The Bad Radger Reader

I’ve been working nearly non-stop for so long at this point that it’s destroyed my body and constitution. So much so that the oncoming spring has ushered in some illness that I can’t seem to kick. Is it the flu with flu-like symptoms? Or is it something that feels like the flu but isn’t? I’m sweating in cold rooms, all of my bones and joints ache like they’re going to crack, my muscles feel individually too tight but too loosely attached to the rest of my body, my head throbs, and I’m hacking up phlegm. Which are all very extreme examples of nicotine withdrawal, as well.

That’s right. I’ve finally stopped smoking again. It’s been just under a year since I started up again, but I’ve been paring down since I got my new car – refusing to smoke inside – and smoked my last cigarette this past Monday. I’m still incredibly bored, but this is probably one of the better decisions I’ve made lately. Once I can smell myself again, I’ll no longer reek of stale tar. Maybe the stains that have already begun to form on my fingers will go away, and once the withdrawal ends – I was smoking heavily, so it might take awhile – I’ll probably be healthier overall. Which is all well and good, but I’m just tired of hurting all the time. I work so hard, though, and the pain I’m in- I can’t let it stop me.

Recently, I told the boss at the event company that I’d be willing to drive the truck for events. That translated into running shows, even though I said I wasn’t comfortable doing that part. My first show-running experience was with another veteran crew leader and a team I could trust, so the experience wasn’t bad, though I didn’t find out I was in charge until after the breakdown had already begun. That was a bit…nerve-wracking, to say the least. My second solo show took all day. I picked up the truck from the rental office, I told people what to do, I stayed and guarded the ball pit from drunks – somewhat successfully provided that I was mostly sober and they were bigger than me – I directed the breakdown, I drove back to the warehouse, and I dropped the truck back off at the rental place. All told, it was 16 hours of work with only a short break.

A week later, and I did it again. With this added responsibility came a $2 per hour pay increase, so this work earns me $20 an hour rather than the previous $18. Not too shabby…except for when you’re so sick that you shouldn’t be around people and have to stay awake and drive for hours and lift heavy things and think and drink and pay for things. Which is an example of what’s on my plate for today. I’m not running the show or driving their truck, but I still have to be away from home from…just a few minutes from now until probably after 3am.

Luckily, I’ve managed to come as close as possible to overdosing on several different OTC meds without actually crossing that line, so the pain has been slightly muted. Still more intense than yesterday, but you do what you have to do. And I’m one of the boss’s official go-to guys for everything now, so I don’t want that to change. I can finally officially add this job to my resume as more than just being a semi-intelligent mule.

Since it’s about time for me to wash this stale sweat off my body and get a move on, I’ll cut this narrative short, but I just wanted to say a few things since I’ve been silent for so long. Please feel free to hold me accountable if I start smoking again. I don’t feel any cravings, but I get so bored, and one smoke passes about 10 minutes. Makes it disappear off the front- and back-ends of my life, and while that’s not a bad thing, it does limit my options moving down the road.

Please wish me luck juggling these two jobs that I seem to be excelling in. Even though the crew leader position is rough going, I’m getting the hang of it and am figuring ways to make it better. Next, I need to work on my speed. With my courier job, I’ve adjusted the way I work so that I am able to come home during the afternoon and take a few hours to myself while still having the ability to work, so I’m not feeling so bored and alone. It’s a better feeling, though it’s mostly in response to my current illness. And please wish me luck getting over said illness because I have no idea what caused it or how long it will last, but it really hurts, and I want it to be done.

Been busy lately. Running around and driving quickly or spending my downtime with a friend, so I haven’t been back in a week or so. Does that break the trust we’ve been building in this semi-private public space? I don’t think so. You don’t task yourself to write in your downtime and then beat yourself up when you don’t have any time to write. Where’s the joy in that?

The event work has come back with a vengeance. For those of you who don’t know, I am part of a work crew that sets up and breaks down various different types of events. For most of this year, I’ve been working a few days a week or month to set up the curtains and couches, lights and table centerpieces, and dance floors for the bar and bat mitzvahs for rich Jewish kids in the suburbs. I’ve crewed for a few other events, too, but it’s mostly been the mitzvahs. They’re a pain in the ass – and the arms and legs – but the money is really good, so I take the work whenever it becomes available to me.

What does this consist of? Well, when call time arrives, I show up at the company’s warehouse/office space, help the other guys load a truck or two, drive to the venue, spend several hours setting things up, take a few hours off, go back to break everything down, drive back to the warehouse to unload the truck, and drive home. It’s usually mentally easy while being incredibly physically tasking, but the rewards are great. In this case, I’m spending time as part of a team and also using my body. Plus, as I said before, the money is really good.

Pretty soon, prom season will be starting again. I worked last year’s prom series, and it was rough. The work was close to back-breaking, and there were several days after where I could barely move, but it saved me from going completely broke until I could find more work as a driver. The season ended at the start of last summer, so I didn’t hear back from the company until late August. And all of that will be starting again in just a few weeks.

