I was looking for a .gif of the “Get me a G-O-B” scene, but this’ll do.
Last week was an exceptionally shitty week to be a furniture salesman– easily the worst single week in my entire two-year tenure, in fact, and is is nearly unimaginable that June will not end up as my worst single month as a furniture salesman as well. So when a previous customer called last week and said that she was out of town but wanted to make an appointment to come in and spend a few thousand dollars, I happily scheduled her for 10:00 this morning and came in anyway. While I was there, I caught a customer from yesterday who had had to postpone his purchase because of a freeze on his credit accounts– meaning that I had, in a single hour, on a day when I was not supposed to be at work, more total sales than in the seventeen days prior to that hour.
So, yeah. Come into work on my day off, but make hundreds of dollars in commissions during that hour I came in? No problem.
Then I returned something to Best Buy, came home, played video games, mowed the lawn, played more video games, got some important emails, responded to those emails, finished my renewal for my teachers’ license (which will expire in 2028, a year that is so far away I cannot comprehend it), played more video games, got some light cleaning done around the house, ate dinner, and now I’m writing thishere blog post.
My big plan for tomorrow? Breakfast is gonna be sausage grits and a fried egg. Ask me how excited I am about my breakfast tomorrow.
I am so excited about my breakfast tomorrow.
The remainder of the day will be split between more video games– can you tell I caved and bought Dark Souls Remastered once I realized I’d have a solid week where I didn’t have to go to work?– and the Composition of Fiction.
I just added a new microfiction, and bookmarks are shipping this week for any Patrons at the $5 or above tiers. Join my patrons today to be part of the niftiest club around!
I don’t believe in karma. The universe doesn’t care about me (or you) one way or another, and there is no balancing force or supernatural intelligence out there looking to balance any sort of scales, especially with regard to my specific life.
That said, sometimes shit happens and makes you wonder.
Monday afternoon sometime I had a guest come into the store. It became immediately apparent that the guest was Not Quite Right in some way or another; either impaired on some sort of substance or simply, for whatever reason, not in possession of a surfeit of social skills. She had a problem of some sort; there’s no need to go into the details, but it was immediately clear to me– as in within a sentence or two– that I was not the person to solve her problem, but that the person who could solve her problem was in the store, and I could take her to that person in mere moments, if she would shut up about her interminably long, ridiculous, boring story long enough for me to get a word in edgewise.
You have probably had this conversation at some point, right? Where the person takes forever to explain something to you, you provide the information they need in less than a sentence, and then they go “Yes, but” and repeat the entire story again?
It happened three times in a row until I simply walked away, assuming that either she would follow me or I would collect the person she actually needed to talk to and bring them to her.
At any rate, at about the halfway point during this conversation I noticed that this woman had her shirt on inside out. And I went into one of those stupid mental calculation things, where my desire to be done and away from this conversation and my additional desire to not do or say things that cause embarrassment to other people went to war with, well, let’s call it “basic fucking human decency” and leave it at that.
Basic human decency did not win. I did not point out the condition of her shirt to her, having no desire to poke the bear any further, and eventually got her into the custody of someone who could actually help her.
That 382-word short story exists as a preamble to this: this morning I did the following:
Took my dog to the vet;
Took my son to breakfast at McDonalds, and ate inside the restaurant;
Went to the post office;
Went to the bank; and
Went to Target;
and only at that point, halfway through my shopping trip at Target, did I notice that the shirt I’d thrown on that morning, a shirt that I’d pulled out of dirty laundry because I was planning on mowing the lawn after all the errands and there was no point to taking a shower (one of the advantages of being bald) or putting on clean clothes if I was just going to sweat them all up; only after all of that did I notice that I’d been out in public for two and a half hours and my shirt was– wait for it– inside out.
Context: my day has been long and tiring, and yesterday was largely consumed by dealing with my now-six-year-old son’s ass and the various horrifying products it was creating and dispensing. I am not in the mood to write a post, but I have always felt like this one didn’t get enough credit. And most of you haven’t seen it. So therefore: enjoy.
——————————————————————————
So for the last couple of days the boy has been all
and, frankly, it’s starting to look really unpleasant. He’s clearly not terribly happy with the situation either.
My wife gets home from work today and tells me she has a mission for me. I’ll be honest: I was tired (again) and hungry (again) and more than a little aggravated already for reasons that I don’t plan to go into and the thought of a mission was not entirely pleasing to me.
