Well, I am back and it didn't take the better part of a year this time. With less than three months to go, I am officially putting my next trip to Vancouver on the clock. This year I am going over Christmas, in part because there is no use in celebrating Christmas in the states anymore. With my mom passing, the one person who I might have wanted to do sonething with at Christmas is gone. While i am sure I couuld meet up with some family members, who would have me at their familie's festivities, I would feel more like a third wheel than anything else. Since I am not willing to feel like an intruder, I figured I would go do something for the holidays. Besides, it will be my third season in Canada, having been in Vancouver for spring on my first trip and summer on my second. I am jokingly referring to it as Canistmas (Canadian Christmas), but knowing how beautiful that city is, I am curious how decked out it is for the holidays. After that, I am content to die.
I know, how horribly to end the last paragraph, right? In the grand scheme of things though, I've reached a point where some of my contemporaries have already died, friends and acquaintances alike. For me, I work two shit jobs that i pretty much despise, it sucks getting up in the morning, knowing at least part of your day is going to be miserable. And given I am closer to my expiration date than my birth date, mentally I am like the Pittsburgh Pirates most Septembers, just playing out the string. I have become quite content with my eventual passing, i just ask that when I do die, it is not made into some theatrical event, just dimp my body off a bridge into the river and everyone should get on with their business. This is not a cry for help, it just is what it is. I will not choose my brother's path and commit suicide, but I am getting to be too old to reinvent myself. The day to day nonsense of doing what I need to do to get to the next day is just tiresome and hardly rewarding in and of itself. Even the little nuggets i leave myself as things to look forward to, they just don't seem to be enough anymore.
I find most of my interactions with people these days to just be draining, as if I would be better off not having them to begin with. Who would have thunk I would do a blog entry this damn depressing, perhaps it is because I am typing from one of those jobs I loathe so much. But my overnights at work consist of chasing panhandlers off of our lot and selling blunts to potheads. Many of my liberal friends would question me on both, panhandlers are just down on their luck, which I admit may very well be true, but we are a gas station, not a fucking social program and I am not cool with people harassing my potential customers. Likewise I am sure there are plenty of people who will defend marijuana use, hey it's not addictive and yada, yada, yada. That doesn't pass the eyeball test I see every night. I don't ned a clinical study to formulate my opinion. When I shut down the store for about 15 minutes every night to run the daily reports and I have people beating on the door so they can buy their next blunt, I don't have the problem, they do.
Not that my other job is any better, where you basically have to fail the piss test to be employed. Not sure why they took me on, as I don't fit that description at all. The biggest problem I have there is when someone cries that they need more hours, usually it is mine that get cut. Seniority means nothing, even if I am not the most senior person there, after 10 months I have at least moved to the middle of the pack on that ladder, if it meant anything. Apparently it does not. And the ones that are there, it feels almost high school like clique-ish. I am too old to be trying to fit in with a bunch of youngsters whose life goal is getting from one high to the next.
Well, that was even more depressing, but i should get back to work now, selling blunts to the public. Oh joy!
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
There goes that year
It's been a while since i have been around these parts. Probably around a year or so, save for a slew of hockey videos that i posted which no one cares about. For the record, i never posted all of the last Penguins season, so I take full responsibilityfor last season's failure, if you call a playoff appearance and loss to the subsequent Stanley Cup champions as a failure. I imagine it is a Pittsburgh thing to call a playoff appearance a failure, especially when there are places likeNuffalo, Calgary, Florida, etc. who would be happy to make the playoffs regularly.
That being said, the Penguins success or lack thereof is not a reason for me to enter a period of lacking a desire to blog, rather it is a culmination of events that happened this time last year that has me in this relative funk. First and foremost would be my mother passing away, which has reached the one year anniversary now. Notsure such pccasions deserve an anniversary, but my mom was definitely one of the inspirations behind this page, evn though she never read it, or evn knew of it's existence. Many of the entries would be family stories or ideas that I ran by her in order to fleshout how I wanted to write about them. It would be so easy to pick up the phone and just talk to heronce something silly happened. I still find myself reaching for the phone on those occasions, only to put it back down.
Not that my mom was just my sounding board, far from it actually. While my father and I have always maintained a strained relationship, it was my mom who would step into the void, trying to fulfill both roles, trying to keep a roof over our heads. So there were many times when she would be working two jobs and I think that is where I got my own work ethic from. There were plenty of times where we would have to choose between groceries or bills, but somehow she always made it work. I rarely wanted for anything and usually went to bd with my belly full and rather quite content.
