(Nowhere special in the midwest) Why don't you tell me how you got here and we'll start with that. Like one of those brittle autumn leaves that makes that echoey sketchy noise at it traces itself down a concrete Main Street in the middle of the night, I always found myself sort of drifting through life. Making, at least what I considered to be, these very profound reltationships with people while drifting, only to somehow find myself in these situations where we ended up hating each other at the end of it, that is to say when it was all said and done. I've never found much happiness in one place for too long, and it's these other people who are getting in the way of what it really does mean to be happy so when they start fucking things up for me I do all sorts of shadowdy bullshit to fuck up their day. Whatever it is, large or small. Because they deserve it, and because I really know what they are up to. They see soemthing in me that they do not like and they want me to fail at what I am doing, no matter what the fuck it might be I decide I'm going to do, and so they are all try to fuck me over and so I always liked to have the upper-hand when it came to handing out the sort of pain that is attached to getting fucked over. It started all the way back from my childhood when my parents got all up in their feelings about my Sister and I getting molested by our babysitter. You know how it is, you're young and you have absolutely no idea what the hell any of this thing called life means and the people who are getting tasked to see to your greater well-being are so tuned-out of what is going on in the world around them that they have no idea that their children are upstairs molesting my Sister and I on an ongoing basis like it something as commong as "playing House" which is how it very well got started before it transformed into very darker things that don't make me have good feelings about most things that I see in the world today. When I see girls with their clothes off in strange sexual postions or by the arch in their back I get strange recollections of what it was like back then and those terrible things that this babysitters' older child who was twice the age of me and I had two years on my younger sister - and there were two sisters actually but the one was almost as much of a victim to all of this as much as my Sister and I were. When I got much older and had time to really sit down and run the numbers on the whole scenario over and over and over and over in my head it because clear to me that somehow the older Sister was somehow turned on by the pornographic materials that her Father had stashed away in their parents bedroom. Now if you could imagine a pornographic magazine such as Hustler and all those other magazines that, as I liked to think of them, take it "too far". That is to say the women depicted in the magazines are all in very sort of compromising positions and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see how they aren't even to be looked at as female homosapiens anymore and just something warm with a heartbeat that don't look as hairy as they do. And breasts. Oh boy do the boys like breasts! Now then if you could imagine these materials being used as "workbooks" that our Babysitter would like to re-enact and she had three people who she would be able to direct to do whatever it was she deemed necessary. Because why not!? If we didn't of course it is going to be easy to tell her Mother that she saw me upstairs doing weird shit not only to my Sister, but to her Sister as well. I had two loving parents who wanted absolutely nothing to do with having children. They are very much great people and they have many innate talents that got hindered by the fact that I was born and thoughout the course of my life my Father has been very good at reminding me that I hold little worth to him not only as a person, but on a more primal level, he thinks little of me in regards to being a "man". That is to say if Man Cards were actually issued in the states of which a person was born, my Father would be happy to see to it that proper things were set into place that mine was revoked. But you can't really say the term Man Cards anymore without making someone angry, but I never gave two fucks about all of that. I always found myself at the forefront of what the older people saw as "stuff for the kids nowadays" and I always got lump summed into the equations that they put people much younger than me into. I recall just as easily as the smile on Sierra's face when I would say something that made her happy do I recall the reaction my Father had when my Mother came to him about the news about our babysitter molesting us. He got angry with my Mother as if it was her fault, but after further thought on the process it is somewhat easy to see why my Father would think that, as the person who was technically the one babysitting us was a loosely-associated aquaintence of our Mother. So as far as all that went and as cruddy as my Father liked to see the world, that to him was about as equal as our own Mother having committed these acts upon her own children. He blew up at us as if we had done something wrong, and it was up to us as young children and a young Wife to figure out what his rage and anger all met because those were his only ways of communicating when he was upset. If you poked at him at all while he was in that state things would just ramp up dramatically because you had the thought of putting him into question. The way he saw things, his anger was supposed to be representative of how upset he was about what happened to the only who children his semen would create. We were all hurting so much because of what had happened