Worst Vice

I used to think I knew a lot. That should have been the first sign that I was stupid.

But it wasn’t. I didn’t realize that until I was much smarter.

Neither, apparently, did anybody else.

Friends have come to me for advice for as long as I can remember—and I can remember back a ways, to dispensing quasisophical advice to my friend Jared as I sat on the arm of his parents’ 2nd tier couch in their basement. I can remember having long, deep phone conversations with emotionally tortured friends as I sat behind my 1970s-era metal office desk, chatting on my black, oversized office telephone that I insisted on having because I liked how important it looked. I would have these important phone conversations with friends while sitting in a tufted leather office manager’s chair, up in my old bedroom.

It would have been a strange sight—were anybody watching. It’s a good thing they weren’t.

No, nobody was watching, but everybody, it seemed, was listening. People my age, and older, instinctively came to me with their problems, their troubles, their struggles, and their questions. For real—people asked ME questions. Me, not “Dear Apron.” The me boy person man thing. People told me things they may never have told anybody else, and, honestly, I don’t know why. Did I engender trust or confidence? If so, I don’t know how I do it.

Today, I get paid to listen to people tell me about their problems. They tell me they’re suicidal, or were. They tell me their paranoid delusions or their homicidal fantasies, and I write it all down in my reports, I pass some of it along to the nurses, and I swipe my badge and I go home, locking the door securely behind me.

They pay me to listen.

Today, in my capacity at work, I do much more listening and much less advising. My job isn’t to give advice, and I frequently tell patients that—usually after they blatantly come out and ask me for it. Would I advise them to do something moderate and judicious and appropriate? Sure I would, because I know what’s rational and what’s not*.

*Most of the time.

But that’s not important. That doesn’t matter. I am not a prophet on the mount. I am not Moses or Yaweh or some other mustachioed gray-head with a cane he refers to as a “staff.” Maybe they come to me because I wear glasses and tuck in my shirts and have reasonably well-kept hair. I don’t know why they trust me—my friends and my patients. Maybe it’s because I would never violate a trust. But they don’t know that. You never know if someone’s violated your trust until you find out about it, right?

By and large, the friends who so earnestly sought my counsel when I was young have gone away. They weren’t dramatic exits—most of them—they were more like melting snow or flaking paint just sort of… going away slowly and gradually until there was nothing left.

I hope it wasn’t something I said.

On Icarus

They say that, overwhelmingly, the last phrase most frequently uttered inside of a commercial airplane's cockpit about to be demolished in a crash are, "Oh, shit."

The NTSB, the governing body charged by the United States government with investigating airplane accidents, reviews all cockpit voice recordings (CVRs) that are recovered after a fatal aviation accident. During the course of its investigations, this body frequently administers a test to measure stress in the voice of individuals in the cockpit, such as the pilot, the copilot, or the first officer. It is a neat way to tell if the pilots were surprised by whatever weather-related anomaly or mechanical failure or explosion that started the inevitably fatal chain-of-events, and it measures how calm they are able to remain as they struggle to reclaim control of a doomed airliner, whether they are working in concert with, or at cross-purposes, with each other in the final seconds of their lives. And the lives of everyone else onboard.

As a result of these stress tests, it has been determined that this often-uttered final utterance, "Oh, shit" isn't frequently said with high stress, with great force, or even as just a regular, run-of-the-mill exclamation. It is often said dryly, flatly, in a resigned way that indicates an experienced pilot knows, in the final milliseconds of his or her life, that this plane cannot be reclaimed, and into the Pacific Ocean, or mountaintop, or field beyond the desired runway it will go. It will just go.

Oh, shit.

Through circuitious circumstances, I got to thinking about Icarus yesterday. These things tend to happen when I have a week-day off. I'm here in the house, alone, noodling around-- tending to this or that, listening to taciturn, introspective folk music, and it just... happens. I hadn't thought of Icarus since 5th grade, when we all studied our mythology. I was assigned Hades, and I came to school dressed as him for the culminating project. I loved Hades, because he was dark and terrifying, and he embodied everything that I found dark and terrifying-- so I embraced him. I'll show you, mortals. Dip your toe in my little River of Styx and we'll see what's what.

Oh, shit-- right?

I don't remember which of my classmates were assigned the tale of Icarus and Daedalus, but I remember being impressed by-- and probably a little jealous of-- the wings-- fashioned out of string and popsicle sticks, glue, feathers, and sticks. I don't think Daedalus himself could have done better. I was sure their parents had helped them. But what of that? My mother made my Hades hat.