The good thing about working freelance is that I don’t have to accept work to be able to keep working. I’ve recently started paring the mostly-unworthy runs out of my driving day which gives me a little more time to sit but also keeps me from running my car quite so hard. A good thing, all in all, and I still make the money that I need to survive and thrive. Since both of my jobs are freelance, I can take a day off from driving whenever I want in order to work an event, and since I can clock in and out when I choose, I can drive in between my crew shifts. It makes for a very long day, but it also keeps me from getting drunk when I shouldn’t be spending so much money.

Speaking of paring things down, I’m going to cut this essay off a little bit because I’ve actually run out of things to write about this topic. I could definitely go into the details of what the actual set up and break down entails, but I’d rather save that for another day. Suffice to say that I’ve been busy and will continue to be busy, and that’s very nice. When I’m alone and doing nothing for long enough, the darkness comes back. When the dark thoughts return, I start to get self-destructive, and we all know that that’s a terrible thing. You’ve never plumbed the depths of my darkness, but if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll realize that you could probably descend forever without ever reaching the bottom. And that’s where we are now. The bottom…of this post.

With the recent onset of winter in Atlanta, the delivery game has picked up. Nothing says, “making money,” like a person’s mouth, but in this case, that mouth is a blustery, frigid day. It’s hell of windy in the midtown and downtown areas of this city, and nobody wants to get out in it to walk to a restaurant. The people who do are crazy, so they’re probably not ordering food to be delivered anyway. They’re the ones standing on the street corners begging for change or cigarettes. Or walking to a restaurant to pick up lunch or dinner for someone who can’t be bothered to get out into the brisk.

Winter is a real game-changer when it comes to delivering food. Days go from hoping to make $100 in 10 hours to hoping to make $200 in the same amount of time. Let me tell you, that extra $100 goes a long way when most of your bills sit at right about that much. And with the additional car payment, increased insurance premium on the new car, and required health care premium – THANKS, OBAMA! – that extra $100 in a day is pretty danged well necessary, so winter couldn’t have come at a better time.

We’ve been hit with some setbacks in the past few months. September was amazing! October was much less so. They mandated that we use a new courier app, and that app was inherently broken. The payouts dropped because they no longer calculated actual mileage but instead mileage based on a straight line from the driver to the restaurant and the restaurant to the customer. In a city where straight-line travel for more than 2 miles is literally impossible because the roads don’t work like that, it was a significant pay decrease. Significant to a blue-collar worker, anyway.

Later, they decided to make Atlanta a test market for tipping. You see, our payouts had been based on nothing but mileage, but then they dropped out mileage pay by about half and decided to let the customer’s altruism rule the day. Since customers are rarely altruistic – as most people are rarely altruistic – the payouts stayed much lower than they had been in the past. The money is still there if the runs are there, but the days of making $22 in mileage pay for a single run that takes a little less than an hour disappeared.

The other setback, and this was pretty huge, was a series of courier and vendor app crashes combined with a few server crashes right at the start of the dinner rush that made people gun shy about using our service. The market in this city used to be dominated by one company, but when others came into town, they came in droves. The downside was that when people couldn’t properly use our service, they had other options. As options go, people will tend to pick one and stick with it until it stops working when they need it. And while the others are not as good, they didn’t crash when ours did, and it hampered business for several months. By the time things started picking back up, the holidays had rolled around, and that meant that people were saving money and traveling, so we didn’t have much work.

The beginning of the year was supposed to be huge. The first week or so is never busy in this game, and it doesn’t matter who you work for. It was supposed to be either cold or rainy or both, but it was neither for quite a while. This one, I blame on El Niño, and that’s a pretty valid complaint, but it’s the weather, so there’s nothing a lowly courier can do about it. Almost the entire month of January, when it was supposed to be cold, the weather was mostly dry, and the temperatures were having in the 70º range. Also not very good for business when people are taking advantage of the sunny days to take their kids to the park after school or to go out to dinner at their favorite spots.

Flash forward to the present. It’s currently about 37º outside, and that’s great! I wear fingerless gloves, so my fingertips are a little chilly, but that’s alright. I’m still having enough time to write, so that’s good, too, but I’m currently just waiting out the calm before the storm that is the dinner rush. Wednesdays are hit or miss, but today already hit hard, so I’m very excited about hitting another $200 day. It happened throughout September, so why not February? That’s basically just the winter version of September, right? If the weather stays dry or snowy but hell of cold, it’s completely reasonable to have these days for the rest of the month. It also helps that I’m one of the most trusted and highest paid couriers in the organization, but that’s mostly politics and skill. So, I’ve had a couple of good days, and I’m hoping those days continue until May, as I’ve predicted. The cold will always help, and so will the on-coming storms of the spring.

