unusual presentations of rare diseases in between orders at work. I convinced myself I was dying as the evening shift shuffled in, listening to my coworkers talk about whether the Hawk Tuah girl was hot. I was sweating and thinking, HELLO, I’m DYING of CANCER over here, HELLO! as one of them said, “I don’t know, she’s conventionally attractive but not really my type.”
But who could have guessed that rarely going outside except to work 6+ days a week at the job that you hate would have some kind of detrimental effect on your mental?
So, to the third factor in my not writing: my horrible food service job has been really, really insane recently. Several times in the past month, I found myself crying at work and couldn’t stop for more than an hour (I powered through because I’m on that #Grindset). As far as I can tell, my managers are getting together in their weekly meeting to come up with new Fifth Amendment violations to try out on me, like 40+ hours a week of doubles and working two jobs at once. I also think the CIA is sending in undercover agents to ask stupid questions and drive me crazy at work because my swag is a profound threat to national security. Either I’m becoming more irritable or the average IQ of the American population has dropped precipitously in the past few weeks.
It’s shocking, actually, how grown adults will revert to the strategies of toddlers when placed in a mildly inconvenient situation. I’ve had many people try the preschool strategy of asking the same question multiple times in the expectation of a different result at my job. For example:
“Hi, we’d like to buy a 7 inch pineapple upside down cheesecake.”
“Okay, so, we actually only have the pineapple in the 10 inch size.”
“We would like a 7 inch cake.”
“We have 7 inch cakes in select flavors, which you can see here.”
“We want a pineapple one.”
“So, we don’t actually carry the pineapple in the seven inch size, but there are other options as you can see on our price list.”
“Yes, we were looking to purchase the 7 inch pineapple upside down cheesecake.”
Like toddlers, customers also imagine that your only role is to fulfill their each and every desire, and that you necessarily don’t exist outside of attending to them. I most frequently experience this when I’m doing curbside takeout orders4. Recently I approached a car with a to-go order for the man in the driver’s seat to totally ignore me. He pretended that there wasn’t someone trying to hand-deliver his food for him. I tried waving. I tried my best customer service smile. I tried a perky hello. But the man literally would not look up from his phone, let alone roll down his window so I could give him the food. It was like I didn’t exist at all. I eventually ascertained that I was to make myself scarce and leave the food in the trunk.
I’m not asking for the red carpet to be rolled out when I hand you your chicken alfredo. I also don’t care for extended pleasantries about how your day is going. But to pretend I’m not there? Like, okay, food wench, bring me my potstickers and don’t speak unless spoken to.
The natural reaction of a toddler to not getting what they want is, obviously, to have a temper tantrum. This is also quite common among the customers at my place of work, like the fried mac and cheese incident. During the worst of my instability last month, this woman called me at 11:30 in the morning to order fried mac and cheese balls5. When I informed her that we were out, she got heated with me, and asked me my name so she could write it down, and then asked how it could be possible that we were out, and asked if she came in would she be able to order the fried mac and cheese because she was certain that she would, even though I told her she couldn’t, given that we were out. I told her my name, and tried to explain the idea of ingredients and how sometimes we run out of things due to the finite nature of food and the fickleness of supply chains.
This call ended with my manager getting on the phone to also explain that we were out of the mac and cheese balls and I wasn’t playing an elaborate deep fried prank on her. More specifically, my manager got on the phone with this woman and immediately started repeating, “Ma’am, I’m trying to help you. Ma’am, I’m just trying to help here” as she grilled my manager on what I’d told him, convinced that a grand conspiracy was afoot because we were out of mac and cheese balls.
If you are going to accuse me of lying because I tell you we’re out of something, then you simply have more problems than I as a cashier can solve for you. But people do this all the time: they assume I’m the singular barrier between them and their overpriced, high calorie food, and as such they treat me like I have it out for them. And if I don’t use all of my attention and ability to get them their meatloaf as quickly as possible, the situation devolves into a fit.
I recently made the mistake of taking an advance order over the phone and setting it to send to the kitchen at 5 when the customer wanted to pick it up at 5. I want to say first and foremost that I recognize how frustrating it must be to get the chicken tenders you ordered from a chain restaurant 15 minutes off schedule from what you intended. I can imagine that it was actually vewy difficuwt for you and I’m just making space for those feelings. I offer my sincerest apologies. Luckily, the customer who placed this order was one of these man-toddler types, so he had no qualms with expressing himself to me about his frustration.
“Look, I was supposed to pick up this food at 5, and now I’ve been waiting for fifteen minutes, and I’m starting to get REALLY pissed. What was the point of ordering ahead?”
“I’m so sorry about that, sir,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just go check on that for you real quick.”
And so I grabbed a manager.
“I’m so sorry about that, sir,” my manager said, after getting an earful about how really pissed this guy was. “Can I offer you a free slice of cheesecake?”