but if it was mentioned again it was just a rehashing of all that anger once again, the throwing of heavy objects and the destruction of random things that hang on the wall or displayed themselves on a table. Nothing was safe in our house. If it could be picked up or broken it was an equal of a canditate of being shattered as your emotions were when he would decide you were the problem that day and he focused all his anger on you while playing very nice to the others. It became clear to me early on as well that this anger and hostility was mostly geared towards me and as the years dragged on, and well after my parents finally decided to call it quits, did my Father almost go out of his way to shelter my Sister from seeing the sort of anger he would unload on me. It was never very physical the things that he did to me, but sometimes I just wish that he had because then the outcome would become immediately obvious. The way he mentally degraded me for all those years, I found myself lingering and holding onto for years after the fact and a lot of those things I still struggle with this this very day. And to various degress I just have done nothing of more of the same for those of whom I've had the priviliage and the honor of knowing on my short time on this earth. Sometimes I just had wished that he beat me so badly that I just took it unto myself to finish the job he can't seem to bring himself to do. Instead I waged war against myself and others while trying to navigate through middle and high school. Angry with my past and with nobody to talk to I found it very easy to point the finger at myself as to why all the things in the world were not going the way I had wanted them to. My Mother was also a heavy victim of my Father's bullshit behaviors while I was growing up. She found herself in one of those typical situations people find themselves in at that time in history where you sort of got married as a direct result of having children, and you received extra bonus points if you held off on having children until after you were married. Well my Father was a line-cook and my Mother was a waitress at the time and there was a decent enough age gap between to the two to assume the sexual intercourse that happened between them that cold day in early 1981 was to be nothing more than casual, but sadly enough for them I came along shortly thereafter. I can't speak on the things that happened to my Mother before I was born because I never really asked her about them, and I grew up in a household were you didn't really ask too many questions about anything of any importance. Speaking not at all was actually preferred in this house, and mind reading was even more preferred. She is taller than most women in the world and I'd like to think that is where I got my height from, because I tower well over six-feet tall and my Father is only about average height. She is now married to another man who keeps her happier than my Father did, but there are times when I think she just sort of settled herself down quickly for the principal of doing so after she divorced my Father. I mean being married to a vicious dog that did nothing but bite and scratch you would have been preferred before you'd consider finding yourself entangled his type of bullshit again. Once my parents mustered up the decency and courage to stop the tragedy that was their marriage, my Sister and I remained in housing with my Mother in the house we grew up in while we went to Elementary and Middle school in but once their divorce had been finalized the house vaporized into the pages of our family history and we moved to a duplex apartment on the other side of town and that is where I learned, although I was highly unaware at the time that a persons shadow can become the dominant force in their life. Maybe the term shadow is the incorrect one, but that seemingly helps articulate where I'm trying to get to. Us having spent all those years with an invisble piece of tape over our mouths proved to be quite painful as that was coupled with the stresses of a growing teenager already confused about the overwhelming amount of horomones already running rampant inside of me. It was like the precise moment we moved into that apartment that I started to somehow find myself evil dictator of the house, and basically turning into a social clubhouse for all my friends, associates, and anybody they may have known. I think what I was actually up to was looking around for potential people to act as a stand-in sort of family to make up for the absense of that sort of blood-bound sense of community that a family brings. That sort of tender openness that you just get automatically and don't have to worry about predeterminations or reservations those around you might have because you already know you're in the clear as far as all that socially anxious stuff goes. My Father had commited adultery multiple times during the course of our parents marriage. During the beginning of their State Documented Relationship it was a huge problem, all of which my Mother just sort of had to suck up because she was too busy raising us as young children. Dusted throughout the middle of the marriage were random flings from my Fathers work who help find a temporary solution for his "Sex Addiction" as he once had called it. At the end of the marriage however my Father was pretty seriously engaged with this one lady from his work whom he would later marry as his Second Wife. You reach a sort of breaking point in a relationship and normal things you would never conceive of telling another soul for any reason whatsoever suddenly become talking points in someone you find the ability to confide into because you need to make sure