The world was a little different Tuesday than it needed to be, in my opinion. I have a new PC, generously given to me by a very good friend, and on it, he's installed all sorts of programs, features, and other things designed to make my life easier. Anything is easier than trying to use a 4MB workstation for anything in the year 2009, which is what I was previously doing. This new computer is a slate-blue compaq with a digital clock. On the carcass. It's the damnedest thing I've ever seen, but it keeps great time.
It's been my observation over time that things that are free are never really free. Take love, for instance. There isn't any monetary exchange, but there is certainly an emotional one. You increase your own vulnerability, become engaged and concerned with the events in anothers' life, and you are so committed. It's worse than say, getting a prostitute. With the concubine, there is a simple exchange of services for a set fee, the deal is done, and there's nothing left, good or bad, but an empty wallet. Great stuff.
Or take this slate-blue Compaq as another example. Now, I didn't pay a dime for the thing, but in many ways I wish I did. I can't return it for something different, and by this time I'd almost be insistent on an exchange for another carcass with a digital clock. Or even an analog clock. I wouldn't care anymore--I would have to have a clock on my computer. I've become used to it. I don't even know where you would go to find a computer with a clock mounted on the carcass. But there, at my feet, it sits.
I left very few instructions with Tim, the generous lifelong friend who set me up with this workstation. One of the instructions was that my older version of Windows Office xp should be installed on the new unit. I have my reasons for this. One, it's easy to use. Two, I can accomplish what I want to very quickly on that program. Sure, it has it's faults--I can't perform air traffic control from that software--but I can compose business letters, update invoicing, and crank out estimates for jobs in a very efficient manner. It's kind of like the clock, inasmuch as it became something I knew and trusted.
But when I got the new workstation, and Tim was proudly showing it off to me--I remember the morning like it was yesterday--I was looking at the neatly arranged icons on the desktop, and I saw the "Office 2007" icon there. I pointed at the flat screen enough to make the plasma bleed just a bit, and I asked Tim, "Now, what the hell did I say about that?"
Tim started laughing, and said, "Oh, that? I just thought you might want to enter the new millennium." He saw that I was upset, still. "Try it. It's good. You'll like it."
"I'm quite sure I will not like it," I told him. I'd only used the program on a very limited basis on my business partner's laptop, and it had already caused me considerable grief in a very short period of time. "Not to bitch about something that's free to me, but goddamn, Tim--this is about the only thing I mentioned."
"It'll be fine," he insisted. "All your old files will work on this--see?" and he put a disc in with all my old files and ramblings, and sure enough, they all popped up in the new software. "It's got this compatibility mode, see, and..." he continued on and on about the merits of the new software, but I was done listening as soon as I saw the new icons there. I knew what was going to happen.
So that's how it started, this now ongoing struggle with my "new" software. Tuesday found me needing to crank out three estimates, compose a bunch of sales projections, finish a business plan and etc. It was to be a monumentally busy day. So I started with the simplest thing on the list. An estimate. I got through about two-thirds of it without incident when something happened. I don't know what I did, but now the computer had taken over the editing of my document. It was citing all the errors and suggestions it had to make it a better document, and it had inserted an entire column comprising the right side of the page detailing all the formatting decisions I had elected to make. Furthermore, any text I attempted to insert was automatically introduced in red, and any changes I tried to make to the estimate resulted in a red line being inserted over the text, which it now refused to delete. It sure as hell was good at telling me I was trying to delete it, though.
A person with a modicum of patience would have handled this situation much differently than I. There was lots of yelling. Lots. In moments of misguided aggression, I bitchslapped the monitor on more than one occasion. The monitor, of course, is just like the computer. It's simply doing what it's user is telling it to do. This is fine in the world of the rational. In a world of impatience, it is an incorrigible transgression.
Finally, I had to do something different. Another great friend of mine works IT in a bank. Surely he knows what to do, I thought to myself, and I sent him a text message: 'I need advice. I have to learn how to use office2007 by noon. Does this have help or a tutorial? I am going to destroy timbox if i dont get it soon.' It should be noted that any "free" PC provided by Tim is by default called "Timbox." Technically speaking, this is Timbox2.0 here. He'd previously provided me with the 4MB computer, which worked just fine until it didn't work.
Bryan responded by saying that they didn't use 2007 at the bank--they still used the xp programs, which their employees can use without having to send them all to special classes. He then wanted, naturally, to know why I had to know all this by noon.
I sent another text: 'Who is the least patient person you have ever met?'
Re replied: 'You' So I got the list out of my wallet, and chalked up another easy sale. Bryan knows thousands of people. Ouch. He replied immediately. I sent another message, this one pleading him to think harder--that there must be someone else a little more high strung than myself. He replied after a couple of minutes that perhaps our junior high shop teacher was right there with me, but he wouldn't commit one way or the other. This is a friendly means among my peers to keep me from snapping, I suspect...
I thanked him for his help and I took a leave from the computer. I had to do something else, because I was simply going crazy that I couldn't navigate this new system in a yes/no world. This fucking program was screaming 'maybe!' back at any command I tried to give it, and I couldn't handle it anymore. I dragged out my air compressor, and set out to repair the front door window. I'd broken it one of the previous times I'd gotten stuck in a snowdrift right outside in the yard. Not enough distance to cool myself off, apparently, without a little misguided aggression...
I called my Mom. I already had my list out, and I figured I'd knock out another easy one. She is the most patient person I know. She's had to deal with me from the start, and I don't know how anyone could do that...I can't deal with myself. Anyway, we talked for a bit, and I finally plugged in the air compressor. While I'm on the phone with my mother. She said some things that I obviously was unable to hear, until I walked outside with the phone.
"Did you just turn on a saw? Goodness, you know I can't hear you when you're running your tools."
"No. That's the air compressor. Sorry about that." She went on to ask why I had the compressor going, and I had to explain the whole window thing, and so on and so on...she'd heard shit like this before. Finally, I had to ask: "Who's the most impatient person you've ever known?"
"My son?" and she chuckled.
"Anyone else?" I asked.
"Your father, for a long time didn't have very much patience at all. He's mellowed out quite a bit, I'm sure you've noticed."
I had noticed, and at that moment he came up the drive. He works in town and occassionally comes over for coffee break. This was one of those days. I let mom off the phone and got a cup ready when he came in. We greeted, and he asked about the compressor.
"Well, I'm fixing the door pane. You know--The one I broke?"
He acted a bit like he'd forgotten about it, but I knew he hadn't. "Oh. Why'd you unplug the compressor?" I had unplugged and moved the bubble, the hose and the gun, partly to get it out of the way. The entry door I was fixing was in the kitchen.
"You hear that hissing. That's the 'fixed' version of those Porter Cable compressors. I've got another one that's nearly identical that has the same problem with the valves. I leave it plugged in right now, it will run constantly." I was actually a little inconvenienced I'd been unable to just finish the job before he got there. It was about a five minute commitment, but it would have to wait. I had to find the brad nails--somewhere in the garage, or in the barn, or in the truck--that project in and of itself might take all day.
He went on to talk about some problem he was having with his air bubble, and to be honest, I don't at all remember what he was talking about. My mind was very much drifting...When there was a break in whatever that conversation was about, I asked him the standard question: Anyone more impatient than myself?
Dad took a sip of coffee, a slight drag off the Camel he was smoking, and shot me a kind of sideways glance with a smirk, "You know, some people have accused me of not being very patient myself."
"Yeah, but you're better now. How did that happen? Did you just mellow with age? I mean--did you do anything about it, or did it just happen?" I remembered an incident when I was very young--I don't even know if my brother and sister were around yet--and the chain saw wasn't working. I'm almost positive it had something to do with the pull cord, or eventual lack thereof. Anyway, that situation did not end well. There is sheer-faced stone bluff of about 25 feet behind my folks house. That saw headed over that drop-off. It was not an accident.
"I guess I just learned how to not sweat the little things," he said. "you know, not many things acutally matter." Now I remembered a thought he had jotted down in college. I'd been in all kinds of trouble with the law, and on that note (which was an identical piece of memo paper I was currently carrying in my wallet) he had written, 'NOTHING EVER MATTERS VERY MUCH, AND VERY RARELY DOES ANYTHING EVEN MATTER AT ALL.' I had taken it from the top drawer of his desk, and held it with me for years. I tried to use it as a personal philosophy, but my individual application of the thought was greatly flawed. I wondered if that was something he'd picked up from someone else, if my personal struggles of the day had inspired it, or how that all came about...maybe I'll find out someday.