Funding is fickle in this line of work, but with bad weather comes good money, so I’m hoping this trend continues. As a proponent of positive thinking, it’s good to stay hyped, but it’s hard for me. So many disappointments in life have made it difficult to maintain a solid level of motivation. Working through any laziness and plowing through the slow times writing and sipping on hot coffee will definitely help. As of this second, the year looks bright, and that’s what it’ll take to not only survive but to also flourish, so please stay upbeat with me, and together we can destroy this year like we did the fourth quarter of 2015.

Having written at length on a large number of the same topic over and over again, it’s about time to touch on a subject that’s constantly plagued me while getting more and more difficult as the years pass. And that subject is dating. There’s no shortage of reading material in this department, but my take will hopefully help. If nothing else, the venting will assist my own thought process.

Dating is hard. It’s difficult. It’s a pain in the ass. And it’s been made more and more difficult as the years have gone by. I’m currently 34 as I write this, and I’m so busy that I’m relegated mostly to the online arena. There are several problems with this, and I’ll go about enumerating them as I see fit, thankyouverymuch.

The first impediment to online dating as a goddamned adult is the fact that I can’t hide how old I am. Now, I’m not looking for a way to do that better. I don’t care how old I am. It’s just a number. All it means is that I’m one higher on an arbitrarily-dictated incremental system determined by the Earth’s position in space. I’m very much the same as I was in my late- and mid-20s, but there’s a number that says I’m not, and that’s the first thing people look at. Well, they look at the pictures, too, but that doesn’t help. If you’ve seen my pics, you know that I’m not conventionally attractive and tend to rely on my animated personality and gestures to make up for it. No six-pack abs. No chiseled features. No ultra-manly physique. And a particularly low number of friends who take pictures of me when we’re together in public. None of those things help, but the age is the first obvious deterrent. Being 34 and single means that I’ve obviously made mistakes, which is true, but none of those mistakes have trapped me into a relationship that has lasted longer than it needed to. Well, none save one, but that’s not for the here and now to discuss.

The second impediment is my social status. I don’t have a high-paying career-type job, and I’m not in the upper echelon of society. I work blue collar as a freelance food courier, and I work roughly six days a week. I also work as event crew, but that collar is even bluer since it’s purely physical work with very little problem-solving, though there is plenty of that along with a little bit of autonomous design, though it doesn’t come across that way and is very difficult to convey. And since everything I do is freelance, I have the added burden of having to pay all of my own taxes and knowing that close to half of the money that I make isn’t really mine. Of course, very few women get to find this out because they don’t talk to me.

The third impediment. I’m a pretty weird guy. I have a decently-unique point of view about many things, and I’m not all that good at small talk. I’m the guy who approaches you in public and says something weird enough to make you pull a stupid face until I walk away. It would be pretty groovy if I had a head-mounted camera and wanted a collection of stupid looks, but that’s not what I’m trying to get. I’m trying to get dates, and a stupid face means no dates. A STUPID FACE MEANS NO DATES! You like the emphasis? Moving along.

That basic inability to small-talk translates abhorrently into text, unfortunately. And while I used to be great at cold messaging a girl, that ability has sadly fallen by the wayside. We have apps with match percentages or swiping pictures, and I’m trying to figure out what to say that will get you to respond. Just one response is usually all I need, but even that rarely happens. I’m not a super creep, and I’m not trying to marry you with the first message. I’m just trying to phish for a response and get you to respond so that you’ll maybe go out with me and have a good time. I know how to have a pretty good time, and that’s important, but you have to respond before that happens, and my weirdness certainly doesn’t help with that.

The fourth impediment to actually dating someone is my sad inability to get a second date. When all the stars align, and I get to go on a first date, something happens that prevents a second. It’s either the way I communicate after the date or during, or it’s something that happens where I find out that you’re suddenly not in the right mental or emotional place to be dating people, and I had to spend money for you to figure that out. Or maybe you’re just not in the right mental or emotional place to date me. I don’t know. I can’t tell, and if you don’t tell me that, I won’t be able to pick it up. Apparently.

This is just a list of gripes, but the it’s mostly true that the Internet has mostly ruined traditional dating. It’s made girls cynical and guarded. Always wondering if THIS is the guy who’s going to kill her and wear her skin. And while I’m not one of those “nice guy” types who tips his tiny fedora and says, “M’lady,” it doesn’t help me any because I’m intense and hard to understand. My intentions, even when spelled out from the front, are apparently unclear. It’s the same thing that happens every time I go for a job interview. I’m deadpan and calm. I can unleash a terrible passion, but it has to be with terrible purpose, and a first date doesn’t really count. All of these things are my crazy, but it goes deeper than that.

How deep does it go? That remains to be seen. If it’s ever to be seen again. I’m not getting any younger, and I’ll never be the type of guy who destroys womanly objects for his own sexual gains, so it remains that dating is hard. The dating game is difficult, and “Netflix and Chill,” is ridiculous. So, here I sit. Looking. Waiting. Hoping. Not approaching. Is there a way around this? Maybe, but if so, I’m not in the right place. My life’s choices have made dating harder than it needs to be. Harder than it should be. And there’s no manual written for people like me. And that really sucks because I’m the guy who actually reads the manual.