you're not loosing your fucking mind. For my Mother that was a guy named George. He had also been dragged through the mud with a former marriage himself and so they related on that level very much. It was safe to say that long before either of my parents were formally divorced by the state that they were both sexually active with other people. And once I had become made aware of this in regards to my Mother I basically ramped up my Asshole Game to Level 10 Expert+ Mode and stepped-in where my Father's damage left off. The wretched and horrible things I would say to her about her involvement with George rendered quite a difficult relationship for us to naviagate through during my middle teenage years. I drove her to the point of sheer madness, the point of which was she was broken. A point where she didn't want to be part of this world anymore. She wanted to be anwhere in the world but near this person who made her feel as bad, worse even than my Father did. Right around the time I should have been entering my 11th year in High School, my Mother decided to move out of the apartment we had moved to and move in with her boyfriend George. She was set to send us off to live with my Father in a different city under a whole different set of social norms and reservations. But the reality is, that is what she needed to do in order for things to be better for her. I had pushed her to her very limits of what any parents ought to be able to asked of doing and she just had enough. She deserved the chance to reclaim her life whatever way she saw fit because I had made it pretty hard for her to do so while also having to oversee me and my activities. So off she went to a town not all that far away and we skipped town as well to move in with my Father. Having been the only person giving myself direction since they had separated, I found it extremely difficult to live under the comparitively strict set of rules that my Father expected of me. I spent only a couple months under his roof before dropping out of school and moving to a place closer to the restaurant I was working at the time. I spent most of my time immersed on the internet, scouring internet chat rooms looking for any signs of life. Lives that I could relate to, someone I could talk to. Eventually I found this one website where you could post things in almost a diary-like format (we called them Blogs later on as the internet started to take shape) and other people could comment on them. It was the first technological step towards removing a layer of connection between people, and started to help erode empathy, although we were all highly unaware of it at the time. You sort of got grouped together with other people based on the interests you listed on your profile as they were all "clickable topics" much like hashtags are approached today and when you did click on a "interest" on someone's profile it would show you all the other people on the site that had the same interest as you did. It also grouped you sort of in a geographical way as well, and sort of by default grouped you into regions where you lived. Eventually I started to put comments on other people's posts, my subtle way of trying to seek out friends. I would often leave comments that were actually one-liner lyrical excerpts from songs I liked or I had felt were in relation to what the person was posting about. It became clear to me that a lot of people in the geographical areas I was active in, were all sort of knew each other in the real-world and this platform was just a digital sort of commonplace for them. I was always late to the show that way, always being caught up in my head. My words resonated with people enough that I started to gain friendship from some of these people who I was leaving comments to. As time wore on, I started to really strike up a bond with a lady who I would ultimately know as Lucia but her online handle at the was \_forsaken. At first glance she almost seemed to come as someone who didn't care about anything as much as I did, and I found that very fascinating, because she was a female, and she was older than I was. I remember my Father telling me when I was a younger boy that I should always be with an older female because they will "teach you things" and boy that ended up being so true. It was not unlike the others in which I had communicated with before, I had always been leaving here one-liners from songs like I had been to everyone else. Once we had striken up friendship on this platform, you're entitled to more information about that person, including ways to get ahold of people on instant messenger programs, which was on the primary methods of communication at the time. I do not recall who messaged the other one first, but one of us opened up a line of communication to the other and before you knew it were talking all the time. Before work, and after work. She was in the medical field and I was trying to make headway in professional kitchens. She didn't think much of my professional work, and I didn't think much of her professional work. Although we never made it to the point of security with one another, but that irritation we saw in the other person is truly what sort of also fueled our desire to keeping talking to other one as much as we were. I had been surrounded by people my whole life and had been waiting this whole time to have a conversation, and Lucia had grown up an only-child and although she had too had been surrounded by people her whole life, she too, had nobody to listen to what she had to say. I sought out validation and order in this world and I very saw those elements within Lucia from the first times we started talking. She was the very first thing that I was able