DISPATCH 7.333333: BULL MARKET PT. 2
RE: GETAWAY VEHICLES, PATHOLOGICAL LIARS, EPILEPTIC BABY DADDIES, AND BEAUTIFUL/TERRIBLE BATHROOM EXPERIENCES
I need to go to church. I need to go to hell. I need to run around in 1000 tiny circles. I need to burrow into the ground like a vole. I need to Google ‘vole’ and find out what distinguishes it from other rodents. I need to check my email and go to the gym. I need to drink 20 beers and punch a hole in the wall. I need to look up Buddhism on Wikipedia and find out if there’s a way to release myself from the prison of need. I need to be a monk. I need an excellent turkey club no tomato. I need my body to be rolled out by a steamroller and then ironed perfectly flat. I need to be sucked up by the vacuum cleaner and accidentally tossed out with the dust.
When I was younger and wanted to keep a journal, I would hold myself to this standard of writing a page every day, and if I missed a day I would make myself write an extra page the next day. This would ultimately lead me to stop writing in said journal because it would stress me out too bad. It is via these same completionist and self-flagellating tendencies that we will continue where we left off on my last post as opposed to skipping forward to more recent events1. Also, my audience deserves the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, which means I am obligated to tell you about a camping trip I went on two months ago during which nothing all that funny happened.
This is part two of a three (?) part series detailing what occurred in my life late August into early September. We ended the last newsletter on the Wednesday night before Labor Day weekend. I am at what is likely my highest point in months because I have just put in my two weeks notice at a terrible food service job which has harangued me for the better part of the year and left me anxious and bereft in my free time. This series of posts will take us through the end of that job, closing – I hope – that portion of my life forever, right up to the point where I could walk out of that job and never come back again. Let’s start with the day after I put in my two weeks notice.
The next morning – Thursday – I was on the phone with Mary getting ready for work. Likely running late and scrambling around per usual, I rushed out the door to my car, at which point my end of the phone call sounded something like this:
“Wait, why is my car door literally open. Like it’s lowkey ajar as fuck. It’s like, cracked open. Oh, um. Okay, so I think someone literally broken into my fucking car. Of fucking course this would happen. My car got broken into.”
All of my stuff had been rifled through – there were napkins and receipts and plastic utensils all over my front seat. Someone had put all my clock out slips (which have my full name on them) in a stack on the passenger seat. The light was on in the front seat.
This was actually fine, for the most part, as I don’t leave anything in my car of value. To put a fine point on it, my car is mainly full of trash and dirt and kind of smells like a really really old Cheeto. There were maybe a few dollars in the center console, but on the whole it was just junk. Well, except: a few weeks prior, I’d spiked my hat on the ground at my shitty job in a fit of rage and broken one of my Employee of the Month pins, which I'd then put into my cupholder.
It appears that whoever broke into my car made away with absolutely nothing except the shiny half of my broken Employee of the Month pin.
I like this image a lot: someone breaking into my car looking for cash only to pick up the Employee of the Month pin and go ‘eh, good enough.’
Anyways, my coworkers have a tendency to gossip. Once, in what I can only describe as a fit of Bartleby The Scrivener-esque pique, I tried to quit. I ended up rescinding my resignation within the week. However, I was asked about it for days after the fact, even though I had only disclosed my decision to managers. This is all to say: the upside of my car getting broken into the day after I submitted my two weeks notice is that it gave me a) a somewhat believable reason for being late to work and b) something to pre-empt any gossip-fueled questions about my potential resignation.
That Thursday morning, I blustered into work, and immediately recounted this to my managers, deftly avoiding the fact that I’d resigned the night before, as well as my coworker Jayden. The thing you need to know about Jayden is that he has a tendency to lie. Personally, I love coworkers who are pathological liars; if you’re stuck putting whipped cream on cheesecakes for hours on end, you might as well start telling falsehoods to pass the time.
So, I told Jayden that my car had been broken into. He shook his head with disdain.
“That makes sense. Them Kia boys, they’ve been crazy recently. And they’re not just doing Kias anymore, too,” He said gravely. “A few of ‘em, they were teenagers — they killed an old man the other night. And one of ‘em stole a car from the head of a gang. Do you know how dumb you gotta be to steal a car from a gang?”
