Mr. Burger's

Fiction, Etc.

[mrburger]

Merrick (Ten Years Later)

Merrick is feeling a little bit high for the first time in a long time.  He knows this isn’t probably how it works but it really does feel like the THC starts inside his trachea, his throat, his sinuses, etc., feelable and localized like that; and that it suffuses whatever soft tissue and cartilage is there, whatever the smoke has touched; and in addition to feeling warm and sort of relaxing it also makes him feel a tad nauseated.  

But if he focuses on the nausea, really centers himself around it, then he can feel that it’s not actually nausea but some other feeling in nausea’s clothing.  What feeling, exactly, is to be figured out by offering the feeling various activities and seeing how it responds.  Do you want music?  Sometimes a puppy-like joy response.  Do you want porn?  Perhaps a subtle, solemn nod.  Do you want a La Croix?  Yes.  Do you want to go for a walk?  Not today.  Do you want to try and write something?  One never knows, now does one.  Until one asks.

Merrick is at home with his two huge dogs, Derek.  They lay curled up, inter-nestled, on an air mattress on the floor.  This is Merrick’s office.  Biga’s dad has recently stayed over for a few days and used the office for his bedroom while he was here.  The man plans to be back on Thursday with more to do, and so out the mattress stays.  Derek, meanwhile, has decided the poor bed is theirs to nap on.  This worries Merrick.  Both dogs together barely fit atop the thing.  Granted, they curl up surprisingly small considering how monstrously, doorway-fillingly big they are when they’re up and about, but even tightly curled the mattress barely holds them off the floor.  Merrick worries specifically about the material integrity of the air mattress.  It is somehow still holding its air for now.  Derek are asleep and noiseless.  He expects that whenever they finally dismount, the mattress will not bounce back up to its original shape, but stay mushy-looking and sad to the touch.  Like even if he re-inflates it.  With that noisy little fucking thing that inflates it.

Cicadas suddenly sing to life out his office window.  It’s as though someone has switched on a cicada machine.  Merrick makes no expression at this but simply blinks through the sudden buzz of melancholy.  Is it that time of year already?  He gazes out the little band of window visible beneath the mostly lowered blinds, through the gazillion tiny squares of mesh, out at the yellowy late-day sunlight warming the lawn across the street.  For the first time this year, the yellow light of summer strikes Merrick as not beautiful.  When he looks at it he feels the concept of DAY itself shrinking, receding, losing interest. 

He looks away, indoors, at the desk.  White, smooth, essentially featureless except for the odd dog hair or dried condensation ring.  He regards the wall behind his desk, beneath the window, white but shadowed by the sill and by his desk.  He regards his laptop.  He considers writing something.  His melancholy gradually recedes, but leaves a gray, filmy damp on his mood.

Biga is at work.  Her dad has visited recently and helped to set up the downstairs apartment so that the baby has a place to live when it’s born.  Biga and Merrick’s baby’s situation is peculiar but not unheard of.  She is pregnant with what is now a fully developed adult man.  Given her tiny stature, this looks about as ridiculous as you might think.  But she wears it well, Merrick thinks.  Pregnancy suits her.  He has said so repeatedly.  Biga beams whenever he tells her or their friends or their family this.  He beams too.  Such words are pure magic.

And Biga can’t wait to meet their son.  Merrick, therefore, feels obliged to be the nervous one.  What if their son is an asshole?  What if he’s already smart, like an adult, but has stubborn opinions about things?  What if he still terrorizes their sleep like all babies do?  Merrick dreads sleep-deprivation.  He knows it is going to hurt him in a way that he has never been hurt before.  The feeling of being slightly high now reaches his eye sockets, his eyeballs, his vision. It all starts to feel dry and achy.  Almost sleepy.  A feeling like needing to yawn gathers inside what he decides must be his tonsils.  He sort of yawns without opening his mouth or even making a face, except his eyelids squinch a bit.  It rolls like thunder inside his head.  Then it’s gone.  He blinks and long blurs of whatever he’s looking at smear downward across his vision.  Nothing hallucinatory.  Just a gentle fit of bleariness.

Biga is scheduled to get a C-section next month.  She went and scheduled the procedure years ago, after they first found out they were pregnant.  The obstetrician had all but mandated the operation.  She had barely begun to list the possible complications of a vaginal delivery before Biga had interrupted and asserted her consent to the C-section.  Merrick had not been there for this appointment but had been relieved to hear it all the same.  Also what was this about having an adult baby, he’d had to ask.

After dinner last night, while Biga’s dad was still here, the men had taken turns resting their open hands across Biga’s giant belly and feeling at what Biga told them was probably the baby’s back and butt, or possibly his legs.  Merrick had felt a surge of comfort and love as he felt their baby shift beneath the bellyfat.  Biga’s dad, a giant himself, had stooped semi-awkwardly and kissed his daughter’s naked belly with his scratchy bearded face.

Merrick’s laptop makes a noise.  He blinks at it.  His vision is suddenly sharp, alert, taut.  His next client is ready for their appointment.  He groans through his nose.  He doesn’t click “OK” to allow the client into the video chatroom.  He stays very quiet and stares at the computer screen.  He waits for the laptop noise to stop.  When it finally goes quiet he grimaces so intently that his high disappears altogether.  When next he checks the feeling, all he finds is its empty clothing, wopsed up and sweaty-smelling and nauseating to the touch.

[mrburger]

We Exploded

My family slowly exploded.  Something blew up, I’m not sure what, and we were scattered all over the place.  A few of us stuck close to home--cousins on my dad’s side especially--in Omaha or thereabouts.  Some of us went North--my mom’s side.  My brother and his wife, they went to California.  My parents, South Carolina.  

And here I am in St. Louis.  My partner and I are happy in our slightly too-small apartment.  It’s awesome.  But we are alone in here.

Nobody else.

We exploded.  And we didn’t just fly apart.  We lost the ability to communicate.  We got straight-up Babeled.  What I mean is of course that most of my family supports Trump now, or at least supports hating the political Left, while my brother and I and our wives don’t.  

I’m sorry before I even say it, but I think we all sort of slightly hate each other, now.

I can hear at least two uncles vehemently disagreeing with me, especially about the hating-each-other-now thing, but only to enforce peace, and possibly also to patronize me, and of course out of that knee-jerk Midwestern aversion to unwholesomeness.  But shit.  We do actually kind of if not hate then find exhausting each other now, despite the memories we unanimously cherish of our pre-exploded life together.  Those were good times.  These are not.

I’m not entirely sure what there is to be done about it.  Tomorrow there’s a vote to decide whether Brett Kavanaugh’s having allegedly attempted to rape Christine Blasey Ford should pertain to his fitness as a potential Supreme Court justice.  It’s a weird, hideous moment.  Either way it lands, boom goes the family.

And there is no bomb to disarm.  Anyway, what’s one more explosion?  I ... it’s late, I need to sleep.

[mrburger]

The Jelly Belly Merry Pairing Game

(Taste is obviously subjective here.  How much fun this game is for you depends on how playful and/or developed your Jelly Belly palate is.  Also, please brush your teeth after playing, and remember to enjoy your sweets in moderation.) 

Blindly withdraw from a body of mixed Jelly Belly gourmet jelly beans a total of six beans.

Sort the beans into “good” pairs.  "Good” pairings should be:  a) thoughtful, b) delicious, and c) non-duplicate.  How you decide to meet these criteria is up to you.  Arrange finished pairs two by two in a single row.

If you are able to create three good pairs on your first try, you win!  Merry pairing!

If there are any beans that cannot be paired, however, leave them unpaired and draw three more.

You may now either pair these new beans with the unpaired beans, or rearrange existing couples to fit them in elsewhere.

If you are able to get down to one unpaired bean, then you may either choose to add it to an existing pair and create a thoughtful, delicious trio, or else draw one more bean.

If you are able to create five good pairs after obtaining this last bean, you win!  Merry pairing!

If at this point you cannot pair any more beans, however, stop and reconsider what the fuck you are doing with your free time.