to find and create on my own, and without anybodys help I was able to find her all on my own. We chatted online for almost a year before I gathered up the courage to suggest we should meet up in the real world. I would always just be getting off of work when she was be getting home from going out and I think she enjoyed the comfort of knowing I would be there when she got home. In many ways, despite us having only had an online existence to one another, we found a comfort in knowing the other one was there. She was happy to know I would be there to respond to a message at 2:17 in the morning and I found comfort in knowing that she would say something, anything back to me. The way in which I articulated to her that I wanted to meet up with her was a shining example of what kind of socially anxious state I was in at the time. I had told her that I was going to be going to the local bookstore and that if she didn't have anything else to do and if (and only if) she absoultey nothing else in the world she would rather be doing that she should consider going to the same bookstore and then maybe if the stars lined up just in perfect harmony might we able to meet each other in the flesh. She took the bait and told me that she would meet me. I told her that I would be hanging out in the American History section of the store and that is where she would be able to find me. That was of course, not the place I was sitting there waiting for her. I was actually upstairs with a perfect birdseye view of the American History section below. I anxiously waited for her to arrive, pacing back and fourth and sweating. I'm in character, trying to figure out which version of myself I'm to present her with. A short, pale-skinned women with stop-sign red hair wearing all black clothing walked into the bookstore and started heading towards the American History section. She was sure of where she was heading, she didn't seem to be looking around the store at all, she just went right for the place I told her I was going to be located. It was almost like time itself was operating at a slower pace when I started to make my descent down the escalator to approach Lucia. So many people I've come to know have such a hard time talking to people for the first time. I'm no different than anybody else when it comes to that, but at the same time I've had so much time to myself that I have several different incarnations of the way I perceive myself and I can almost selectively choose which one of those I need to be active at the time and put that persona on and proceed onward guising myself under that mask. When it comes to meeting someone new, I find it extremely easy to make them laugh. I can find humor in the darkest of places, and I find it as a good starting point to get to know a person. It also keeps their minds busy on the humor and keeps their curiosities about who I am as an actual person far away from things they might actually start thinking about. That is to say a lot of people are incredibly stupid and if you serve them up enough low-haning fruit they'll eventualy figure out how to make a fruit salad and you wont ever have to serve them up a main course of the genuine you. She told me she never had Starbucks in her life. I'm struck by the fragrance that she is wearing, it is so potent. It is heavy hitting like the presense she has on me. She seems so sure of herself, she carries herself in a way that doesn't leave you wondering how she is feeling. It's not arrorgance, it's the perfect balance of knowing who she is and the confidence to be that person she knows herself to be. "Alright Micah, I believe that is all we are going to have time for today." said a man in a white labratory coat with a nametag that read Dr. Alan Richter "We will meet at this time again next week and start to get a better sense of where we should start." I could see and hear the words he was speaking but I didn't have it in me to say anything in return, I felt embarrased in all the things I had just told him and now am trying to figure out what exactly they might think about me, so I'm sitting there shriveled up like a prune unwilling to speak. "Micah, are you alright?" said Dr. Richter. "Of course, I'm perfect, thank you. Same time next week then?" I ask as I slowly rise to me feet and grab my shoulder bag and start to walk towards the exit of the doctors office. The doctor nods to me and I head out of the office and into the hallway. There is something strange about the smell of the doctors office, it almost smells like the starch they used to put too much of when they would wash our aproons at the restaurant and they would come back all stiff and non-pliable. I sat down in the waiting room to gather my thoughts about what I just all told the doctor. I open my shoulderbag and pull out my dotted notebook and pen and start to jot down notes. "Told the new doctor about being molested and told him about my Parents and meeting my ex-Wife. We got nowhere all he did was listen." I shut the notebook and put it back into my bag and walk into the parking lot to my car. As I get into the vehicle I pulled out my phone to check my notifications and a smile smirk pokes through my face as I'm filled with joy to see I have a message from Sierra. > Hope your appointment went well with the new Doctor. <3 -> Thank you Sierra! He seems like all the other ones I've talked to, but it was only the first time so maybe this guy will be different. Hit send and start the engine and head back towards home for a moment before having to head to work. I'm listening to "The Very Thought of You" by Tony Bennett as I'm pulling up to my apartment and I see the bartender and her significant other walking into the