Bag of Sugar to Plant to Human

There is another plant at work that I take care of–protect with my life, really.  Had I not known it had been Julie’s I’d let someone else have their way with it.  As she was preparing to move, Julie donated to us a sun-starved aloe, maybe actually her mother’s.  I took it under wing, trimming the dead and dying and placing it on the sunny breakroom sill.  It’s green again, and I do what I can to keep it that way:  Every day, first thing, I make sure with a finger that someone hasn’t watered it.  I saw Nikki peer into the pot, and I was quick to say, “It’s good.  I watered it last week.  It’s probably good for a couple more weeks.  I’ve been tempted many times to send out a staff email alerting them to leave that plant to me, but I don’t want to get possessive.  I wouldn’t so much as pretend to deny that that little aloe is a surrogate Julie.  I care for and protect it as I’ve wanted to Julie, to demonstrate, if only to myself, that I’m capable, and in so doing ameliorate my guilt and shame.  It helps me, too, to subdue the frustration of that old hopeless hope, which continues to burn and sometimes flairs.  Love, in-love–I don’t know the difference, but the feeling remains.  I have love, and that Julie doesn’t want it is irrelevant to that fact.  It is, again, love regardless.  Is this love she will not take only hers? or does it now await someone else?  Is love love?  For all the unique reasons it exists for Julie, how could it be regifted intact to someone else?  To believe it could be that easy would altogether marginalize Julie, and I don’t want that, though I don’t know why.

I’ve been told how Julie seethed and stomped about when the flowers were delivered to her.  Had I been there, I think she would have confronted me again, and I would have, again, refused to defend myself and apologized for a blameless act.  Trying to spark a dialogue, I had, yet again, provoked a territorial defense.  Those flowers, of course, are long dead, but the peace lily is thriving and blooming.  I repotted it, giving most of the plant to others and returning the remainder to the same pot and cachepot.  This plant, a reminder of emotional support, gets no less precious treatment than the aloe.  Though Julie is gone from Twin Hickory, not all of my paranoia went with her.  I am not comfortable there feeling as I do that I yet must be on my best behavior, that even a slip five years down the road will validate management’s label of me as an emotional loose cannon with an “ongoing” attitude problem.  That plant must outlive my stay at Twin Hickory, which will be much longer yet, unless I can find my way out of the Henrico library system altogether.

I took the day off to write, because I need more time to do it than work and the commute allow me, and it’s more rewarding.  Don’t tell me a job is it’s own reward–that’s bullshit.  If a job is your life, it’s not a job.  My life is much larger than my job, for which Henrico County has not rewarded me or my coworkers with raises for going-on four years while they chase the technological Jones’ with “upgrades” that don’t make our work lives any easier.  No plant gives me solace from that frustration.

Writing is not my life, either, though.  Just as my job is a means to feeding myself, writing is the means to discovering my self.  Were I paid to make this quest I would feel much more rewarded, much more complete, much nearer my goals.  Love is one of my goals, and I’m still desperate for it; but it’s still winter, too, so I am little up to the pursuit.  Instead, I think and write about love, little though I know about it.  I’m still reading Why We Love.  There is no chapter on unrequited love.  Breakup is as close to the subject as the author gets.  Julie and I did break up, in a sense.  The emotional attachment might have been all mine, but it was nonetheless painful for both of us.  In my goofy, awkward, painful way, I try to make it up to both of us by taking care of an aloe in a chipped pot.  It’s the way I’ve done anything involving Julie.  How could I possibly change now? and in what possible way could this offend her?

“We Understand”

Did I tell you about the plant?  It landed on my desk the day after the tribunal, the first of two consecutive days I took off in order to get away from Julie for the week and write what I thought then was the last post of Satellite Dance.  Of course, I didn’t know the plant was there until I made it back to work, but Angie informed me it created quite a stir, and that only through serious conscience-searching did the curious leave the little card envelope sealed for me to open myself.  The plant was a peace lily in a bright orange pot.  The card said, “We understand.  Hang in there.”  It wasn’t signed.  A florist had delivered it.  Only Angie and Bethany ventured a query about it.  I told them only that the card wasn’t signed.  The message was mine.  I smiled impishly to think of the overheating the rumor mill must have suffered in speculation of the sender and message.  I don’t speculate much myself.  No, I don’t know who it was, and, yes, I’d like to know, but they don’t want me to know.  It’s a horse with perfectly good teeth, is all I know–well, that and that it lives at the library and is a hell of an ally.  Just when I was feeling my most isolated and friendless, someone dares to step up and step in and say, “We understand.”  It could be the most timely and necessary gift ever given me.  On my desk, where I could see it and touch it, it got me through that last month of Julie, offering support and peace of mind that came to me from nowhere else in that building.