[Addendum:  More advanced or gluttonous characters can just keep drawing more beans until all pairs match.  Playing this way, the goal is still to end as quickly as possible, but not to compromise on taste; the only way to lose, then, is by giving up.  My record is six good pairs and one good trio.  Though I should note, I’ve only ever played this game once.  I’ve just invented it.  Do people still blog?]

[mrburger]

Compound Interest

Interest is interesting.  We can’t escape it, we can’t outrun it, and we can’t thwart it.  We just are interested.  What if something doesn’t hold our interest?  Then our interest doesn’t go anywhere.  We do.

While we may behave differently from moment to moment, there is this kernel of us, a hard little nuclear bean of a self, a me-self, that is always acting almost exactly the same way, all the time, in every context.

There seem to be axioms.  To put it in terms of ice cream:  i) You can interest me-self in another flavor of ice cream, but not in disliking ice cream.  ii) You can sneak it rotten ice cream, so that it wretches the night away and never again enjoys the taste of ice cream, but you cannot interest it in having that experience.  iii) Finally, you cannot interest it in being less interested than it tends to be, overall.  Interests may vary, but interest itself lacks mutability.

Thus I think the me-self is kind of neat.  Each of ours is merely an arbitrary combo of interests, an internal compass that points us in a single unchanging constellation of random interesting directions.

Others’ me-selves’ personalities may nearly mirror ours, their intelligences may just about match, and they may even share roughly our same sexual orientations and everything--there are thousands if not millions of these “each of us”-es--and yet we all feel kind of alone within ourselves, stuck; which is probably where the ‘nearly,’ the ‘just about,’ the ‘roughly,’ etc., from the first half of this sentence comes in...

... [mind wanders a bit] ...

These (these what?) are just as much a part of me as I am, for all I can tell, since they, like me, never go away (from me?), but at the same time ...

At the very, very core of even that inner-most me-self...

Is yet another me-self.  The part of me that cannot help but be interested, period.  Not in any particular thing or direction.  Just interested.  Me is nothing if not interested.  If you were to subtract interestedness from the equation, I’d go vegetal.

This is truly the truest me-self.  The me-self’s me-self.  It’s where meaning at its purest and least specific comes from, for me, I think, almost...

Which leaves then only one last and final aspect of 'self’ about me:  myself, itself.  Just the self.  Neither the self that calls itself ‘self’, nor the self that that self addresses.  Simply, the self.  A flavorless, desiccated bean of me-ness that merely sits there and is me.

This is the last me-self, at last, and is made up of structural shit that otherwise has nothing to do with me.  Goop and fiber and water and shit.  A brain, I guess.  The scaffolding that supports my existence but is not my existence.

And okay, I guess there’s an argument to be made for there being, somewhere, some kind abstract logicky analog of myself, too, randomly and divinely written into soulless matter, whose complexity surpasses some special threshold and therefore “comprises” me.  This level of me-self is little more than a pattern of behaviors, a list of rules, an array of networks, a feedback loop, a network of feedback loops, etc.

And but then that’s it.  If I have to consider any aspect of my self less concrete than this, something like schizophrenia starts to kick in.  And so hey, let’s back up a few layers, and let’s resume never thinking about this.  Cool?

[mrburger]

I Can’t Write You A Poem

I didn’t practice enough as a kid, so today I’m a grown man who can’t write poetry.  A teacher once taught me that poetry is supposed to say something ancient and familiar in a brand new and unfamiliar way, right?  Well I can’t write in a single unfamiliar way to save my life.  Whenever I try, I feel stupid.  I feel like I’m fiddling around with an instrument I never learned how to play.  Like, I’m sorry if you thought I was about to pull off some sweet solo or something!  I’m not.

[mrburger]

Future Merrick Wakes Up From His Nap

Future Merrick appears to be napping on Merrick’s couch when Merrick gets home.

 “You can nap?”

 “Apparently,” yawns the old ghost.

 “Hey,” Merrick realizes, “you came back!”

 “Oh.  I was gone?” Future Merrick grabs his glasses, puts them on.

 “For years!  I don’t—even know how many.  I’d have to go check.”

 “Weird.  Do you know where I was?”

 “No.”

 “Jesus,” Future Merrick sighs, noticing the state of his glasses. He takes off his glasses, peers at them through the light, and starts to wipe them clean.

 “Where were you?”

 “Oh, I have no idea.  I was napping.”  He fits his glasses back on and finally gives the thirty-year old standing across the room from him a proper look-over.  He spots the shiny new ring.  “Hey, did you get married already?”

 “You said something to me like ‘It wasn’t like this,’ and then floated away out the window.  That was the last time I saw you.”

 Future Merrick nods, “I remember that, now you mention it.”

 Future Merrick sits up and lowers his wobbly old legs to the floor.  His left knee gives him grief.

 “What did you mean by ‘not like this’?”  Merrick still stands by the door.

 “I ... can’t answer that.”

 “Oh, Jesus, we’re back to that.”

 “Hey, it’s not like I’m lying.  I can’t answer that.  I don’t remember the answer.   ‘Not like this?’   Was I quoting The Matrix?  I do do that.  Maybe I had something on my mind that day, and I said something dramatic, and I left all in a grump.”

 “’All in a grump?’  You left me alone in the present.  For years I wondered I was living my life wrong.  You left me thinking I was living in, like, a rejected timeline or something.  I thought my whole existence was, like, I don’t know, but you’re telling me, years later, that that is not what you meant?”

 “If it was, I don’t remember.”  Future Merrick gives Merrick an unselfconscious look.  “Life after death is not less confusing.”

 Merrick suddenly wishes he could go home.  He is home.  But he wishes for something else, for some reason.

 “What is it like, being here?” he asks the ghost.

 “Oh, Jesus, we’re back to that.”

 For a moment, it’s almost like Future Merrick’s not going to answer.  He never answers questions like these.  Future Merrick stands up and stretches and yawns, cracks his back, yawns again.

 “Actually, okay.  I can answer that.”  He looks glumly about the dusty, cluttered, lived-in apartment, and then back at Merrick.  “It’s like I’m on some sort of weaponized trip.  I’m re-hallucinating my own life.  Myself has become its own inescapable little corner of reality.  At all times.  The trip won’t let up.  It’s all I can do not to wail for help.  Does that startle you?  I don’t know how else to put it, otherwise, so sorry.  I hope you just get what I mean.”  The old ghost points at Merrick.  “I’m the same thing you are.”

 “I don’t get it.  Are you saying you’re, like, stuck?  Purgatory style?”

 “Maybe.  Not to be a bummer.” Future Merrick rubs up under his glasses.  “I wouldn’t say I’m depressed, but everything feels a bit bleak, and is mildly,” he strains for the right word for a moment, then seems to settle for, “depressing.”

 “Fuck.  What can we do?”

 Future Merrick chuckles sneezishly.  A little jet of snot actually spits out onto his upper lip.  He wipes it off, then wipes his hand off.  

Merrick has the instinct to grab him a tissue, but what would be the use.

 “Is there anything I can do?” Merrick asks again.

 “Probably not,” Future Merrick grins oddly, “You just keep doing you, and we’ll be fine.”

 “I’ll be fine, sure.  But you just told me you’re in purgatory.  And I am you.  So technically, aren’t neither of us fine?”

 “I’m not sure.  I’d say let’s go ahead and read some Borges on the matter.  I’m not sure it would help.  But we should try.”

 “Has it always been like this?”

 Future Merrick confesses by way of silence.

 “Old ghost, I am you.  You must trust me.  Why didn’t you tell me this last time?”  Merrick plunks tiredly down onto the sofa. “You just reappear, you don’t know where you’ve been at all, and now all of a sudden you’re telling me you’re depressed.  I don’t get why this is happening.”

 Future Merrick considers this.  “I’m sorry.  I’m not sure why this time I feel like—” he begins, but then.  His gaze fidgets to the young man’s wedding ring.

 Merrick looks down, too, then back at Future Merrick.

 “The drug,” Future Merrick says strangely, “You took the drug.”

 “What drug?” Merrick asks.

 “The drug.”

 There’s some meaningful eye contact.