The rest of the day didn't go very well. I could say that it didn't even go at all. I was exhausted from the rush of getting the kitchen remodel wrapped up, and was down to a little bit of grouting. I was infuriated at the computer for just not working the way I wished it would work, and I decided a nap would help my overall assessment of my situation. I went to sleep somewhere around noon, and awoke somewhere around midnight. I must have been very tired, but I still had substantial work to do.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Seeking out Godot
Monday morning I started a list on a small post-it note. It's still in my wallet today. I never know when I might need it, but it's more important than money right now to me. It was actually just a memo-pad note. No adhesive. Small things. I'm always hung up on the small things. It befouls the big picture...
On my list are three columns: The first contains the names of those I know and love; the second confirms me being the most impatient person they have ever met; and the third contains the name(s) of any suggested contenders to the title of "least patient person in your world." I'll say this: The second column has a hell of a lot of check marks. It looks like it might stay that way for a while...
I already had Susan on the list, and I didn't directly ask her if I was the least patient person she'd known. It was fairly assumed, I think. She didn't offer anyone else that she knew to exhibit less patience, at least at that moment in time. So she's there, and I'm checked. A young woman I'm chasing like a jackrabbit in heat is also on the list. I'm number two there. I don't understand it, and I haven't met this uncle fellow of hers, but I hope we're both disarmed when we do meet. It should be interesting. I don't have the patience or time to track him down right now, and I'll jump to the assumption that maybe this young lady simply doesn't know me well enough yet...we'll see. She knows I'm damned impatient, though. She repeatedly brings it to my full attention.
The next person I contacted is an individual in whom I occasionally seek some counsel on how to live a more effective life. He's unpaid, and I think he gets something of a kick out of hearing from me. I've tried the paid counselor thing, and I've been kicked out of every form of counseling that I know to exist. I've been kicked out of thirty-day treatment facilities, individual counseling sessions, group counseling sessions, online counseling sessions...I could go on and on, I'm sure there are more types of counseling from which I could face eviction, but at some point I had to throw my arms in the air and give up on the thing. Most of them hadn't helped one bit anyway...
Anyway, I told the gentleman that I'd come to this realization about myself, and I wondered if he'd encountered anyone with less patience than myself. He'd be likely to have run into someone, somewhere that might have the affliction a bit worse than me. His answer, after I'd droned on and on about this particular hangup was: "Not right now." So he's been added to the list, and the second column has been checked.
So I go to work, and I do a little tiling for a kitchen I've been remodeling. Here's the irony of the whole patience issue: I'm surrounded by the most patient people in the world. I don't know if it's because I've worn them down over the years of my abusive existence, or if it's God's peculiar way of pointing out my defects by example, but it is most certainly the case. Perhaps I couldn't handle being around anyone for any period of time if they were struck with the impatience as severely as I. The homeowner in this example has been patient to a fault--I've had an illness I've had to fight through, and I've been snowed in twice since I started to rip the kitchen to shreds. No complaints. Only compliments. It's a helluva deal...
But I do my work, and I've got maybe a couple of hours left on the job. A little grout, a little touch-up--it's done. One more trip. Completed projects are the best. I've got so many incomplete projects in my life...that will require a completely different post, but it is a quite substantial list. All I need right now...another goddamned list.
I drive home from KC, and as usual, I'm literal hell on wheels. The truck is fully loaded with crap from the job, and I drove like I had a fire to put out somewhere. I just hate the fact that I'll never get back the time spent in that vehicle...there has to be something more to life than transit... My brother had contacted me on the way, and he wanted to come by and do some laundry and watch the K-State/Texas basketball game. That was okay with me, because I had no plans to do anything else. I very rarely have plans to do anything than that which is most necessary or most recently suggested to me. I don't have the patience to "make plans." More to a fault, I've discovered I don't have a strong acumen for tracking the few plans I bother to make. I found myself doubly booked for Saturday due to personal indifference. Oh, well...it's good to be in some demand, I suppose...
I'd suggested I might make some dinner, but I didn't even hit State Line Road before I knew it wasn't going to happen, and I told Travis we'd have to do pizza, or something similar. He was on board, and when I got home I went ahead and ordered up Pizza Hut. I normally wouldn't do such a damned fool thing, but they were offering $10 any pizza, and I ordered a couple. I wish that had gone more smoothly.
I live on the edge of a small town. Baldwin City, Kansas is home to maybe 4,000 people. There is a small liberal-arts university here. It's a nice little town. If I could find anyplace better to live, I'd probably be there by now. My family is here. My best friends are here. And I'm too neurotic to completely start over in a different place right now. I know quite a few of my limitations. Starting a new life in a new geographic location could swing wildly one of two ways--there is little doubt about this in my mind. I don't want to see what might happen if it's on the bad swing of the pendulum.
So here I sit on the edge of this small town. I'm surrounded on three sides by the city limits. These people, to be sure, are within the "map" on the wall of Pizza Hut bounding the delivery area. My home is quite certainly a point of demarcation on this slice of cartography. What I do not have is a city address. It's a rural address. I need to make up a city address, and post it on the mailbox, but that's probably some sort of federal offense, or I'd quit getting the mail, or I don't know what would happen, but it would likely be bad. But I've been on hold for a while with the Pizza Hut girl, and she comes back to explain that they don't deliver to my address.
"Do you deliver to XXX Lawrence Street?" I asked.
Another pause, and she returns. "Yes, we do. Would you like the pizzas delivered there?" she asked.
"No, I don't," I replied. It was my next door neighbor's address. "Do you deliver to YYY Lawrence Street?" I then asked. It was the address of my next-door neighbor to the south.
Another pause, and she returns, "Yes, we do. Would you like the pizzas delivered there?" she asked again.
"No, I don't. I want the pizzas delivered to the house that separates those two addresses."
Another pause, this one much longer than the others, and she returns: "I'm sorry, my manager says we don't deliver to that address."
What I should have done, or maybe I'm glad that I didn't, was to get the manager on the phone. I'd probably already solidly increased my chances that some high school punk was going to jack off all over my pizzas, and I didn't want them to spit all over it to add insult to the injury. So I took my lumps, and kept the order placed as a pick-up.
I duped my brother into picking up the pizzas anyway, so I effectively transferred that minor inconvenience. What happened when the pizza arrived was yet another example of astounding impatience. Keep in mind that all this has happened after my realization of my own Achilles' Heel. He shows up with three pizzas, not the two that I ordered. I made sure he wasn't taken by the Hut, and it turns out they just messed up, and either didn't know what to do with the extra pizza, or didn't know they messed up, or something. Anyway, we have three pizzas where we should have two.
I hadn't eaten anything but toast early that morning. So it had been something like 14 hours since I'd taken on anything but some peanuts. I tore through the pizza like it was my last meal. I realized at the time it must have looked silly, but I just kept going at it. My brother was finishing his third slice of pizza, when he put down the crust, looked at me, and asked, "How many slices of pizza is that?"
"I don't know," I lied. "Maybe eight." It was exactly eight. I had no reason to lie, as my brother is good enough at subtraction to determine if I was deceiving him. Three is a prime number very easily tracked and mentally tagged. Three was also an exponential power of some other prime number determining the exact number of pieces of pizza I had eaten in maybe ten minutes. It must have looked a little disgusting. So I'm a glutton in addition to all my other deficiencies of character...The thing is, I wasn't even hungry, and I probably would have gone back to eat more pizza had he not stopped me by asking me that question. Just because I felt like I was ripping off an inept Pizza Hut. Total madness.
So the game starts up, and we're bullshitting through the start of the first half. I explained to Travis what I was trying to do, and what Susan had suggested as something of an outlet of discovery. I then asked him what I'd been asking everyone else: Was I the worst he'd known concerning the patience question?
"Well...you're right there," he said.
"With whom?" I asked. This is where I find that pauses, if they are to exist, are most likely to happen.