“Describe the nature of this mission,” I requested.
“I need you to get butt paste,” she said.
“Butt paste.” I replied. I made sure to phrase it in such a way that she heard the period at the end of the sentence.
“Butt paste,” she says. “I’m hoping you can get it at Martin’s.”
(Context: Martin’s is our local grocery store; it’s a chain but I’m pretty sure it’s limited to north-central Indiana and maybelower Michigan.)
I look up Butt Paste on the Internet, which sadly is probably not the oddest search I’m going to perform on the Internet this week. It turns out that there is a product specifically called Butt Paste. Check the URL: you find it at buttpaste.com, which should not be a website for medical supplies. However, frighteningly, that is not the Butt Paste that I’m looking for.
What I’m looking for– what the pediatrician apparently explicitly suggested my wife try to locate– is actually called Dr. Sirlin’s Bottom Ointment, which still sounds inappropriate. Dr. Sirlin’s Bottom Ointment is, near as I can tell, only sold in one place on Earth, but more on them later. Needless to say, that place isn’t Martin’s. My wife calls Martin’s anyway, just to be sure, and asks the pharmacist who answers the phone if they carry, no shit, this is a direct quote: “Dr. Sirlin’s butt paste. For butts. Baby butts.”
I consider protesting the use of the phrase butt paste for this query, because we aren’t looking for butt paste, we’re looking for bottom ointment, which is clearly very different. I do not actually voice the query. The person on the other line comes back quickly with an affirmative. We have butt paste! Go for butt paste!
And I’m off to Martin’s. It’s not far away from home, which is the reason we’d rather go there. Once I get there I arrive timed perfectly with a car leaving a very choice parking spot, which I wait for. The driver of the other car, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to get that I want her parking spot, and keeps trying to wave me on past her, thinking she’s being polite, and no amount of flailing and pointing at the empty goddamn parking spot on my part convinces her otherwise. So instead I park here:
And into Martin’s I go. To be greeted with a conundrum! Cute Cashier Girl is for some reason working at the pharmacy counter. Cute Cashier Girl, I hope to God, is in her early twenties. She’s a cashier, though! She’s not supposed to be at the pharmacy!
I cannot ask Cute Cashier Girl for butt paste. I’m gonna try and be all suave, like
but I know me. It’s gonna come off all
I cannot do this.
I spend a moment considering other options and can’t think of any. I approach the counter. She smiles cheerily and asks if she can help me, with no idea of the horror of the request I’m about to make of her.
“I’m looking for something called Dr. Sirlin’s Ointment?” I omit the word bottom, because I cannot say bottom to this lovely young lady. “I understand it’s supposed to be behind the counter for some reason.”
She looks quizzically at me, then looks around for a minute.
“I don’t see it. What’s it for?”
Don’t say butts.
“Diaper rash.” Ha! I win!
She lights up, smiling again. “Oh! You’re the butt paste guy!”
Oh hell no. I am a lot of things, Cute Cashier Girl, but I am sure as hell not butt paste guy. No. Uh-uh. No goddamn way.
The butt paste, apparently, is not behind the counter. It is actually in the baby aisle. I swallow what is left of my dignity and head for the baby aisle, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt what is about to happen. And my worst fears come true:
God dammit. That, you will notice, is not Dr. Sirlin’s Bottom Ointment. That’s fucking butt paste. I don’t want butt paste. I want bottom ointment.
I pick up the box, cursing God and all creation, and return to the pharmacy counter. She’s still there, of course, it’s not like the goddamn baby aisle is that far away.
“I have a, uh, follow-up question?”
“Oh, okay!” oh god she hates me so much she’s actually got her bright cheery smile on her face, and a bit of a twinkle in her eye that suggests to me that she’s enjoying my pain.
“I assume you are the one my wife talked to.”
“Yep!”
“She asked for Dr. Sirlin’s… (makes a face) Butt Paste. The stuff we want is actually called
Bottom ointment. I thought this might happen. Do you have the ointment? This isn’t actually what I’m looking for.”
She looks around again and then signals the actual pharmacist, who has been hiding behind a rack of drugs and trying her damnedest to keep a fucking straight face. The pharmacist confirms that, no, they don’t have Bottom Ointment. Just Butt Paste. So I have to go to the other place.
I thank her for her time and apologize for my own nonsense. Off to the car!
There are two reasons I don’t want to go to this other establishment. One I’ll get to later. The other is that they are a million miles away. They are literally not in the same town I’m in. I don’t want to go to another town for butt paste or bottom ointment. I want to be home, eating dinner. In my town.
