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Happy Leap Day. You only get one every four years (except for those divisible by 100 but not by 400), so make it count.

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Old magnetic reel-to-reel tapes; imitation and original.

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ROCK AND ROLL OVER.

Years ago I ended up in one of the worst points in life. I was in such a depressing place where to this day I won’t ever mention. It was in a post-economic crash job where I had almost no outs to leave and I was broke so I had no choice but to stay. I dealt with a co-worker named Barney, a human subscription who at 40 stood 6’3 and 350 lbs. and who had a multitude of social, legal, and dependency issues. Money issues, too. Back then many people suffered and became desperate to hang in there. I wasn’t the only one who was bound for money but so was Barney.

Another co-worker Little Mike who was still in university and on his way in becoming an economist, was the lead ringleader amongst the staff who had his influential ways; a major troll who knew his power. He was less than half of Barney’s age and size; shorter than him, too. He was the type to exploit individual’s weaknesses and exploit them for his and his friends’ personal gain. Little Mike knew Barney was desperate for money. Barney non-chalantly asked me before to give him a few dollars which I instantly refused, right after he swindled his manager out of $100 and another co-worker with low self-esteem for $500. So Mike had an proposition for Barney: he’d offer him some money (an undisclosed amount) if he’d volunteer to be recorded rolling on the floor behind the counter. After a few days of negotiations, Barney took up on the offer.

So a couple of days later, I helped out a customer across the counter (I was the only one doing so when the rest wouldn’t) when to my left a group of co-workers were standing there giggling, getting ready for Barney’s roll. To my right…here he comes! As I handed my customer her goods, Barney comes rolling down the filthy unswept floor towards my way. I literally had to jump up in order not to be bowled over to let him through. The co-workers saw all of this and they were all laughing their asses off. Mike’s plan worked! They couldn’t believe that our largest co-worker would humiliate himself not only for a few dollars but also for acceptance. Did Barney wake up? Of course not. He volunteered to take part in a couple more of Mike’s games because the rush of a good laugh and the dare for the money was what he went for.

So can you imagine the type of power crafty devious elves wield to take down ogres and giants? Imagine the influential power this degenerate held over Barney who was desperate to make ends meet to support his vices, and also the power he had over some of his other co-workers and myself who refused to bow to him? (I never yielded to his unwarranted garbage and as a result got some of it from of his privileged co-worker friends because I refused to play along). Imagine how people would stoop so low to devaluate and embarrass themselves for so little?

There’s many times I put up with such harassment and bullshit I never asked for (and there’s even worse stories than this), simply because I had no choice but to be in a place I never wanted to be just to survive. Looking back at it, I count my bells and lucky sevens that I forever removed myself from a depressing low point in my life and the various sludge I refused to associate with. I remind myself every day I’m at a better place where I can look back and scare myself never to return to that nadir again.

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FRACTURE.

I had a bad right shoulder. I had it for most of my life. It occurred as I rode my bike and somewhat somehow lost control, causing myself to hurl over the front of the bike and land shoulder first onto the concrete. Somewhere along the healing process I happened to be unlucky: both the bone and muscle grew into each other which caused atrophy and severely limited the movement of my arm. Tiny shards of bone also were given birth and settled within my shoulder, pinching the nerves and muscle resulting in sharp stings equivalent of electrodes shooting through my right arm. I have had two operations to remove the shards but was told by my orthopedist that the shoulder could not be fully repaired. Looking at pictures of myself, you would not suspect that there’s physically wrong with me and on the surface things actually do look normal, but in reality they are not.

I also had this job that deals directly to the public mostly focusing in basic goods, nothing special. There was no intelligent discourse about statistics, proper methods, Fibonacci spirals, hexa-decimals, or blueprints. None. Instead, the core audience of patrons were simpletons, idiots, and know-nothings. The belligerent, the feisty, and the damp fish-wives who couldn’t be told anything. People who magically believed were royalty and constantly demanded, repeated themselves, or argued to the death over the most inconsequential things. People who were way too nice, non-specific, or simply went blank because they usually had no clue. So this should tell you about the mentality of some of our customers.

Put the two together and the cards thrown at me is putting up with the absolute worst in people I ever have the misfortune of dealing with.

One afternoon I took the next customer. She was a fading middle-aged woman with a tye-dye shirt. After I take her number and started helping her, she brought up the issue of my shoulder.

“Hey…um, what happened to your shoulder?”

“Ma’am, don’t worry about it---“

“Because I notice you are---“

And then she started impersonating me. Her interpretation of me, which I never even opened my mouth to her for, was this over-exaggerating heaving and hobbling over on one side a la the Hunchback of Notre Dame, as her eyes almost rolled to the back of her head and her mouth wide open as if she was gasping for breath. Yes, that was her version of me, because I really needed to know someone else’s vision of what I look like when I am walking around in public.