 “That was a hallucination,” Merrick explains.  “I was panicking, and I hallucinated, and I came back from it and everything was okay.  I know for a fact it wasn’t real.”

 “We know for a fact,” corrects Future Merrick.

 Merrick opens his mouth to--

 Future Merrick floats over to the digital piano against the wall.  The thing is new as of last week.  It has mostly sat quiet.

 “Wait, is this new?” he asks dreamily.

 “There’s no way what you’re going through is as awful as how that drug was for me.  That was a bad experience.  I dreamed I was in hell.  It was like I’d been tricked into taking something very bad for me.  I really thought I was stuck in a loop where I was just always dying, already dead.  I thought I’d died and gone to hell.”

 Future Merrick plays a lovely, soundless tune over the not-on keys.

 “But for you, I mean, this is hardly hell, right?  I like this apartment.  You were napping when I found you.  It’s a nice summer day outside.  I’m sitting here on a couch, I’m patiently hearing you out and, like, I’m empathizing with you, and like, I am you.  How am I a component of your purgatory?  Isn’t purgatory supposed to suck?  How can this be eternal damnation if there’s still music and video games and--and Biga?”  The A/C suddenly, refreshingly comes on.  “I mean, the goddamn A/C is going!”

 Future Merrick just looks at him.  “Come and turn this on, wouldn’t you?”

 Merrick can’t resist when Future Merrick asks him to do things.  It’s strange.  He’s never known if magic were involved.  Up goes Merrick and on goes the piano, and then Merrick goes back to the couch.

 Future Merrick plays a special chord.

 Merrick sees it now.  

The ghost then lilts through a tune Merrick’s never heard before, but recognizes.  Merrick kicks off his shoes and stretches his legs out on the couch.  He counts seconds staring at his feet as he breathes.  He takes a few very long slow breaths.

 “So why come back?” Merrick wonders aloud.  “Why now?”

 “I don’t know.  Sorry.  But whatever I can do to help, you just let me know.”

 “Well, you remember this, right?  Where we’re at right now?  Back when you were me.”

 “Hm,” says Future Merrick.  He plays the chord again.

 Merrick winces.  “Do you remember anything bad happening next?”

 Future Merrick fumbles the tune for a second, replays the last few notes slowly over and over, then gets it going again.  “I sort of remember … everything.”

 “What?” Merrick stops focusing on his breathing to look at Future Merrick curiously.

 “I don’t know.  Maybe nothing.  I might be making it up.”

 “Jesus,” Merrick whimpers.  “Just kill me.”

 “Wait,” Future Merrick says to him suddenly.  He stops playing for a second to look right at him.

 “What?” Merrick asks.

 “Something bad does happen next.”

 “I’m listening.”

 "Listen,” hesitates the ghost, “It’s on its way…”

Merrick takes a single sharp breath.  

Future Merrick shifts his weight.  He furrows his crinkly brow.  “Listen,” he says, and squeezes out a dry trumpety old fart.  Which he thinks is the funniest thing ever.

[mrburger]

Merrick Alone

On a little balcony outside the managers’ office, Duane and Merrick are interrupted by a spider as it crawls along the railing Merrick is leaning on.  Duane moves to kill it, but Merrick stops him.  

“I got this,” Merrick says determinedly.

Merrick draws the last sip of lemon water from his employee cup and pops the lid off.  He puts the lid and straw in one pocket of his apron and from another pulls out a dessert menu.  He sets the mouth of the cup carefully onto the spider’s path and rests its lip just in front of where the critter has stopped on the railing.  Both Duane and Merrick wait a long moment to see if perhaps the spider will crawl in on its own.  It does not.  So Merrick enlists the dessert menu, gently nudging the spider once from behind toward the cup.  The spider freaks out.  And instead of going into the cup, it flees sideways, disappearing around the underside of the railing.  Merrick flinches at the sudden disappearance and fumbles a haphazard attempt to capture the bug some other way.  His cup clocks the railing.  His dessert menu scrapes haplessly.  The spider is long gone, having dropped away from the railing on an emergency thread.

 “Where’d it go?” asks Duane. Merrick gives him a beleaguered look. Duane pretends not to notice. “Oh well,” he chuckles.  “I commend you for trying.  I’d have just killed it.”

 “Probably would have been a good idea.  What if a guest sees it now?  What if it crawls up onto someone’s table?”

 “Nah,” Duane says, his mind already venturing elsewhere.  “Spiders ain’t like that.”

 He and Merrick bend over the railing and peer down at the bug’s descent.  Its long legs dangle carefully on its way down.  It drops in little starts and stops.

 “Hey can I ask you a question?” Duane asks.

 “I love questions,” Merrick answers out of habit, but then tenses up when he realizes Duane is struggling to choose his next words.  Merrick for just a split second is distracted by how differently they are dressed.  Finally, the question.

 “Why is it that you want to manage so badly?”

 Merrick groans reflexively. It’s a question he’s asked himself so many times he almost forgets he’s standing in front of his boss as he hears it. Then he blinks, and he looks right at Duane.

 “I want to help.”

 “But what does you managing help?”

 Merrick’s cheeks go pink.

 “What does me managing help?” Merrick repeats acidly.  Duane’s eyes widen as he realizes he's said the wrong thing.

 “Oh no, dude,” Duane soothes.  “That’s not what I meant!  I didn’t mean what does you managing help!”  He fusses with his watchband as he stammers out an apology.  “I’m sorry, man.”

 Merrick feels at his own wrist.  He can’t wear a watch while he’s on the clock.  Biga gave him one for Christmas, and it matches his wedding ring, but he can’t wear it.

 “What did you mean?” Merrick finally asks.

 “I just meant, like,” Duane gathers his next few thoughts into a big pile, squares them up, then sets to work carefully re-attempting to share them.  “I just meant that, like, I manage, and I’m a ‘manager,’ but I don’t feel like I ‘help.’  I feel like I try to help, but I don’t feel like I help like how you seem to mean you want to.  I feel like I help individuals sometimes, sure.  I help insofar as I am, like, a helpful sort of guy.  But it’s not as if before I came here the other managers badly needed my help.  I only help insofar as it’s my job to help and because I find it easy to be helpful.  I’m not the kind of help you, like, need.  And like with you, if I say it’s not necessarily like we need you, it’s not because I’m some proud callous asshole who’s made this sweeping judgment about your utility, it’s me relating and saying, like, maybe you’re just not seeing this like how you see it once you become a manager.  You know?”

 “No,” Merrick answers thinly.  He shakes his head a moment, closes his eyes.  Then he comes back.

 “Actually yes,” Merrick answers.  “Sorry, I do know. You feel helpless.  Even though you help so much, you feel like you don’t really help.  So why would I want that for myself?  Right?   Like you’re asking, why can’t I just see how pointless it is to want to ‘help?’”  Merrick mimics Duane’s air quotes.  “You’re trying to protect me.”

“I guess?  I might be.  I don’t know.”

“Well, fuck you, man.  I respect you, I like you, we get each other.  But when I say, ‘I want to help,’ you must know I mean it.  I appreciate you checking my moors, to see if maybe I’m deluded.  I see how that’s kind of your way of worrying about me. But I also see it as you projecting, big-time, your own feelings of helplessness in this stressful ... monotonous ... banal—sorry—I mean, like, don’t you feel like you need help?  Don’t you really, though?  Can’t you admit that?  You are helpful and kind, and you undersell yourself if you think the other managers don’t need you for that, but everything you’ve just told me tells me … when no one’s around, and it’s just you, don’t you whimper quietly to yourself that you wish you had help?”

Duane doesn’t answer, but he does look at Merrick in a strange way.

“You’ve fallen for the wrong worldview, Duane. I do, too, sometimes.  I forget everybody here’s wrong, sometimes.  The monkey in me is fooled, I guess, by the other monkeys all thinking the same thing together.  But I just have to close my eyes and shake my stupid monkey head and forcibly remember the real truth.”  Merrick does this as he speaks, in slow-motion like he’s showing Duane how to do it.  Then he opens his eyes again and looks right at him.