The second thing that happened was the owners at my last job opted to sell the business. I view it partially as a personal failure, if i would have been able to make the business work theway it had in the past, maybe they would have been content to keep it and continue to run it. I don't blame myself fully, because being a manager I did see some writing on the wall as it were. Cuts were made to staff and management until I was basically the only one doing most everything, Somehow we managed to run that dynamic for better than a year before not even that could maintain the status quo. While i was assured tye new owners agreed to keepme on after the sale, i knew that ouldnotbe the case. Any new owner would be skeptical with soneone theydon't know handling any portion of their finances. And what ithpught came to pass. Mind you itdidn't take long for me to find another job after I was let go, within two weeks of my termination I had two new jobs (which I still have btw) and while I don't care for either job all that much, I attribute it to that mom-like work ethic that icontinue to grind away.
The third thing was theending of a brief relationship I was involved in. It was with a former coworker from the above mentioned job, and while it only lasted for like three months, i had bought into her fora far greater time than that. Even when she left where we worked, I had went out of my way to get her Christmas Presents and a Halloween basket with candy for her son, it is something my mom had done in the past for other people (there she is rubbing off on me again), and I just wanted to make sure she and her son had something at the holidays. When this finally went from me pining after her to any sort of reciprication on her part would be last summer. And it started off well enough, until i realized that my presence was more as an enabler for her drug habit, than any sort of partnership. I held on as long as i could hoping things might change, though the user has to want that change for it to happenand she was content where she was in life, my tipping point, even after a long amount of fighting over the issue, came when my mom had her stroke, which led to her subsequent death, and i asked her to be there for emotional support. The fact I asked for any support at all, should tell those who know me just what my frame of mind was at that point. Instead I was rejected, she wanted to go party withher friends, which told me all I needed to know about how important I was.
So, my mom dying, being told the business was being soldand the end of my relationship all happened within about a 48 hr time frame and i have spent the last 365 days or so licking my emotional wounds more than blogging. I would like to get back to this at some point, to not let that period of time define my life (see Captain Sisko merting the prophets for the appropriate sci-fi reference), but i needed toget all this off mychest first, if i hadn't done so already.
That being said, the Penguins success or lack thereof is not a reason for me to enter a period of lacking a desire to blog, rather it is a culmination of events that happened this time last year that has me in this relative funk. First and foremost would be my mother passing away, which has reached the one year anniversary now. Notsure such pccasions deserve an anniversary, but my mom was definitely one of the inspirations behind this page, evn though she never read it, or evn knew of it's existence. Many of the entries would be family stories or ideas that I ran by her in order to fleshout how I wanted to write about them. It would be so easy to pick up the phone and just talk to heronce something silly happened. I still find myself reaching for the phone on those occasions, only to put it back down.
Not that my mom was just my sounding board, far from it actually. While my father and I have always maintained a strained relationship, it was my mom who would step into the void, trying to fulfill both roles, trying to keep a roof over our heads. So there were many times when she would be working two jobs and I think that is where I got my own work ethic from. There were plenty of times where we would have to choose between groceries or bills, but somehow she always made it work. I rarely wanted for anything and usually went to bd with my belly full and rather quite content.
The second thing that happened was the owners at my last job opted to sell the business. I view it partially as a personal failure, if i would have been able to make the business work theway it had in the past, maybe they would have been content to keep it and continue to run it. I don't blame myself fully, because being a manager I did see some writing on the wall as it were. Cuts were made to staff and management until I was basically the only one doing most everything, Somehow we managed to run that dynamic for better than a year before not even that could maintain the status quo. While i was assured tye new owners agreed to keepme on after the sale, i knew that ouldnotbe the case. Any new owner would be skeptical with soneone theydon't know handling any portion of their finances. And what ithpught came to pass. Mind you itdidn't take long for me to find another job after I was let go, within two weeks of my termination I had two new jobs (which I still have btw) and while I don't care for either job all that much, I attribute it to that mom-like work ethic that icontinue to grind away.
The third thing was theending of a brief relationship I was involved in. It was with a former coworker from the above mentioned job, and while it only lasted for like three months, i had bought into her fora far greater time than that. Even when she left where we worked, I had went out of my way to get her Christmas Presents and a Halloween basket with candy for her son, it is something my mom had done in the past for other people (there she is rubbing off on me again), and I just wanted to make sure she and her son had something at the holidays. When this finally went from me pining after her to any sort of reciprication on her part would be last summer. And it started off well enough, until i realized that my presence was more as an enabler for her drug habit, than any sort of partnership. I held on as long as i could hoping things might change, though the user has to want that change for it to happenand she was content where she was in life, my tipping point, even after a long amount of fighting over the issue, came when my mom had her stroke, which led to her subsequent death, and i asked her to be there for emotional support. The fact I asked for any support at all, should tell those who know me just what my frame of mind was at that point. Instead I was rejected, she wanted to go party withher friends, which told me all I needed to know about how important I was.
So, my mom dying, being told the business was being soldand the end of my relationship all happened within about a 48 hr time frame and i have spent the last 365 days or so licking my emotional wounds more than blogging. I would like to get back to this at some point, to not let that period of time define my life (see Captain Sisko merting the prophets for the appropriate sci-fi reference), but i needed toget all this off mychest first, if i hadn't done so already.
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