I solemnly nodded along. Sure, any of this could be true. But Jayden had a tendency to just say shit: for example, every week he seemed to be working a different second job. For a while, he was a security guard at nights, but that was only to accommodate his role as a kitchen manager at a different restaurant during the day, which was not to be confused with his other job as a baker at a local grocery store, nor his role at the Arby’s up the street. And this all wasn’t even to mention his side gig as a warehouse worker at Amazon, which he claimed was the best of the bunch.
Jayden supposedly owned somewhere between 8 and 14 dogs, and lived in an apartment with his roommate, but was also a stepfather of a kind. The dogs were a frequent topic of conversation: the logistics of owning that many dogs in a small apartment seemed suspect, but I guess Jayden made it work somehow between his multitudinous employers.
“I don’t have my license,” he said, which I knew was true — he took the bus every day with our coworker Alice. “But if I had a car, I’d keep one of my dogs in there all the time. Then nobody’d steal it. Oh, I’d be angry if someone stole my car.”
This was another thing to know about Jayden: he had anger issues. By his own account, he’d made almost everyone in our workgroup cry. His conflicts had, by his telling, escalated to the point of throwing a cheesecake at a coworker’s head.
“You know, I wasn’t going to say this, but I had a past life stealing cars.” Jayden said to me.
“Wow,” I said. “Wow. That’s crazy.”
Sometimes coworkers will just say things at you and you have no choice but to say “Wow.” At least two of my coworkers had episodes of paranoid psychosis during a shift, and that’s really the only response there. Once a coworker told me – unsolicited – about her experience with a sugar daddy.
“Yeah, I think he has all his money from, like, mob stuff,” she said. “He’s only this big.” She held up two fingers indicating a substandard amount of inches.
She continued, “He’s kinda gross, but he sends me $20 every once in a while.” This is when I just about dropped my cheesecake knife.
Twenty dollars? I wanted to say. You’re sending pics to some uggo in the mob for the occasional twenty dollars? Good lord, girl. Get up off the damn floor and sign up for Doordash2. But she was my coworker, so instead I said, “Oh, wow.”
I had another coworker, Alice, tell me about her epileptic baby daddy Cesar. Cesar was a known menace at my workplace, though he never actually materialized at the restaurant; this was because Alice was kind and beautiful and everyone knew her baby daddy was a deadbeat.
Alice told me that Cesar had called her while he was walking home to her place and said he’d felt the aura of a seizure coming on. Alice, aware of Cesar’s condition, rushed out into the street to meet him; shortly after, he started seizing on the sidewalk. She managed to get him to a parking lot and called 911. After a few minutes, a passerby stopped and asked if she’d like him to call an ambulance. She said yes, seeing as it was taking them a while to dispatch responders to the scene.
“There’s a man here at the corner of Oxford and Brighton having a seizure in a parking lot,” said the passerby, in Alice’s telling. “He’s, uh, about 50 years old, I’d say, balding —”
This is when Cesar jumped straight up from his seizure and ran across the street in embarrassment.
“So anyways, I don’t know what to think — I’m not sure if he’s been faking the seizures the whole time,” Alice told me in between sliding cheesecake slices into to-go boxes. “I mean, I’ve seen Cesar seize before, but as soon as that man said he was balding, he just snapped right out of it.”
“Well, is he balding?” I said.
“Well yes, for sure. And he’s 45, too — so 50 wasn’t that far off,” Alice said.
Maybe Alice and Jayden and the coworker with the sugar daddy were telling the truth, and they just had a tendency to get into situations, as I did. This seemed to be the case when they worked together, at the very least. They seemed to have a very copacetic relationship, which was refreshing in a work environment filled with backstabbing, bullying, and harassment3. Jayden told me about how he’d even tried to save a bee for Alice.
“A bee?” I said.
“Yeah, well, Alice has been a vegetarian her whole life, and she loves animals. Even insects and bugs. And she saw this bee inside on the counter, and it had a torn wing, and she was crying over it. Ya know, cuz she loves animals and she knew it was dying.”