But I love my wife, and I love my son, at least the non-butt parts of him. So off I go. I drive past this place on my way home from OtherJob all the time, so I know where it is, and I head there– to OtherJob, not quite realizing until it’s slightly too late that I drive past it on the way home from OtherJob, and for reasons that are not interesting I generally drive home from OtherJob via a different route than I take to get to OtherJob. So I’m going the wrong way.
Once I realize this and correct my course, I still manage to make two fucking wrong turns before successfully arriving at Pharmacy Two. On the way over to the pharmacy, it occurs to me that I am so fucking blogging this shit when I get home. I take a moment in their parking lot and compose an entertaining Tweet to that effect. Then I get out and go inside.
Well, I try to. As I’m reaching for the fucking door, an employee locks the fucking thing from the inside and points at a sign next to the door. The sign cheerfully informs me that this fucking place closes at six, as pharmacies do oh wait no they fucking don’t, ever.
I look at my watch.
It’s five fucking fifty-eight.
At this point my mood somewhat transitions.
I was entertained with this bullshit up until this exact fucking second.
You did not just LOCK A FUCKING DOOR IN MY FUCKING FACE TWO FUCKING MINUTES BEFORE FUCKING CLOSING AT A FUCKING ***PHARMACY***. It ain’t goddamn 1983 anymore. My fucking watch ties into a goddamn satellite that tells it what time it is. I can’t even adjust the motherfucker. It ain’t goddamn 6:00 yet, which means your ass isn’t fucking closed yet.
Listen, bitch, this ain’t fucking Barnes and Noble and it isn’t fucking Applebee’s. I am not fucking here to browse. You’re a pharmacy, motherfucker, and no fucker anywhere goes to a fucking pharmacy unless they motherfucking need to. I am there to get my shit and get the fuck out, and don’t you dare fucking thing for one fucking second that I can’t see that there is at least one motherfucker in there who isn’t dressed like he’s at fucking work.
I have two fuckin’ choices here. One is to go home. The other is to go to jail. Jail will no doubt feel better but either way there will be no fucking Bottom Ointment.
Not. Happy.
I went home and had dinner. A bit more research after dinner indicated that Dr. Sirlin’s Bottom Ointment is apparently produced by this pharmacy. It’s literally the only place you can get it other than the Internet. Well, fuck them.
Butt Paste it is. I return to Martin’s.
I collect my Butt Paste. I go back to the pharmacy counter, because I’m buying this with a damn flex account and it’s easier if we just use the pharmacy counter to buy anything medical-related. She’s still there, naturally. And she, I swear to God, says:
“There’s a story here, isn’t there.”
Oh sweetie. You have no idea.
(ADDENDUM: I didn’t include this in context because it kinda kills the tone of the piece, but the other reason I don’t like this pharmacy? They tried to kill my dog. My dog in high school/early college developed epilepsy, and rather than try to get a canine version of the drug they needed the vet just contracted through them to produce his medicine– which happened to be in liquid form. He was on the stuff for quite a while, and at some point we went in and got a bottle that was a radically different color and consistency than every other version of the medicine we’d gotten. The pharmacist not only argued with my mother about whether the medicine was different, at one point he actually said the words “Look, it’s just for a dog.” So this is the second time this place has nearly resulted in a member of my family going to jail. Merrill Pharmacy in Mishawaka, Indiana? Go fuck yourselves.)
(FINAL NOTE: As I was finishing this post up, my wife, who has been bathing our son, sticks her head into the office. “Hey, babe? There’s poop in the tub.” Because of course there is.)
Today was a blasted nightmare hellscape of a day, and when I got home my wife still managed to one-up me within less than a minute of me walking in the door. I had an eighteen thousand dollar order finally deliver today after two and a half months of sitting in the warehouse, and while ultimately I’m pretty sure everything ended up working out more or less to the good I spent the entire day on the phone dealing with customer service issues and intermittently talking people who had spent an enormous amount of money off of ledges. Today started with a customer who bought a leather power sectional a few months ago coming in and wanting a refund. Like, literally, I walked in the door, and they were already in the store. I managed to trade those people to another set and actually made some money on the deal, but still. This is me, the entire fucking day:
And, like, okay, there are no bullet holes in me, and that’s probably a whole lot of good thing, but I still spent damn near my every fucking waking second dodging, or looking for furniture in a giant warehouse, furniture that was not where it was supposed to be, or walking up to co-workers and saying things like “I need you to save my life right now, and here’s how you’re going to do it,” and various and sundry other things, and as it turns out that all of that shit is stressful as fuck. I am actually walking into the last day of my week at negative sales, too, which brings its own special brand of exhaustion with it.
