suburban-shaman-blog1

[suburban-shaman-blog1]

The Most Physically Disgusting Thing I’ve Ever Experienced

When I was a very stupid teenager, I was working under the table for a local restaurant. One day, the owner asked me if I'd like to make some extra cash. They were the former owners of a catering business, and they used to use this rental unit kitchen on the other side of town, but they hadn't used it in three years, and the lease was up. So for $5 an hour, they wanted me and this other guy to go over there and clean it up, so the new tenants could get moved in.

The place had no electricity and hadn't for a couple years, so when we opened the door, only darkness greeted us. Darkness, and a blast of the most revolting, putrid air I have ever experienced.

I have cleaned animal corpses out of my wood shed. I have wrestled with a badly skunked German Shepherd. I have been to Newark, New Jersey. But NOTHING compares to the fucking stench of that old, black kitchen.

It was as if, three years ago, the place had been in full swing, preparing for a banquet, when suddenly everyone dropped what they were doing and ran away, never to return. Pots full of rot stood on cold, cobwebbed stoves. Chafing dishes sat lined up in the insulated hot box that was the fridge, brimming with curdled remnants of leftovers.

Knives and ladles still lay across the work surfaces, with the stains and goop of rotten food still on them. The trash cans were full of trash, which had decomposed, along with the bags, into evil black soup.

I still do not understand how it was left in that condition. It didn't make any sense. But that other dope and I spent hours gagging on the miasma of preposterous neglect, shoveling rotten biomass out of a dark, dank building by flashlight.

I felt filthy on the inside for days after that. I felt like something, or many horrible things, must have invaded my mouth and lungs and poisoned me. It was disgusting beyond my ability to explain, and I'm trying.

I recently tried to play the new Resident Evil, and I can't. Its not the screaming rednecks- its the dark, festering house, and the pots full of death, and the fridge full of rot and filth. It takes me right back to that kitchen and I want to vomit. I feel like I need a shower just from remembering this.

[suburban-shaman-blog1]

Mindfulness

I’ve just been listening to music with my headphones on, without noticing that the music was coming from my desktop speakers. These were supposed to be noise cancelling headphones.

[suburban-shaman-blog1]

Holding It In

I've noticed myself biting my tongue when people say idiotic things to me, because they've become so damn unbearable to try to argue with. Eighteen-year-old me would be ashamed of who I have become, but he had a lot more energy and free time than me, and he could afford to lose a job.

Religion used to be the only faith-based bullshit you had to walk on eggshells around, now it seems like everyone is making their scientific and political decisions the same way, with their stupid uninformed emotions.

Ask a Trumper exactly how we will pay for a larger military, a giant wall, and a nationwide deportation force, all while massively cutting taxes. You get the same spray of nonsense as if you'd asked a Christian how God's son being executed by Romans causes my sins to be forgiven.

There's a fucked up belief in modern society that everyone's perspective is as valid as anyone else's. It's not. You can be wrong about things, no matter how hard you believe them, no matter how much you feel your feelings. The election of Trump proves beyond doubt that there is no Illuminati. Nobody is at the wheel of this world. There are no global conspiracies of scientists and mathematicians trying to trick you into believing things.

It's time to stop bitching about elitism. The Founding Fathers sure didn't. They had this wacky notion that the most educated, best-informed people would make the best decisions, and they were right. A lot of our country's biggest problems have come because we just HAD to take the opinions of corn farmers and ditch diggers into account, no matter how fucked up they were- starting with the 3/5ths Compromise and the Electoral College itself.

Now here we are, two hundred years later, with a Secretary of Education who thinks you should get to choose which sciences your children learn about in school, because reality fucks up their stupid Bible stories.

If the only answer you can come up with is that you believe it, or that it just feels right, or that in YOUR personal experience things aren't the way the whole world says they are, you're probably wrong.

And if you voted for Trump, you deserve to watch your grandparents' medical expenses quintuple. Fuck you.

[suburban-shaman-blog1]

Bakery Lady

I worked with an interesting person last night. The people in charge think I need help with attention to detail, which is probably true. I’m taking their word for it, because if I was noticing myself making mistakes I would probably not be making them.

So while I would normally have worked alone last night, instead I had a partner. She was a short woman, about forty, with the utilitarian short hair and easy strength of a working mom. She wore the military-style cap our company offers. I wear the stocking cap. This is the only insight into a person’s personality you can glean from their clothes here, everything else is a uniform.

She was one of those people who immediately tells you about what a mom they are. I generally find this exhausting. She also did not take long to let me know she was a Catholic, as she’s having the kid baptized soon. 

And yet, I found myself quickly and constantly drawn into easy conversation with her. This was stranger than it sounds. Most of the time I work with men around my age, and every last one of us works wearing headphones and mostly ignoring the other guy. For young men, this is usually a comfortable way to coexist. This is how a predator shows he wants to be peaceful and friendly; he does not watch you or enter your space.

I guess it’s different with women. I talked to women all day at my last job, but that was during the day and my job required me to be constantly communicating with everyone. As a night baker, you might go three or four hours without saying a word, all night if you’re alone, so the conversation is all voluntary. If nobody feels like talking, they don’t.