After the pause, he mentioned a person with whom we'd worked a few construction jobs. I noted that he many pressures in his life to which I have no subjection. Travis conceded this was most certainly the case, and when I pointed out that he had to deal with that wife of his simultaneously, a consensus was reached among us that he indeed had more patience than myself. I'd have kicked that daffy skirt to the curb five minutes after finishing the first go...poor fella...he probably feels the same way in retrospect...
But Travis had to concede that he had no solid evidence that I'd ever shown any tangible level of consistent patience in my life, and he had plenty of funny stories to back them up. Poor guy. I guess he's seen more than most...but we finally started watching the basketball game, and we were both very impressed with the Wildcats of K-State.
Their coach, Frank Martin, is one hell of a contradiction. Looking at him, I can tell he lacks patience. But he almost never blows up at the refs. He blows up on those players all the time, but they seem to love him. They play their asses off for that guy. He is, in my opinion, one of the five best coaches in the college game right now. He is a fantastic fit for that university, even though I am a Jayhawk through and through. I absolutely love what he's doing over there. Maybe it's that I can relate to the cauldron you can see in the guy--he always looks like he's just on the edge of doing something remarkably stupid, but it seems that he always tilts it just enough toward doing something profound instead. He's just right there on the edge--a hell of a lot like me--and in the end, even though I was too impatient to stay awake the entire game, Frank's Kats beat the hated Horns, and all was right in the state of Kansas when I awakened. Sometimes impatience is an asset?
On my list are three columns: The first contains the names of those I know and love; the second confirms me being the most impatient person they have ever met; and the third contains the name(s) of any suggested contenders to the title of "least patient person in your world." I'll say this: The second column has a hell of a lot of check marks. It looks like it might stay that way for a while...
I already had Susan on the list, and I didn't directly ask her if I was the least patient person she'd known. It was fairly assumed, I think. She didn't offer anyone else that she knew to exhibit less patience, at least at that moment in time. So she's there, and I'm checked. A young woman I'm chasing like a jackrabbit in heat is also on the list. I'm number two there. I don't understand it, and I haven't met this uncle fellow of hers, but I hope we're both disarmed when we do meet. It should be interesting. I don't have the patience or time to track him down right now, and I'll jump to the assumption that maybe this young lady simply doesn't know me well enough yet...we'll see. She knows I'm damned impatient, though. She repeatedly brings it to my full attention.
The next person I contacted is an individual in whom I occasionally seek some counsel on how to live a more effective life. He's unpaid, and I think he gets something of a kick out of hearing from me. I've tried the paid counselor thing, and I've been kicked out of every form of counseling that I know to exist. I've been kicked out of thirty-day treatment facilities, individual counseling sessions, group counseling sessions, online counseling sessions...I could go on and on, I'm sure there are more types of counseling from which I could face eviction, but at some point I had to throw my arms in the air and give up on the thing. Most of them hadn't helped one bit anyway...
Anyway, I told the gentleman that I'd come to this realization about myself, and I wondered if he'd encountered anyone with less patience than myself. He'd be likely to have run into someone, somewhere that might have the affliction a bit worse than me. His answer, after I'd droned on and on about this particular hangup was: "Not right now." So he's been added to the list, and the second column has been checked.
So I go to work, and I do a little tiling for a kitchen I've been remodeling. Here's the irony of the whole patience issue: I'm surrounded by the most patient people in the world. I don't know if it's because I've worn them down over the years of my abusive existence, or if it's God's peculiar way of pointing out my defects by example, but it is most certainly the case. Perhaps I couldn't handle being around anyone for any period of time if they were struck with the impatience as severely as I. The homeowner in this example has been patient to a fault--I've had an illness I've had to fight through, and I've been snowed in twice since I started to rip the kitchen to shreds. No complaints. Only compliments. It's a helluva deal...
But I do my work, and I've got maybe a couple of hours left on the job. A little grout, a little touch-up--it's done. One more trip. Completed projects are the best. I've got so many incomplete projects in my life...that will require a completely different post, but it is a quite substantial list. All I need right now...another goddamned list.
I drive home from KC, and as usual, I'm literal hell on wheels. The truck is fully loaded with crap from the job, and I drove like I had a fire to put out somewhere. I just hate the fact that I'll never get back the time spent in that vehicle...there has to be something more to life than transit... My brother had contacted me on the way, and he wanted to come by and do some laundry and watch the K-State/Texas basketball game. That was okay with me, because I had no plans to do anything else. I very rarely have plans to do anything than that which is most necessary or most recently suggested to me. I don't have the patience to "make plans." More to a fault, I've discovered I don't have a strong acumen for tracking the few plans I bother to make. I found myself doubly booked for Saturday due to personal indifference. Oh, well...it's good to be in some demand, I suppose...
I'd suggested I might make some dinner, but I didn't even hit State Line Road before I knew it wasn't going to happen, and I told Travis we'd have to do pizza, or something similar. He was on board, and when I got home I went ahead and ordered up Pizza Hut. I normally wouldn't do such a damned fool thing, but they were offering $10 any pizza, and I ordered a couple. I wish that had gone more smoothly.
I live on the edge of a small town. Baldwin City, Kansas is home to maybe 4,000 people. There is a small liberal-arts university here. It's a nice little town. If I could find anyplace better to live, I'd probably be there by now. My family is here. My best friends are here. And I'm too neurotic to completely start over in a different place right now. I know quite a few of my limitations. Starting a new life in a new geographic location could swing wildly one of two ways--there is little doubt about this in my mind. I don't want to see what might happen if it's on the bad swing of the pendulum.
So here I sit on the edge of this small town. I'm surrounded on three sides by the city limits. These people, to be sure, are within the "map" on the wall of Pizza Hut bounding the delivery area. My home is quite certainly a point of demarcation on this slice of cartography. What I do not have is a city address. It's a rural address. I need to make up a city address, and post it on the mailbox, but that's probably some sort of federal offense, or I'd quit getting the mail, or I don't know what would happen, but it would likely be bad. But I've been on hold for a while with the Pizza Hut girl, and she comes back to explain that they don't deliver to my address.
"Do you deliver to XXX Lawrence Street?" I asked.
Another pause, and she returns. "Yes, we do. Would you like the pizzas delivered there?" she asked.
"No, I don't," I replied. It was my next door neighbor's address. "Do you deliver to YYY Lawrence Street?" I then asked. It was the address of my next-door neighbor to the south.
Another pause, and she returns, "Yes, we do. Would you like the pizzas delivered there?" she asked again.
"No, I don't. I want the pizzas delivered to the house that separates those two addresses."
Another pause, this one much longer than the others, and she returns: "I'm sorry, my manager says we don't deliver to that address."
What I should have done, or maybe I'm glad that I didn't, was to get the manager on the phone. I'd probably already solidly increased my chances that some high school punk was going to jack off all over my pizzas, and I didn't want them to spit all over it to add insult to the injury. So I took my lumps, and kept the order placed as a pick-up.
I duped my brother into picking up the pizzas anyway, so I effectively transferred that minor inconvenience. What happened when the pizza arrived was yet another example of astounding impatience. Keep in mind that all this has happened after my realization of my own Achilles' Heel. He shows up with three pizzas, not the two that I ordered. I made sure he wasn't taken by the Hut, and it turns out they just messed up, and either didn't know what to do with the extra pizza, or didn't know they messed up, or something. Anyway, we have three pizzas where we should have two.
I hadn't eaten anything but toast early that morning. So it had been something like 14 hours since I'd taken on anything but some peanuts. I tore through the pizza like it was my last meal. I realized at the time it must have looked silly, but I just kept going at it. My brother was finishing his third slice of pizza, when he put down the crust, looked at me, and asked, "How many slices of pizza is that?"
"I don't know," I lied. "Maybe eight." It was exactly eight. I had no reason to lie, as my brother is good enough at subtraction to determine if I was deceiving him. Three is a prime number very easily tracked and mentally tagged. Three was also an exponential power of some other prime number determining the exact number of pieces of pizza I had eaten in maybe ten minutes. It must have looked a little disgusting. So I'm a glutton in addition to all my other deficiencies of character...The thing is, I wasn't even hungry, and I probably would have gone back to eat more pizza had he not stopped me by asking me that question. Just because I felt like I was ripping off an inept Pizza Hut. Total madness.