 “You bring something the other managers can’t.  And each of them does, too, their own thing.  But none of you sees yourselves like this, or if you do then you’re only half-looking.  If you do, you only barely acknowledge the pretty part of the picture, and instead obsess over the ugly part.  You spend the vast majority of your time contemplating the unique ways in which each of you will never fit the role of manager, yourselves included.  You meditate on reasons not to admire the others and yourself. You talk friendly to each other’s faces, but privately resent each other.  And yourself.  

“Duane, you suck, is a thing I admit I sometimes say."

“Me too, if we’re being honest.  None of you will ever become the best.  No one ever does that.  The best managers don’t exist.  And what few who come close do didn’t become the way they are, they just are themselves.  Sure they had to learn some stuff along the way, fuck up here and there, but the hardest things come somehow naturally to them.  And when they fuck up, they fuck up better than you or me or anyone else.  And you know what? Fuck ‘em!  If we had that person on our team, great, that’d be great.  But we don’t.   We are an embittered team of misunderstood failures.  And we need to start acting like one!    Or I mean, you guys do, sorry.”

Duane clearly doesn’t mind.

“As weird as it sounds,” Merrick continues, “You’ve got to quit telling yourselves you can all get better. The trick to actually doing better is to be honest with yourselves and admit that you will never get better.  Though I won’t say there’s no such thing as the perfect manager, I will say you will never be it.  Far easier to become, if you’d just learn to be comfortable with yourselves, is the perfect team of managers.  The perfect stable of talent and weakness, with everyone doing what they’re best at, and no one doing what they’re worst at.  The perfect combination of imperfect managers.”

 Merrick and Duane have at some point relocated to Duane’s car.  Merrick talks in the front seat while Duane takes random turns through a neighborhood, listening.  When Merrick finishes his last thought, he takes to staring off into space.  Duane gets him going again.

 “But so what is the perfect combination, then?  Have you actually read about this or are you just, like, free-styling here?”

 “I’m doing both,” Merrick nods. “I’m sort of tinkering, here, I admit, but nothing I’m saying isn’t supported by good science.  Forgive me for not citing my sources, but if it helps I can name some reputable ones:  BBC, NPR, Yale, an old text—”

 “I don’t need your bibliography. Just tell me what you think our management team needs to be perfect, or whatever.  Is this where you’re saying you come in?  Do you complete us?”

 “Come on,” Merrick says. “I don’t know.  I know I could at least bring this new way of looking at things. Or I could share my framework, or something, I guess?  I don’t know!”

“Don’t doubt yourself now, Merrick!” Duane chides, somewhat distractedly as he makes a left turn through a stop sign.  Merrick can’t tell if Duane totally believes in him, but assumes the best and continues.

 “OK, let me see if I can put this the right way.  So I see it as you’ve got this managerial ideal you each aspire to, like I said. And it’s made you resentful of each other, because you see each other as falling short.  And each of you does fall short.  But none of you talks about it, because it’d be just the worst thing ever to drag this out into the open now, so late in the game.  But that’s exactly what I’m saying you gotta do.  You all gotta stop seeing yourselves as a random group of incomplete managers.  You need to know when to pass each other the ball.  Which I mean, means you need to know when to be humble.  You need to know when Brittany could do something better than you, and then let her handle it, and she needs to be cool with letting you do this.  Your team needs to let you not do things you can’t handle.  And you need to let your teammates not do things you can handle especially well.  There has to be that tolerance, that mercy, that respect, all at once, all the time.  Basic teamwork buzzwords, I know, but they do matter.”

 “They do,” Duane agrees.

 And now for just a second Merrick remembers he is alone at his computer, typing this all up into Microsoft Word.  Duane is at work, managing another Meatball Monday.  Neither has spoken to the other much lately.  Merrick misses Duane, or at least this version of him he’s talking to now.

 “Do you mind if I hit this?” Merrick asks, pulling his own private pipe inexplicably out of Duane’s glove compartment.

 “Only if you promise to share,” Duane says.  Merrick acquiesces.

 Through a lungful of smoke, he grunts, “Do.  You. Get.  What I’m saying?”

 Duane gives him the hold on a sec finger and takes his own deep hit.  Then he holds it a sec, makes a sickly face—nothing to worry about, it’s the face he always makes—and finally exhales a tremendous plume of yellowy smoke.

 “You mean Voltron.”

 “Eh?”

 “Voltron.  You mean we are the Thundercats but we haven’t we realized we can turn into Voltron.”

 “Oh!  Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.”

 “But you’re saying we’re missing a Thundercat?  Our Voltron doesn’t have a head?  And you’re that Thundercat?”

 “I’m not saying I’m the head, or even that I’m a Thundercat.  I’m saying I’ve seen Thundercats, though, and studied the show inside and out, and can maybe help you guys discover how to, like, form Voltron. This … metaphor’s a little too perfect.”

 “I’m thinking you’re a Thundercat, dude.  You’re the long-lost Thundercat who, in our darkest hour, we refuse to admit we need. But who will save us.”

 “If you say so, Duane.”

 “I SAY SO.  And I’m your boss.”

“Aye, captain.  Well hey, thanks for the endorsement.  Now if only your opinion meant shit to the other managers.  To that goddamn sociopath.”

 “He is seeing a licensed cognitive behavioral therapist.”

 “And he doesn’t give a shit about me.”

 “He does, too.  In his way.”

 “Well, whatever.  He’s flawed, which is fine.  He’s just part of an uncoordinated group of mecha-lions. But what’s not fine,” Merrick sighs heavily, really, painfully, “Is this.”

 “What?  Wait, what’s ‘this?’”

 “This, I mean,” says Merrick, pointing at the car, the road, the pipe in his own hands.  “I’m alone in my apartment, Biga’s in bed, it’s almost midnight, and none of what you think is happening right now is happening.”

 “Oh come on,” Duane scoffs. “You really think that matters?”

 “It feels like it does.”

 “I tell you what.  Next time I see The Sociopath, I’ll tell him what you told me.”

 “NO.  DON’T.”

 “Naw, naw, I will.  He and I are cool.  I’ll tell him the Voltron thing.  I’ll tell him you’re a Thundercat, and that we need you to complete our Voltron.”

 “I’m not a Thundercat.”

 “You know you are. You think you’re not one, which is what makes you the coolest one of all.”

 “That’s such a ham-fisted trope.”

 “It’s the ham-fisted truth, my brother.  Listen to me. I don’t care that this isn’t real. I don’t care!  I like the way this is just fine, just like I like you.  You can sit in your little smoke-cloud of misery and self-pity and, like, imagining that me not literally being with you means you’re painfully and incurably alone, but know this.  You are not incurably alone.  I still exist.  We will reunite some day.  I am your friend and it is my solemn duty to do that.  I know we haven’t spoken in awhile.  I know I’m gone, to you, vanished past the far bank of some river you think is a promotion, and that we haven’t talked in way too long, but I will talk to you again someday.  I am your friend.  I do say nice things about you to The Sociopath.  You’re right, I can’t actually tell him any of the things you’ve told me today, but know that if I could, I would.  I do it in spirit.  Sort of. I—I, like …”

 And Merrick loses the train of thought.  Duane’s face kind of ceases to mean, his mannerisms become false, and for a moment Merrick resumes feeling like he’s talking to himself.

 He closes his eyes. He shakes his stupid monkey head.

 “Can I ask you a question?” Duane asks him.

[mrburger]

Know Your Audience?

Just ask a comedian!  Sometimes, you bomb.  That doesn’t mean you didn’t know your audience.  It means that you didn’t know one audience; or more charitably, that one audience didn’t know you.  Next week you’ll play a gig in Boston and tear the house down.  The week after that you’ll kill it again in Dallas.  What awaits you in Omaha?  Who knows!  Maybe you’ll bomb!  Especially when you’re just starting out, and can’t be choosy with your venues.  You’ll probably bomb.

And now I admit, “know your audience” is shit advice from the mouths of most who give it.  But it can be good advice.  Here, let me show you.