To cease this rambling rant sooner than later, I just want to meet a crazy girl who matches me. Who’s willing to give me a chance. And who doesn’t mind that I’m a weird guy who works hard to survive. That should count for something, right? But when it does, I just hope I’ll be able to see it for what it is.

Where I’m sitting right now should be a moot point that I don’t even mention, but it still gets me every time. I’d always avoided these places in the past, preferring locally-owned and operated coffee shops, but you can’t always do that. Actually, I can’t really afford to do that. For a couple of reasons.

Reason number one: Local coffee shops are so expensive! Now, you might be thinking something like, “Well, if you can afford to buy coffee at a Starbucks every day, you can certainly afford to shop at a local coffee shop.” You have a point there, Me, but you’d be wrong. I stop and sit at this place for hours a day. It’s centrally-located in the city, so it’s a really good place for me to wait for runs to come in, and that’s how I make money. There are no local coffee shops around me, but I probably wouldn’t go to one of those, anyway. Also, local coffee shops tend to charge more for their coffee. Almost $2 more for the same size, in some cases. I’m here at this Starbucks about 5 days a week, so when you think about it, that’s an extra $10. Which doesn’t count the fact that I can get a cheap refill because I’m always here, even though you’re only supposed to be able to do this if you stay in the cafe the whole time. They know me here, so they know my drink, and they don’t mind giving me a refill when they should be charging me for another cup, and while I could probably get that at any local coffee shop I could frequent, I might feel worse about it. Almost like I was taking advantage of them, whereas there’s no cognitive dissonance here because it’s a huge corporation that happens to take care of their employees while still paying them a shit wage. So, that savings goes from $10 a week of guilt-free coffee to about $30 a week because it’s always possible that I might feel bad for the owner who I have gotten to know.

Reason number two: Location, location, location! I already bunked this one by mentioning it in my last paragraph, but I cannot stress enough how important it is to find a good location to sit and wait. This is Midtown Atlanta. There are very few places to park for free, so all I have to do to earn the right to sit here is to buy a coffee and sip on it for a few hours. I can leave and come back, but since I have this branded cup, I can bring it inside and use it as my Starbucks ghetto pass and sit until I get another order. Ad infinitum. Plus, it’s winter…ish, so being inside a building in a comfy chair is kind of nice. It definitely beats sitting in my car in one of the surrounding neighborhoods where I could potentially be rousted by the cops or reported for loitering by the residents. Being an unsavory-looking individual has its negatives, even if I look better this way, and that’s one of them. Seen from a distance, I’m a bit intimidating. You have to talk to me to get over that.

Reason number three: There is NOOOOOOO reason number three.

Reason number four: They know me here. I’ve bonded with the manager – he looks suspiciously like Colin Meloy, the lead singer for The Decemberists – and I’m friendly with most of the baristas. This is important because it earns me good will. I don’t make a fuss, I’m polite and friendly, and with the exception of that one girl who doesn’t work here anymore, these people like me. I have something in common with all of them, and it extends beyond just spending all of our time in this Starbucks in Midtown.

Reason number five: The coffee. I drink coffee like it’s going out of style. Like I’m trying to give myself a heart attack. Like I have nothing to live for but still keep going because I’m too much of a coward to end my life, and the only thing keeping me from drowning in this abyss of sorrow and disappointment is the too-strong coffee. Calling back to that girl who took an exception to me because I was apparently being “too friendly,” the day I made friends with the manager, I got very angry at “getting in trouble” and almost resolved to never come here again. I tried going to the Starbucks down the road, but there was no parking, and it put me way too close to Downtown. Then, I tried the Caribou Coffee a few blocks away, but after drinking so much of this java that it could kill a god, their coffee was a pale, weak, watery brew of no consequence, so I came back. And things have been great ever since. I guess it showed strength of character, or some bullshit like that, but I’ve been coming back ever since, and the unnamed employee who took exception to me never said anything about me again, so I must have properly behaved myself. Which is just fine with me because it takes less effort and allows me to get more work done.

Reason number six: The free wifi. Yes, I know that lots of places have free wifi nowadays, but Google is literally four blocks away, and this wifi is powered by Google. I know that technically doesn’t have anything to do with the strength or speed of my downloads or the consistency of the connection, but there’s something to be said about psychosomatic reassurances. Back at the Caribou, the wifi was slow and terrible. Here at the Starbucks, it’s very rarely down, and it’s almost even usable in the parking lot. That saves me even more money by allowing my to download app updates and surf imgur from a wifi signal rather than using my own data plan, and it keeps me from using too much data at home which allows me to binge watch more Netflix shows. Because who really watches movies anymore, right?

Reason number seven: The butts. I’m in Midtown Atlanta, as I said. There are a LOT of good looking girls in the area, and most of them walk to Starbucks. Some of them come more than once. Cute, hot, enticing, appealing, enthralling…there is plenty of eye candy around here, but this is probably the least important reason why I come here. Probably. We’ll see.