So the game starts up, and we're bullshitting through the start of the first half. I explained to Travis what I was trying to do, and what Susan had suggested as something of an outlet of discovery. I then asked him what I'd been asking everyone else: Was I the worst he'd known concerning the patience question?
"Well...you're right there," he said.
"With whom?" I asked. This is where I find that pauses, if they are to exist, are most likely to happen.
After the pause, he mentioned a person with whom we'd worked a few construction jobs. I noted that he many pressures in his life to which I have no subjection. Travis conceded this was most certainly the case, and when I pointed out that he had to deal with that wife of his simultaneously, a consensus was reached among us that he indeed had more patience than myself. I'd have kicked that daffy skirt to the curb five minutes after finishing the first go...poor fella...he probably feels the same way in retrospect...
But Travis had to concede that he had no solid evidence that I'd ever shown any tangible level of consistent patience in my life, and he had plenty of funny stories to back them up. Poor guy. I guess he's seen more than most...but we finally started watching the basketball game, and we were both very impressed with the Wildcats of K-State.
Their coach, Frank Martin, is one hell of a contradiction. Looking at him, I can tell he lacks patience. But he almost never blows up at the refs. He blows up on those players all the time, but they seem to love him. They play their asses off for that guy. He is, in my opinion, one of the five best coaches in the college game right now. He is a fantastic fit for that university, even though I am a Jayhawk through and through. I absolutely love what he's doing over there. Maybe it's that I can relate to the cauldron you can see in the guy--he always looks like he's just on the edge of doing something remarkably stupid, but it seems that he always tilts it just enough toward doing something profound instead. He's just right there on the edge--a hell of a lot like me--and in the end, even though I was too impatient to stay awake the entire game, Frank's Kats beat the hated Horns, and all was right in the state of Kansas when I awakened. Sometimes impatience is an asset?
Distant Tolerance
The phone finally rings and it is my Aunt Susan on the end of the line. We exchange pleasantries, and she asks how I've been doing. The last time we had spoken, I was sitting in midtown KC in a truck with no gasoline, with no money in my pocket or account, and a key in my wallet I was too impatient to find that would have gained me entrance to my business partner's home. It was about -5 degrees that night, and the wind was blowing like mad, so all things considered, I was doing pretty well.
"So how's everything going for you," she asks me. "Well, I left a message for you, and in it I claimed that you and Dallas struck me as very patient people. It wasn't until a few minutes after I left that message that I realized that Dallas is actually not at all patient, but that might tell you where I'm at right now. He seems patient to me."
My dad's brother has had many run-ins with impatience, many of them public. He teaches college courses now, and uses the rules on his syllabus mainly as guidelines for immediate expulsion from his sections. If he's anything like me, he probably delights in it. Less work for him. He just has to wait out people to make that one mistake. Most people can't make it thirteen weeks without making one error at a younger age...hell, I can't generally make it thirteen minutes.
"He parses out his patience. You know, I see that," she told me. "So did you just find out that you were impatient? Is this a new thing?"
"Hell no. I've always known I was impatient. What I didn't know was that I was the least patient person I've ever met. I dragged out the yearbooks, all my phone numbers, all my contacts in my email. I'm more impatient than all of them. It's really not even close."
"How long have you known you were the least patient person you've ever met?" she asked.
"Since about 3 this afternoon."
"Wow." Susan likes saying 'wow' when talking to me. I don't know if she does that with everyone, but I think she sees me as something of a case study for what can go wrong in the human mind. "I think you could see this as some sort of a breakthrough!"
"A breakthrough to what?" I asked.
"This is something you could take and really run with it. Do you write? You could write about your search to find just one person who is more impatient than you."
"I don't have the patience to do that right now."
"It could be an exercise in patience." She continued, "Do you blog? You could write about how your search is going in a blog or something." Susan was far more excited about this discovery than I was. I just wanted to know how to find some patience.
Susan used to drink quite a bit, apparently. I used to drink quantities that would kill people with patience, and additionally do any drugs that were available in my general area. So we have this in common, and I'm still trying to fight through the fact that I'm criminally insane even without the chemical influences. But I don't want to drink anymore. I just want to be a little bit more sane, and I'd like to have a lot more patience. I'm not even sure I'm an alcoholic anymore, but I know good and goddamned well that I'm far too impatient to drink right. I just don't properly know how to adjust to the lag time of the stuff hitting my bloodstream, and even then, it's not effective enough, and it's never quick enough...
"I have blogged, but no one will read it. It won't be interesting, and it won't be very good. I'm a dullard with a bad attitude."
"Well, see--that's interesting right there. Have you read Eggers?"
"Yeah, a little."
"See, the way you're talking, you kind of remind me of him right now." I didn't know if that was a good or a bad thing, but it was at least a point of reference. I wondered if Dave had any patience. Maybe I'll check into it soon. Most certainly his capacity outweighs mine in this field. "What else do you read?" she asked.
"I don't read anything anymore unless I can finish it in one setting. I don't have the capacity to put something down and pick it back up in the future," I explained. "I'm limited to things under about three hundred pages, and I have to be damned interested in something like that. I also have to have a fair chunk of time set aside. I'm stuck with magazine articles and online blurbs, mostly."
"Do you read anything contemporary?" she asked.
"Not really. I've been stuck thinking that people are generally getting dumber as the years pass by, and I don't want to get stuck in some modern rut of stupidity. I'm dumb enough already. I don't need any assistance."
"Wow." Again with the 'wows.' "Don't you think your analytical skills are pretty good, though? You were pretty good at math, right? Have you considering tutoring kids? They require a lot of patience."
I explained to her that I had done quite a bit of tutoring in the past, and that I was very good at it. For whatever reason, I have the ability to give children a free pass, as I figure they simply don't know better. It's bizarre to me, but I can sit patiently with a child and explain things in dozens of different ways until I can make a breakthrough with them. With adults, one shot if you're lucky, and I snap. I've coached a lot of little league, and I've umpired a bunch of ballgames. I've only kicked out coaches and idiotic parents, but I've kicked out more of them than I could possibly count. I'm the only person I know who has ever dismissed a fellow umpire from my crew during a game (there are only two for most little league affairs)...he certainly had it coming, and it drew an ovation from both teams' benches and fans. It did not sit well with the recreation commission, however...
"Do you remember reading 'Beowulf' back in high school?" she continued. "Maybe you could do something like that and turn your biggest weakness into an asset."
"If I could turn this thing into an asset it would be nothing short of miraculous," I told her.
"It can be done. I mean, it's possible, right?" she sounded as if she didn't believe herself too much anymore.
"I'll concede that anything is possible, but I'm not getting a lobotomy. I don't even know where to go these days to get one of those, and I don't particularly want one. I don't hate myself or anything, I just want to have quite a bit more tolerance. I think it would serve me well."
"Well, what do you do for entertainment? You have to have some fun, don't you?"
"Do you really want to know?" I asked. She was dancing on a pond of thin ice here...
"Shaww," she said in a thick New Yaak accent that comes through quite a little bit to a hayseed from Kansas. What a great woman...
"Just yesterday, I was driving down Main Street in KC, and the Scientology headquarters for the metro is down in Westport. Anyway, I'm going to the lumberyard, and I notice these idiots standing across the street from the entrance, and these fools are wearing robes and masks, and they've all got signs proclaiming that these fucking scientologists are somehow the end of the world as we know it, and I don't know how to describe it, other than to say that they pissed me off...bad. So I'm sitting at the stop light, looking at these idiots, and I'm just getting angrier and angrier...It's one thing to protest, I suppose, but these idiots are protesting an idea...and it's an idea anyone can easily ignore. I'm no scientologist, see...and I'm not even sympathetic to their cause, but I can appreciate the fact that a great number of people are so goddamned lame that they need shit like this. There are a lot of people that are worse off than me, even with all my faults. But these idiots out here protesting the dianetics lab--they're the worst kind of moron in my book. They aren't even protesting anything that matters! And what the fuck is the protest going to get them? More fucking attention for the scientologists! That's why I think those people suck.