Disgruntled worker trying in countless different ways to make your plight heard, don’t beat your head against a wall trying to sway an audience who simply doesn’t like you.  Sure, in a democracy this is healthy, communicative behavior!  But in the workplace where you probably work, only a single ideology reigns, in which case reaching across the aisle is an exercise in futility.   A noble exercise!  But a futile one.  If the ruling ideology is against you, then hear you this:  fuck off.  Go elsewhere.  Go someplace where the people in charge feel the same way about the people in charge as you do.  That urge you have to influence positive change is not immune to burnout, so don’t let it suffer too long or too intensely.  Know your audience.  And then go work for them, instead.

But wait, what cowardice is this?  Just back down from malignance like that?  But what of our poor comrades who stay on after we go, and continue to suffer under the ruling ideology; who if anything work in an even worse place now that their number is one voice quieter?

They should fuck off, too!

It’s not cowardice to walk away from a fight you know you cannot win.  Anyone who’s played a jRPG knows this.  It’s a beleaguered morsel of wisdom gleaned from painful life experiences, difficult video games, and modern research into the nature of group-think.  Bothering people who aren’t like you even when you know you’re right is, technically, just being a bother.  You can win the fight to make the good things happen (i.e., make the audience laugh), but you can’t do that just anywhere and everywhere.  Someone, somewhere, will hate you.  So don’t go working at their business and then telling them they need to change.  Nobody changes.  That’s not how problems get solved.  Circumstances are changed so that the people in them may better suit them.  Whatever that means in any given scenario, that’s how problems get solved.

But what cynicism!  What hopelessness!

No, dude, listen.  I also like hope.  But hope without truth is all fat and no meat.  

People are different from each other, and they tend to be different from each other in groups.  Even in an utopian society where peace reigns, the tolerant will tend to segregate themselves from the intolerant.  Intolerance, in those who are born with it, is a facet of something subconscious, genetic, and pervasive across contexts.  It can be challenged and overcome on a case by case basis, but never cured altogether.  Our species will for all intents and purposes always be approximately 1/2 intolerant.

So cheer up!  This bleak but very probably true outlook is useful.  It means you are free to go.  You live in a time when like-minded people are able to cluster relatively easily.  We are stuck in a never-ending cycle, where sometimes good prevails, and sometimes evil.  Communicating is important but on a grand scale, not on the kind of scale where you walk into your boss’s office and tell them off for not stocking the first-aid cabinet with the good kind of band-aids.  All you can ever hope to do, especially if you really want to make a difference, is side with good.  And applied to your career, that means:  go work for the good guys.  The bad guys will always be the bad guys.  Fuck them!

Go find your audience.  You’ll know them when you see them.

(Note:  They might be super, duper hard to find.  You cool with that?  Sorry in advance.)

[mrburger]

An Angry Little Note

Are you 100% sure passive aggression is objectively real?

Wikipedia says PA “is the indirect expression of hostility.”  I like that just fine, and so do you.  But now let’s break it down, just in case we’re missing something.

First off, "indirect expression” can be taken to mean anything except direct expression.  Wikipedia gives us examples of indirect hostility such as, “procrastination, stubbornness, [and] sullen behavior.”  Note the trends here of noncompliance, delay, and non-verbal confrontation.  Googling “passive aggression” also gives us this cute visual summary.

There are also decades of commentary on PA, dating back to World War II and Col. Menninger’s research into what he perceived as “immaturity” among certain noncompliant cadets.  

Clinical opinion on the matter seems to have fluctuated over the past 70-odd years.  Early attempts to explain PA saw it as “stem[ming] from a childhood stimulus,” qua Freud and his nurturist framework.  Then came the behaviorist movement of the 1950s, during which the definition of PA narrowed significantly and became coupled with “passive-dependency” (today, Dependent Personality Disorder).  Later, in the age of the popular psychologist and the ensuing bevy of “new age” diagnoses, came Millon, who insisted that PA was its own personality disorder--to which I’d provide a link, but here Wikipedia just circles back to the PA article.  Eventually, passive aggression (or Millon’s “negavitism”) was relegated to the appendix of the DSM-IV, and by the DSM-V it was gone completely.

Where did it go?  Why, to that place that all scientifically unfounded theories in psychology go when they die!  Common parlance.

And now, in answer to that, here’s my take on what PA really is.

Passive aggression is entirely subjective, and rests chiefly on hostile or apathetic misinterpretations of passive (read:  conflict-averse, cooperation-oriented) attempts at communicating grievances, especially with someone who is themselves hostile or apathetic.  How often do you see belligerent assholes engage in passive aggression with sweet kindly folk?  Zero often, yes?  And now how often do you see the inverse?

If you’ll humor me for a second, let’s consider one of the chief causes of Dependent Personality Disorder, which would seem to be a pathologically high score in trait Agreeableness.  (I say “seem to” because the DSM still for whatever reason refuses to incorporate findings from explicitly pertinent FFM research.)  Agreeableness is a lovely, angelic trait, roundly appreciated in every human culture known to science.  But at too high a level, and constellated with high Neuroticism and certain socially needy facets of Extraversion, Agreeableness can begin to interfere with a person’s quality of life.  Think of the pushover, the sycophant, or the apologist.  Think of too much of a good thing.  Think of nice guys finishing last.

Now, to be clear, I’m not equating PA to DPD.  Healthy, non-disorderly people engage in PA everyday!  Instead, I’m simply trying to highlight that PA is a defining behavior of a disorder whose defining trait is Agreeableness.  Which is where we proceed at last to my main point.

I would argue that PA is actually, simply, the Agreeable person’s trademark approach to conflict, and that the label of “passive aggression” is one only ever administered by their antagonists.  PA is not in and of itself maladaptive.  In fact, it’s almost indistinguishable from the very kinds of peaceful resistance we tend historically to laud.  Rosa Parks, for instance, in refusing to get up from her seat could have easily been mislabeled as a passive aggressor.  (And indeed, she was given a $10 fine for violation of city ordinance.)

The kind are greedily and coldly misunderstood by the unkind.  Just as easily, like Dr. King and Ms. Parks, are they underestimated.   Empathy and altruism, cooperation and trust, these things look to the Disagreeable like holier-than-thou-ness and naivety, like pure foolishness, because Disagreeable people struggle for veracity when attempting to project their own self-interest onto the un-self-interested motives of others.  

To the reader, whichever way you fall, I say open your eyes and ears.  Appreciate the angsty little post-its for what they are:  invitations to peaceful debate.  Passive aggression is not pussyfooting.  It is none other than the graceful’s attempt at letting the graceless know when they have stepped out of line.

[mrburger]

How To Stop Misjudging People

Step One:  Admit that you misjudge people.  Oh, you don’t?  Okay, then tell me what the Big Five personality traits are off the top of your head.  There’s only the five, and yes, Introversion/Extraversion is one of them.  But can you name the other four?  If you can’t, if you haven’t learned about the Big Five, then you’re operating without a legit model, and you’re winging it when it comes to “judging” people.

Step Two:  Learn the Big Five model of personality.  It’s powerful simple.  No, it won’t grant you magic powers, it won’t turn you into a high-functioning sociopath, and it definitely won’t net you that promotion you’ve been passed over for again and again.  But it will give you merciful perspective, tidy up some of the guesswork you’ve been doing, and over the course of months open your eyes to the full, heartbreaking scale of just how inaccurate the gossip around you tends to be.  In other words, it’ll seriously up your gossip game.  (Sorry about that promotion, by the way.)

Step Three:  Ask people personal questions.  You’re trying to quit judging books by their covers, which means you’re going to need to start reading them instead.  Don’t fret!  Reading people is way quicker and easier than reading books.  It taps into much older, more reliable equipment in our social monkey brains.  Simply hand the person a banana, start rubbing their back, and then ask them why they left their last job, or what it was that was bothering them the other day, or what their favorite _____ ever is.  Really, once you get used to noticing the Big Five, you’ll discover that not only do personalities suck at hiding, they actually prefer being out in the open eating bananas and getting back rubs.