These are the reasons why I’m always here. Being here is how I’m suddenly able to start writing again. It’s why I’ll hopefully be coming up with better content for you, if you’re even here at all and not just hanging out in my imagination. And now, to stop this post and make use of the other reason why I hang out here. All the coffee I drink has to go somewhere, after all.

This is what I do, as you all know, but here’s how I do it, in case you have no idea. It’s important to spell out the different aspects of a hobby or obsession, or whatever you want to call it, and this is me attempting to do just that.

Sitting in a Starbucks while I write and greedily gulp down this expensive, super-flavorful coffee is what most people might consider a leisurely pursuit, but to me, it’s an extension of life. The ability to let the dark thoughts out in such a way that others can see them is risky business, but it is business nonetheless. Opening my mind and my heart and the deep, dark depths of my soul, I’m trying to let other people inside me in such a way that comes unnaturally to me in person. It makes sense if you know me, and if you’ve been paying attention, you get to come very close.

Sitting here, I write. Typing on this expensive keyboard attached to this expensive iPad because I didn’t want to buy a laptop because a laptop is too versatile yet oh so limiting. Trying to make a name for myself in a place where names don’t matter all that much. Trying to be genuine to myself while I work in a place filled with personalities without souls and appearances without faces.Living is about finding your place. Writing is about finding your voice. Working is about making your life livable, yet it reaches a point where you have to continuously ask yourself if what you’re doing is worth it. What I’m doing is worth it, of course, but in the largest scheme, it doesn’t matter. Delivering food to people who could easily get it for themselves. Writing words for people who could less-easily write their own. This is my gift to you. Madness encapsulated. Ideas expounded. Purportedly deranged in such a way that it makes sense. When it can.

No one really knows what it’s all about. “What if the Hokey-Pokey…” is just another way of asking a ridiculous question and coming up with an equally ridiculous, nonsensical answer, but it’s just as good as any other answer to this question that doesn’t matter. No one CAN know what it’s all about. No one can really know what IT really is, anyway. “It,” is an ubiquitous idea. A pronoun that simple exists to delimit the undefinable. And that’s what this is about. Nothing.

Nothing can be said to encompass nothing else, and that’s fine. It doesn’t make sense in the ways we make sense of things because we have to have something to make sense of and something to compare it to. The infinite void is empty, and that emptiness belies explanation. Once it’s measures or observed, it’s no longer “nothing,” and that’s an idea that the human brain can’t wrap around. I certainly understand it, but my understanding, or lack thereof, is secondary to the bigger point.

The bigger point? It’s very simply. There is no point. I’ll put it in quotations marks so it seems more profound. “There is no point.” Life goes, and no one knows where it really came from. Life ends, and no one really knows why. Where does it come from, and where does it go? No one can know the answer, and that frightens a lot of people. Of course, there are those like me who embrace the darkness and uncertainly of ignorance, and we try to make sense of it, but we’re simply whistling in the dark just like everyone else.

There is no point. And there was no point. I broke out this expensive toy to piddle into the wind with trite clichés that we use to describe things that should remain indescribable, and I wait. And I write. And I watch and wonder. And I waste time just as we all waste time wondering and pondering, and it doesn’t matter. There is no point except for that which we imagine. There is no grand scheme, and there is no big plan. And that is, unfortunately, is what it’s all about.

My life is one constant series of waits. Always waiting for the next thing. Occasionally taking proactive steps towards getting more of what I need, but never doing too much or politicking too hard in case it gets taken away from me again. It happens so often that I expect it. Makes staying optimistic and positive difficult, and I can’t really say I’ve been any good at maintaining a good outlook on things.

Had a discussion with my roommate the other day, talking about how it’s easy to see the best in people if no one has ever been out to get you and actually succeeded. It’s happened to me a few times. I was fired from my last job because I managed to piss off a girl who somehow had enough influence with others to get me canned. I worked for an abusive man who used me as a pawn in his game to hurt his wife. I had an abusive girlfriend. And my brother’s wife hates me and tried to starve me once. That last one is a fun little story that I think I’ll keep to myself for a while longer, but know that it happened.When people set out to do you harm, and they succeed in hurting you, it makes trusting anyone a difficult prospect. You’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. You’re constantly expecting to be whipped to the ground and kicked once you hit it. You don’t know where the next blow will be coming from, so you expect it from everywhere at once, and it gets exhausting and stays painful. Stress levels run high, and the constant mistrust eats away at your faith in your own self. It’s even worse when you’re forced to trust people in order to properly survive, and it makes things very difficult when you’re trying to put yourself out there and find a job or a relationship or even just a good friend. Everyone becomes an acquaintance, and though you want to love, you separate yourself from as many connections as you can, and that causes even more damage to the psyche in the long run.

If, like me, you’re forced to trust someone when you’re in that headspace, you only trust them as far as you absolutely need to and always expect them to betray you. They’re out for themselves, and they’re out to get you, and they’re completely willing to hurt you on purpose to achieve their nefarious ends. Trust is the devil. Trusting is Hell. Opening up is nigh impossible, and the walls grow higher and thicker, and the masks cover not only your face but also the rest of you. You shine like a beacon of mediocrity, and you hide in the shadows of anonymity.

