REBLOG: And none could say they were surprised: on #Ferguson

On August 10, 2016August 10, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

In honor of the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s murder (which, I admit, was yesterday) I’m reposting this.

I keep needing to remind myself of something: I have liked every cop I’ve ever known. The number’s not large, mind you; four, perhaps five people, one of whom’s faces I can remember clearly but whose name has escaped me. At least one is a Facebook friend who may read this. Alternate universe me actually is a police officer; if you Google search my real name most of the results you’ll get are for the other guy since I’m as diligent as I can be about keeping my name off the Web.

But as much as I want to generalize, I keep having to remind myself: I know cops. I am friends, or at least cordial acquaintances, with two of them. They aren’t all bad people, as much as it frequently seems like they are. They’re just embedded in a system that encourages them to be bad people, and if…

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In which I’m really seriously not Amazon

On August 9, 2016August 9, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work9 Comments

I’m starting to develop some ridiculous not-actually-PTSD form of PTSD about the word “delivery.” I don’t wanna hear it anymore and I’m starting to encourage my people to do whatever the hell they need to do to pick their shit up so that it cuts down on the bullshit I have to put up with to schedule deliveries.

Short version: we need another truck and no less than three new delivery guys. But we do not have them, at least in part because corporate has not yet been convinced to invest in the truck, which the employees are not about to pool their money to buy. We have one truck, one delivery guy and a series of temps who keep quitting, some (including today’s) who quit in the middle of their goddamned shifts. These types of things have detrimental effects on getting everyone the furniture they want and deserve in a proper amount of time. Then people call me. And they yell at me. Even though I had nothing to do with any part of this. It’s getting tiring.

And these things have a cascade effect, so right now for various reasons we’re scheduling deliveries about a week and a half out. It can get worse if you live in the middle of gatdamb nowhere, as lots of people in northern Indiana and southern Michigan do. We might only get out to your neck of the woods (literal fucking woods) one day a week, and if that day is already full for some reason you get to wait for the next one.

I understand it’s inconvenient. It’s also inconvenient that I don’t get paid until your shit is in your house. So believe me when I say that I want your shit in your house as much as you do, because I don’t get paid until it is, okay? But I don’t drive the damn truck and I can’t put twenty-five goddamn deliveries on it on the same day because then ten of those people don’t get their shit and this starts all over again.

Motherfuckers are spoiled by Amazon, is what I’m saying. People are conditioned to think that they can get goddamn anything within two days. And if I had distribution centers all over the damn country and UPS and FedEx and the US Postal Service at my disposal, I might be able to make that shit happen.

I don’t.

Deal with it. Thank you.

Today’s highlight: calling a guy listed as picking up two nightstands to tell him his nightstands that he was going to pick up were there and that he should come to pick up his two nightstands.

The second I started telling him the warehouse hours he started yelling at me. Bitching and yammering about how he’d “spoken to the truck driver that morning” and that he was supposed to get his shit delivered tonight. I know for a fact he didn’t talk to our damn delivery driver, who was going to Chicago this morning because jesus fuck I don’t even want to to get into it.

He probably ranted for three solid minutes until I got a damn word in edgewise and he realized that I was calling about the nightstands he was going to pick up GEE ASSHOLE WHERE DID YOU GET THAT IDEA and not the other furniture that he’d ordered from somewhere else, at which point he transitioned directly into interrogating me about warehouse hours (which was when he interrupted me, remember) without a single syllable of apology about the yelling and cussing.

I got raised better than this. I thought everyfuckingbody got raised better than this. Clearly not.

OH SHIT

On August 8, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking8 Comments

I almost forgot to blog today. That would have been a disaster of insignificant proportions. I’m literally in bed right now writing this on my phone. 🙂

So, uh, hi?

In which they’re still up there

On August 7, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

The keys– and let me remind you, for those of you not terribly prone to read post headlines, that they were not my keys– are still on top of the rafter, despite the intermittent engineering efforts of half a dozen reasonably smart guys with access to duct tape, oversized ladders and steel rods. At one point a cell phone was attached to what amounted to a jury-rigged fifteen foot long selfie stick to attempt to find the keys via recorded video. No luck.

They are gone now. They are ex-keys. The owner has given up.

(My best week of sales so far, not that I expect anyone else to care. Also, book sales are up. Have I mentioned I sell books? Buy books! Leave reviews!)

Anyway. There is little else going on at the moment; I only just realized that it’s August and for the first time in the past decade and a half I’m not panicking about school starting, which is producing no small amount of warm fuzzy feelings in my gut. I’m sitting in my recliner in the living room watching Sarah & Duck because I can’t find the remote so screw it. Sarah just bought Duck a new chair.