Step Four:  Take note of their defining trait(s).  Even though our personality traits are measured against population averages, no one scores averagely across the board on all five traits.  You just don’t see it.  Instead, what most everyone has is at least one Big Five trait that they score noticeably high or low on.  (Though gosh, if you ever do meet someone who hasn’t got a single interesting trait, and I admit it is technically feasible, then please tell me, because I have been hoping for years to interview a perfectly average person!)  Anyway, knowing the defining trait of an individual gives you a solid base on which to build the rest of your "judgment” theory.  It gives you an anchorpoint.  It starts your theory off small but reliable.

Step Five:  Please, accept mystery.  Despite your best intentions, you won’t be able to figure out any one person’s entire personality.  Those average trait scores, and we all have them, tend to throw us for loops.  Sometimes we act one way, sometimes we act the other, so which is it?  Which is "us?”  Our social monkey brains were built to tolerate these mysteries with relative ease, but only by taking advantage of our brains’ phenomenal capacity for ignorance.  So having not to ignore these indiscernible traits, and puzzle over them instead, is hard work.  Like, think about someone you know who you don’t know for sure if they’re introverted or extroverted.  Got someone in mind?  Now, ask yourself, how often do you think about that you don’t know for sure whether this person is introverted or extraverted?  And there you have my point.  Seldom to never, right?  Instead, you probably define them by some other much more meaningful trait--that they’re an asshole, or a genius, or a tool--and just straight-up don’t even worry about how eager they are to stay in or go out on weekends.

Step Six:  Peer review.  As wrong as laymen plebes tend to be, it’s still worthwhile to compare notes with others from time to time.  Yes, this is technically an endorsement of gossip, but it’s also ancient behavior that serves a vital social purpose.  Plus, there’s nothing saying you can’t compare notes with the people you’re judging, themselves.  You just have to be careful, is all.  In particular, most folks don’t like to identify as Close-minded; for that one, you either have to word things in a tricky way, like try to come in sneaky-like, or else simply observe carefully and be ready to know it when you see it.  With the occasional tricky exception, you can ultimately stand only to improve your theory of a person’s personality by testing the strength of yours against theirs and others’.  This kind of shit is the backbone of science.  And that’s really all my advice boils down to.  If you wind up practicing only one of these nine steps, let it be this one.

Step Seven:  Note the effects of stress on personality!   Woo, doggy.   Here’s where the vast number of misjudgments come from.  Stress has a way of magnifying low trait scores, and temporarily depressing average scores, and generally really bringing out the worst in all of us.  Assholes become hazards, introverts disappear into themselves, and neurotic types get downright ugly (stress ain’t their thing).  And when this happens, our instinct is to say, “This person is exhibiting a meaningful behavior, such as lying to protect themselves from shame, or starving themselves of social contact, or playing the RESPECT MY AUTHORITY card to keep control of a panicky situation, and this decisive behavior pings hard on my social monkey personality theory clue collection radar.”  Ah-HA!, our inner monkeys think, such extreme behaviors can only be indicative of Low Agreeableness, Introversion, and Close-mindedness respectively!  And in the absence of stress, we’d be right.  But stress is a meaningful confound!  You’ll see.  Whenever you go around “comparing notes” (see Step 6) with plebes, and find a mismatch, the reason will almost always be stress.  One of you or the other (probably the other) will have likely caught that person on a bad day, and let them make a terrible impression on you.  Just ask, if someone’s theory differs from yours in a negative or cynical way:  was their subject by any chance having kind of a bad day?  Even if you hate someone’s guts and/or totally don’t understand them, it’s still easy to tell if they are having a good or bad day.  (Aside: I say “easy to tell,” but then depression can hide just as easily, so, like, actually the assessment stays kind of a nice meaty challenge throughout.  Maybe that can be a whole ‘nother How To, is telling/predicting whether someone is secretly depressed.  It’s easier than you think!  And harder, much harder.  Next time...)

Step Eight:  Take pity on those who misbehave out of stress.  Because though we all misbehave differently, we all misbehave.  Whatever stupid thing really grinds your gears, is to someone else just as bad as whatever stupid thing it is you do that you’re not proud of.  That should be pretty self-explanatory.  I’ll leave this step short to account for the previous rambler.

Step Nine:  Judge the rest accordingly.  This one I’ll keep even shorter.

And tempted though I am to keep adding steps and adding steps, truth be told they’d only start to drift past the goal of Non-Misjudgment.  What we’ve got for now is a decent first pass!  Hope it serves us somewhat well.  Thanks for reading.

[mrburger]

Chef Ali’s Secret

The incredible young cook and local celebrity, Chef Ali, has a secret.

Ali’s parents, close friends, and relatives back in Japan think she perished in a horrific school shooting perpetrated by her brother--who is actually dead, having not survived the incident.  The truth is she deliberately switched uniforms with one of the girls who was murdered (beyond all recognition) and then fled to America to start a new life.  The real dead girl’s family doesn’t know what happened to their little angel, and though the search for her went cold years ago, those once closest to her cling forever to the hope that she might still be out there, hiding somewhere, getting by, perhaps using a secret identity, recovering from the trauma, preparing herself psychologically to come back home someday and have to explain herself.  Although she was only a preschooler at the time, Ali knew few would guess the truth.  She made a clean, easy break and never looked back.

Each year since her arrival, she has flown into Atlanta, picked a random flight to get onto, and then sneaked aboard using forgery (she is a superlative talent), sleight of hand, and where these have occasionally failed her, charm.  Everytime she touches down, she sets in motion the usual rigamarole of contacting the local foreign exchange student program, pleading her (completely fictional) case, arranging for the soonest possible host family (invariably a loving, highly conscientious family who has recently sent home their own previous foreign exchange student) and then letting herself be whisked away to her newest temporary “home,” oftentimes that same day.  

Once situated, Ali invariably endears herself to the new host family, becoming no less than their favorite student.  She has never failed at this, possibly because she’s a genius, or possibly because she always seems to find herself adopted by the same kinds of people:  considerate, open-minded, friendly, etc.  Whatever the case, she wins.  Wherever there is the occasional asshole in the family, she gets by on pacifism and diplomacy.

Though it is difficult with Morrie.  Uncommonly difficult.

Anyway.  She has a special place in her heart for the Atlanta International Airport.  Good old Hartsfield-Jackson.  She sometimes has dreams where she’s there, and they’re never the stressful kind.  She walks up to the screens with all the flights listed on them.  She closes her eyes.  She closes her eyes in the dream and imagines.

[mrburger]

Every Manager Sucks Dude

Every manager sucks dude. Every manager.  FUCKING.  Sucks.

No dude, listen.  I’ve had some good ones.

No man.  Cause listen.  You cannot tell me even the good ones didn’t suck SOMEtimes.  At least SOME of the fucking time.  Just every once in awhile, just like WHOOPS, they sucked.

No dude!  For real!  I had this one manager who—

No, no, man.  No.  You’re missing it.  You’re not hearing me.  Whatever you’re about to tell me, whoever it was, they sucked too.  They sucked SOMEhow.  Like they ALWAYS do, at least a little bit.

Well then, like, WHY man? Like what is it that you don’t like about your managers?

What don’t I LIKE?  It’s not that I don’t LIKE them.  You don’t have to put it like that, it’s not like I don’t LIKE them, it’s just that I recognize that they all kind of suck.

Dude.  That’s just it, what if they DON’T?

They DO.  And you know why?

NO man, like—you don’t even know this guy I worked for, he fucking—

Jerked you off every day and told you “Good Job” afterwards?  Whatever, I get it, but—

The fuck?

—still the point is, at the end of the day, he probably wasn’t also someone you were super eager to like hang OUT with.

Actually dude, this dude and I, we sometimes like—

Jerked each other off and then fucking high-fived afterwards? I GET IT but then the next day you went back to your jobs and he kinda SUCKED and now, wait hear me out, cause now here’s my point—

Dude for real though, do you like LIKE to imagine me getting jerked off?

Yes.  My point being though.  My point being.  That you then go both, you go both of you, you, FUCK, you go off and you do your damn jobs or whatever and then both of you at least SOME of the TIME … suck!  Right?  LIke you know what I mean?