bar that I live above. She looks like shes still wearing the same clothes she had on yesterday and her hair looks matted and she looks rough. Her name is Ava, she's younger than I am and we got on quite well. Back when I was going through my divorce she was the barenteder serving me up Jack Daniels until she responsibly told me that I was cut off for the night. She used to know the guy who lived upstairs before I did and he was something of a starving artist musican so he often "on the road" and his apartment was open left unattended. I think for a while Ava may have been fucking him because she would stay up in the apartment when the nights would get late. I pull up behind the bar and park by the staircase that leads to my apartment when Ava takes notice of my arrival. She throws up a high wave to me as I get out of the car and I yell over to her "Another Late Night!?" A double-fist-pump indicates it sure was and I had up the stairs. I get up to my apartment and sit on a milkcrate in the living room and proceed to load up a pipe with some marijuana. I'm just finishing that up when I hear a tap at the door. It's Ava I can see her through the small windows on the door. I motion for her to come in and she steps in. "Just in time" I say to her as I hand her the pipe as she enters the living room. I stand up and pull one of my seat cushions off the floor and set it on one of the other milkcrates for her to have a seat. "You ever going actually buy furniture for this place?" she asks as she sparks the bowl and takes a nice piney fresh hit. "I have a favor to ask you." as she hands the bowl to me. "What is it?" I ask her. "Paul was wondering if you could cut the New York strips for service on Saturday. His vendor friend is in town for the next couple of weeks while that new store is opening and offered him a good price on whole strip loins." "Of course, when are you thinking Friday night when I get out of work?" I inquire. "I can come straight in straight away." "Yes that would be great", she said "You getting off at your normal time?" "In theory, but I'll make it happen I don't wanna be in the way when you guys are in the weeds." I hand her the pipe back and she reaches forward. When she sparks the bowl again she was met with a bit of hesitation before she lights the lighter. I wait until I know she has inhaled the smoke before looking up at me before asking "You alright?" Ava is younger than I am, and when I first starting lingering around the bar when I got divorced I didn't think much of her if I'm being honest. I have this predetermined notion about all women who have this thick layer of black eyeliner around their eyes who are not trying to be part of gothic subculture. I'm torn on whether or not they are blantantly trying to let the world know that they are dark magicians or if they are trying to conceal themselves from the world and try to hide their True Self. So as much as the eyeliner rubs me the wrong way I can't findmyself in a place where I am not curious to figure out if it is truly them trying to hide their True Self. It's so easy to be your True Self, you just have to do it. I'm happy to show her or anybody how to get there. "It's Paul." She said and confirming what I had already knew. After the travelling musician left town she found herself sleeping with Paul, the owner of the bar where I live almost immediately. Ava is full of life and she enjoys being a goofy chatterbox with everyone, which is a absolute must for a good bartender. That ability to socially guise yourself with others as they walk in and sit down sober and try and navigate through what parts of life they are trying to get through as they drink themselves into a pool of misery and quick abrupt actions. Prior to the travelling musican she had a longtime boyfriend named Michael whom was her first serious boyfriend that she had been with since high-school. They moved out to this town together and were both new faces at the time and they were frequents at the bar before she took up working there. That is ultimately what brought her and Micael to break up. He simply couldn't handle the way the public just ate her up. She caught everybodys attention with that outgoing personality and almost deep voice that could carry across a room. Very much one of the boys, but also elegant in her appearance. She was a beautiful women. Anybody in their right mind would find it an honor to have this lovely women at their side. "He just.." she stumbles "He just doesn't seem like he wants to commit. Everytime we are together he makes me feel like I'm the only person in the world with this attention and he makes me just the same way I used to feel when I was with Michael and I really miss feeling like that and I just want to be happy again." One can only imagine the magical powers a "bar owner" must have at certain times during the night, especially when it is the darkest both inside and out. It pains me to think about the things he has done to her almost as it pains me to know the things that she has subjected herself to do to him. The things that has made her do. While at one angle Ava looks to be a strong women when she's heavy in conversation with someone, there are times when you can see she is a little naive. Having only really been with one person person for a majority of her most criticial growing years, how could she not? There are so many different avenues that a person could take this conversation. One could lie to her and say that everything is going to be okay and just to keep on fighting another day and just keep your head up! Or you could tell directly that she should cut her losses right now and take on seeking to other avenues that would lead to ultimately