"I'm so great and the rest of you's all suck"

Tomorrow I have to meet with another agency about the following job. This St. Petersburg Funeral Home is seeking an Accounting Clerk to work in their corporate office. Must have good experience doing A/P, A/R and must know Excel. They will train on their industry specific software.

I'll probably get this job because it has to do with dead people and that's morbid. Can you imagine paying the bills for embalming fluid and then charging widow's twice the price? Ohhh boy my dream job. Not. So I'm sure I'll get it. But I am totally over my current job. It is a job of "no fun" all day long every day. My boss is this short spastic puke of a guy that likes to spout off about his made up historical career in collections. He was the blah blah at blippity blop corp. for 12 years and then he was the prestigious bloppity flop at Bankity Blank and on and on he goes. All about his fictional resume. C'mon anyone with experience of the kind he professes would not have worn out elbows in every one of his shirt sleeves nor would he feel the need to sprout a new flower (weeds in his case) garden to prove his self gardening worth. Did that make sense? Who cares? He's simply enough to make me gag on my morning coffee every morning. I sit in the circle we are forced to make with our chairs every morning listening to his 1/2 hr meetings about production all the while calculating that if you take one half hour times 365 days minus weekends when scheduled off it equals BAD PRODUCTION due to MISMANAGEMENT OF POSSIBLE PRODUCTIVE HOURS SPENT LISTENING TO ARROGANT SELF OBSESSED OFFICE MANAGER talk about himself!!!

Two weeks ago I decided to use these 1/2 hr meetings to write in my notebook. Write stories. Outlines. Poetry. Anything to occupy my mind with valuable worthwhile tasks of the writing mind. (I am currently searching for a "writers prompt" book so I have ideas daily) Last week I sat down to a meeting and wrote a story called "Lost Connection". I wrote this entire story while sitting in the typical round collectors circle of nightmare number story telling. I never heard a word of it. I just might finish my novel at this rate. Today while having a one on one meeting with me about our client Alltell Communications and the progress, my boss praised me in the following way..."I have noticed you are taking furious notes in my meetings and I'm glad you are taking initiative to become a true bill collector and not just another chair warmer out there." To which I replied, "I realized I needed to better maximize my time and I'm glad you noticed my ingenious plan to better myself at your intellectual expense." He stopped for one moment and replied "at my intellectual expense? Are you putting my intelligence down?" To which I replied, "Absolutely not Mr. BIGBOSSMANIHATE, I am merely stating that I realize you are the best at what you do and I am taking notes and using you to my advantage, I am only taking from your years of experience to help our office succeed and grow in leaps and bounds." He's not too articulate and so he replied "hmm k...so like I was saying... when I worked for Chase Manhatten...in Long Island New York I was successful for many years...." And so somethings you can't change, you just adapt and utilize. Simple. :-)

my humble story written during the "I'm so great and the rest of you's all suck" morning meeting....



Lost Connection

Listening to him complain, the wind in my hair. I rolled down the window and hung the cellphone outside. When I returned the cellphone to my ear he returned blathering on just like before the tunnel of wind I blasted his words with. The wind unnoticed, or was it just ignored.

"...bullocks crazy child, I tell ya that women says she wants to get freaky with me but then again when I buy the tickets and put on my best swinger outfit she all of the sudden has so many family problems you'd think she was the tree trunk holding up the likes of the fucking Clintons."

I nod knowing full well he can't hear my movement. I lick my lips and turn the channel on the radio and wonder why this conversation has garnered my attention. Why it always does. I slip into the feeling that I am merely a earpiece and his is the lungful of noise.

I close the phone to him mid-complaint. When it rings again I answer and say "I'm sorry my son just called and somehow the call caused a break in our connection..say can I call you back later?" It was a needed break. Blame it on the cellular company, that always works. I had these moments when I wanted to grab onto someone and that was just when I always found myself letting go like a child holding a scab almost peeled from the skin. The pain of healing is worse than the original cut.

I looked up just in time to see the truck in front of me slam on the brakes and I'm flung forward propelled by the force of my foot on the brake pedal. I look over in time to see my cellphone slide across the dashboard and go flying out the window. And now I am sorry I broke the nonsense listening so fast. Immediately I tally the cost of replacement and the possibilities of it lands somewhere mid January between post Christmas cost and pre-Valentines day needed weed.

I pull over my beat up Honda and retrieve the cracked phone from the midsection of the fattest street in town. I wipe it off on the ass of my jeans and notice it just has one deep scar in the screen. And it's ringing again, he must have forgotten to finish his sentence. I run haphazard across the roadway back to my car and shove the phone into my backpack along with the remnants of last nights trip to the bookstore.

Later I will remember this a thousand times. When the news comes that he's gone. I always knew he had a drinking problem. I once saw the same face attached to my father's broad shoulders. The face of desperation, red nosed and drawn too white. I knew it but just like when I was younger, I didn't know how to paint it colorful so I just dropped the thoughts of my being the solution long ago. I knew this new man who I wanted but didn't know how to hold was the same propotions of the previous father I let go of too soon. I knew it was the reason but I never spoke it aloud, just merely shoved into the back of my minds drawer like a treasure to be kept but never worn in public. I wanted him, but I could never drink him in fast enough to satisfy my thirst.

I never traveled with him, although he asked me to accompany him on many a trip to the swingers clubs. He wanted to get in on the come with a girl for $10 deal instead of buying into the "lonely stud at the door" because that would cost him far more. I went in my mind a thousand times, to seedy places and disjointed motels wondering what his life was like, but preferring to hear about it only in voice tone. He fascinated me, his confidence seemingly born from nowhere. He carried his flogger as a keychain, we never spoke of it, but I imagined it hitting my rawest places all the time.

I was too young, too weak, too mild to his heat. I didn't have the nerve to put my face too close to that flame. I always wanted but always denied myself those experiences. I stood on the sidelines keeping score, taking in the action from afar. I thought I had time. I thought I had another weekend to jump a bus over to his end of the moral world. I missed my ride even though I kept fingering my bus ticket.

Weeks went by, I called room 104 plenty of times. I was always met by silence just when I had decided I could handle all of his noise. I finally drove there sure that he had just missed my call. There was the same rust encrusted bananna seated bicycle near the front door. The one I often pictured in some little girl sexual fantasy he might have carried on. I never asked. The room was now rented out to someone else. This man was from Scotland and he knew nothing. He had small eyes and was reading from a big bible. The contrast of what I had gone for and what I had found left me vacant, my soul void.

One day a call came on my cracked phone. It was from someone I never met who I never answered. There was no forwarding number, just a voice message that he was gone. His drinking had caused his body to eat upon itself until his heart gave out. He died face down naked, tied to the wooden railing of a tiny loft in a timeshare near the beach. He had a black book with the scribbled words, "girls I have never bedded" with a smiley face on the top. She called me. I still don't know who she was, but before I could feel the loss, I laughed out loud.

It was then that I began to spend my nights sitting in a bar on that bad side of town. The one I never went to with him. I waited and he never came. But there in his place was another lonely face with wide eyes and boozed lips. I took his hand and I slid off the barstool I followed him out, my eyes indented into the shoulder blades of his back, I didn't want to lose sight but I never found it again. I closed my eyes and tasted the beer on his mouth. When his drunken hands found my crying skin I closed my eyes and I called that number on my cracked phone. It rang and rang but as I lay there head turned in silence, foreign hips whispering, I knew I would never find someone like him again.

-PoeticaL