I suck?

No, or god, I mean YES, but like so, LISTEN, so okay, so most of the time you’re fucking fine, sure, you do your job great and you do a good job, but then SOME OF THE TIME?  Like, SOME of the time? You’re tired or whatever, or you’re angry, or you’re just feeling fucked over, and so you do something on purpose that SUCKS because FUCK it, right?  Because in that moment, it’s like—

Well, yeah, but dude okay, that happens to everybody.

Exactly!  In that moment, you suck.  I suck.  We all suck!

… Well, okay.  But wait.  So—

And so do the mangers!  That’s all I’m saying!  We gotta get out of our heads that we don’t ALL kind of suck some of the time!  I mean, some of the worst managers I’ve ever had were the ones who supposedly NEVER sucked, right?  Because what that meant, all that really meant was, they just didn’t  TALK about it or let anyone TELL them about it, how they sucked, like nobody ever confronted them about the exact way in which they sucked.  Because they would never’ve had to admit to it anyway!  Like they were so fucking peachy that no one EVER confronted them about their mistakes or else when they did it was so weird and like out of place that they like, that like all the manger had to do was be all entitled to be like, just like:  no one else seems to think that way!  It just becomes their whole fucking shtick, is how they DON’T suck, and but yet they still did!  At least a little bit of the time!  Like, if it lets them get off the hook SOME of the time, ALL of the time, you know, you can have a real serious PROBLEM there, you know? You get what I mean?  They can still SUPER suck, as long as they’re consistent?  It’s just fucking, fucking, like they—

Dude you’re rambling.

Like they, dude HEY, did you get that?  Let me just fucking—

Nah, dude, listen—

Let me just, let me just, what was I even saying?

Dude, listen.

FUCK.  What was I about to say?

Listen.  So I got a question for you.

You totally just knocked that thought right out of my fucking head.

Man, let me just ask you this.

WHAT.

Why you gotta be like that?

Just WHAT.

No, like, why you gotta BE like that?  Why you gotta be like, the only guy who, like, tells the one good boss when they’re fucking up?  What’s the good in that?

Dude I don’t!  You’re missing my whole point!

You just SAID how you were, like—!

No, that was just, I mean, it’s not like we should just randomly tell these people they suck for no good fucking REASON, but it’s when these supposedly great bosses, like SUPPOSEDLY great now, can get to where they like, fucking okay, only SOMETIMES make mistakes, right, but then they never perfectly own up to it, and so say it’s in like this really systemic, like FUCKED UP way, because—

Whoa, wait—

So that every time they fuck up it’s in the same small little who gives a fuck way, but it’s this needly little way, and it’s like enough to do a lot of damage if it’s done at the wrong time at the wrong place every single time, RIGHT?

But dude like REALLY? You really think they’re doing this shit where they like by just occasionally fucking up they’re the reason the whole thing is going bad?  Like how does that even make sense?

It ... doesn’t, to be perfectly honest with you—

I KNOW right?  But that’s what I MEAN dude, that’s how—

I wasn’t agreeing with you.

What?

You weren’t making any sense.

What, just now?

You were saying something before, and you were saying like does that make sense, and I was like no it doesn’t, because it didn’t make sense, what you were saying.

But that’s not—what was I even saying?

I can’t SAY.

Fuck.  DUDE.  I hate when you pull this shit man.

Sorry man.  You’re just too fucking high for me.

You are too motherfucker! I was just fucking—

We are just two high ass motherfuckers.

Haha, okay, that’s true.  Okay.

It’s like whatever man.

Whatever.  Right.

But so you get why I say every manager sucks, right?  It’s because we all suck. Right?  We all suck.  That’s all I’m saying.

I do wish we could say “every manager sucks” at work and not, like, get in trouble for it.

RIGHT?  God that’d be so great.  But you could NEVER say that.

You’d be fired so fast.

You’d be 86 the next day.

Yeah man.  Fuck that shit man.

Fuck that shit.

Yeah.  Hey.  So.  Hey, yeah man, I think I’m done for the night.

Yeah?

Yeah, I think I’m, I think I’m feeling it.  Pretty good.

You feeling the call of the beast?

I’m feeling the call of the beast man. I’m feeling the roar.

Yeah, feel the roar.  You go do you man.  You get out of here.

I believe I will, sir, thank you.

Aw don’t mention it, bro!  And bro, listen, for real?  I’m glad when we have these talks, you know?

Me too man—

Like even if it gets, like, you know, to where we’re like both like ACK, you know, still, it’s like—

I know man.  Me too.  It’s been great.

Cool dude.

Oh hey, you working tomorrow?

No, I’m off tomorrow dude.

Oh.  Work Wednesday?

I work Wednesday lunch.

Well, I open dinner man, so I’ll see you there.

For like a second?

Yeah.  But still—

I’ll see you there buddy.

Yeah good night man.  Let’s hang again soon.

Bye.  

…

Oh, hey.  HEY.  YOU FORGOT YOUR BOTTLE.

WHAT?

YOU FORGOT.  YOUR BOTTLE.

OH SHIT.  

...

Sorry man.  Hey thanks.

You got to have your bottle.

This goddamn thing.  I’m totally gonna lose this someday.

You just about did man. That’s a nice bottle.

Yeah, ha.  Thanks again bro.  You have a good night.

GOOD night bro.

[mrburger]

Memory and Inspiration (feat. Future Merrick)

Dear artist, come and sit beside me, that I may speak quietly.

There are two types of remembrance, my child:  those that occur on purpose, which we would tend to characterize as vague, fragmentary, and meditative; and those that occur all of a sudden, spontaneously, by accident, and which we longingly describe as vivid, exquisite, and all-too-brief.

Listen closely, now.  I have made one point for you, that I may now make another far more urgent one--one that having occurred to me out of the blue, quite vividly and exquisitely, I am delighted to impart.

Art made on purpose is vague, fragmentary, and meditative.  It can be good, but like anything done for a deadline or a paycheck or to satisfy a formless craving to make art, it feels artisanal rather than inspired.  Art made all of a sudden, spontaneously, and by “accident,” by comparison, is noticeably more intense.  It captures the one magical thing only art can.  

(All attempts to replicate it fail in some way.   And just as it can’t be replicated, neither can it be resuscitated.  Failure to reach a canvas before a great idea fades can mean irrevocable loss.  Those lucky artists who do manage to capture it tend, years later, not to feel proud so much as embarrassed by their current inferiority to their own past self.  They worry that they’ll never capture the muse again.)

And there, just like that, I’ve made my point.  You can go now, child.  Don’t reflect too much on what I’ve said, or you’ll wear away its luster.  Think on it just long enough to remember it, and then let it go.  With any luck, I will return to you someday, like a bolt from the blue, vivid and exquisite, good as new--or as new as you care to recall me.  With any luck.  Go now.  It’s okay.

[mrburger]

Customer

NOUN

1 - A person who buys goods or services from a shop or business.

2 - (with adjective) A person of a specified kind with whom one has to deal.

The customer comes first.  Great and terrible companies alike respect this axiom.  The restaurant where Duane now manages Merrick is one such company.  The customer always comes first.

Once upon a time, Duane and Merrick used to get high together after work and play video games on the couch in Merrick’s apartment.  Merrick knows Duane’s glass pipe’s name.  Duane knows Merrick’s, too.

It hadn’t been all that glorious or anything, their friendship, as it had occurred inevitably and unintentionally, the juxtaposition of two ego-damaged stoners each seeking respite in the other’s non-judgment, but now in hindsight it glowed.

Merrick and Duane don’t play video games together anymore.  They don’t even go out for drinks.  Merrick is Duane’s employee.  The last time they drank together was at the company barbecue, and then only technically.  Both remember the other being there only vaguely.

Merrick doesn’t tell his coworkers Duane smokes pot.  He likes Duane too much.  The rumors might hurt him.  But he doesn’t like Duane enough to be happy working for him.  To be underneath Duane at this awful restaurant.  Every day he feels repulsed by work, by Duane, by his having to drive in the direction he has to drive to go to work.

Duane hates the restaurant, too, but for different reasons.