“Sure, I guess,” he said. He stood there, disgruntled, and selected a flavor. I prepared it with extreme care, acting as deferential as I could manage, before proffering it to him.
And then he snatched the slice, and with a flick of his wrist, flung it on the floor. He stomped out the front door and left the rest of the lobby staring in his wake.
As Freud says in Civilization and its Discontents, “It is much less difficult to be unhappy.” I see this every day at work. It is easier to tell the food service worker that they’re “killing America” because of the size of the cake slice you get than to accept the simple joy of a sweet treat. It’s easier to throw a free slice of cheesecake on the floor than it is to be patient for 20 minutes. It’s easier to assume everyone and everything is out to get you than to accept that mild inconvenience at your local chain restaurant.
The irony, of course, is that this is a lesson I have yet to internalize myself. Perhaps all these hurdles, large and small, are not some kind of karmic justice for a transgression in my past, but rather the random events of the universe. Maybe I do have some control over these miserable waves – maybe if I try to stop constantly anticipating the worst case scenario, I can at least free myself from the unhappiness generated by unnecessary anxiety.
In this spirit, I sat down to write my first blog post in over a month, returning to an activity that I truly enjoyed. And then I went to post it, and saw that Substack was down.
GEEK LOVE - KATHERINE DUNN
Something that we haven’t really culturally reckoned with yet is the rapid emergence and decline of the ‘circus freak’ aesthetic that briefly took over in the early to mid aughts. I’m talking about whatever was going on with the Dresden Dolls and 2000s era Tim Burton. The ‘I Write Sins Not Tragedies’ music video. American Horror Story6. You get it. Geek Love predates this by some time but feels of a kind with this sort of media. It is, in short, about a family of circus freaks. And then it gets really effed up and crazy, and you can imagine some coworker with big gauges and a ‘NORMAL PEOPLE SCARE ME’ shirt raving about the book and telling you that it’s not for everyone.
And yet, it’s one of my favorite books of the year so far. Geek Love is a deeply imaginative novel about family, power, love, and being a freak. One of my most favorite favorite favorite books is Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. Geek Love is similar in that the characters are creative and fraught, trapped by circumstance of birth and grappling with the conditions in which they are to live and love. It also has a similar kind of flowery language that I’m partial to – it’s a very voicey book.
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD - RICHARD YATES7
There are a lot of really horrible couples in fiction, but April and Frank Wheeler, wow. This book is harrowing. Revolutionary Road is about the violence that lurks beneath the surface of suburbia, about the horror in realizing that your life may be just as banal and insignificant as everyone else. In the 90s, Stewart O’Nan called Yates a ‘writer’s writer’, ‘that august but sad category’; since then, I think Revolutionary Road has had something of a resurgence, especially with a star studded film adaptation in 2008. It was always his biggest hit in any case, but Revolutionary Road seems to have taken its proper place in the American canon as a classic of the anti-suburban screed.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT - MAXIMUM GRAVES
I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this webcomic yet given how obsessed I am. This is about true crime, My Little Pony Tumblrs, and how we handle identity online. It wrestles with the age old question: can someone still be valid if they were an accessory to a murder? In all seriousness, I think a lot of works are trying to address what it means to be ‘online’, and ‘What Happens Next’ actually captures this very well. The issue of how the internet warps our own self-perception and how we interact with others is the defining issue of this era, and specifically this era of fiction, because if our self-conception and personal relationships are radically reconstructed due to technological advancements it presents a major challenge to art as it stands. Some work “about” the internet takes on the texture of being online by using hyper-current signifiers and memes, but fails to grapple with what being online actually does to you. ‘What Happens Next’ is an ongoing comic that I think gets closer to answering this question.
AMPHIBIAN - BANG BANG MACHINE
Sometimes I look up the titles of books I’ve read on Spotify to see what playlists people make about them, which I assume is a sort of embarrassing vestigial reading habit from being on Tumblr in the mid-2010s. I’m not afraid to admit that I found Bang Bang Machine because I looked up ‘Geek Love’, which was actually a good idea, because it led me to their incredible single of the same name. Bang Bang Machine blends swirly goth and shoegaze into 5+ minute long bangers with a little more 80s pop influence than your average ethereal guitar band. I love the drama of tracks like ‘Show Me Your Pain’. Another banger off Amphibian is ‘Tough Delilah’, which I was bumping this morning.
TRAIL OF FLOWERS - SIERRA FERRELL
Look, 2012 is coming back in a big way. We have to take the bad with the good. We’re on the verge of feminism popping off again, but I also think we’re in danger of a stomp-clamp revival. Hence the rise of Sierra Ferrell, who I started listening to because of her excellent Tiny Desk Concert. She’s a country artist whose sound leans towards bluegrass and roots. Her songs are catchy and beautiful, anchored by her fiddle playing and harmonies with her band. This album may be more palatable to listeners who haven’t taken a plunge into country but are vaguely interested in the genre due to its current resurgence.