happiness. She is just repeating the same cycles over and over again that are making her unhappy. She never got many elements of her True Self validated when she was with Micael and she's been thinly spreading her energy across all different types of places in hopes that she can seek that same validation she had been searching for for all this time. But I had to get to work, and I don't need to find myself in another situation where I'm getting underneath a persons skin just because I can read into them in that way. So then.. "You know I'll label it exactly as it is and you either don't want to hear that or you're not ready." I said to her firmly. "If you want to keep this conversation going, we can surely talk after you get off work tonight, or I can even stop in if you would prefer." "Stop in? At the actual bar!?" she said in suprise. This is because since having stopped drinking (at least socially) I don't really parlay at the bar all that much. Shortly after I Johnny Cashed my way over alcoholism after two failed attempts at taking Alcholics Anonomous seriously I tried to expose myself to the belly of the beast as a way to test my resistance in regards to "going back" and while it for the most part successful, there were many nights were I had extremely bad experiences that I do not really remember the details of. There seems to this level of alcoholism that once you get there, there is genuinely and sincerely no way to "going back". That is to say, if you get that point were drinking alcohol is part of your "getting ready for the day" routine you are typically drinking that early just to keep yourself from getting sick and to "keep your balance" but you feel like a bottle of liquor that is somehow only holding liquid at the top of the bottle and the bottom half that is empty are your working legs trying to tout your top-heavy ass around. Just enough of bending over at the wrong angle of time would result in aprupt sickness. "Yeah. It's fine. I'll come down later on while you're shutting it down and give you a hand." I say to her. You good with that? "You don't have to all that Micah, I can come up after I'm done closing down." She gets up and tossing her cushion the floor and walks over to give me a hug. "Thank you" Her embrace feels so strong, you can feel her energy just below the surface. "I hope you have a good day. Go get it!" Ava sees herself out. I watched her walk down the stairs but backed away from the window before she reached the bottom so she didn't know I was looking. In my dreams she has someone that treats her as decently as I dream she should be treated. I smoke another bowl to myself and then eat an edible. I sit on the floor of my empty living room of milkcrates and sit there with my legs crossed almost like I'm pretending to meditate. I know all the basics about meditation. I know enough of them to tell someone else precisely how to meditate and for very short flashes of time I am even to emulate exactly what it is to meditate but for some reason it just do not stick with me. I do all things that you are supposed to do. I behave in the exact way I am supposed to behave for meditation but it does not work. When you catch yourself not thinking about whatever it is you're meditating on and you bring yourself back. That is supposed to be something like a mental bicep curl for your brain? If that is true I should be the most mentally strong person on this entire planet, but yet I find no peace. So it's off to work then. When I was married my ex-Wife Lucia was hellbent on me leaving the kitchen life because she thought it was immature and stupid. But the luxuries that life affored me suited me real good for all the years it did. The people are some of the best in the world, down to earth mostly out of extended exposure to the reality of the public. But just as soon you got off we're you able to decompress and alter your consciousness at least for the night, so you can face the day again tomorrow. It was until after I was divorced that I realized that she was right about that and a lot of other things about me as a person that I was unwilling to admit or be receptive to at the time. I liked to be that person who said I came up with those types of revelations on my own not with the help or aide of others. I need to be the one helping you, you're not to be the one helping me. That is the way that it is, and that is the way that it will always be. I went through a lot of personal changes when I stopped drinking. Those fucking idiots who are addicted to the Bible at AA didn't understand the postitive things that drinking gave me to my life and they were never willing to admit that, and that was just one of the reasons I couldn't get behind their message, not matter how "sincere" it may have been when you pulled back the God Layers. The most profound of those being that cooking in a kitchen was the most nonsensical thing I had been waisting my time with. When this realization came to the surface, being at work suddenly did not make any sense at all. A grocery store opening up across the street and I thought about Gordon Ramsay's insight about the best way to find out what you're truly made of is to put yourself in strange and uncomfortable situations the second you get comfortable in a kitchen. And while I was never really good at following that in regards to professional cooking, I thought there was very little harm in giving it whack in regards to completely changing up the type of work I have known my whole life. I ended up Googling them one night after work and found myself working in the Deli almost immediately. Before long I had found a better home in the Meat Department, the place I still work to this day. The