Maybe when you’re thrown into a locked building with a strange man twice your size, it makes sense to try to get to know him right away. Maybe it would have been unsettling for me to lumber around laughing and muttering to myself while I listened to podcasts. Sometimes it’s hard not to frame every interaction I have as ‘how this person is managing to deal with me’. I still don’t even like it when I know people can hear me breathing, it feels like I must be bothering them. I always worry that I’m making women feel unsafe, because of the way so many of my friends talk about men. I wish I was smaller a lot of the time. Even weaker. I wish my aspect made people see how not threatening I really am.

This lady at the bakery was extremely friendly and easygoing. She did her stuff, and had nothing to say about the way I did mine. We talked, first about work, than our immediate circumstances. 

At some point or perhaps on a gradient, we just naturally started talking more personally. The work we do is about steady, constant, but simple effort, and takes up very little attention. Both of us feel like we are making our partners unhappy with our odd work hours. Maybe this is something all the bakers are dealing with, but this was the first time I’d really talked to someone else about it. 

We talked about how we don’t spend a lot of time with friends or family either. And before long, we both revealed that it wasn’t really because we work nights. Some of the people in her family are dismissive and distant, a lot of the people in mine are psychological terrorists who like to ruin special occasions. 

She talked about wanting to deliberately create joy and magic in her child’s life. I agreed that that sounded like a worthwhile effort. My immediate, cynical reaction was thinking that it’s dumb to play Tooth Fairy with kids, it sends the wrong message to let them actually believe in Santa Claus. But for once I was able to let that go, and I think it was because of how honest and earnest she had been, ever since I’d met her a couple hours ago.

Thinking about holidays with my family makes me want to be a less cynical person. Christmas surrounded by sarcasm and teasing and fighting is as blasphemous and unnatural as having Thanksgiving with a gang of reanimated corpses. My one uncle hasn’t had a holiday until his daughter has cried about something. The whole clan can’t just express love for each other, even when they feel it. They can’t just be happy for each others’ happiness. Not without a joke, or some kind of trick to make it less serious. 

I miss magic. I miss the warmth I could summon with my faith, and make myself feel. There is still wonder in my life, now, but it’s different. I can experience the awe of space, of nature, of art. But when I believed in that specific brand of Jesus I could feel something that my family never gave me, and which I think I’ll never know again; I could feel comforted, safe, like I belonged where I was. Like I was loved unconditionally, that nothing I had ever done, or could possibly do, would ever change that love. Like I had been created on purpose and it was good that I existed. 

I gather from second-hand accounts that some people feel like that about their parents, or going home. I can believe it. I just don’t think I can get myself there.

The lady at the bakery talked to me about our favorite movies, especially Disney cartoons. She was aware, in a way that I admired, of the messages being taught by stories, and I was pleased to be able to recommend The Iron Giant. Not Disney, better than Disney.

She told me lots of movies make her cry. I told her the only thing that’s made me sob like a child in a long time, was this one scene from the first season finale of The Leftovers. I didn’t tell her which scene, because it would be a big spoiler, but I will give you a hint: It’s the last scene you might expect a heathen like me to appreciate. Justin Theroux deserves some kind of statuette award.

It’s so refreshing, and still so strange, to connect with people this way. It happens so rarely now. I could blame the night job, but I have fallen away from most of the world ever since I stopped being required to go to school. I could just about make friends and fall in love like a normal person, because everyone in the area in my age group was lined up in rows around me every day. It’s a damn good thing I met my woman in senior year. I don’t want to know what kind of person I would be if I had been single these last ten years.

It makes me feel good when I have these odd interactions, because so often in the past when I’ve just been myself and tried to be friendly, I’ve put people off or freaked them out, or just been generally disliked. I got fired from a hotel clerk job once because the manager thought I was scary, and the whole time I worked there I was focused on sucking in my gut and trying to work up the courage to tell them I needed a bigger uniform. I was trembling with embarrassment and discomfort every time I worked, and I could not make myself bother them enough to request bigger pants, and then one day the regional manager sat me down in the office and told me I was being let go, because I intimidated and frightened the manager, who was nervous with her husband overseas, and she’d been there longer. 

I hate the way I feel like a clumsy, cowardly mess while having to assume people see me as some menacing monster. I hate the way I never feel like I’m supposed to be where I am, trespassing wherever I go, like if the manager of the bakery finds out I’ve got the key he gave me, I’m going to be in big trouble. We don’t have assigned parking but I always feel like I’m taking somebody’s space.

I think I felt comfortable around the bakery lady because she needed to talk about herself as badly as I do, but didn’t need to guard her emotions the way men usually do. And of course it’s other men we have to wall off from, so it’s much easier to talk about personal things with women. Especially older, married, non-sexual-candidate women. It’s not as though I have a shot with any of the young single women I know (spoiler alert, none at all) but there’s something about being completely off-the-table that makes people relaxing to be around.

I think I experience the world in a slightly different way than most people, and that’s not without its own rewards, but once in awhile it’s very good to meet and enjoy a regular old person. Just some lady at the bakery, who was sent to help me get my details right. 

At the end of the night, she shrugged and said “Everything you made looks fine to me.”