Being anonymous has never properly worked out for me. I’m too loud or outspoken, or I’m quiet and always watching. I leave human wreckage in my wake. I try not to hurt people, and I try so hard to connect, but it rarely happens that I can open up the doors to myself wide enough to let in more than a beam of light and a peeking face. It gets to the point where all the wondrous beauty of life gets muted, and all you can see is the darkness. All you can see are the walls in front of your eyes. You look in the mirror, and all you can see is the mask on your face. If I do manage to connect to someone, I end up hurting them eventually. They hurt me first, or they indicate that they might, and I run. I run away and throw anything and everything in their path in an attempt at dissuading them from following after. Some people do, but their motives can’t be altruistic, can they? That’s not the way life works. People only hold onto you because they need you for something, and for me, that purpose is pain. Right? Isn’t that the way all this works?

I have no clever ending for this waiting session. I have no proper conclusion to this topic, and I don’t know what it will take to break through these blocks of distrust that isolate me from the people close to me. That keep me from allowing myself to get close to others. To invite new people into my life at more than a superficial level. I’m constantly waiting for the other shoe. A shoe with golf cleats that bite into my skin as it’s swung at my face. Constantly waiting. Waiting again.

I’ve come to realize that one of the quickest ways to get work is to try to do something productive. So, for now, I’m going to write until I either get a run or get super bored from writing nonsense. Since you’ve read my previous posts, you can probably safely assume which will happen first.

I’ll start by telling you what happened to me recently. I started the new year on a high note. I had an event to tear down because I do event work. For a couple of days at the end of the year, I was called to assist with the set up of the hotel lounge spaces for the two Peach Bowl teams. It was some pretty alright work. Two short-ish days spent in two different hotels sweating my face off setting up furniture and curtains and generally just moving things about. On New Years Day, a Friday, we were all called back to tear down both setups. They paid us extra, which was nice. I have a friend working this job with me now, so it was like hanging out and getting paid for it. Plus a whole bunch of hard labor thrown into the mix, but the money was really good. It meant that my New Years Eve ended at about 10pm, but I’m an adult in his 30s, so who really cares about hard partying, eh?

So, I made a lot of money right off the bat, which was pretty nice because I didn’t expect many people to want food delivered in the first week of the new year, which was mostly correct. Things were going well, but then my car started making some godawful noises on top of the other godawful noises it had already been making. This happened a lot with my car, so I decided to take it into the shop at my earliest convenience. With it being an incremental couple of weeks, that convenience wasn’t convenient enough, it seems.

Wednesday night on the 6th, my car started making a loud grinding noise. Well, shit. I guess the brakes have gone. I really hope that they haven’t taken the rotors with them again! I had to go to court on Thursday morning to fight a bogus ticket – another story entirely – but aside from that, I wasn’t planning on driving that day. The ticket was thrown out because the officer didn’t show – this was the trial date because the arraignment had happened early the previous month – and I called to make an appointment with the shop on my way home. The earliest I could get in was Monday morning. Okay, cool. I can deal with that.

Friday morning, I started driving and realized that everything is wrong. The grinding was so loud, and the brakes were so sluggish, that for the sake of safety, I couldn’t drive that day. I ended up borrowing my roommate’s car on Saturday to drive to the event I was setting up, and I ended up having to borrow her car again on Sunday in order to work my driving job. This was not the way I wanted my year to start, but at least things could get worse. Things can ALWAYS get worse.

It’s Monday morning, and I take my car to the shop. I’m waiting for close to two hours before they give me a loaner vehicle, and since my appointment was so early in the morning, I went without showering. But, I hadn’t showered the previous day, either, so I really needed a scrub down. Getting ready for work, I get a phone call from the dealership, and that’s when the bad news truly hits. To paraphrase: “Your transmission is busted, your head gaskets have blown, your axle has broken because your tires are mismatched, your brakes are gone and have taken the rotors with them, and that pesky sensor that you’ve been avoiding replacing because it’s mostly pointless and costs over $400 to repair is still broken. All in all, it’s going to cost you $9,000 to repair.” Mario Speedwagon has officially outlived his usefulness, so I now I have to scramble to get a new car.

I do some looking online at the dealership because I doubt they can legally allow me to drive away without being liable for my safety, and I find a car. The exact car I’ve been looking for! It’s a 2010 red Honda Fit Sport model with 95,000 miles on it, which is pretty high for a 2010, but it’s alright because I’m in a bind, and Hondas last forever. Probably good for another 200,000 miles, at least. The car costs roughly $10,500, which translates to about $13,000 after taxes and other expenses, but at a base price of $10.5k, and repairs at OVER 9000!!!!!! I don’t have much of a choice. And, it’s what I want, so I drive the loaner back to the dealership to discuss my options with a salesman.