In this first week without her, it continues to offer support and solace.  It is a friend, as others, I hope, will become.  No longer tiptoeing through a minefield of paranoia–hers as well as mine–I am free to do my job.  The person I was before–that acerbic, angry man–left with Julie; in fact, existed only relative to her.  How long it will take anyone to realize that and adjust their judgement of me is not my concern, though a certain vanity cares a little how I am perceived; but they are not even potential friends.  I know who those people are–I’ve seen the judgement in their eyes, as I could see it in Julie’s, though theirs is much subtler, perhaps becasue of the relative absence of malice.  All the judgements are irrelevant.  I like my work, and I like the people with whom I work most closely.  I talk to them, I ask after their families.  I show interest in them with the hope they’ll show interest in me.  I want to get along, not be alone.

To say the whole Julie thing is behind me would be a lie, though one I try almost incessantly to believe.  “Out-of-sight, out-of-mind” is hardly accurate.  Her nameplate on the whiteboard was removed the first day she was gone and the gap filled by lowering those above; Tupperware cups she’d brought in to hold the transit-hold flags have been replaced with something more useful; and the last of the holds with her handwriting on the slip has either been picked up or deleted.  I had no hand in any of it.  I’m not the only one eager to move on from this mess, which might serve as Julie’s legacy at Twin Hickory.  I can think of nothing else she’s left behind but in a few select hearts.  No, I’m not over it, but I refrain from initiating reference to it, preferring, instead, to looking forward.  I did tell Megan what I thought of Julie in a few terse words, just to get it off my chest, but only Becky has spoken to me directly about it, intimating my relief.  I was grateful that she cared, though I was more expressive of my lingering bitterness over the handling of the affair than of my gratitude to her.  The bitterness will linger for some time, because my questions are not satisfied with silence for an answer.  Things swept under the rug make a lump that’s always there to be tripped over.  It will likely remain difficult for some time to accept Julie’s departure as resolution, but it’s all the resolution I will get.  It’s a pretty damned good one as they go, though, and, without doubt, the best one I could have hoped for:  The one person I couldn’t get along with is gone, and with her the hostility that poisoned the workplace.  My peace lily is thriving, and with good reason.

Magnum Hopus

Thursday I couldn’t be pulled from my writing to shave and shower for work, but I didn’t get on my bike ungroomed for my day off Friday.  I believe my priorities are straight:  Compared to my social life, work is little more than a paycheck, and as long as both Julie and I are there the paycheck is way too small.  I have work to do outside of the library that’s worth much more.

I got back down to Carytown, but my first stop was well past it–Quirk–an art gallery on Broad past VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University). 

Quirk

The exhibit of handcrafted painted bikes and bike accessories was quite a bit less impressive than I’d hoped, but it had at least brought me back to a part of town I hadn’t hung about since I was selling blood to supplement my paper route money.  (If Id’ known where to sell spunk, I’d be living off the interest of that fortune today.  Hmm….)  It is no longer the seedy neighborhood I knew, but chock-a-block  with art galleries, cafes, and eclectic shops.  I popped into a couple other galleries and ate alone in the

Harlem Cafe

Harlem Cafe.  I could have eaten across the street at Comfort, which just got a big writeup in a Richmond glossy, but that’s the kind of thing that brings in the outsiders and squeezes out the locals, and I didn’t want to be one of those or be among them.  My Caribbean jerk chicken sandwich was excellent and cheap.  I asked the waitress about the place, prefacing with, “I always worry about a place when I’m the only person in it,” but she said they’d been open several years, but that most of their business was at night, with parties, music, and open-mic events.

I was disappointed to find the Richmond Book Shop closed.  Even in my college days a textbook’s toss away and in my woozy, blood-deprived meanderings I never managed to stumble in there despite the decadent allure of the faded posters and hand-written signs leaving only slits to peer through into a murky treasure trove stacked to the high ceilings.  At least that’s what I imagine is inside:  The sun and dirt on the storefront fill in the cracks between the postings, the latest of which, taped under “Closed,” read “Sorry.  It’s just too hot.”  In one of my rare silver-lining discoveries, I just sighed and thought, “Well, there’s incentive to get back down here.”  It’s at least another  mile past Carytown that I wouldn’t otherwise justify if I weren’t already headed to see James on Tobacco Row.

