005.) Who Would Have Thought Snow Patrol Could Say It Best?

In my mind an old song prevails,

"I find it easier to sit and stare
Than push my limbs out toward you right there.
My heart is bursting in your perfect eyes,
As blue as oceans and as pure as skies."

He does indeed make me numb and I'm not sure why (he is not my type). Perhaps I might finally tell him this when next I see him. Perhaps I'll bring a paper bag along with me, give it to him in efforts to spare him injury from tripping over the swooning bodies.

Suddenly, I now find myself once again in love with their other song "Run", though I believe so long ago it was called "Light Up"?

004.) At Least No One Peed in the Dressing Room - Again.

Let it be known to all that I do like my job. I like my job very much, in fact, so it does not bother me at all to find myself on register duty on a Saturday - not in the latter of our two buildings, however, but the former.

The first store where I cannot listen to my own music (however "old folk friendly" it has to be) but must listen to B93.3 (and while, yes, they do play U2 and Queen and... they also won't shut up about Michael Jackson - and while, yes, it might or might not be a shame that he's gone, he also molested little children (got away with it because of his name) and did I-don't-want-to-know-what with/to his "biological" children, and there are other important people who have died or are dying that deserve a tiny, passive mention). The first store where there really isn't a whole lot to do other than organize the jewelry wall, an impossible feat and yet I try so hard and surely that is the definition of madness. The first store, with its counter too short and the popcorn machine which works in fits and spurts. The first store, where customers neither shut off the light to the bathroom nor wash their hands (because there's very little toweling in the trash can for the amount of people who go in and out of that restroom).

At least I don't have to deal with certain coworkers complaining about certain other coworkers, right?

Or the young teenager who does nothing to hide the long stares he gives me from his spot on the floor by the videos (whose fancy is adorable, but I really don't want to have to procure a Rita Hayworth poster and a rock hammer)? That polite white boy with the syntax of 50 Cent, who for once was not bound to his "Pops" and the confines of the second building and its video tapes? Yeah. He stopped by with two of his friends (and how I would love a rich, silken complexion such as theirs). All three of them were dressed nicely, as if they were on their way to work at a country club golf course. Whatever they were dressed for, Blondie was wearing too strong an aftershave.

Most assuredly, in this first building I don't have to deal with the exceedingly creepy and off-centre gentlemen who buys things he doesn't take home (there are still things of his sitting out on the lawn more than a month after he bought them), the exceedingly creepy and off-centre gentlemen who repeatedly mispronounces my name and once asked me out for ice cream - and here I quote - "Boy, you look interesting! I'd love to escort you down to - " [a place I've never heard of] " - for ice cream." The man is a least sixty-five. I thought he was joking. He was not.

Back to my original train of thought:

It doesn't really matter where I am because the difficult people always find me. They hunt me down like a wounded gazelle. They fly to me like moths to a flame. No. They orbit around me in wondrous arcs like planets to the Sun.

These difficult people come barging into the store before we are open, as if they own the place or are royalty or are so hated by the rest of humanity that they must pull stunts like these in order to save themselves from a lynching (in which case, why don't they order things on-line? It works well for those afraid of the "market", those few who would not show up for the highly anticipated lynching of these hated eager beavers even if they were promised money, and a lot of it).

These difficult people complain about the prices of everything. No matter how cheap something is and therefor how utterly stupid they'll sound they will always try to talk the price down, apparently thinking that they're at a tag sale and not a place of business. Seriously, do they do this at Kohl's?

These difficult people will stand in the line and sigh dramatically if things aren't moving quickly enough - then they'll come back later on with their carts loaded to heaping, demanding that each item be placed in a certain bag because they obviously don't have the time or patience to do all of that themselves when they get home.

These difficult people saunter into the store five minutes to closing - "Oh, I'll be quick!" - and take their sweet, sweet time. Even when we shut the lights off, even when we make a few hundred closing announcements, even when we explain to them that we really need to be closing down and, yes, we do mind if they use the dressing room - even when... they shop. The difficult difficult people don't buy a thing; they're waiting around until we all leave so that they can break into the building and take what they want (and thankfully Mullet Man doesn't stop by anymore, not since we installed that fiendishly simple latch on his beloved breached door).

Most customers are good people, though. They have their moments, but they're good.

These aforementioned moments typically involve my tattoos - because, obviously, I am a walking art exhibit. My tattoos are, of course, not my own but the world's. Please, by all means, gawk and comment. Please, poke and prod and ask questions about what they mean - as if they are meant for you, as if they hold significance for you. What am I but the canvas they are painted on?

A lot of people nicely ask what my left arm says, or what the banner on my right arm reads, or what's going on with my right upper arm. Mainly it's the text on my left arm. Usually always it's the text on my left arm, and when I read the tattoo aloud to these curious people they look at me as if I've just sprouted a second head. They don't get it.