I don’t know where Sarah gets her money from.

Neither of these people are me

On August 6, 2016August 6, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work8 Comments

8a202184c338637c55139ba665ce60e1c5ced87cf032df9e1131b7b21b7e31d6.jpg You may have had a bad day today.

But look on the bright side:

You did not, somehow, while idly tossing your keys over your head and catching them, trying to kill time with fifteen minutes left in your shift, manage to get your keys stuck on a rafter fully fifty feet off the ground when there is no ladder higher than thirty feet on the premises, thus locking yourself out of both your car and your home with absolutely no way to get your keys that anyone can figure out.

You are also not the person responsible for loading out six thousand dollars worth of furniture into a U-Haul and doing it incorrectly, a mistake that the owners of the furniture did not discover until they had unloaded the U-Haul into their new house– in fucking Indianapolis.

Go ahead, ask if we’ve figured out who the two extra pieces that were put on the U-Haul and weren’t supposed to be there are actually supposed to go to.

Feel free to psychoanalyze me

On August 5, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized3 Comments

The Olympics start tonight, if you’re into that. I personally am not. For my part, I’ll count them a success if none of the athletes die and the Games themselves don’t lead to a global pandemic. My years as an educator have predisposed me to high standards, you see.

I’ve been having weird dreams lately, guys. I generally don’t remember my dreams at all– more than one in a month that I remember past my morning shower is unusual. So the fact that I can still remember dreams from three of the past five days and am pretty certain I can reconstruct the other two given some time is Goddamned weird, and possibly a sign that I’ve been a bit too sleep-deprived lately. And, again, in addition to the fact that I’ve remembered them, they’ve been weird dreams, mostly dreams about people I have little contact with outside of occasional Facebook likes and haven’t seen in years. One of them was about trying to get a woman to take me back after a mutual breakup; in the real world we not only never dated but I was never even into her like that. She’s married with a couple of kids now and we haven’t spoken face-to-face in damn near a decade and a half. Another was about going to New Orleans with three of my oldest friends– or, to be a bit more precise, two of my oldest friends and one of their husbands– only to realize partway through that the husband was with the wrong woman and that everyone had been really uncomfortable the entire time and I just hadn’t noticed.

Also, I swear to you that I’ve had dreams set in this weird proto-New-Orleans before. I’ve never been to Louisiana, much less New Orleans specifically, so it’s really odd that my brain has this chunk of NO mapped out well enough to revisit it in more than one dream.

Oh, and I woke up seriously mad at the husband, and had to fight off the urge to text one of them to tell them about it.

Three hours until my eye doctor appointment. I have high hopes that fiction might actually be accomplished. Or at least lunch. Cleaning. Something. I also got Searching for Malumba available at Smashwords. It is, naturally, griping at me about Various Issues, so it’ll pop up at the other non-Amazon services as soon as I get around to fixing whatever it’s mad about. But it’s up at Smashwords!

More later, if anything interesting strikes me.

In which there is nothing going on

On August 4, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

It’s been several days since I wrote a blog post with more than a few sentences of original content in it, so it would probably be good to do that today, I suppose. The problem is that immediately after writing a post about how much I liked my job I immediately went straight into a couple of nightmare days, including one where there was only two of us (one of the “us” being me, of course) available to unload two trucks full of furniture, a job that normally involves no less than five people.

It took four fucking hours. Normally, we’re done in less than one. I hurt myself halfway through, but by then a third person had shown up, so he took over for me. Don’t be alarmed, it was just a muscle pull, but shit. My least favorite thing about working at this job is being sweaty all the time. I’m basically at the point where I’m coming to work on Tuesdays prepared to give myself a sponge bath in the men’s room after the truck gets unloaded. On the plus side, I did well in sales this week with the weekend still to come, but holy shit did I have to wade through some nonsense in order to get that accomplished.

But anyway.

I’m going to get some fiction written tomorrow if it kills me. I want a book out by Halloween, goddammit, and since it’s August and all I probably ought to get moving on getting the effing manuscript finished. There really isn’t much more to go; it’s mapped out in my head, I just need to get everything left onto the damn page. Screen.

Whatever.

I keep almost writing posts about the election, and I’m pretty sure that I’ve written less about this election than any other one since, probably, 2000, when I only barely had a blog. Donald Trump has lost the power to meaningfully piss me off, it seems, and I just don’t believe that he actually has any chance to win the election, so it’s just a matter of enduring the whole mess until it’s over. It’s not like there’s not been plenty to write about, I just haven’t been able to muster the will to bother.

Tomorrow I have an actual day off. I have an eye appointment at 2:30. Hopefully I’ll use the time before that productively, somehow, and not just crawl the hell into bed and die again. We’ll see.