3 - MOM
You may know Devi McCallion from Black Dresses, Girls Ritual, Anarchy 99, Cats Millionaire, etc etc etc. She’s a prolific artist whose work often focuses lyrically on the impacts of trauma over chiptuney or harsh electronic stylings. The specific McCallion side project I’ve been listening to recently is Mom, and particularly the album 3. It’s actually shocking how forward-thinking this project is. It’s an album that’s pretty much about being repulsed by slash not knowing how to handle your own desires, except the instrumentals kind of sound like tracks they decided not to use for the Wii because they were too creepy.
McCallion has a magical insight with her lyrics: “You’re 15,000 tiny bugs and you should crawl into my pores” comes from ‘Warped Tour’; “I’ll be your fuck doll if you’ll be my hospital” comes from ‘Fingers’; “I’m slime and sleaze I’m really not so hard to please I just want to be loved by everyone/My whole body feels like a clenched fist” comes from ‘I Fuck Everything Up.’ The most popular track on the album is ‘Bloodeater’, an upbeat, jumpy ninety second number that ends: “I hope one day life will be better/climb a ladder made of my sweat and blood/but the blood eater hungers/everything just keeps getting harder.”
OTHER NOTES OF INTEREST
The whole Olympics has happened since the last time I wrote, which is kind of crazy. When I last posted, we didn’t even know about that pommel horse guy who does the Rubik’s cube. We didn’t know him. I’m pretty sure that the JD Vance fucking a couch thing had not happened by the time I’d last written. We have lived thousands of lives since then.
Anyways, shout out the ‘lympics for keeping me going for a period there. I was losing my mind and yelling “I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE” driving home from work, and then I’d turn on, like, rhythmic gymnastics, and an immense sense of peace would wash over me. That’s the real power of sport.
I live in the city home to Mount Hope Cemetery, the place where both Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass are buried. There’s a lot to discuss when it comes to this cemetery, but I want to talk about a suspected grave robbery. On the Summer Solstice in 2000, the body of Civil War General Elisha Marshall was exhumed and his remains were scattered in what the police assumed was a Satanic ritual. Most of his bones were found – except for his skull, which remains missing to this day. Anyways, this blog recounting the mystery of Elisha’s skull recently resurfaced. The blog is so awesome: the mystery itself is very real, but the blog is very local investigator following whatever is mildly interesting in their city.
Last year there was a movie released called ‘Cocaine Bear,’ and also another one called ‘Cocaine Shark,’ according to Google. A New York Times article titled ‘Not Afraid of Sharks? Well, Now They’re on Cocaine’ reports our cocaine shark fears have become a reality. I wanted to link because the expert interview they include is with a scientist named, incredibly, Daniel Snow.
There was a lot of buzz a little while ago about Friend, an AI-powered necklace that sends you texts about how you suck at gaming. This is mainly because the CEO raised $2.5M in capital and then spent $1.8M of it on the domain “friend.com”. The part of this news cycle I feel like we all missed was how another CEO of an extremely similar product got on Twitter to accuse the friend.com guy of stealing the tech via rap diss. Everyone who works in tech is deeply insane.
MORAL OF THE STORY: YELLING AT FOOD SERVICE WORKERS WON’T CHANGE YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES. GET AN AIRTAG FOR YOUR WALLET. GARLIC BREAD HELPS. HOPE IS NOT FOOLISH DESPITE ALL EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY.
Don't tell my parents, my car is fine — I just rolled into a fence while parking because I'm stupid.
I actually think it’s really funny when the corporate guys visit because they turn everything into a giant dick measuring competition. They play mind games with my managers: last week I heard one of them say to a manager, “There’s something wrong in the bar. I’ll give you two minutes to figure out what it is.” I’ve never seen grown men so anxious about cake as when we have to prepare a slice for corporate. Like, picture a group of men in button-ups counting the number of chocolate zig-zags on the plate. That kind of cock-off.
God wouldn't give a hypochondriac with a persecution complex cancer anyhow.
I want to say for the record that if you’re ordering takeout and you can’t even get out of the car to pick up the food that someone else has made for you, you are not surviving the winter.
11:30 is still practically brunch, in my book, and eating something you can buy at a county fair for brunch is something I find mildly objectionable, but who am I to tell these people how to live their lives.
I know that the circus season of AHS came later and doesn't fit into the proscribed time period I set out just two sentences prior. Give me a break. This is a Substack, not a dissertation.
I listened to this as an audiobook from Random House Audio read by Mark Bramhall in 2008, and wanted to shout that out because the reading was quite good.