A few people will yell, "Stop moving! I'm trying to read your arm!" (in a nasty tone of voice, as if I've affronted them somehow by, I don't know, doing my job and ringing up their items). These people don't so much look at me as a sideshow freak with two heads, but merely blink.

I can hear the cogs turning in their heads. I can see their thought, each individual word shooting up into the air like blooming fireworks. They do not think, "I just accosted you for this thing which I do not understand? I'm so sorry!" but instead, "I just took an extra minute out of my life for that? What the hell is all that supposed to mean, huh? I don't read. I wouldn't know that this came from a poem even if Robinson Jeffers himself crawled out of the grave and bit me in the ass."

Of course, they only smile and tell me "How nice."

Fewer people still simply grab me.

I'll be handing them back their change and one beefy hand will come flying toward me as they grab my wrist. With quite a bit of force they'll do this, grab me and pull me forward so that they can read my arm whilst also taking my blood pressure (for they haven't at all relaxed their grip).

It never fails that the grabbers will then sneer and say something along the lines of, "That stuff don't wash off, honey."

Here I reply by feigning shock. "Well, at least the coroner will have something to look at," I say because I cannot spit. I cannot maim or yell or beat. I cannot say "Suck dirt and die", though I want to so badly.




At least no one peed in the dressing room - again.

I mean that seriously, and if you are sensitive to this breed of things here is where you might want to stop reading.

Once upon a time, the restroom in the front building was not in working order. Not having the strength of bladder to walk the short way to the next available bathroom, a customer grabbed a small wooden barrel from our eternal Christmas display and somehow sneaked into an open dressing room with this small wooden barrel. In this unlocked dressing room, the customer urinated into the barrel.

How this individual was able to do this, pee into a wooden barrel in a small dressing room with walls that do not extend all the way to the ceiling -

(note how the ceiling does not meet the door frame)

- how this could be done without being heard is beyond my comprehension. How this individual could then simply leave that used barrel under the stool of that first dressing room is also beyond my grasp.

Worse yet, the urine must have been sitting in the dressing room for quite some time - at least long enough for it to acquire scent, long enough for that scent to grow into a foul stench strong as a pair of hands around the throat.

All I know is, I was the only one to notice that something dastardly was afoot. At 3.00. An hour before the store closed, six hours into the working day, and I'm the one (called up from the other building to help close) who has to stick her head into the first dressing room and all but vomit from the odor.

How can you be working up there all day and not notice the repugnant, viciously atrocious, disgusting odor of piss in a small wooden barrel? How can you be a customer and not say something? How can you be a customer in that dressing room and not faint?

How can you pee in a dressing room in the fist place? What kind of person does that? I mean, if you have a medical condition we can deal with that - you can use the employee bathroom - but to do that? Have you no soul?

003.) Ghosts and Dog Crates

During my break on Tuesday 23 June, I watched two hippies (whom I have affectionately named Shaggy and Scooby) spend at least thirty minutes attempting to attach their dog carrier onto the roof of their car. Scooby did most of the work, whereas Shaggy stood by overseeing. She also repeatedly pulled up her jeans, which must have been at least two sizes too big for her tiny frame.

They were dancing with twine before I went on break, during and a good five minutes after - but eventually they went on their merry way.

I wonder how far along the highway they went before the dog crate flew off the car?




I wonder why I must be so cursed as to find myself constantly accosted by individuals from a past I'm not willing to revisit?

Let me explain: Around two O'clock on this same Tuesday as Shaggy and Scooby, as I'm walking back to the register in efforts to find something with which to dust the store, I am met with a ghost.





Nearly tripping over my own feet, I stopped and did what some of us might do when met by a specter such as he: I gaped.

I pointed and asked him a simple question, though the effort of getting that question out was not simple at all.

"Do I know you?" I asked him, this ghost and if indeed he was a ghost it perhaps was not wise of me to be talking at him. "Yes," I said, "I do know you." It was at that point when I left him, awash with a myriad of old emotions tasting of that stagnant film draping homemade pudding.

This ghost did not leave me alone, however. He bought a t-shirt and a belt I wish I had seen a lot earlier (meaning I would have prevented this geist from procuring such an item - because why would a ghost need a leather belt with an ornate metal buckle?).

When finally he did leave, I did not say good-bye (rude, yes, but I did have another customer to attend to). I dared not speak his name, for fear that be him a mere ghost his name would bring about a resurgence of his existence.

002.) Meditation at the Tattoo Parlor

The following passed through my mind on Friday, 19 June, as needles melted the world down to a simple hum, vibrant conversation and rockabilly music:

I can barely deal with wisdom teeth removal. I am horrified of certain plaster lawn decorations. Yet I love the feel of a tattoo needle breaking open my flesh and staining me with eternal color. What is wrong with this picture?