"So I got this idea, and it's something I've been kicking around for a long time...I think I'm going to go down to City Hall for a permit to protest. Let this one sink in for a moment--I want to protest those person's first amendment right to protest. It's the only thing I can think of in the world that's dumber than what they're doing."
"Wow! Do you think that will get some media attention?"
"I don't care about that. I just want to do something that makes those assholes look as stupid as they are, and I want it to reflect negatively on the Scientologists as well. I think I might wear a suit and wear shades. Those dipshits already think the Scientologists are out to get them, so I might as well fuel the fire." I didn't mention it to her then, but I'd like to wear an unnecessary bluetooth, like Shamwow Vince, so it looks like I'm doing something that I'm not to those with below average intelligence. It would give me a further excuse to do something exceptionally stupid if in fact the television cameras showed up--I could take my sign protesting the first amendment and chuck it over my shoulder and say something like, "I'm throwing my Saturday away." At least I'd get a kick out of it.
"That's very creative. You should do something with your life that's creative, don't you think?"
"Well, creative doesn't necessarily equate with anything that's interesting to most people. For example, right now I'm working on a screenplay, but I'm not sure there's any market for it. I'd say it's an uphill climb."
"What's it about?" she was showing more patience with me than she really should at this point.
"It's about a man who becomes fascinated with toast."
A pause. She then spelled, "T-O-A-S-T?"
"Toast."
"Toast." Another pause on both ends.
"You'd be surprised how many ways toast can affect your day."
"I had some toast this afternoon," she said.
"How was it?" I asked.
"It was good."
"Can you imagine how your day might have went if the toast was bad?"
"I hadn't even considered it, but now I'll probably be on the lookout. See, even this is intriguing to me, just based on that line 'how many ways toast can affect your day.' How much have you written?"
"About 60 pages. But again, we have to go back to the impatience. See, my old workstation ran out of memory right after I got started in earnest on the project, and about the third time that the thing ate up all my work, I got entirely frustrated with the whole effort and I had to put it down for a while. I've got a new PC now, so I guess I'll get back to it someday."
"I'd love to read it. You'll have to get me some of it when you get a chance."
"Yeah, if I have enough patience to finish it. I've got all the main ideas already worked out--I just have to connect all the dots."
We tapered off after that--talking about other unimportant shit that had somehow recently punctuated my existence, and I had to let her go after about an hour. It was far too long to punish a patient woman. This impatience thing might be contagious as it regards me.
"So how's everything going for you," she asks me. "Well, I left a message for you, and in it I claimed that you and Dallas struck me as very patient people. It wasn't until a few minutes after I left that message that I realized that Dallas is actually not at all patient, but that might tell you where I'm at right now. He seems patient to me."
My dad's brother has had many run-ins with impatience, many of them public. He teaches college courses now, and uses the rules on his syllabus mainly as guidelines for immediate expulsion from his sections. If he's anything like me, he probably delights in it. Less work for him. He just has to wait out people to make that one mistake. Most people can't make it thirteen weeks without making one error at a younger age...hell, I can't generally make it thirteen minutes.
"He parses out his patience. You know, I see that," she told me. "So did you just find out that you were impatient? Is this a new thing?"
"Hell no. I've always known I was impatient. What I didn't know was that I was the least patient person I've ever met. I dragged out the yearbooks, all my phone numbers, all my contacts in my email. I'm more impatient than all of them. It's really not even close."
"How long have you known you were the least patient person you've ever met?" she asked.
"Since about 3 this afternoon."
"Wow." Susan likes saying 'wow' when talking to me. I don't know if she does that with everyone, but I think she sees me as something of a case study for what can go wrong in the human mind. "I think you could see this as some sort of a breakthrough!"
"A breakthrough to what?" I asked.
"This is something you could take and really run with it. Do you write? You could write about your search to find just one person who is more impatient than you."
"I don't have the patience to do that right now."
"It could be an exercise in patience." She continued, "Do you blog? You could write about how your search is going in a blog or something." Susan was far more excited about this discovery than I was. I just wanted to know how to find some patience.
Susan used to drink quite a bit, apparently. I used to drink quantities that would kill people with patience, and additionally do any drugs that were available in my general area. So we have this in common, and I'm still trying to fight through the fact that I'm criminally insane even without the chemical influences. But I don't want to drink anymore. I just want to be a little bit more sane, and I'd like to have a lot more patience. I'm not even sure I'm an alcoholic anymore, but I know good and goddamned well that I'm far too impatient to drink right. I just don't properly know how to adjust to the lag time of the stuff hitting my bloodstream, and even then, it's not effective enough, and it's never quick enough...
"I have blogged, but no one will read it. It won't be interesting, and it won't be very good. I'm a dullard with a bad attitude."
"Well, see--that's interesting right there. Have you read Eggers?"
"Yeah, a little."
"See, the way you're talking, you kind of remind me of him right now." I didn't know if that was a good or a bad thing, but it was at least a point of reference. I wondered if Dave had any patience. Maybe I'll check into it soon. Most certainly his capacity outweighs mine in this field. "What else do you read?" she asked.
"I don't read anything anymore unless I can finish it in one setting. I don't have the capacity to put something down and pick it back up in the future," I explained. "I'm limited to things under about three hundred pages, and I have to be damned interested in something like that. I also have to have a fair chunk of time set aside. I'm stuck with magazine articles and online blurbs, mostly."
"Do you read anything contemporary?" she asked.
"Not really. I've been stuck thinking that people are generally getting dumber as the years pass by, and I don't want to get stuck in some modern rut of stupidity. I'm dumb enough already. I don't need any assistance."
"Wow." Again with the 'wows.' "Don't you think your analytical skills are pretty good, though? You were pretty good at math, right? Have you considering tutoring kids? They require a lot of patience."
I explained to her that I had done quite a bit of tutoring in the past, and that I was very good at it. For whatever reason, I have the ability to give children a free pass, as I figure they simply don't know better. It's bizarre to me, but I can sit patiently with a child and explain things in dozens of different ways until I can make a breakthrough with them. With adults, one shot if you're lucky, and I snap. I've coached a lot of little league, and I've umpired a bunch of ballgames. I've only kicked out coaches and idiotic parents, but I've kicked out more of them than I could possibly count. I'm the only person I know who has ever dismissed a fellow umpire from my crew during a game (there are only two for most little league affairs)...he certainly had it coming, and it drew an ovation from both teams' benches and fans. It did not sit well with the recreation commission, however...
"Do you remember reading 'Beowulf' back in high school?" she continued. "Maybe you could do something like that and turn your biggest weakness into an asset."
"If I could turn this thing into an asset it would be nothing short of miraculous," I told her.
"It can be done. I mean, it's possible, right?" she sounded as if she didn't believe herself too much anymore.
"I'll concede that anything is possible, but I'm not getting a lobotomy. I don't even know where to go these days to get one of those, and I don't particularly want one. I don't hate myself or anything, I just want to have quite a bit more tolerance. I think it would serve me well."
"Well, what do you do for entertainment? You have to have some fun, don't you?"
"Do you really want to know?" I asked. She was dancing on a pond of thin ice here...
"Shaww," she said in a thick New Yaak accent that comes through quite a little bit to a hayseed from Kansas. What a great woman...
"Just yesterday, I was driving down Main Street in KC, and the Scientology headquarters for the metro is down in Westport. Anyway, I'm going to the lumberyard, and I notice these idiots standing across the street from the entrance, and these fools are wearing robes and masks, and they've all got signs proclaiming that these fucking scientologists are somehow the end of the world as we know it, and I don't know how to describe it, other than to say that they pissed me off...bad. So I'm sitting at the stop light, looking at these idiots, and I'm just getting angrier and angrier...It's one thing to protest, I suppose, but these idiots are protesting an idea...and it's an idea anyone can easily ignore. I'm no scientologist, see...and I'm not even sympathetic to their cause, but I can appreciate the fact that a great number of people are so goddamned lame that they need shit like this. There are a lot of people that are worse off than me, even with all my faults. But these idiots out here protesting the dianetics lab--they're the worst kind of moron in my book. They aren't even protesting anything that matters! And what the fuck is the protest going to get them? More fucking attention for the scientologists! That's why I think those people suck.