In a triangle park behind Shafer Court, on my way back west, toward Carytown, I stopped to call James.  He didn’t answer, and I moved on.  It would have been nice to see him, but I would have spent the rest of the day and probably quite a bit of the evening with him, stimulated enough with conversation but diverted from my agenda–simply, to talk to people I don’t know. See, in light of my desperation I have to parse my hopes, bring the future closer to the present, live not for love but for what becomes love.  I can’t pull love from another’s eyes, though I might see it there; it isn’t mine.  It might be some day, that love, but not from the eyes I hope or expect to see it in.  I’ll never know it until I’ve met it, smiled to it, said hello to it.  And that’s what I do now.  It might not yet be love I’m meeting on the sidewalks and in the shops, but aren’t the chances a lot better out there than in here?

It was yet another very hot day in Richmond, so that was motivation enough to duck into this shop and that.  Plan 9‘s CD collection has shrunken yet smaller in reaction to the new inventory tax.  I thought I’d augment my Belle and Sebastian collection, but their bin had been wiped out in the two weeks since I’d bought Dear Catastrophe Waitress.  I left with only a card announcing their appearance in D.C. in October, to which I probably can’t go.  (When I got home I slipped the card into a book, All Quiet on the Western Front, to flatten it back out, but forgot to remove it when I returned the book.)  I’ll give the missing CD’s a few weeks to show up in the used bin.

I crossed the street to the toy store, World of Mirth, where I’d gotten the l.s., to buy it’s companion magnet.  I’d retrieved the l.s. from Julie’s cabinet the day before.  It was more than half-exposed.  She had to have seen it. 

"Little something," retrieved.

Good:  Now she’ll know I’ve taken it back.  I decided to give it to Kevyn with its companion; she would appreciate it.  Thunder heralded the rain just before I stepped out into it.  I stood on the sidewalk and sighed, relieved, the soaking cooling my baked skin as the sidewalks cleared of shoppers scurrying for the shelter of recessed storefronts.  The light in the western sky told me it would be over soon.  I walked the away.  I didn’t get a block before it stopped.

Carytown has a psychic now, just past the 7-Eleven.  I don’t often walk up that far.  A sign hanging from the shingle announced half-off palm readings, now $10.  Without hesitation, I started to the door, but it said Closed, without apology, for the heat or otherewise.  I was more disappointed than at the bookstore.  I am a skeptic, but a hopeful one, and at the prospect of finding out (or being told, anyway) something positive about myself and being given some direction, I was willing to leave the skeptic outside and enter with hope.  (This from someone who can’t accept a god.)  This disappointment, as with the bookstore’s, will bring me back ever more hopeful of finding treasure.

I felt like buying myself a ring, so I went up another block to Alter Natives, because they’re local, non-profit and have interesting and inexpensive handcrafts.  The first thing the shopgirl said to me was, “Are you from Richmond?”  “Yep,” I answered, “born and–well, raised,” and I fessed up to my birth and six-month residencey in Hopewell.  I didn’t need to ask the same of her–not that I could tell through my particular atptitude for accent recognition or that her vitals were tattooed on her forehead–she told me:  She was from Chesterfield, came to the city to study world religions at VCU, and still lived down there in the Fan.  She appreciated the irony of my living carless in bike-anathemic Henrico County and having to pedal into town for all my fun.  It was just the two of us in there for half an hour before I left, but by the time I did we knew a lot about each other.  She even knows I’m open to love, because I had to ask her about the traditional way to wear the claddagh I’d just bought, and she looked it up on Wikipedia.  It’s on my right hand with the crown facing away from my heart. 

This wasn’t love, or even attraction–I didn’t give her The Eye–but a friendly, open conversation–all I can ask for right now, according to my adjusted standard.  Applicable, also, to this standard is the perceived need to always be doing what I can to be seen or make contact.  There’s still the reluctance to go home unsatisfied, but the satisfaction gets easier to find each week.