I’ve calculated that I’ll be making about $38k this year, if things go well, and that qualifies me for a pretty nice loan. I have enough money in the bank to drop 2 grand thanks to cashing out my IRA and paying off all my debts, so that means I’m only financing about $9,000, which is less than I would’ve had to put on my credit card to repair my old car only to watch it break again in about a month. (As an aside, if you own a Subaru, get rid of it at about 100,000 miles, or you’ll have some bad times.) Also, my credit score is one of the best I’ve ever heard of at 836, so I could basically get anything I could possibly want, but I need good gas mileage from a car that will last. And, the Fit is tiny with a good amount of storage space, and it’s fury red. In fact, I’ve named him Fury on account of an excess of rage in my system.

Here’s where the difficulty started. I’ve been living in Atlanta for just shy of five years now: the result of a miscalculation in a tractor trailer that stranded me in the city. Instead of moving back to my dad’s house, again, I decided to stay, but thanks to that pesky sensor, I couldn’t pass emissions in this city, so I never updated my address to Atlanta or Georgia, so I would have been subject to Tennessee taxes. As Tennessee has a 9% sales tax rate versus Georgia’s 7%, making this one little change will save me over 2 thousand dollars in the long run which made that decision a no-brainier. I had to go to the Department of Driver Services the following morning to get a new license and then head back afterwards to actually buy the car. After waiting in line at the DDS for two hours, I had my fancy paper license and went to buy my car. It’s the first time I’ve had to do that in roughly 10 years, so I was naturally a little nervous. Everything went off without a hitch, and I drove away with a new-ish car and immediately started working.

Flash forward a week. It’s a Thursday, the weather is terrible, and I’m driving. My roommate is sick at home and finds a letter for me from the state of Georgia that says my license will be cancelled on February 2 because my Tennessee license had been cancelled/expired/suspended, a statement that was patently untrue. Being in the car and driving around the city, I was unable to call about it immediately. I tried calling the next morning but was notified that Tennessee had close due to wintry conditions, so I called Georgia to find out what the actual problem with my license was. After putting it out of my mind for a weekend, I called Tennessee again this past Monday to get my license issue taken care of, and after over half-an-hour on hold, I was able to explain my problem and get my difficulty taken care of almost immediately.

Since I started writing this several hours ago and didn’t pick up the telling until I got home from work, I’ve absolutely lost the flow of the narrative. That’s alright, I’m hoping, because you all know me and have plenty of examples of what I do and don’t do with letters and a keyboard, so I’ll just sum up really quickly because it’s late, and I’m tired. In short, I have a Georgia drivers license, which means that just shy of five years after I found myself living in Georgia, I have officially moved here. After driving it for 140,000 miles, my old car finally died, so I replaced it. I’m making as much money now as I did when I worked as a computer professional, but my job is much less difficult, albeit infinitely more life-threatening. Things are going well, I’m going to owe a helluva lot of money in taxes, and I’m typing this on an iPad Pro like some kind of proud hipster. And that’s really all there is to it.

Sorry the ending sucked so much, but you’ll get over it. You always do.

This is what I do when I’m waiting. “Waiting on what?” you might wonder, so I’ll tell you. I’m waiting on money. Money that should come to me. Waiting on money to pay my bills, to allow me to do some recreational activities, and money to make me not so worried about what the future might hold. I’m a delivery driver, as some of you might know, but I work freelance and get paid by the order, so I have to wait for the orders to come in. As some of you might also know, I hate waiting, but it’s a necessary evil when it applies to my work. In the meantime, my goal is to write.

Sure, I’ve set this goal before, but until just a few days ago, I haven’t really had the inclination to actually sit down and do it. I’ve been working really hard, and I’ve been working some really long hours. At least 10 to 12 hours a day since some time in September.Some time in September was the moment that I realized how hard I needed to work to be able to make the money I need to survive, pay my bills, and do more than just fret about the future. There’s plenty of fretting, and there’s plenty of uncertainty, but that’s the way of life in this business. Or any business, really. I work for myself, so I have to make my self work for me. For someone who has always had trouble motivating himself to do more than just the bare minimum to get by, this was an important realization.

Truly realizing that I needed to work so much allowed me to shift my work ethic and get up in the morning. I helped me see that working hard for such long hours just about every day was what it would take to be more than just a sluggish blue collar worker. Yes, that’s how I make my living, but that’s not all that I am. The downfall to working virtually all the time was that I didn’t get, and haven’t had, the chance that I need to write. That’s been a huge impediment to moving forward. Writing, as you know, is one of my passions, and I have precious few of those. I determined what it would take to get back into it, and that realization and actualization is what has allowed me to finally get back into the “swing of things.”

A couple of things went wrong at exactly the same time. I started my website, and while that was good, it led to one terribly bad decision. I got an offer from a cloud-based backup service that destroyed my installation of Windows. It was pretty bad. The already faulty box upon which I was placing my ability to leak my madness into the ether was compromised by this attempt to secure it, and that damaged my installation of Windows to the point where I had to upgrade to Windows 10, against my better judgment. That poor judgment proved to be disastrous in that it made my desktop virtually unusable. Add to that the fact that both of my monitors are over 9 years old, and you see the beginnings of the crisis I was facing.