entire experience there has a been a unique one and I stick out like a sore thumb in many good ways. That is to say, quite possibly the best thing from all those years in a kitchen is the fact that the stresses of this retail enviornment prove of little impact to the reality of a Sunday Brunch. I took up a two-thousand-five-hundred hour long apprenticeship for becoming a "butcher" and after that amount of time I was making the most amount of money I ever had in my entire life. It was nice and for the first time I was able to actually have extra money before the next time I got paid. There is something to be said about the level of comfort I found in barely had enough money to get by. But it was the same type of enviornment growing up and having that "what if" hanging over me in regards to running out of all resource was the only thing that seemed to keep me going. When I was younger when I had levels of comfort at my disposal, that is precisely how I behaved. But for the most part my drug habits have calmed down for the most part. Only short binges when things seem like they should happen, but nothing like it used to be back in the day when it was quarter and half jars of ecstacy, eight balls of cocaine or 1/2 sheets of LSD and long weekends in the woods. Those days are over. Body can't seem to handle that level of exposure like it used to, or maybe I'm just getting old. I'm always keeping an eye on the schedule because I like to know what I am walking into. That whole "communicating with your coworkers" is only something these retail people talk about doing, none of them actually do it. So if you want to have any sort of idea to what is happening at work or what your day is going to look like, it is on you to go to work early and investigate those things yourself. Otherwise you're just walking into a shitstorm without sense of direction. And while the people who are in charge of the store are happy to go around and tell everyone that they "just hired someone for your department" the reality is, running their stores short-staffed is almost a fundamental way of operation. There just is no other way. So once my apprenticeship was over I was handed the "Nightswatch" position and left to figure out things on my own. There is so much lack of accountability and so many people that just don't give a shit about their job. They don't know what having a shit job is like, so I'm happy to walk around with a happy face on most of the time and make the other people laugh because it's the only thing you can do to help them. They're stuck in a cycle of "my job sucks" without having any idea of what it's like to have been strung out on cocaine and barely able to stand on your feet but somehow finding the strength to get through an entire dinner service. They only have to work eight hours, they're not "just getting started" at eight hours. I'm walking into Laurel and see James in the room cutting beef. He is within a three month window of my Father's birthday and was indirectly part of my apprenticeship program as one of my "masters" but a man so unsure of himself was not to be really trusted in regards to the art of cutting beef because having been cutting as long as he had been, he is still second guessing absolutely everything he does in the room. He scatters away from conversations with those corporate overseers we have visit every now and again because he is one of those old-school cutters that do things the "old way". He is also an avid hunter and really knows a lot about real butchery and it because of this that he doesn't really want to hear about it from anybody. Every once in a while he makes some strange comments about how "all animals break down the same and humans are mammals. He used to say all sorts of things like that in hopes to "scare me away" from meat cutting I do believe. James is the passive aggressive type, comes off as the sweetest guy on earth but really holds some very hard and rigid reservations about the world. His son is part of that whole "Thin Blue Line" movement, that is the support network for police brutality. I do not see my boss Dustin anywhere on the sales floor but also failed to see his car was in the parking lot when I pulled in, but he is scheduled to be here today. I walk into the Department and into the back by the washing sinks and our sort of impromptu "office area" which is just a network of zip-tied milkcrates with a bunch of old shelving we scraped out of the back before vendor tossed it into the bin several months back. One of the things James randomly told me during the beginning of my apprenticeship that stuck with me was that he thought it was "interesting" that I would take up an apprenticeship for cutting meat because he himself is still trying to figure out what he wants to be when he "grows up". He's been on anti-anxiety medications since I've been 11 years old and he's very much on edge and scatterbrained. When you first arrive at work he's going to almost tackle you because it gives him a reason to leave the room and he very much just like "chatting it up" more than he likes cutting beef. James comes out of the cutting room: "MICAH! Guess who called in today!?" After informing me Dustin had called off, he comes at me with a scattered plethora of almost entirely worthless information, complaining about the stuff that happened yesterday, knowing full-well I was on the only one here. I suppose as far as that goes that is as direct as he will come to saying anything to me about work. He continued on about how because "last night must have been so busy" he was unable to do all the things he would like to have normally done and he didn't get any chance to walk away from the room until just