Hello friends, saying hello. I spent a few hours editing a post and a post after that but my intuition tells me that it doesn’t necessarily like short stories for the same reason you may like blog posts: most of content online feels so divorced from one’s actual living reality that it’s boring. Even if these posts I’m editing comes from real life occasions – for example, it’s inspired from when I used to work at a fast food joint, and my manager pulled me aside for a 1-on-1 which is completely unnecessary for fast food seeing as most employees don’t last longer than a year but we sauntered cross the street on my 15 minute break and outside the bagel joint in those metallic jet-black and coarse parasol chairs situated ahead those glass storefront panels you avoid looking through to not make eye contact with the employees preparing to begrudgingly greet you.
Dragging the chairs for the unavoidable concrete screeching he positioned his chair more directly toward me as though this was a serious business meeting – and it was entirely for him I think, as I later discerned with more interactions his big plans – and asked me, something like, “where do you see yourself” or wasn’t it something more like, “what type of person are you?”
I felt like I was getting recruited again even though I’ve been at this job at least for 3 months, and I just wasn’t sure what to say so I stammered out, “Oh I don’t know, I’m just getting by or something” and he kept pressing me. So on a crisp 12:07 afternoon, probably somewhere in March, manager with the rounded buzzcut and chains and some ear rings, all black and skinny jeans, hunched over and elbows planted firmly on each knee, I then felt cornered into a confession and my Christian blood rose to the occasion.
It was a blur, half unmemorable, but I said something like, “I don’t have any aspirations, honestly, and I’m perfectly okay to do the lowest level position possible. That’s all I want. If you had to press any further, you won’t find anything because there’s nothing there. I can’t even tell you myself what I am, I don’t know anymore. It’s like being a ghost and I enjoy being the ghost because it keeps everything orderly and that’s all I want.” My mask was slipping so much, maybe half of this is falsehood, and maybe it made him lean back in confusion because it really was a mask off moment, laying bare my lack of ambitions at least, which obviously you aren’t ever supposed to do in a work setting, but something unlocked and I just let it rip.
Anyway as I later discerned he wanted to climb the franchise ladder and he was unsurprisingly caught with some pay-cutting shenannies but I left like 6 months later and didn’t know until years later. I would go to the place after and all of the employees that I worked with rarely recognized me: true to form, my goal achieved. Maybe one did and that’s how I heard about the manager’s illicit payroll activities. I never interacted much with any of them anyway but I watched them and their personality seemed so bright, all of them, and I was in a sitcom basically. It’s good material for a short story.
But compared to short stories, however derived from reality, so blog posts give you a “realer” hit because it’s actually happening instead of scripted. Not to say there’s anything wrong with a script. I’m not going to pretend I don’t get punched in to these hyper-optimized Netflix series the same as anyone else. If you put me in the front of the screen it’s likely I’d finish it to the end. There’s just no will to tap the needle on the first episode.
Majority of the things I’d talk about prior came from this null space between these divorced reality TV shows and hovering existence between here and grocery stores – and maybe it was slightly entertaining, or on the cusp of something, but in the same way you realize that however much TV you watch you will never find the golden jewel so floating in such planes only guarantees staring at a hundred lives down the aisle and trying to articulate a place without sight and sound. However much one consumes the interesting part I inevitably realized, for me, and maybe obviously to you, but for me is how does this affect our shared reality. Spectating I can do any time, but how can I affect reality is the most amusing thing possible so ironically coming from a ghost. That’s what blog posts ultimately have over short stories: a purer reflected form of affected reality.
So I wandered around slightly stressed about what the hell am I going to do because I’m dealing with that tension between pseudonymity and reality and reality is what’s interesting but how to bridge it because the alternatives to this are too much – and on a few iterations prior, a website long ago, I’d make some books about programming, or walking through programming, like a Rails tutorial, and maybe that’s the solution, maybe.
It wouldn’t be a full blown tutorial, but a talk-along as I try to figure out what I need to do next. For example, I want to learn how to make a mobile app, so I would talk through the tribulations and joys(?) of that.
But when I did these books prior so it did, on reflection, become exhausting, and I’m not sure if it did anything positive, but it at least was the best way to bridge to reality, and that’s what’s interesting. Still, I’m not sure if I can dwell in the null space any longer. I’m not a qualified psychonaut with my half-baked nonsense and if you aren’t careful you can lose grip on reality and sound insane, become convinced you’re onto something biblical and float right toward the melding chrome walls for your new campaign cult to take control.
So I don’t know if I’m going to fidget my way through talking about programming which is very monkey-wrenchy but oh well. I’m not sure what else to do which wouldn’t be a complete waste of time. It’s also a tension between wanting cool things but also that takes a lot of effort for something you aren’t getting any payouts or returns-on-investments even if your idealisms admonish you and assure you that is the entire point of living, to spend a thousand hours on something that you’d throw away and start again because that’s living, but I just don’t know if I have the energy.
The nice thing about orchestra music is that, if you listen to it long enough, when you walk around, you have the ensemble in your head with you, and everything looks so magical while it plays again and again. Music surely is one of the few that always feels close to reality, and really affects it – but of course there’s also the argument of how it sedates just as well. So convinced of another epiphany while marching to the tune but two weeks later one has cookie crumbs all over the baggy shirt and milk dribbling. It’s just Act 2 is what I’d say.
Who knows what happens, but I hope it could be something more than whatever was before.