"So I got this idea, and it's something I've been kicking around for a long time...I think I'm going to go down to City Hall for a permit to protest. Let this one sink in for a moment--I want to protest those person's first amendment right to protest. It's the only thing I can think of in the world that's dumber than what they're doing."
"Wow! Do you think that will get some media attention?"
"I don't care about that. I just want to do something that makes those assholes look as stupid as they are, and I want it to reflect negatively on the Scientologists as well. I think I might wear a suit and wear shades. Those dipshits already think the Scientologists are out to get them, so I might as well fuel the fire." I didn't mention it to her then, but I'd like to wear an unnecessary bluetooth, like Shamwow Vince, so it looks like I'm doing something that I'm not to those with below average intelligence. It would give me a further excuse to do something exceptionally stupid if in fact the television cameras showed up--I could take my sign protesting the first amendment and chuck it over my shoulder and say something like, "I'm throwing my Saturday away." At least I'd get a kick out of it.
"That's very creative. You should do something with your life that's creative, don't you think?"
"Well, creative doesn't necessarily equate with anything that's interesting to most people. For example, right now I'm working on a screenplay, but I'm not sure there's any market for it. I'd say it's an uphill climb."
"What's it about?" she was showing more patience with me than she really should at this point.
"It's about a man who becomes fascinated with toast."
A pause. She then spelled, "T-O-A-S-T?"
"Toast."
"Toast." Another pause on both ends.
"You'd be surprised how many ways toast can affect your day."
"I had some toast this afternoon," she said.
"How was it?" I asked.
"It was good."
"Can you imagine how your day might have went if the toast was bad?"
"I hadn't even considered it, but now I'll probably be on the lookout. See, even this is intriguing to me, just based on that line 'how many ways toast can affect your day.' How much have you written?"
"About 60 pages. But again, we have to go back to the impatience. See, my old workstation ran out of memory right after I got started in earnest on the project, and about the third time that the thing ate up all my work, I got entirely frustrated with the whole effort and I had to put it down for a while. I've got a new PC now, so I guess I'll get back to it someday."
"I'd love to read it. You'll have to get me some of it when you get a chance."
"Yeah, if I have enough patience to finish it. I've got all the main ideas already worked out--I just have to connect all the dots."
We tapered off after that--talking about other unimportant shit that had somehow recently punctuated my existence, and I had to let her go after about an hour. It was far too long to punish a patient woman. This impatience thing might be contagious as it regards me.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Vehicles and Metaphors
So I suppose that getting stuck in the vehicle, even when it's easy enough to release yourself from that bondage is a proper enough parallel for everything that's happening right now. I simply don't take the time to think when the proper moment arises. It gets me in constant trouble, where the problem could be easily bypassed.
I just took the extra time to edit the first post, and I'm still quite dissatisfied. It doesn't look as I wish it would, and the content is severely lacking as well. I don't have the patience right now to learn my Word 2007 program on my new workstation--another situation in and of itself. The only way to keep my sanity right now is to go straight to the composition page within the blogger and do this directly. It's entirely inefficient, which is another form of frustration, and it doesn't have the ability, as far as I can tell, to make simple indentations on paragraphs and etc. and etc. and etc. I hope that was a long enough run-on sentence to accurately convey the current state of mind.
Anyway, why am I doing this? Good fucking question. I don't have a good answer for that yet, unfortunately. I'll go back a couple (or three now--sheesh!) days and explain. I wish it could be done with brevity, but it probably won't...
After ruining the tires on my F-150, I went to Wal Mart to get a pair for the back axle. That was a Sunday, and they said they could get me in and out without an appointment, so there I went. I ordered the cheapest set of Goodyear Viva 2s they had, made sure they were in stock, and inquired about the wait. "About forty-five minutes," I was told. The time was 3:45. I said fine, and walked to Burger King, because the food is fast and cheap (kind of like me). I got to the BK, and there came upon me a realization that if I were simply dropped into this place without knowing where I was, I would have determined within five minutes that I was Ottawa, KS. Every ugly teenager had an even uglier baby, and a high percentage of the people in the building were either on Meth, were dealing Meth, or were looking for Meth. Neat town, Ottawa.
Finished eating, and went back to Wal-Mart. Truck is still in the lot. Tire is completely flat now, so I suppose I made one good decision that day. Already about a half hour had elapsed, so I figured I'd do a little grocery shopping. I was pretty much out of food at home, and unless these grease-monkey magicians had a few tricks up their sleeves, the vehicle wasn't getting two new tires for quite a bit more than fifteen minutes.
With my disposition, shopping at Wal-Mart is hell. It's somehow worse than any other retailer, because it has a tendency to extract all the worst elements of society within its walls. I already know I'm the least patient person I know, and inside Wal-Mart it becomes worse. Ugly people become somehow more ugly in Wal-Mart. Obese people shop for clothes they can grow into in Wal-Mart. The poor become poorer in Wal-Mart, and so on and so on and so on. It's a tremendously frustrating cycle. And now I'm stuck in Wal-Mart.
For the above reasons, I consciously try to limit my exposure to Wal-Mart. It makes me a worse person when I'm there, and I already know I'm a pretty low-quality individual when it comes to inter-personal relationships. I'm not sure I could be friends with myself. I don't like that I'm an insufferable ass. Working on it....quite a project... But I jump through the hoops and do the necessary shopping, despite their high prices. Wal-Marts are only as competitive in their pricing as they need be. In Ottawa, they have a virtual monopoly on many items, and they know it. It's a hidden tax on the poor and stupid...count me as both, I suppose...
But I'm finally ready to check out. I get into the only check out line with one outfit in it, and started to unload my cart. The guy in front of me looks at what I'm doing, and says, "Oh, I'm sorry, wait a minute," then this mother-fucker starts placing items in his cart up onto the conveyor right in front of me. "This is two separate purchases," he says to the cashier, and he smiles at her. I am not smiling. He's sitting here bullshitting with the cashier, and his mom, or whoever the hell he is with, and he's got all fucking day to do whatever the hell it is that he's going to do, and he's just going on with his business, because he probably has done stupid shit like this his entire life. He simply doesn't know any better, and now I'm seething.
Somehow, I manage to avoid physical confrontation. I think it may be that I scare people to death with my attitude and outward appearance. I've shaved my head since I was about twenty-one, partly because I started losing my hair at a young age, and I didn't have the patience to try and make a receding hairline look like anything other than it is. Other people can care about that--not my deal. I haven't paid for a haircut in a decade and a half, and I never have to bitch the barber. They can't do much with an infertile field, anyway. That being said, I guess some people think I look mean. And I'm kind of a big guy, too. Not fat, but pretty well built. I work construction, and I'm in decent shape. I'm strong. People don't want to fuck with me, and generally speaking, it's probably a good idea. I'm pretty wound up, and although historically I only take out my frustration on inanimate objects, things do not end well for those apt to provoking me. I don't strike first, but shit man...don't strike...
So I'm pissed. The guy in front of me knows it, too. So now he's kind of in a hurry, because I'm slamming my items right up next to his as he's trying to make space for them on the conveyor. I'm doing everything I can so that he has to hand the items individually to the cashier, which he ends up doing for the last four or five items. Neither he nor the cashier wants to engage me in any way by this point. It's not a security moment, as long as the two can successfully negotiate an efficient transaction. Their hands being somewhat forced, they manage to do this, and the situation has been diffused. And it's not like I'm in a hurry. They have yet to page me to inform me my vehicle is done. I can go nowhere. Yet I'm pissed that I couldn't get through the checkout a little quicker. The time is now 5:10.
I take my groceries back to the tire center, and see that the truck is at least now in the shop. The woman working the desk tells me, "They need you to sign this waiver. Those tires don't meet the manufacturer's recommendations." They did not page me to inform me of this fact--they just all sat around looking at my truck, waiting for me to appear before beginning the work on the vehicle. The intercom is right there in the phone system. That's all they had to do to get me to sign the waiver. They already had a copy of a previously signed waiver in their possession. I had to sign an identical waiver on Nov. 1 of last year, when I'd purchased two tires identical to those I was now purchasing. Without notice of any of these facts presented to the worker, I signed the waiver, and the shop monkeys started installing the tires.