Leaving Alter Natives and heading back toward my bike, I wondered if I was heading home.  I stopped at the T where Belmont Street stopped at Cary to ponder the question.  Live music, unadulterated, undegraded, undiluted by the trip from studio to stereo, blasted crisp and clear.  My ears directed my eyes south down Belmont where they caught figures moving in a square of dark.  Without the warning thunder, it began to rain again.  I followed the sound to the sight.  The guitar and drum seemed slightly out of sync, but the closer I came to the music, the closer came the instruments to each other, as if I were uniting them with my approach.  They were a drummer and a guitarist in a one-car garage on the corner of an alley.  I sat down across the alley on a low wall that kept a tiny, sloping front yard from spilling on to the sidewalk and into the alley, but I hardly just sat.  The drum shoved me this way and that and pounded my foot into the grit, and the guitar, issuing with improbable volume and clarity from a ten-inch box that looked like a fifties radio, smoothed and rounded the rhythm in a wash of reverb.  All this and rain, too.

 ”Hey, man.  Mind if I join you?”

I turned.  “No, not at all.”

He introduced himself as Tyler.  I had a hell of a time getting my name through to him over the music and was tempted to let it go at Leon.  He’d just gotten off work at Weezy’s, a diner on Cary, and had been drawn as I had.  I was surprised there weren’t more behind him, in an unbroken line back to Cary.  Tyler’s glasses were held together at the temples with black electrical tape and tipped from the top toward his cheeks, as if looking down at his feet.  Sandy hair peeked from a dirty baseball cap.

“Man!” he said, “this is just the kind of music I’ve been looking to play!  The Band is my all-time favorite band, and these guys sound so much like them.”  I didn’t know, but I didn’t think so.

Tyler’s been in Richmond, via Harrisonburg, for five years.  He was in a bluegrass band up there, but hasn’t found a scene here to play in. 

The jam came to a consensual close after about twenty minutes.  I didn’t want to disturb the guys, but Tyler yelled, “Great stuff, man!”

“Thanks,” said the guitarist.

So I asked, “You guys gig anywhere?” hoping the verb didn’t betray my ignorance of the culture.

“No, but if you know of anyplace, let us know.”

I nodded.  Me?  Know of anyplace?  Do I look like I ‘d have connections?  I guess I must have at least sounded like it.

Tyler strolled across the alley to them.  I followed, reluctantly, feeling creepy not to.  Chris and Robert, guitarist and drummer, shared this cube with a washer and dryer lined on the wall near the opening, and a tv on top of them facing the wall.  Thin sheets of blue foam rubber suspended from the ceiling flapped lightly against the cinderblock walls in the breeze of a small box fan on the floor.

The rest of the band was in Georgia.  “They don’t get up here too often,” said Chris.  “What’s you band’s name?” said Tyler.

Chris looked at Robert, who shrugged but finally said, “Uh, the Chris Wickham Experience?”

Chris chuckled, said, “Yeah.”

Tyler offered his musicianship, and Chris took his email address.  Tyler’s effusing over The Band seemed to back Chris off a bit.

I watched Tyler shuffle up the alley, then asked Chris, “You think you’ll contact him?”

“I don’t know.  We need somebody, but….”

“Seems a bit sketchy,” said Robert, lifting his forehead from a cymbal he’d been tapping.

“Yeah,” said Chris, ” a little.”

“Well, you never know,” I said.

The rain had stopped.  I left them to their thing, hoping they weren’t rueing the intrusion.  Instead of going back to Cary, though, I trod up the alley the way Tyler’d gone. He’d disappeared pretty quickly, so I figured he lived along here somewhere.  Four doors up I was hailed from the bottom back porch of a duplex.  Tyler sat in a plastic chair at a plastic table.  I followed a buckled sidewalk under the shade of an elm, through a dusty yard the rain hadn’t reached through the tree.  Two concrete steps nearly met the wood porch that canted toward them.  On the table in a plastic glass painted with hibiscus floated sharp ice cubes in tea.  A glass ashtray behind it betrayed a roach.  Tyler’s eye’s betrayed he’d been smoking it.

“Want some?”

I did, but I knew I’d feel paranoid in public.  I told him that.

“That’s cool.”

The guys started up again.  It didn’t carry so well in this direction.

“They’re not going to get back to me,” Tyler said.

In the time it took me to get back to my bike I’d decided to see Winter’s Bone at the Westhampton.  All day I was sure I wasn’t going, that it would be a downer, but then, deciding that it wasn’t about the mood but the movie, and that the movie would probably be good, I headed that way, a couple miles closer to home.