I, no shit, suggested to my boss around 5:30 tonight that we start a fight club, and I’m not sure I was kidding.
(Here’s the kind of day I had, in microcosm: y’all know Panera Bread, right? They’re tasty and shit. Today we had an employee from Panera walk into the store and drop off a menu, announcing that they were actually delivering now. Cool! At around 1:30, in the early stages of the shakes from hunger, I decided I didn’t have time to leave the store and needed to get a lunch delivery of some sort, and– at the menu’s suggestion– downloaded the Panera app. Which could not be convinced that the address of my place of business, which is a real place that is actually there, since I was at that address at the time, existed, and so would not let me proceed to the part of the app where I actually order food. So I called them, at which point the recording informed me that the restaurant was closed for renovations despite the fact that their employee had brought me a menu today. Extend that exact kind of bullshit to every single interaction I had with any human at any time today and you have my day.)
I got a text from my mother just now, while I was eating dinner, that my second grade teacher had passed away, at the admirably ripe old age of 92. Mrs. Gates is one of the several teachers that my book Searching for Malumba is dedicated to, one of only two from my elementary/primary school years.
I had found myself wondering about her many times over the years. My second-grade recollection of her was that she was one of my older teachers, but that could have meant she was 40; kids are terrible at pegging how old adults are, right? As it turns out, she was nearly 60 when I had her, so she was probably nearing retirement at the time. I remember her as being probably the best example I ever had of the “strict but fair” teacher, which was something I always tried to emulate in my own career.
The funny thing is that when I try to unearth specific memories of what she was like as a teacher, I can only come up with one or two of them, and the clearest memory probably counts as educational malpractice, to the point where I almost feel disrespectful for talking about it. Mrs. Gates was always big on cleanliness– keeping the room clean, and in particular, keeping our desks clean. She’d actually inspect them from time to time– I have no idea how frequently; this could have been a daily or weekly thing for all I remember, or it could have been more frequently than that.
I am still in touch with literally no one who was in my second grade class, but I can think of perhaps four or five kids who are no more than a quick Facebook search away. And I guarantee each of them remembers the day Mrs. Gates got tired of Jonathan W. (I remember his full name, but why let him Google this?) having a sloppy desk for like the nine hundredth time in a row and in a fit of frustration dumped it out on the classroom floor in front of everyone. Objectively, with thirty-some-odd years of hindsight, this was probably a terribly humiliating thing for Jonathan and was not the proper way for her to have handled the situation. I certainly can’t imagine dumping a kid’s desk out on the floor in front of the whole class. And yet, I think for most of us, it made us more fond of her– and make no mistake, strict as she was, the kids in that class loved Mrs. Gates. Because this lady wasn’t taking any shit, and chances are most of our moms would have done the same damn thing in similar circumstances. I stayed friends with Jonathan until he moved away, I think in middle school sometime, and that story was still getting told at slumber parties years later.
For whatever it’s worth, I suspect he’d probably still laugh at the story. I dunno; maybe I shouldn’t have told it.
Rest in peace, Mrs. Gates. I hope wherever you are, all the desks are pristine.
(Writing this at work, on my phone, so expect typos and formatting nonsense.)
I had a dream last night. I was at the Student Union at Indiana University, where I went to college, and I came out over this large staircase they have in the back of the building.
The stairs led down to desert, which is not there in the actual building. I got halfway down the stairs and realized that ahead of me there were snakes– sidewinders, specifically– as far as the eye could see. Thousands of them.
I turned around, and the path behind me back to safety was full of angry hornets. Where I was was moderately safe but I still had to kick a snake away or swat a stinging insect every few seconds.
I stayed there, growing gradually more terrified, until I woke up.
For the last several years, I’ve basically been boycotting Christmas. With the single exception of my son, I’m done buying gifts for anyone at Christmastime and I don’t want anyone getting anything for me either. I’m not a Christian. I’m a grown man with his very own job and in general if I want something I can get it for myself. The fact that the right wing has managed to make how I greet people during December into a shibboleth doesn’t help, either. Fuck it, all of it. I’m out.
My mother has had… some trouble with this concept.