Sometimes, I'm impatient with cause. This was one of those times. It happened after I'd realized I was the most impatient person I'd ever known, and I think in this instance, I handled it quite well. I might have been emotionally spent from not blowing my top over the previous incident in the check-out line. I don't know. They had a kiosk with several maps, and I started looking through the newest version of the Rand McNally Kansas City Streetfinder. I've been working in KC, and since I had nothing better to do for the forseeable future, I thought I'd see if there were any magical new streets to get me around town any better. There weren't. One feature I liked was the indication of one-way streets. In the oldest grids of KC, almost all the streets are one-ways. I've been around town enough to know which direction most of these are, but I thought that was a handy feature. What I didn't like was the new page numbering system. Some genius at Rand McNally apparently decided to number all pages in the United States, regardless of your geographic point of interest. So now, one has to jump from page 2567 to page 3145 to move a block North or South. Easier for Rand McNally, I suppose, but hopelessly stupid. Stupid. Someone probably got a promotion for this idea.
But I'm standing there watching these people put tires on the truck, and I think about stealing this map. I have the money to buy it. I don't particularly want it. I just think it would be a somewhat fitting payback to Wal-Mart, to the Walton and Glass families, and to these fucking idiots who were making me wait in Ottawa for a truck that could have easily been done by this point. It's now 5:45. And it's everything I can do not to steal this map.
Eventually, the truck is released from the jack, and the boys are again standing around the vehicle gawking at its contents and it's general state of disrepair. All the dents and dings on the vehicle are a direct result of impatience. I run the vehicle into things that needn't be hit on a regular basis. I'm a menace on the road. I text on the telephone while driving, knowing it is unsafe, and not caring. I can't help it. Driving bores me. I don't like it. It's just one other thing that seems to get in my way, and prevents me from a more efficient use of my time. Anyway, all the dents, dings, scrapes, missing mirrors--all my fault. I know it. At least it's a source of amusement to others on this occasion.
I walk up to the desk. "I'd like to pay for that thing," I tell the woman. "They're not done with it yet," she replies. I walk to the window and look out into the garage again. They are most certainly done with it. They're now all leaned over the truck bed and looking at the various items strewn about, and laughing to each other. I don't know why they find it such a source of amusement, but they do. I point out the window. "You call that working on it?" I asked her. She kind of rolls her eyes, and says, "Let me see if I can get the final bill." She waddles off and runs down one of these idiots, who is now clearly just burning time so that he can clock out and go home, and he reluctantly processes whatever needed to be processed to print my bill. I think he had to hit one button on his mobile keypad.
Finally, I've paid for the repairs, and I'm on my way home. There is a thick fog which doesn't at all prevent me from breaking every law of the road on my trip. Stop signs, not for me. Red lights? I check for a camera, pedestrians, and other traffic, and I disregard these. Speed limits? I prefer not to. As I said before, I'm a menace, and I know it. I don't like it, but I know my limitations, and I'm going to do all I can in the future to be better about this sort of thing. Right now, it's just not in my toolkit...
After it was obvious that I was the least patient person I'd ever personally known, I called my Aunt Susan in California. She's married to my dad's brother, and I call her occasionally to let her know I'm still totally fucking insane. I got the answering machine, and left the message: "Yeah, it's Slade. It occurred to me that you and Dallas strike me as two very patient people. I wondered how you did that. That is all." A stupid message, to be sure. I'm not good with leaving messages. Hell, I'm also not good at speaking to people directly. I'm not good at ignoring people. These are just a few deficiencies of character, and they all somehow point back to the impatience issue as I see it today.
What I had to do next was watch some TV. I don't watch much, but I have to do it sometimes to get out of my own head. This was one of those moments. I would pace the floors and wear out the carpet if I didn't do something with my time, and right then and there, as I was only waiting for that phone to ring. I was messed up, and for the first time in my life, I knew exactly why.
I just took the extra time to edit the first post, and I'm still quite dissatisfied. It doesn't look as I wish it would, and the content is severely lacking as well. I don't have the patience right now to learn my Word 2007 program on my new workstation--another situation in and of itself. The only way to keep my sanity right now is to go straight to the composition page within the blogger and do this directly. It's entirely inefficient, which is another form of frustration, and it doesn't have the ability, as far as I can tell, to make simple indentations on paragraphs and etc. and etc. and etc. I hope that was a long enough run-on sentence to accurately convey the current state of mind.
Anyway, why am I doing this? Good fucking question. I don't have a good answer for that yet, unfortunately. I'll go back a couple (or three now--sheesh!) days and explain. I wish it could be done with brevity, but it probably won't...
After ruining the tires on my F-150, I went to Wal Mart to get a pair for the back axle. That was a Sunday, and they said they could get me in and out without an appointment, so there I went. I ordered the cheapest set of Goodyear Viva 2s they had, made sure they were in stock, and inquired about the wait. "About forty-five minutes," I was told. The time was 3:45. I said fine, and walked to Burger King, because the food is fast and cheap (kind of like me). I got to the BK, and there came upon me a realization that if I were simply dropped into this place without knowing where I was, I would have determined within five minutes that I was Ottawa, KS. Every ugly teenager had an even uglier baby, and a high percentage of the people in the building were either on Meth, were dealing Meth, or were looking for Meth. Neat town, Ottawa.
Finished eating, and went back to Wal-Mart. Truck is still in the lot. Tire is completely flat now, so I suppose I made one good decision that day. Already about a half hour had elapsed, so I figured I'd do a little grocery shopping. I was pretty much out of food at home, and unless these grease-monkey magicians had a few tricks up their sleeves, the vehicle wasn't getting two new tires for quite a bit more than fifteen minutes.
With my disposition, shopping at Wal-Mart is hell. It's somehow worse than any other retailer, because it has a tendency to extract all the worst elements of society within its walls. I already know I'm the least patient person I know, and inside Wal-Mart it becomes worse. Ugly people become somehow more ugly in Wal-Mart. Obese people shop for clothes they can grow into in Wal-Mart. The poor become poorer in Wal-Mart, and so on and so on and so on. It's a tremendously frustrating cycle. And now I'm stuck in Wal-Mart.
For the above reasons, I consciously try to limit my exposure to Wal-Mart. It makes me a worse person when I'm there, and I already know I'm a pretty low-quality individual when it comes to inter-personal relationships. I'm not sure I could be friends with myself. I don't like that I'm an insufferable ass. Working on it....quite a project... But I jump through the hoops and do the necessary shopping, despite their high prices. Wal-Marts are only as competitive in their pricing as they need be. In Ottawa, they have a virtual monopoly on many items, and they know it. It's a hidden tax on the poor and stupid...count me as both, I suppose...
But I'm finally ready to check out. I get into the only check out line with one outfit in it, and started to unload my cart. The guy in front of me looks at what I'm doing, and says, "Oh, I'm sorry, wait a minute," then this mother-fucker starts placing items in his cart up onto the conveyor right in front of me. "This is two separate purchases," he says to the cashier, and he smiles at her. I am not smiling. He's sitting here bullshitting with the cashier, and his mom, or whoever the hell he is with, and he's got all fucking day to do whatever the hell it is that he's going to do, and he's just going on with his business, because he probably has done stupid shit like this his entire life. He simply doesn't know any better, and now I'm seething.
Somehow, I manage to avoid physical confrontation. I think it may be that I scare people to death with my attitude and outward appearance. I've shaved my head since I was about twenty-one, partly because I started losing my hair at a young age, and I didn't have the patience to try and make a receding hairline look like anything other than it is. Other people can care about that--not my deal. I haven't paid for a haircut in a decade and a half, and I never have to bitch the barber. They can't do much with an infertile field, anyway. That being said, I guess some people think I look mean. And I'm kind of a big guy, too. Not fat, but pretty well built. I work construction, and I'm in decent shape. I'm strong. People don't want to fuck with me, and generally speaking, it's probably a good idea. I'm pretty wound up, and although historically I only take out my frustration on inanimate objects, things do not end well for those apt to provoking me. I don't strike first, but shit man...don't strike...