I caught the seven o’clock show.  Of course, it was dark when I got out, and I knew the batteries in my headlight were as good as dead.  A man and a woman stood in front of my bike, talking.  I heard, from him, “structure” and “Catholic Church.”  He was talking about himself.  I crossed the street to take a picture of the theater, but the light was too low.  I continued to the 7-Eleven around the corner on Libbie and bought batteries.

They were–he was–still talking in front of my bike when I got back to it, and they were close enough to it that I had to step to the curb side of it to access the light.

“We were thinking of stealing your bike,”  the woman said to me.  Her hair was cleanly blond–no “dirty” to it–and thick and short.  Black-rimmed glasses hovered over sharp cheekbones aligned with a strong square jaw.

I looked into her brown eyes and said, “Couldn’t figure out the combination, huh?” 

“Nope.”  I’d expected something a bit more clever.

I opened the lock but didn’t leave.  My dinner, half a sub, was already spent, so I sat nearby and ate a nutrition bar from my satchel.  Still he talked about religion and himself.  She was listening, asking cogent questions, making intelligent comments, but she seemed engaged more on a professional level than a personal one.  I hadn’t seen them in the theater.  Perhaps they’d been in Phillip’s next door.  He began to seem much younger than she.  I began to think this was a first date, after an online correspondence.

As I approached my bike she said to me, “Really, we were going to steal your bike.”

“Well, I gave you a shot at it.  It’s been unlocked for five minutes.”

 ”Ah, but you were too close.”

I didn’t want to, but I glanced at the now-young man.  He was looking at her with a creeping dread of losing her attention, and maybe a little guilt for talking so much and precipating the loss.

“Better luck next time,” I said, and winked.  This was satisfaction.  I pedalled home behind a bright headlight.

There’s a long way to go yet.  The transfer isn’t happening.  I got sick of waiting to hear something, so I called the woman who’d sent out the solicitation.  She explained, apologetically, that this was just a flyer for interest, and that they do it every year (though not last year or the year before, believe me!) and put the responses on file in case of emergency openings.  So now Fridays can’t come soon enough and are more deserved each week as I pass through the yet-tighter gauntlet of Monday-through-Thursday of Julie.  Staving off the desperate aspect of my pursuit is contingent upon stockpiling these little satisfactions, making progress as much toward what I want as away from what I don’t.  This also means entirely ignoring Julie–not even looking at her from behind.  So I’m a creep or a jerk–or both–to her, but not caring what she thinks of me is as important as getting into town on the weekend.  I can’t afford to waste guilt on it.  How or if it will ever get better at work, I don’t know, but my efforts at making my true life better are what matter first.  I can’t even afford to care what you think of me.  Where I’m going I’ll get to following my own path.  I have a paycheck coming to me that’s much larger than Henrico County will ever give me.

The Norse God of Escape

I have not been back to Carytown since my street-corner recitation.  I’ve hardly been out at all.  I’ve allowed myself many excuses for it.  Being without a car in the suburbs, I often play myself the distance card:  How far am I willing to go?  Less than three miles east takes me to the western border of Richmond and nine more miles puts me out the other side.  That is the range to which I’m conditioned.  North and south, my conditioning is the eighteen-mile trip to work and back.  By Friday evening, my best chance to find a social life, I’ve put ninety miles on my legs, which need some kind of rest (and a good massage, which I don’t get) before the next work week.  I can’t always motivate myself to get back on the bike, especially if (as has often been the case already this summer) I have just plowed through humid, triple-digit heat to get home.  My imagination, or lack of it, contributes to my inertia by claiming, after looking at the movie listings, that there’s nowhere to go, anyway.  Neither have I been encouraged by my efforts when I have managed to get out and about.  No matter where I go, I seem to be the only person there, or if not, am not welcome.  Sub shop, coffee shop–I can sit in there for an hour and no one else will have come in.  And forget about hanging out in a restaurant alone:  One person in a booth?  Move to the the bar or clear out.  The last movie I took in at the Westhampton (Please Give) was a late-afternoon show, so I ate dinner afterwards next door at Phillip’s.  I’d never been served so quickly, but when the check was slipped onto the table without a proffer of dessert or another beer, I knew that I was not experiencing efficiency but expediency.  I had been prepared to stay awhile with another beer, dessert, coffee, and maybe something harder while I wrote, but while it was all conveyed very politely, the message received was, “Get out so we can serve a bigger party and make more money from that booth.”  Not encouraging, but I can either play the oppressed minority or find my way to where I’m welcome, can have a good time, and meet people.  I don’t know where that is, but haven’t I always said I like a challenge?  But that box I’m in contains my imagination, as well.  The answers are all outside the way I’ve been thinking, but my ideas have all rebounded from the walls all the way back to online dating, which I gave up when I finally admitted to myself, two years ago, that I wanted Julie.  (I swore I wouldn’t mention her!)  It’s not the way to go, but every time I chop it down it sprouts up somewhere else.  I never got anything more than conversation–some of it stimulating–from the online scene–certainly not a date.  I am not going back that.