“Right,” I said.
“So I took this outside” — here he grabbed the blowtorch we used for the tops of certain desserts — “and I tried to attach the wing back on. I was being real gentle. But I just set the whole bee on fire.”
Anyways, when Jayden said there’d been a rash of automotive related crimes which included teenagers mowing down an elderly man, I didn’t quite believe him. So I got back to my apartment that Thursday night and decided to look it up.
As it turns out, he was, shockingly, correct: there’d been a terrible accident involving some high schoolers driving a stolen vehicle and an old man4. There’d also been other incidents in the city that week – including a major high speed car race the night prior. I clicked on the story and was shocked to see footage of the end of my street.
I will not link the article so as to not doxx myself to my 16 rabid, rabid subscribers, but for context, I live in the downtown area of my city on a smaller street off a main road. A car chase had started in one of the suburbs and wound its way through the city that Wednesday night, the driver taking an erratic path that somehow included the network of side streets I live on. He then abandoned his vehicle near the end of my street – less than a block from the house I live in — and made his great escape on foot.
Wednesday night, you’ll remember, was the night my car was broken into.
This would explain why the person who’d broken into the car left behind some of the higher value items (for example, there was a faux gold necklace in one of the side pockets that was still there in the morning). It did not explain why the would-be car thief chose to steal my Employee of the Month pin. In my head, this is a token of his grand escape which he displays with other trinkets in his house, perhaps reflective of other similar escapades.
Of course, I went into work Friday and told my coworkers all about it. Many of them grumbled about Kia Boys, not to be bothered with the fact that I have a Ford.
Over that weekend, we had plans to go camping with friends from high school. We do this every year. It’s important to gather your high school friends together intermittently to find out who from your graduating class has had a baby, or became a cop, or joined a cult5. One high school friend moved to Austria to be with her older boyfriend who I believe she met on a Warrior Cats MMORPG. My longtime middle school crush who became a high school Soundcloud rapper is apparently in a Denver rehab and recently converted to Islam. White boy, to be clear. Per Sylvia Plath, there are many fruits dangling from the fig tree, whether they be liberal arts degree to consulting pipeline, becoming a racist gas station employee, or absconding to a faraway land with a questionable paramour.
Having somewhere to swim is one of the requirements when looking for a campsite for these trips. Because of the weather that weekend, though, we ended up doing less swimming and more of what I consider to be the bread and butter of our annual camping trip: drinking beer and smoking weed. My friend Nell was kind enough to procure the beverages for the campers. She went to Costco and picked up seltzers, but she also got liquor and beers, which presented a bit of a hurdle because Nell doesn’t really like beer so she had to consult with me on what to get. A last minute audible led to possibly the worst outcome, which is a 30 rack of Coors Light.
I want to emphasize what I said just two sentences ago: she did consult with me on this, and so I really only have myself to blame, and Nell to thank for getting the drinks in the first place — this one’s on me. But Coors Light tastes like you photocopied a beer 5 times. Coors Light tastes like if you collected all the can sweat from a normal beer into a container. Coors Light tastes like if you left soda water in the back of a kind of smelly car for a few weeks and then froze it and let it thaw out. I think I drank like 4 in a row before I started to feel anything — but that was my cross to bear6, having to handle the 30 pack of Coors Light.
So this was the bulk of the trip: drinking beers, listening to tunes on a borrowed Bluetooth speaker, and discussing the life choices of people I’ve known since elementary school. As I grow older, I become more convinced that I’m right about everything and everyone else is a freak, a feeling which becomes more acute in the presence of people who you went to high school with. It makes you realize how much it is possible to lead a very different life from your own. My friends made fun of my boyfriend and I for being into a bunch of bands that sound like two random words smashed together. I think this initially came up because my boyfriend mentioned JPEGMAFIA.
“What kind of music is Bikini Kill? Is that even a real band?”
I guess I’m cursed with college radio brain on account of spending four years at college radio. I live in a world where all the white boys were into Ethiopian jazz a little while back. It’s not until you go out in the real world that you realize that actually the amount of people who are interested in the thing you’re interested in is very small. RYM has 1M users but that’s still less than 1% of the US population.