So I'm pissed. The guy in front of me knows it, too. So now he's kind of in a hurry, because I'm slamming my items right up next to his as he's trying to make space for them on the conveyor. I'm doing everything I can so that he has to hand the items individually to the cashier, which he ends up doing for the last four or five items. Neither he nor the cashier wants to engage me in any way by this point. It's not a security moment, as long as the two can successfully negotiate an efficient transaction. Their hands being somewhat forced, they manage to do this, and the situation has been diffused. And it's not like I'm in a hurry. They have yet to page me to inform me my vehicle is done. I can go nowhere. Yet I'm pissed that I couldn't get through the checkout a little quicker. The time is now 5:10.
I take my groceries back to the tire center, and see that the truck is at least now in the shop. The woman working the desk tells me, "They need you to sign this waiver. Those tires don't meet the manufacturer's recommendations." They did not page me to inform me of this fact--they just all sat around looking at my truck, waiting for me to appear before beginning the work on the vehicle. The intercom is right there in the phone system. That's all they had to do to get me to sign the waiver. They already had a copy of a previously signed waiver in their possession. I had to sign an identical waiver on Nov. 1 of last year, when I'd purchased two tires identical to those I was now purchasing. Without notice of any of these facts presented to the worker, I signed the waiver, and the shop monkeys started installing the tires.
Sometimes, I'm impatient with cause. This was one of those times. It happened after I'd realized I was the most impatient person I'd ever known, and I think in this instance, I handled it quite well. I might have been emotionally spent from not blowing my top over the previous incident in the check-out line. I don't know. They had a kiosk with several maps, and I started looking through the newest version of the Rand McNally Kansas City Streetfinder. I've been working in KC, and since I had nothing better to do for the forseeable future, I thought I'd see if there were any magical new streets to get me around town any better. There weren't. One feature I liked was the indication of one-way streets. In the oldest grids of KC, almost all the streets are one-ways. I've been around town enough to know which direction most of these are, but I thought that was a handy feature. What I didn't like was the new page numbering system. Some genius at Rand McNally apparently decided to number all pages in the United States, regardless of your geographic point of interest. So now, one has to jump from page 2567 to page 3145 to move a block North or South. Easier for Rand McNally, I suppose, but hopelessly stupid. Stupid. Someone probably got a promotion for this idea.
But I'm standing there watching these people put tires on the truck, and I think about stealing this map. I have the money to buy it. I don't particularly want it. I just think it would be a somewhat fitting payback to Wal-Mart, to the Walton and Glass families, and to these fucking idiots who were making me wait in Ottawa for a truck that could have easily been done by this point. It's now 5:45. And it's everything I can do not to steal this map.
Eventually, the truck is released from the jack, and the boys are again standing around the vehicle gawking at its contents and it's general state of disrepair. All the dents and dings on the vehicle are a direct result of impatience. I run the vehicle into things that needn't be hit on a regular basis. I'm a menace on the road. I text on the telephone while driving, knowing it is unsafe, and not caring. I can't help it. Driving bores me. I don't like it. It's just one other thing that seems to get in my way, and prevents me from a more efficient use of my time. Anyway, all the dents, dings, scrapes, missing mirrors--all my fault. I know it. At least it's a source of amusement to others on this occasion.
I walk up to the desk. "I'd like to pay for that thing," I tell the woman. "They're not done with it yet," she replies. I walk to the window and look out into the garage again. They are most certainly done with it. They're now all leaned over the truck bed and looking at the various items strewn about, and laughing to each other. I don't know why they find it such a source of amusement, but they do. I point out the window. "You call that working on it?" I asked her. She kind of rolls her eyes, and says, "Let me see if I can get the final bill." She waddles off and runs down one of these idiots, who is now clearly just burning time so that he can clock out and go home, and he reluctantly processes whatever needed to be processed to print my bill. I think he had to hit one button on his mobile keypad.
Finally, I've paid for the repairs, and I'm on my way home. There is a thick fog which doesn't at all prevent me from breaking every law of the road on my trip. Stop signs, not for me. Red lights? I check for a camera, pedestrians, and other traffic, and I disregard these. Speed limits? I prefer not to. As I said before, I'm a menace, and I know it. I don't like it, but I know my limitations, and I'm going to do all I can in the future to be better about this sort of thing. Right now, it's just not in my toolkit...
After it was obvious that I was the least patient person I'd ever personally known, I called my Aunt Susan in California. She's married to my dad's brother, and I call her occasionally to let her know I'm still totally fucking insane. I got the answering machine, and left the message: "Yeah, it's Slade. It occurred to me that you and Dallas strike me as two very patient people. I wondered how you did that. That is all." A stupid message, to be sure. I'm not good with leaving messages. Hell, I'm also not good at speaking to people directly. I'm not good at ignoring people. These are just a few deficiencies of character, and they all somehow point back to the impatience issue as I see it today.
What I had to do next was watch some TV. I don't watch much, but I have to do it sometimes to get out of my own head. This was one of those moments. I would pace the floors and wear out the carpet if I didn't do something with my time, and right then and there, as I was only waiting for that phone to ring. I was messed up, and for the first time in my life, I knew exactly why.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
im-pa-tient (adj) 1. Unable to wait patiently or tolerate delay; restless. 2. Unable to endure irritation or opposition; intolerant. 3. Expressing or produced by impatience: shot me an impatient stare. 4. Restively eager or desirous: impatient to begin.
That's me. I realized at about 3pm on Sunday, January 17, 2010 that I had never met a more impatient person than myself. It should have come to me much sooner, but I was likely too impatient to wait for the realization. I was napping, and I stirred to a text message that stated simply, "Patience is a virtue." That's all it said. What the hell good was this going to do me? We've all heard it dozens of times, to be sure, and I don't know if it was the messenger or the right message at the right time, or what exactly led me to the realization that I was living one hell of a dishonorable life regarding the patience question.
At first, I was mad. Those who struggle under the excessive burden of constant impatience understand this phenomenon well. Who the hell is she to tell me anything about patience? What makes her patience better than mine? More quickly and importantly, who cares? I had things to do. I had to get tires put on the truck, as I'd been stuck that day for about the twentieth time this winter in the Kansas sludge.
I shouldn't have gotten stuck at all. The vehicle started going sideways, and finally backwards as I attempted to navigate up a driveway that morning. This is country living we're talking about here--gravel roads, long and drifted drives--not some goddamned struggle to get to thirty-ninth street. I say driveway, but it was more or less a path carved through part of the yard close to the driveway. I tried to turn around there--it's a circle drive, and one side was much more clearly drawn than the other. But I got stuck. Again.
Why is this? How could I go through 38 years of life and not realize I'd never met a more impatient person than myself? It seems a bit excessive. Was I too impatient to suffer the fool who happened to be more impatient than I the moment I might have met him? I've met thousands of people. Thousands. Not one among them may I count in my class of frustration.
I'll have to finish this story some other time. I don't have time for it right now.
That's me. I realized at about 3pm on Sunday, January 17, 2010 that I had never met a more impatient person than myself. It should have come to me much sooner, but I was likely too impatient to wait for the realization. I was napping, and I stirred to a text message that stated simply, "Patience is a virtue." That's all it said. What the hell good was this going to do me? We've all heard it dozens of times, to be sure, and I don't know if it was the messenger or the right message at the right time, or what exactly led me to the realization that I was living one hell of a dishonorable life regarding the patience question.
At first, I was mad. Those who struggle under the excessive burden of constant impatience understand this phenomenon well. Who the hell is she to tell me anything about patience? What makes her patience better than mine? More quickly and importantly, who cares? I had things to do. I had to get tires put on the truck, as I'd been stuck that day for about the twentieth time this winter in the Kansas sludge.
I shouldn't have gotten stuck at all. The vehicle started going sideways, and finally backwards as I attempted to navigate up a driveway that morning. This is country living we're talking about here--gravel roads, long and drifted drives--not some goddamned struggle to get to thirty-ninth street. I say driveway, but it was more or less a path carved through part of the yard close to the driveway. I tried to turn around there--it's a circle drive, and one side was much more clearly drawn than the other. But I got stuck. Again.
Why is this? How could I go through 38 years of life and not realize I'd never met a more impatient person than myself? It seems a bit excessive. Was I too impatient to suffer the fool who happened to be more impatient than I the moment I might have met him? I've met thousands of people. Thousands. Not one among them may I count in my class of frustration.
I'll have to finish this story some other time. I don't have time for it right now.
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