Desperation is a mighty inhibitor of my imagination, distilling all social considerations down to the possibility of “success” (whatever that is).  Of course, by that standard, no venue is worthy of my effort to visit it or my presence there.  But what do I know of possibilities?  Who do I know is going to be at any of these places?  And desperation shows.  Being “after” more than the movie, meal or shopping, is a pretense that won’t hide, is an emanation that repels even on a psychic level.  Often, I can’t look at a woman on the street without conveying desperation.  At work, knowing this, I have tried to dowse the emanation, with the result of hardly feeling anything, even attraction, toward the women I see there.  I’ve all but forgotten how to play my eye game.

I’ve lain all my hopes and confidence upon the altar of Transfer.  I put all my meager faith in it and have effectively suspended “artificial” efforts at finding peace and love.  It’s as good a god as any, I guess; until I get away from Julie I won’t be over her, and until I’m over her I can’t find what I need, or even pursue it.  That is the ultimate excuse, and having accepted that, I have no excuse at all to not just go out and have a good time–one movie, one beer, one coffee, one art gallery, one impulsive purchase at a time.

GMAT, GRE, CLEP…?

I asked Greta again if she knew anything about the transfers, and this time she said that “they” were waiting for the end of the fiscal year before moving on the transfers.  Not much information, but more than I’d had.  I suspect she knows more, but between the bunker mentality borne of her retail experience and the executive privilege of witholding information in the name of professional discretion, what I got was the best I could have expected to get from her.  It’s a straw I will snatch.  No timetable, no process–that hasn’t stopped my hopes from packing my bags.  I even started a farewell letter to Julie, though I’ve already trashed it.  Forget advising myself against high hopes, because at this point they are a substantial boost of oxygen into the hermetic box called the Twin Hickory library.  I’m not blind to the chance of a negative outcome, I just don’t want to entertain it.  I’m even aware that raising hopes for the positive can give the negative devastating power, but I’ve chosen to take that as it comes and not modulate my reaction pre-emptively.  When I look ahead I can’t see Julie, so if I can maintain that focus my attitude will keep me in a job.  Job evaluations were conducted, despite no raises in sight (and Henrico County can see at least a couple more years ahead), and we were required to assess ourselves in writing, demonstrating how well we’ve performed over the last year, how well we reached the goals we had set, and what goals we intended to meet this year.  I was blunt:

I realize that a narrative will not make this part of your job easier for you, but I have to be honest, for whatever it costs me or is worth to you: My heart’s not in it. I do not know what goals I set last year, but I probably did not meet them all. I took no classes and am not interested in taking any. I would rather just do my job, which I like and feel I do well at. I have no further professional ambition as regards the library, except to not be here while a certain someone is, and, of course, I’d rather be closer to home, anyway. Given the impossibility of reaching that goal, I can only concentrate on my job and on strengthening relationships with the coworkers who aren’t afraid of me and will talk with me. I believe in our family despite the strain within it, and I really do want to get along with everyone. Emotionally, some days are better than others. You can probably tell which are which, and I hope I’m not affecting my “siblings” on the not-so-good ones.

I still try to challenge myself daily to make what we do more efficient. I’m glad to see some of my ideas, such as the re-orienting of the holds rubber bands and the sorting hour, were well received and doing the good I thought they would. I’ve weathered the attrition storm with, I hope, a level demeanor; and Java and STEP and whatever other new technological marvel they throw at us will only take some getting used to and is nothing I think will be difficult to master, as has nothing else I’ve had to get used to for my job.