now and so he's going to go on both of his fifteen minute breaks now and then come back and go on his lunch. This is how James says goodbye to me each day. He takes off his whites and puts them in the seafood cooler where we put the dirty ones. Comes out and shakes my hand, and that's it off he goes. I got into the room and it's a fucking nightmare. The entire corner of the cutting room is full of the expired stuff that Mark pulled off the floor this morning, all the marked down items that I failed to pull off the salesfloor and kick into the freezer before leaving the night before and anything else that might have gotten returned up from the front of the store. Bags, that are normally reserved for use in the produce department full of shit James pulled out of the display case from last night that he didn't feel like using today so he just tosses them all in this bag without a label, right on top of all the other shit that is to be thrown away. That old adge that Harlan used to say in The Dishroom back in the day "When the cats gone, the mice play." and that is nowhere made more true than it is at Laurel. If the boss calls off you are absolutely fucked by your very own. Once Dustin and James or John are gone that is it for the me, I'm atypically alone once that happens. James' knife and blood and cold fat saturated kevlar cutting glove are still on the table amongst a pile of a scrap beef that he should have very well done something with before he left. Chuck roasts are on sale this week so there is at least eigth or nine pounds of scrap sitting on the table, and has probably been there the majority of the morning. Underneath some of this scrap meat is one of the steels, another utility knife and a scattered amount of various sized trays. It's almost like he goes out of his way to make this this chatoicly messy in the room for me. There is at least a dozen random boxes, some full, some not scatted all throughout the room. There is an entire cart of unwrapped and unpriced pork just standing there naked in the room dying. It is just moment after 12:15 and it will be just around 2 o'clock by the time I have this room in order before I'm able to produce anything that I would sell to your Grandmother. I started by wrapping the pork because I'm absolutely clueless as to how long it has been sitting there. James' blood soaked glove and knife are dirty on the beef side so it's very possible this is stuff he cut over an hour ago, just leaving it for me to do when I get here, because he can. Once I finished that I just pushed it all out onto the sales floor because I knew I wasn't going to get another chance to come back out here for quite some time. I go back into the room and start cleaning up the shit that Jame should have done before he left. I put all his scrap beef in the huge red thing that only resembles a buspan to me, but they call them something like "lugs" or something like that. It is where you put all the salvagable meat that you can grind up later. You really shouldn't have all that much in a bin like this because as you're cutting your beef you should strive to break it all down before you even decide to throw it into one of these red bins. If you're going to make stew meat and you're cutting chuck roasts you should be working those parts of the chuck roll that you do not use for roasts of steaks or center eye steaks for stew meat straight away. You're not supposed to just pile it on the back of the bench and leave it for the guy working after you to do something with. They would not dare do such things if it were my Boss shutting down the department, which actually does happen once a week because they are forced to give me at least two days off a week, one of the biggest luxuries of working retail. When they do this just as James' has today I just grind the entire lot of it up, regardless if at the end of the night I'm putting 9 trays of grind out that nobody is going to buy. I look through the glass and see a customer behind the counter. It's this one lady who is in all the time, and I know exactly what she is going to ask me for. She is going to ask me to make her at least two Bacon Cheddar Cheeseburgers without the Bacon. It's for her kids. She has a guy who she is in with every now and again. Once when she was in her alone I asked her "No Husband today!?" and she all huffy-puffy about it, wanting me to very clear that he is not the husband. I suppose she is just the Baby Momma and he is just the Baby Daddy. These are terms that I have problems dealing with, and I had a lot different reservations as to why before finding myself in the middle of the conversation myself. I walk through the Cutting Room doors: "Hey there!" I say to the beautiful customer whose name I do not know. She is so short, and has grown out died blonde hair and glasses. Hair always tied back. I've never seen her dressed up, she's always in a hurry. She's loosing her mind with her rapidly growing son, which might an indication as to why she is so hellbent on everyone knowing ol' boy is not the Husband only the Father of her children. "You got time to make me two?" she says this to me because I'm one of the only Cutters who sort of goes out of my way to make these for her, and if I catch with my eyes coming into the store I will sometimes put a two or four finger sign up into the air asking her from afar what she is after, because I always ask her to get her other stuff and swing back around and pick them back up. I do this though, because I always track her down in the store and give them to her that way. This lady is so deserving of someone who she wants everyone to know is her Husband just as much as she is adament on knowing Baby Daddy is not.