Five
This morning while I was sitting at the bus stop between two rough looking guys, I noticed that the mustard message I mentioned earlier was starting to flake and peel. The guy on my right was an old Yellow man. He wore leather loafers that were almost completely worn out and brown fast food looking dirty polyester slacks. Both his eyes were badly swollen. Hopefully, he was on his way to the doctor. The guy on my left was White, bearded, and his mouth was sunk in like he was missing a lot of teeth. His hair was long and greasy. He was wearing sneakers that originally were white but were now soiled. He wore no socks and dirty blue jeans. He carried a wooden cane that was splintered at the handle, so he had a rubber band to keep it together. When the bus came, I saw him get up and move okay. He really didn’t need the cane to walk. I guess he had it for protection. I’m going to stary carrying a chainsaw and say I’m a lumberjack. The thing these guys and I had in common were the jackets we were wearing. We all had on brown jackets. The kind you wear casually with big pockets that button on the front. The main differences in the jackets were each one’s degree of dirtiness, but for the most part, the style was the same. I wish I had a picture of the three of us sitting side by side at the bus stop.
I’m in the lunchroom now at my job. It’s after work and I don’t want to go right home because my roommate is there. She took the day off and I really don’t want to talk to anyone. She’s nice enough, it’s just that I like to be by myself after work. I don’t think having a roommate is natural. If you look in The Bible, I bet there isn’t anyone who were roommates. Sharing a place with a family member is one thing, but there is just something odd about living with someone you aren’t related to because there will always be some kind of dynamic that will develop. With my roommate and me it’s a brother and sister thing. I decide to go to this theatre by my work that shows month old movies. I have about an hour to kill, and I want to wait for the getting off the job people traffic to thin out before heading home. I give the pretty Yellow girl working the box office six times what the movie I’m going to see is worth and step inside. The interior is dreary. The carpeting is ugly. Its orange patterned and it covers the entire upstairs and downstairs. The Black man who takes my ticket tells me the bathrooms are downstairs and my movie is upstairs. I go up, pass the video games and unattended snack bar, noting that there are candies on display. I don’t think the snack bar is supposed to be self serve. I leave it alone and go inside the theatre. There are credits rolling and I’m thinking maybe I misunderstood the Black man who took my ticket because there are about ten minutes to go before my movie starts. I go back downstairs, but the ticket man is gone. I ask the older Yellow man working as a security guard where my movie is and he assures me that it’s upstairs. I thank him and walk up the escalator that isn’t working, deciding that it might be bad luck to walk on too much orange, past the non-self-serving unattended snack bar, and into the theatre that will be showing my movie. Inside there are other people, only I think they have more time to kill. They look like they have paid the before five o’clock amount to get in. In fact, I would guess that a few of them have been here since the first show and will be staying until the last. I sit down in the middle chair of the last row in front of the wall where the projector is. There is a metal railing in front of me and I am just barely able to see over it. I move to the left rear section and sit in the middle seat of the last row. These seats are easily the most uncomfortable movie theatre seats I have ever sat in. They have some kind of orange padding; but they are so smashed down from accommodating peoples’ behinds that they might as well be cinder blocks. They have wooden arm rests. The one on my right side is loose. The backs are also wooden and the back to my left has some gang words written in permanent magic marker. If any of you have tried to read gang writing you’ve probably come to realize that you can’t unless I guess you are actually in a gang. Gang writing looks like an ancient alphabet to me, or some kind of hieroglyphics. I wonder if each gang has their own written language. I’ll grab a tagger the next time I see one autographing the bus roof and ask him. There are three other people in my section besides myself and they are all Black. There is a man and woman who appear to be on a date and a young man wearing a puffy down filled jacket. He is wearing a baseball cap with the brim extending over his left ear. The movie is about vampires, and it is pretty stupid. Of course, the vampires are way cooler than the heroes that are trying to kill them. It wouldn’t be too bad being a vampire. I mean, at least you’d get to live forever. The only thing is it might be kind of hard to get used to drinking blood.
Eternity Dawnless Hell Earths Core 666 This is written in magic maker on the piece of plywood that is serving as one of the windows to the lobby level entrance of the building where I work. If I didn’t know better, I would consider it a bad sign, but I actually like my job. I’ve worked at a lot of different places since I got here. My first job was an inside sales job. I can’t remember if I actually thought that job was some kind of new start. I probably did. Every new thing I find myself falling into I think is the beginning of something great. But it usually only turns out to be a stopover. A weird rest area while things keep shifting and I end up someplace that really does have potential. The main thing I noticed on the way to my first job here was the lack of trees. There are some trees, but it is obvious that the city was here first, and they just added them later by jackhammering holes in the sidewalk and putting them in. My job was to data entry product orders into the computer system and listen to the salesmen on the phone so I could learn how to sell. The salesmen where all White, in fact everybody at this place was White. The salesmen were musicians. This was their day job. One guy played keyboards in a swing-type band. His band would sometimes give performances in convalescence homes. He said the audience didn’t applaud they just shook their IV stands. Another guy was a drummer who recorded and arranged songs at home using the computer music software we sold. He was nice enough. He was a tall skinny guy with glasses and curly hair. The last sales guy was a Loner. He had long blonde hair and a beard. He seemed older than he was. He also seemed very afraid. I see him at concerts all the time. I remember his name, but I never say hello because I know he wouldn’t remember me. The office manager was this psychotic witch with stringy black hair who played bass in some small-time outfit I never heard of. She would verbally abuse me. At first it seemed unreal. No one had ever spoken to me the way she did. She was apparently unhappy with my job progress even though me and my two bosses seemed to think I was doing fine. I quit very suddenly without giving notice.
I have too many numbers assigned to me and sometimes it’s confusing having them all. It takes thirteen numbers to access my voicemail at work, nine for my social security number, six for my date of birth, and four for my personal identification number that allows me to get cash from an ATM. Even though my PIN is the least number of digits, it’s the one I have the hardest time remembering because I just kept the one they assigned me. I was at the grocery store using my debit card to try to pay and I could not remember my PIN. I didn’t have enough cash on hand or my credit card. The woman working the register was very nice. I think she could see that I was genuinely confused and allowed me to try again three times before I finally got it right. The other people in line were also nice. They didn’t seem frustrated or impatient. It was so strange. Not at all like you’d expect.
Sometimes I feel like I’m actually glowing. Seriously. It’s like I’m one of those neon light sticks that they sell at nightclubs and concerts that you crack, shake, and then they glow. I have this uncomfortable awareness of myself that is almost maddening. And other people appear very intense to me. Almost exaggerated. I hope this goes away. I don’t ever remember feeling this way. Not even when I was single before.