Patrons are always my first concern as I work. Everything I do is with a consideration of their convenience and needs. I still consider myself a patron before an employee and feel it helps me empathize with them better and understand their needs in their words, which aren’t usually from the same vocabulary as ours as employees of the library.

I’m sure there’s much I didn’t cover, many competencies I missed, and I’m sorry. If you need me to do this more conventionally, let me know.

Perhaps that “impossibility” in April is not so much of one now, but my attitude has not much changed, and with summer, our busiest time, upon us, my diplomatic abilities will be strained, at least with coworkers, some of whom seem to be affronted by their duties.  One person in particular, whom Julie calls “Chuckles” but whom I refer to as “Slackles,” does little that lifts him off his ass.  Slackles, a few months ago, was a Head of Circulation at another branch in the Henrico system.  When he tried to take sexual liberties with someone in his office, he was demoted and shipped to us.  Nearly everything he says is full-stopped with a laugh, hence Julie’s nickname for him.  After he took a cell call in the stacks, I told him, “That was not cool.”  He answered, with a grin, “Thank you.”  A designated shelving hour to him means shelving the holds he’s just trapped, and the holds shelves are closer to the workroom than any other.  I could go on.  I have little enough patience with lazy coworkers, and I’ll have none at all at the end of the summer if they don’t step it up.  Even Julie has slackened, and I once admired her ethic.  She was designated to sort one hour, but took a look at the carts and said, “There’s nothing to sort” (a blind-wrong assessment), then proceeded to help the backup discharge books–that is, make work for the sorter.  Yet she wasn’t making the work for herself; she spent the entire hour discharging.  Halfway through the hour, when I realized she had no intention of sorting, I stepped into her job.

Readers of A Bright Ironic Hell readers might recall that it was just three weeks short of a year ago that I made similar disparaging statements about Julie (Steps Forward: Steps Back–especially the comments).  Back then, Julie lashed out, essentially forcing the closure of that blog.  That won’t happen this year, and its not my intention to provoke it.  It’s my intention to leave before I provoke anything, and I fear the summer stress–increased workload, the proportional slack to take up from some coworkers, and Julie–will have increasing influence over the better part of valor, and that as the summer wears on my self-control will wear out.  Of course, I hope I’m gone by then, and my hopes remain high, because it’s what I want–desperately.  But hope can’t be justified.  If all hope needed in order to be rewarded was a good reason, I’d have Julie and you wouldn’t be reading this.

It’s been a long weekend, in a good way, especially for the Monday off giving me an extra day without Julie and shortening the coming week with her to three days, but there’s not another holiday till Labor Day and the heat is picking up, too.  Hope, patience, heat, Julie–what other tests do I have to pass to get to Tuckahoe?  I have to know.

My Child Can Beat Up Her Child

The last post haunts me.  Will this child ever grow up? or will it just grow more powerful, until its tyranny is complete?  I say there will be tokens and notes, then think that because I say that I have the control to not let it happen.  Then I start planning what I’ll write on the repair slips.  I think of removing the l.s., but I don’t want to find it still there, after more than a week.  (It’s become partially visible since I had to replace another DVD case the day after I installed it.)  Every day with Julie more is difficult than the one before.  You should see our accidental approaches:  We scramble for somewhere else to go, something else to do, someone to speak to.  I’ve tried to steel myself against the cowardly avoidance and look her in the eye, but she will not oblige me, and I find myself staring at her, waiting for her to turn to me, but then I feel like a creep.  If I thought I had any real hope of a transfer, I wouldn’t try but cut my losses and get out of there, but Thomas says some people in the system are already trasnferring, so it seems that if mine were to be granted I’d know by now; and if I have to stay at Twin Hickory things between Julie and me have to change drastically, because I’m suffocating day by day, sealed in a shrinking box. 