Merrick doesn’t care about Duane’s reasons.  Duane’s reasons are small and impersonal compared to Merrick’s, and probably just the blindered results of too much work and too little video games.  Duane works harder than Merrick has ever known Duane to be comfortable working.  It is likely getting to him.

Merrick feels mistreated and unheard at the restaurant.  He is aware that others also feel similarly.  It isn’t just Duane’s being there that repulses him (and indeed the others don’t seem to mind Duane at all; he is roundly well-liked, at least as far as managers go).  No, the repulsion comes from something more specifically awful, but less specific in general.  Merrick and the others just feel completely miserable on an increasingly regular basis while going to work.  Some even feel miserable while they’re there, and in fact it’s like they take turns.

Tonight was Merrick’s turn.  After finishing his side work and clocking out, he leaves quickly and hideously.  As he crosses a windy street to his car, his hair gets blown all out of whack, and totally uncharacteristically of Merrick, he does not try to fix it.  The product in his hair holds the tousle, keeps its furiously windswept even after the wind dies down, and although it bounces and shifts a little with each step as he clomps down the sidewalk, changes somewhat, Merrick lets it.  

He ducks into a nice long alley between the bank and the post office.  Here it is quiet and lonely.  Partway through the alley, his rage falters, shudders, and then shrivels suddenly and dramatically.  It becomes grief.  Merrick is momentarily awash in self-pity.  You may avert your gaze.

Meanwhile consider this.  Servers are customers, too.  Servers are customers of the restaurants that employ them.  Quick, easy money is the good for sale, and all one has to do in exchange for this excellent product is learn a menu, memorize some table numbers, and figure out who not to piss off (and then not piss them off).  Whether restaurants like it or not, they must compete with each other for servers just as they would for diners.  If the service community finds out a certain restaurant is a terrible place to work, and be assured this is the first thing any of them talks about when they meet in the wild, then that restaurant suffers just as badly as if its food and hospitality were lacking.  Subsequently, turnover among the service staff takes its own toll, and hospitality does indeed decline.  The loss of a crucial customer base leads to the loss of another. 

Like it or not, the happiness of those yawning, leaning, grumbling mercenaries pretending nice out on your dining room floor for cash are also dire to your company’s survival.  The emotional oaf trudging back to his car is not just some malignant idiot, though he can be that at times.  Worse, he is reasonable, and so all the more dangerous.

Those tears look stupid because Merrick himself knows they look stupid.  He knows it’s stupid for a server to break down on his way back to his car.  There is no earthly reason, given the events of the night, that this particular shift should have been the one to make him quake.  But shit, there it is.  He blows his nose a nostril at a time, farmer style, loud, right out onto on the unlit pavement on either side of him as he walks.  The wind blows, too.  His next uptake of sniffed-in breath is clear and sweet and dark.  He reaches his car in something like a state of beleaguered acceptance.  It’s fake, and mildly hopeless, but peaceful.  He fixes his hair in the mirror.  Then he starts 'er up and drives off and on the road home it’s just him and the music and the sweet, sad knowledge of the names of both his own glass pipe and Duane’s, and everything just sort of fizzles and sloshes until he can get home and plant blind kisses on Biga’s sleeping grunting cheek and he can smoke a fresh bowl and he can play some nice video games all by himself into the wee-most.

[mrburger]

Why I’m How I am When I Am

I have a problem.  When something urgently needs to be communicated, I change.  I don't always realize that I've changed.  Even later do I realize why.  But I come around.  And then it's always for the same reason--that something needed saying--even if to whom or how or why is ever-changing.

I confess, there are  issues of my own making that then factor into and compound the problem once things have already slipped for me.  Mental energy normally required to engage with day to day tedium I instead expend on utterly distracted, day-consuming, circuit-frying ruminations.  When my poor brain *must* take breaks, the evenings are dull.  

Long story short, I go lazy and fall off the grid.  Around what few random folk with whom I keep in touch I act like everything is fine.  Because when I have friends or family around I feel better, and so I act better.  At work, too, I skew positive.  But this then enables further unseen, unmet misbehavior, and by the time anyone notices something’s wrong it’s because the symptoms of neglect have already gotten out of hand.

And I have company over because I know it helps.  I see a therapist because I know it helps.  I engage at work because I know it helps.  Still, there is no helping me until I realize, myself, that there's something I need to say.  To somebody.  Somehow.

And then that's that!  Problem solved.  Everything after that is the fun part.  No, I'm not joking, I'm really not.  I mean I guess I sort of am, but also, fuck.  What comes next is music or art or fiction!  The fitful duelists in my head ally, alloy, and finally allow me to proceed as a unified whole.  It always feels like coming home.  It’s like remembering who I am.  It feels awesome.  It's a little embarrassing to watch, maybe, but it's good for me.

To be quite clear, though, the truth as to "who I am" changes.  Depending on any number of things, I am alternately proud and humble.  Alternately obsessive and pragmatic.  Alternately cheerless and cheerful.  Granted, most of me stays consistent, pervasive, and even reliable, but a few facets of me predictably and inevitably fluctuate.  I can know that they will change but not stop them from changing.  It is maddening, and may well be a symptom of madness.

A late diagnosis of ADHD is just another part of the puzzle, as is a family history of neurosis and addiction, as is daily use of at least three psychoactive substances (methylphenidate, caffeine, and another one).  My fiancee plays two roles, one unconscious and one conscious.  Work, too, likes to stay involved.  Family stuff flares up every now and again, but then usually quite intensely.  And have I mentioned how lonely I am?  How lonely are we both, my fiancee and I?  Very, it turns out.  At least insofar as lonely people can measure their own loneliness.

When I get these moments of jubilant self-understanding, when there's something that needs saying and I simply say it, it's like finding and placing a puzzle piece.  It might not actually *be* that, but it's *like* that.  I'm at least my very me-est in the effort.

[mrburger]

Organizational Behaviorism, Pt II

Once upon a restaurant, a server slept with the general manager.  We didn’t find out right away.  Today, it’s weird to remember.

The plot unfolded in what I guess is probably classic fashion.  First, the GM told a few people he was leaving the company. That same day, the server in question told a few people that she was being promoted to management at the GM’s insistence.

Next, the GM told still more people that he was only leaving temporarily, and that the rumor he was leaving for good was false.  The server in question answered this with a rumor that she had turned down the promotion, citing that she had found a terrific new opportunity elsewhere. A few weeks later, rumor got out that the server had been lying about being offered a promotion.  Apparently, the GM had sat her down and scolded her.  Whether or not this is true remains, of course, unverified. After that, things quieted down.  The server put in her two weeks, and did leave for greener-looking pastures.  We all wished her the best for some reason.  Her last day was a Thursday.

The GM moved away for awhile, I forget why, and then came back just like he said he would.  But he was noticeably different.  He'd somehow lost his grip.  He barely spoke to anybody anymore, except in short, frantically professional little bursts, and always while he needed to be doing something else.  I think he left the company that same year.

Truth be told, that they had slept together was itself a rumor.  But it just had that feel that some rumors have.  The good rumors almost make this little clicking sound when you first hear them.

[mrburger]

Organizational Behaviorism

Recently, someone pulled me aside and said, “I have a juicy one for ya,” and then proceeded to tell me a rumor I later learned was false.  But get this.  I learned that it was false by way of rumor.  

I still don’t know what to believe.  I’m waiting for a third and final rumor.

I once started a rumor I knew was false, on purpose.  I wanted a person I worked with not to work with me anymore, and so I started a rumor that this person was leaving in hopes that it would get around to them and demoralize them and eventually lead to their leaving.  I carefully selected three recipients for my false rumor.  A known gossip.  An eager beaver.  And a prolific liar.  I gave them each my rumor one at a time, quickly and succinctly.  I shared it like I would any rumor I thought was true, and then left it at that.  Each time I did this, I felt the lie slither out of me into the wild unnoticed.  Each time, I made no attempts to follow it.  If this lie of mine died prematurely it would be for its own good.  

And it did die prematurely.  All three times.  I feel strange even mentioning it.