I’ve tried to redirect her always-considerable Christmas energies (my list of “what I got” when I was a kid was regularly two or three times as long as anybody else’s, and we were never rich– Mom just really prioritized Christmas) away from my wife and I and toward my son, but “No, really, don’t get me anything” hasn’t sunk in. She’s still getting me things, although I’ve gotten her to tone it down to one or two smaller gifts. This year it was a Barnes and Noble gift card. Just that. And she practically begged me to use it.
I should not be surprised that my mother knows my weak spots. Okay, fine, I’ll bend my principles and go get some free books, geez.
She also got my wife a card, and my son had some free-floating cash around, so we piled into the car yesterday to go to Barnes and Noble, and Christ if I wasn’t reminded yet again why I get every damn thing I read from Amazon now. I used to shop at Barnes and Noble all the time and then they moved their store to the mall, and since then damn near every time I walk into the place it generates a blog post. The mall is seven million miles away and the weather was absolute shit yesterday and the crowds and the parking lot and jesus why the hell am I doing this to myself and my family.
A brief diversion: I have, for the last couple of years, been trying to aggressively diversify my reading, if not in subject matter than at least in terms of the authors I’m reading. I’m always on the lookout for new authors, and in particular I’ve been trying to focus on women authors and authors of color for the last couple of years. I wrote my top 10 books of the year post yesterday, and while part of me looked at it and went yeah, mission accomplished— eight of the eleven books were by women– another part of me noticed how blindingly white the list was. Nine out of the ten authors. In other words, white women, specifically, appear to be the beneficiary of this policy.
Okay, cool. So this year I focus more on authors of color, right?(*)
Y’all have any idea how hard it is to find authors of color in the science fiction/fantasy section at Barnes and Noble? Way harder than I thought it was going to be. I started by going through my Amazon wish list and trying to find some of those books. No luck on 90% of them. I wanted to just scan through the new books, but they’ve gotten rid of that section in SF&F recently and everything is spine-out now. Okay, start looking for authors with visibly ethnic-sounding names and/or using initials instead of first names, which is generally code for “woman author.” No luck. Hell, just finding books by women was difficult enough.
I mean, I eventually found three books, two from my wish list and one that I literally grabbed because I’ve heard of Wesley Chu and he’s Asian and I’ve never read anything by him. But the whole process was unpleasant and took much longer than it ought to have. Turns out discovery of new books is kinda complicated if all you have is the spine and the author’s name to go on.
And then we got up to the counter and the salesperson gave my wife her spiel about the membership card. And we’re cool with that! It’s your job, you go do it. And then I got called over by the salesperson next to her and she did the same thing, and my son made it obvious that he was standing in between his parents and the first lady realized we were together. And I didn’t have a card either, because the card costs $30 annually and I really don’t spend the $300+ every year it would take to make the card worth it at Barnes and Noble any more. I’m not arbitrarily adding $30 to my sale so that I can save money $300 worth of purchases later.
So she leans over to me and snarks, again, in a really shitty sort of tone, “You’d have saved nearly half the cost of the card already if you joined up!” And it’s at this point where you’re no longer just doing your job and you’re kind of being an asshole. I already said I don’t want your card. You’ve had the card for years. I get it. I have to spend $300 before I save any money and I’m not going to.
I opened my mouth, and alternate-universe me snapped “If I wanted to save money I’d have bought this shit from Amazon” back at her. This-universe me, luckily, has a bit more sense and just said “No, thanks” again and we left, driving another seven million miles in snow and over ice to get back home, and I resolved to let the Goddamn post office do the driving for me from now on. Because I’m in sales right now and I’ve worked a register plenty of times before and I try my very hardest to never be anything but perfectly nice to anyone on the other side of a register from me.
So quit making me work at it.
Also, lady? Did you notice we were buying with gift cards? Somebody else already spent that money. I’m not getting your loyalty card today. Between the two of us we got five or six books for like $10 and I don’t care about your card right now.
Ugh.
(*) Miss me with it if you have any plan to quibble with how I arrange my reading, okay? There are millions of books out there and I can’t read all of them, so I’ll use whatever the fuck criteria I want to decide which ones I spend my time on. Thanks.
I don’t believe in karma. The universe doesn’t care about me (or you) one way or another, and there is no balancing force or supernatural intelligence out there looking to balance any sort of scales, especially with regard to my specific life.
I got a text from my mother just now, while I was eating dinner, that 
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 