If not for Thomas I might have suffocated already.  He’s the only person in the library I can talk to about Julie.  Yet I might see him only a few times a week.  On my day shifts I might be on the desk or in the stacks when he brings the branch mail; on the evening shift he’s been and gone before I show up for work.  Thomas has never known about the blogs, and I’d never tell him.  He wouldn’t get it.  He’d shake his head in disappointment and disbelief, but at least he wouldn’t judge me.  I can’t seem to get through to him, either, that I no longer want Julie, but maybe he just knows better.  He thinks I came on too strong at the trainwreck (I don’t call it that with him), that I should have been smoother and slower and gotten to know her, but he has no idea of the months of trial leading up to that.  Love must be a difficult concept for him, too, at least in the context of another guy’s pursuit:  He points to one eligible female coworker after another and says, “What about Soandso?”  My answer is always, “I don’t want that.”  He thinks available is good enough, that sex is the object, but though I often think that it would be a much simpler equation without love, the solution would not be acceptable.  Sex has never been and never could be a casual one-off.  No love, no sex–that simple.  Thomas likes to suggest what it would be like “gettin’ it on” with Julie (“Do you want her to scream your name or mine?”)  and still goads me with reports of the pliability of her flesh under his latest grope in the guise of a hug, but I’ve already done all that in my own mind, and though titillating, it’s only that.  Still, I’m not reluctant to join in, and I especially enjoy it in a crowd of coworkers, whose dirty minds I can challenge with their own inferences.  If he doesn’t see Julie when he comes in with the first hand-truck load of bins he says to me, “Where’s our baby?”  “I was going to ask you the same thing,” I’ve replied.  Across the workroom, I’ve called “Don’t you know her schedule yet?  Want me to write it down for you?”  On a recent Monday when she was off, I answered Thomas, “She’s not here.  She had a rough night.”  Thomas was quick on my implication, bursting into laughter.  “You ain’t right, Dion!”  No, I ain’t.  I’m just trying to grab the deep breaths before Thomas leaves and puts the lid back on the box.

With hope of transfer waning, I try to prepare for the long haul, but the struggle is day-to-day, and I’m already exhausted.  I arrived at work with a headache from muscle tension that ran from my neck to my middle back.  I told myself to give it till five-thirty–a half-hour after Julie was gone–before taking anything for it.  It nearly reached nausea pitch before then, but with her gone my jaw unclenched and the headache dissipated.  And that had just been a half-day with her.  This could be a very long haul; Julie will do nothing about it on her own, and will not accommodate my efforts.  She’s just not equipped.  She believes I want it this way; that’s how she justifies her inaction to herself.  That’s not speculation–no more speculation–but declaration.  If it’s not true, fucking let me know!

I’m stopping–all literary sensibilities aside, loose ends flapping in the breeze, metaphors mixed–fuck it.

Or If It Can Even Pull the Weight

Maddox leaned over my desk and whispered, “Have you read your email?  There’s an email from headquarters about transfers, saying anybody could put in for one, and there’s a form to fill out.”  How cute of him to be so discreet, as if it was any secret that I’ve wanted to get the hell out of this branch for more than half the time I’ve been at Twin Hickory.  My application was in the interoffice mail bin five minutes after I opened the email.  It was a very simple form–name, position, branch,  three choices of transfer.  Tuckahoe was my first choice.  I left the others blank.  The email was not detailed.  I’m not sure why the library system is offering transfers or when the transfers will be made.  I’m already daydreaming about a new start, eight miles closer to home, a million miles from Julie.  I have been careful about what I’ve wished for.  I know what I’d be gaining and what I’d be giving up, and I know the gain would be the easier to accept and would grow more gainful with time.  The losses I hope would diminish proportionally, though their initial store is no doubt double the prospected gains.  I have worked a long time with many of the people I’d be leaving, and I’ve only recently begun to appreciate their camaraderie.

But the balance of gain would hang on Julie:  Which would leaving her be?  I can’t know until I leave.  My clamorous cries to be away from her are merely a desperate admission of a reluctant resignation:  What I can’t change I must get away from.  But at the end of a day of not looking at Julie, as I tug on my bike shoes, I sigh and wish I’d taken that last glance I’d told myself not to take before I snatched the water bottle from my desk and marched away down the hall to change.  This had been no victory, no heroic endeavor, but a cowardly shirking of conscience.  I miss Julie; I’ll miss her then.  I would miss her more than I would the coworkers that have cared to get to know me, and for longer.  If leaving is a good thing, I might not realize it for quite some time afterward.

Yet I stand in the cart and look back upon the road hope has pulled me along, and through the settling dust I can’t see the horse catching up.  The transfer is not guaranteed.  I don’t know how it will be decided to whom the request is granted or when it will be dedided, but the cart somehow still inches forward.  I want to shorten my commute from eight hours a week to thirty minutes.  I want to work in the community in which I live.  That’s all I know of what I really want–or, rather, of what I can actually reasonably ask for.  I wonder if the horse will ever catch up.