001.) Introduction.

(it was 100 degrees. I was sweating. deal with it)

I'm not much of a blog person, let me tell you this right now and let me tell you that I know this because I've had quite a few.

As a teenager (eight years seems like such a long time ago) I was not immune to the razzle-dazzle of internet blogs and created one on UJournal with a backward pen-name which did nothing to hide my state of psychotic obsession with death and disease and disorder (but aren't all kids like that?). I wrote about nothing and somehow out of that nothing came a flurry of entries, all written in the short hand of a fourteen-year-old who could neither type nor spell. I can't remember what exactly I wrote about, but I do remember that I managed to scare at least one person with my blog entries, a slew of "OMG hes so cl and cut a i l0v3 him" I am sure and I do not blame him for running away at the very sight of me, his feet pounding the tile high school floor with the weight of sheer terror.

I moved on to Blurty after that, where I learned two very valuable things:

1.) It's always best to make your posts friends only. That way, if somewhere down the line you forget your password and your e-mail account fades away into the nether from lack of use - well, a friends only blog will save you a whole heck of a lot of embarrassment.

2.) It's a wise thing to do, especially when in high school, to not tell your friends that you have an internet blog. This is an optional rule of thumb, of course, but if you do have friends who leaked your UJournal account to the new, freakishly tall boy in your class (who later quaked at the mere mention of your name) it's not a bad thing at all to leave those "RL" friends out of the loop and meet new people on this new internet blog environment.

On Blurty I did just that. I also took up role playing, often finding myself playing male rock stars because I could not play a female all that well. Never did I consider that a strange thing, being a lady and playing a man, because I was too busy learning about HTML. In the blogging word, HTML refers to (and I may be wrong) the art of layout design - and, boy, did I burn through a lot of layouts. Every three days, a week at the most, I would have a new background image and scroll boxes and embedded music and images on my "Friends Only" post. I went layout crazy. I created an account for the sole purpose of storing my poetry (poetry I'm ashamed and horrified to admit is mine), I created a few hundred role play accounts under the name of any celebrity I could find pictures of on the internet and knew just enough about to sound convincing in the game. All so that I could have fancy layouts.

And then I started making icons. I must have created thousands in the lifespan of my blogging years (roughly five), the early models all covered in blurred text.

In spite of my forays into the art and design of my numerous blogs, my writing grew as well. I still couldn't type and my spelling was atrocious, but I wasn't writing about nothing anymore. Granted, my life wasn't all that interesting, but I was going through enough turmoil to vent on a daily basis. I was going through enough dung, in fact, that when I learned about LiveJournal and GreatestJournal I created accounts there as well and closed down, boarded up, all of my Blurty accounts to move to the latter site (there's something about LiveJournal I've never been able to warm up to).

On GreatestJournal I again created multiple accounts with multiple layout changes. I made a valiant effort to change my layouts only once a month in order to focus on my writing - after all, that is what a blog is for, is it not? - and my writing did improve. So much so that instead of being five characters at once in an RPG I played only one and if I do say so myself I made a wonderful Billy Martin. (Sweet mother of - that was a long time ago).

I also began to write fan fiction. I wasn't very good at it, but I wrote a lot of it and joined fan fiction communities on the blog and joined fan fiction websites as well. I wrote so much of the stuff, so often and on so many sites and in so many different categories, that I fell into that cozy little world of the blog.

Still, regardless of the cocoon, my blogging began to suffer. It wasn't that I was too busy "in RL" or that my life had lost the deep stinking pit of manure to write about. It wasn't even the ever increasing love I had toward fan fiction writing and the time I took to write it.

I just stopped updating my blog. Long periods of time would pass, days to weeks, weeks to months, before I felt obligated to write something down and fill in my friends about my life. I moved three times, I went back to school, I moved again and got a job. Years passed. The thought of a blog rarely entered my mind.

I've always been like this. As a kid I would get diaries and then stop writing in them after a week. The longest I ever went in a physical diary was three-quarters the way through my freshmen year of high school (and even that was sporadic at best). The longest I went on a single blog was on GreatestJournal and I can only guess that that was three years or so.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that this blog is a stupid thing for me to attempt.

My MySpace account? Dying, if not dead already. My Facebook account? Deactivated, reactivated, deactivated again. My Twitter account? That might survive for a while, if ever I get the hang of it. Even my other blog on this site, dortamklavier, would be in big trouble if I wasn't putting my mystery novel there. I can't even guarantee that.

So, I'm going to try this.

I'm going to write about my life, about my plans for my novel(s) and my writing in general. I'm going to attempt to scribe my daily observations and complaints, hopes and fears. I'm going to do all of that and more without icons, without layouts or polls or music or the dreaded friends list.

If I'm going to do this at all, I'm going to do it without any distractions.

Thank you and have a good day.