And I just stood there watching her make a fool of herself, entertaining but ultimately embarrassing herself in the process. My eyes were locked in position. My face was in disdain. I looked to move on but she wanted to complete her curiosity, something I absolutely refused to entertain.

“Ma’am, what else would you like?”

“But what happened to your shoulder?”

“Ma’am, what else would you like?”

“Ummm, I…”

“Ma’am, what else would you like?”

“Ohhh…I didn’t mean to—-“

“Ma’am, what else would you like?”

Yes, it took me four tries to see what else she needed because she was that stupid. Four tries before she realized how much of a nosy, insensitive, ignorant misfire she was. Four tries before her whole world started moving again and left her dumbstruck self behind. She finally given up and told me the rest of her order before she said something about an apology and really feeling sorry, which she should have.

If not for my managers being present at that moment, I would have lashed out at her. But I held onto everything I could and stopped short of humiliating her in return to not strike out and get fired on the job.

I gave her the final part of her order. As she spent her one last attempt at saving herself, I quickly walked away, abandoning her and throwing her out for good.

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Poor examples like that are exactly why I never bring my shoulder issue up. I don’t need to drop everything I am doing to waste my time, energy, and wind on explaining something most people will forget about in five minutes…something which is none of their business in the first place.

Most of these people don’t get it. They are trained and taught to see and learn certain things around them by the books, TV, or movies on a regular basis. When they do notice or see something that’s not normal to them, they turn into invasive idiots. Idiots, who instead of keeping to themselves and figure it out on their own, need the easy answers fed to them right there and now. They only seem or pretend to care, and if they really did, they could offer some real help in the form of a calling card to an orthopaedist instead of spending that time looking like a deer in truck headlights.

That person that I dealt with chose to be uneducated, misunderstanding, and foolish. She settled to make a quick laugh out of my expense by showing me how I acted in public, and in return I showed her exactly just how unfunny and pathetic she really was.

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But that’s not all.

Another moron customer asked me what was wrong with my shoulder. I respectfully told her that I was not allowed to talk about my personal issues. As I walked away, I overheard her get the attention of another co-worker who was doing something more important and asked her about me and my shoulder. I almost lost it. Here was someone, whose blank mind couldn’t take “no” for an answer and decided to run through the backdoor for the win after being told to get lost. The ninth-rate know-nothing who had a lack of personal respect and the inability to mind her business couldn’t move on without the answer to those urgent burning questions.

Yet time had passed and the intrusiveness and nosiness had gotten even worse. Mostly it comes from the town where I work, and it seems like my situation has now become a fascination to the point where it’s now becoming increasing creepy and disgusting.

I recently had a situation where I came out of my car and walked across the parking lot to get to work. I was approached by a man who stood in the middle of said parking lot. He asked me for directions and at first I thought he was a mild-mannered person. When I was in the middle of answering him he interrupted me and asked about my injury. I just shook my head, walked away, and said nevermind. As I walked away from him, he followed me and still questioned me about it. Directions were no longer on his mind as he now asked me what was wrong and was still flustered to. He was constantly apologizing to me to the point where he was stammering but I wanted absolutely none of it as I walked right into work. The human question-mark finally stopped short at the entrance as he was left behind and already forgotten about, never to be paid attention to again; Another situation declared a dead issue as far as I was concerned. But nothing could compare to what else I had experienced:

One afternoon I decided to get some peanut-butter cups around the corner down the block to the highway gas station. When I walked down the service road I see that someone was slowing down while driving past me in a beat-up pickup but I thought nothing of it. About fifty feet from my destination I look up to find that same driver, who happened to be very interested in my injury and my personal life, literally waiting for me at the door in front of the gas station. The closer I approached the entrance was when I noticed him ogling at me with his mouth half-open in such fascination. He started asking about my injury for a good fifteen seconds before he put me through repeated assurance to help equate his childlike curiosity before I was allowed into the store.

Maybe the world would be a better place if people would mind their own fucking business and let others be.

(An expired story.)

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Artwork / template for Omega Radio Winter 2016 mix CD.

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Artwork for personal mix CD; Autumn 2003.

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Ω WUSB Summer 2020 Noise.

A  collective of songs played on Omega, 90.1 FM WUSB Stony Brook, N.Y. featuring Double Leopards, JS Aurelius, Lana Del Rabies, Milat, Valentina Artaud / Monochromatica, and more.

August 31, 2020 (#239).

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Artwork for Omega Radio Summer 2018 mix cassette.