“You should play a song by those Car Headrest guys,” one of my high school friends said, after I answered a question about my favorite bands to much delight. So I played Bodys, because everyone likes Bodys, right? Surely my seven minute long furry indie song won’t scare the hoes.
My liked songs feature bands named things like “Newgrounds Death Rugby”, “Parsnip”, and “Oingo Boingo”. But everyone knows Oingo Boingo! I say, slowly shrinking into a corncob. If you’re reading this, in all likelihood, you’re probably also thinking, “Yeah, everyone does know Oingo Boingo. God, just wait until they hear about Tropical Fuck Storm or Andrew Jackson Jihad.” And I agree — but try voicing this opinion at a high school reunion.
Listing off names like that was a good enough way to pass the time. Or building fires, or collecting sticks for fires, or critiquing the way other people build fires. Mostly, though, we were drinking around the fire until it got dark out.
Sometimes you get less scared of something as you age, and sometimes you get more scared. When I was a child, the doctor didn’t particularly bother me; now, I’ve come to hate the blood pressure monitor with a passion. In my earlier days, I could summon bravery when facing a porta potty. But somewhere along the line, the auditory aspect of the whole experience started to get to me, and [ I was going to finish this sentence and then I realized that describing the sound of using a porta potty would likely alienate some of my readers ].
In health class, they teach you all the ways that alcohol affects you, and in my memory the first stage is ‘impaired judgment’. In a state of ‘impaired judgment’, I could not muster the courage to face the sound of [ REDACTED7 ], and, well, I decided to be a man about the whole thing. Freud’s concept of penis envy is generally laughable, except for when you’re drunk in the woods and you have to pee and you find yourself absolutely penisless.
So there I was, drunkenly squatting on a secluded patch of gravel, when I looked up at the gorgeous night sky — with the star-spangled firmament above me, I for a moment transcended my shitty life as a whipped cream girl pissing out dishwater beer in the dirt, instead becoming a cog in the machine of the vast and beautiful universe forever expanding in all directions; here I was, a finite being of warmth and love, looking up at the dark silence prick’d with diamonds.
The takeaway is to urinate outside whenever possible so as to bring yourself closer to nature.
On Labor Day, we drove back to our normal lives, though now with the addition of at least a dozen leftover Coors Lights. On Wednesday, I got the call — I had the job. I had not quit my cheesecaking for nothing. They wanted me to start almost immediately, which meant coming down in person for my first week and then working remote to give me time to find an apartment. I had 10 days to get down to NC for my first day.
My life spoiler alert: I continue to have the job I was offered on that day. That means that for all intents and purposes, this is a PRIVATE, ANONYMOUS social media account which I am only using to share updates with my close and personal friends. I am now a Business Professional. I am a charming young man with a bright future ahead of me, and I shouldn’t let my digital footprint ruin that.
Unfortunately I have COPD (Chronic Online Posting Disorder), which is a real mental illness in the DSM-V. Like all addicts, I have to satisfy a compulsion, even when it seems against my best interests. And so: look out for more posts soon. They are coming.
MORAL OF THE STORY: PEE OUTSIDE. YOUR BOO IS FAKING THE EPILEPSY. DON’T DRINK COORS LIGHT. AND LOCK YOUR DAMN CAR!
Trust: we'll get there eventually. I've got like six posts cooking at the moment. It's been an eventful two months.
To be clear, I don't particularly care if someone does Doordash or is a sugar baby. But, I don't think this girl should have been beholden to some suspect loser with a small Johnson for gas money.
We had annual harassment training, and it seemed to be an in-joke that incidences of casual harassment went up in the workplace whenever the training rolled around.
Jayden would later come in wearing an Arby's hat, too, so maybe he was never actually a liar.
Where are we at with the Hare Krishna re: being a cult?
Looking down from On High, Jesus is drinking the Coors Light of the meek and feeble.
If you're wondering what I redacted here, it's this: "my own piss echoing in a cavern of the sewage of other strangers,"