Windows 10 would not support my video card. To be more specific, the company supplying the drivers for my video card decided that they didn’t want to support the operating system that I had thrust upon me by the virus that damaged my installation beyond traditional repair. Starting over wasn’t really an option, so moving forward would have to do. When those forward steps take you backwards, you have to make certain alterations to your plans to get moving again. Momentum is key, and mine had been roughly destroyed.

Months have passed since that day. I could no longer satisfactorily use my oh writing tool. I managed to write a couple more essays on my roommate’s computer, but that was it. The time I spent working was taking its toll on me. I couldn’t work so many hours and then arrive home to sit down and write because I didn’t have it in me. That’s not the way I work. I need to be either relatively fresh or kind of bored, and I was neither. So for months, I’d been without a proper outlet. I tweeted some, but that’s not the same. It leaks out the thoughts, but it doesn’t lend enough eloquence to actually say what I want to say. What I need to say. I could have used my phone, but I damaged my right hand a long time ago. Prolonged typing with just my thumbs causes more damage, still. It was also not a solution to my problem, though my will is strong.

I decided that I needed something else. After happening upon the newest set of Apple releases, I decided that I wanted an iPad Pro. It would suit my needs ideally once I could acquire the keyboard that goes along with it, and that finally arrived in the mail on Friday. So, here I sit. In my car, no longer at Starbucks, and I write. I write because I need to, and I’m writing now because I can. I finally have the proper tool. I could have bought a laptop or taken my old netbook out, dusted it off, and used it, but it’s an old and slow machine. The keyboard is too small, and it doesn’t serve the proper purpose. It doesn’t fulfill the need I have.

Pretty soon, I’ll tell you all about the actually “hardships” I’ve faced, but for now, I’ll just let you know that I’m finally back. Finally able to write again. Finally able to focus inward in the time I have available to me away from home. Finally able to write enough to make my thoughts shine in a way that I can see as appropriate.

I hope you enjoy what I have to offer and continue to appreciate it as long as I’m able to provide it. Eventually, I’ll even write something worthy of my skill. Today, however, is not that day. This is just practice. You can’t call me Stella yet. I am only just beggining to get my groove back.

Sometimes, you have to write when you’re not feeling like writing. Sometimes, you have to do things that you don’t want to do because you know you need to. This is one of those times, but it’s been so long that I don’t feel like NOT writing. Please forgive me, but it’ll take a little while before I’m able to sit down and write a comprehensive report on not only the reasons why I haven’t been writing but also what has happened to me in the 148 days since my second-to-last post.

Obviously, my project was a failure, but I have a really good excuse. It’s a seriously good excuse rooted in poverty and machanical difficulty. You’ll love it. You’ll love what I’ve been doing in the interim. You’ll love it so much that you’ll keep reading long after I’ve ceased to say anything at all, and that’s the whole point of this. No, that’s not actually the point, but it’s close. Who really needs to say anything when you can repeatedly say absolutely nothing with such skillful aplomb, eh?

Being a skilled writer has its perks. It also has it’s downfalls, but those are mostly rooted in the criticisms associated with those who lack the skill. There’s no reason to say anything that anyone has to say unless they’re trying to convince you of something, even if that means they’re only trying to convince you that you’ve been entertained. They want you to be convinced that you needed the knowledge they imparted. They need you to believe them. That’s why they write. That’s why I write, and since that’s all I can really verify, the sweeping generalizations will just have to do.

I’ve been driving a whole lot. I’ve had some mishaps, and I’ve had some less-than-wonderful encounters with some lovely people. I’ve been living life with barely a break, but I’ve been doing little more than make and spend money. I’ve been working long hours, but the work mostly hasn’t been all that hard. Not for me. I already know just about everything I need to know about what I do for a living. That’s a bit of a sadness, so I take my spare moments trying to connect with strangers. Trying to make the strangers in my life a little less strange by making them a little more familiar. By making myself a little less mysterious to them. Some of them even seem to enjoy it, and it’s those bare moments that make the days a little less lonely and a little more worthwhile.

I told you I wouldn’t say much about what I’ve been doing, and that’s true. I’ve made and lost some good friends. I’ve acquired and relinquished a few opportunities. I’ve been considering what I’ll do next when it’s finally time to move past this stagnant period in my life. Breaking hearts and forgetting names. Killing beers and eating babies. Shooting Bambi’s mother while burning his father alive. Finding transportation that hopefully won’t break every few weeks.

Be yourself. Don’t be me. Don’t make my mistakes. You might not know what those mistakes are, but when I’ve finally had a chance to share them with you, and you’ve finally convinced yourself that I know what I’m talking about and that my mistakes were actually mistakes and not misplayed hands, you’ll be thankful that your mistakes are your own and that my mistakes aren’t yours.