The morals of the tale of Icarus and Daedalus are plenty, and uninspired, and done and done over again.

Listen to your parents.

Don't fly too high.

Remember, you're only human.

Be mindful of danger.

Don't be prideful.

The sun is dangerous. Don't forget your Lancome Bienfait Super Fluid Facial, SPF-50.

Icarus is easy to dump on, from the comfort of an armchair firmly entrenched in reality's living room. Stupid shit-for-brains: what did you think was going to happen?

Well. I kind of have a soft spot in my heart for the kid. And I would think that anybody who is an enthusiastic participant in the uniquely American rat-race for popularity, for "Likes", for "Friends", for advancement, for prominence, for a legacy might do well to smile kindly on this poor, broken body whose wings are besmirched with melted wax.

I wonder what his last words were. Probably something more eloquent than, "Oh, shit." After all, this is mythology we're talking about here-- a high art-- meant to lift us up, ascending towards Phoebus.

On Monday, a well-intentioned coworker asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up. "Surely you don't want to do this-- work here in a psych hospital-- for the rest of your life," she, a nurse, said.

"God," I sighed, "I don't know, Mary. I just don't know."

And my mind drifted away to the relaxation group I run for the patients. Seated on floral cushions in wicker rockers, they gently drift off to sleep as light Victorian piano music plays for them on the CD player, and I take them on a guided visualization. I always start by having them imagine they're on the beach, all alone, lying on their backs on the warm sand, the glorious sun warming their faces. Through the journey, they end up under water, gliding amongst the fish and the coral, and, the way I tell it, they inevitably end up giving the water a gentle kick and they soar up, up, and up as their heads break through the waves and they soar through the sky-- upwards towards the sun.

"I don't know," I said, smiling faintly, "but, for now, I love what I do."

"Well," she said, "I'm glad you're here."


Me, too.

You Never Know What You'll Find

The biggest cliche, I think, about the show "COPS," which I don't mind admitting to you that I love with all my soul, are the "talking head" pieces that welcome the TV viewer back from commercials. If you still watch TV on a television, you know what "commercials" are.

The typical talking-head piece is filmed inside of a Ford Crown Victoria and it's a shot of the officer behind the wheel, and he or she briefly pontificates, in that cop sort of way, on some aspect of policing-- more likely than not, the "Reader's Digest" version of his or her affiliation with law enforcement.

"Well, I grew up in Fort Worth, and my dad was a cop, and his dad was a cop. I got three uncles in the Fort Worth Police Department, and my dog's a K-9 officer, so this kind of just seemed like a good fit for me. I've been on the job now for fourteen years and I love comin' to work every day-- every day is different. You never know what you'll find."

I've come to grips recently with the fact that they, the police, are never going to accept me into their fold. While I have written a book on their behalf, donated to their causes, penned passionate essays in newspapers, given speeches at police cafeterias and assembly halls, while I have shaken hands with precinct lieutenants and captains and even the Commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department, I won't be wearing their uniforms or enforcing their laws.

I do, however, work at a mental hospital, and as such I can faithfully state that their catchphrase, "Every day is different-- you never know what you'll find" holds true for me. When I slide my gold-colored key into that steel door in the morning, my coffee hot and my hair still wet, I can never quite tell what I will be greeted by.

"I'll never forget my first day here," a co-worker of mine said to me, half-wistfully, just the other day. "It was three years ago-- and the very first hour I was on the unit, this coked-up black guy wandered out of his room-- completely buck-ass naked-- into the hallway and started doing pushups. Then he stood up, peed into a paper cup, and drank it."

My first day was September 13th, and it's hard for me, almost three months later, to remember the exact details. But one thing I can say for sure: yesterday was different from my first day, which has been different from every other day since. On Sunday, I was running an art group for the acute ward patients. There was one of me, and six of them, seated around a long, rectangular table, making holiday cards. For whom, you might ask? Oh, well, one patient was making a holiday card for his daughter. Another patient made one for "the aliens." Another had a big bloody skull on the cover and was addressed to "obamanigger."

"I might not be able to mail that one," I told the patient in question. In truth, we're not allowed to mail anything to the White House, regardless of how the President's name is spelled.

While the patients were drawing, I had classical music playing and, for a rare moment, everyone was peaceful, focused, and content. And in walked Kim-Chee (not his real name!), a fifty-year-old Asian patient, wearing three pair of jeans. He had face cream all over every inch of his face-- maybe he had used five or six packets of it, and he looked like some kind of bizarre Kabuki performer from long ago, all you could see were these tiny little eyes peering out from behind this gloppy, white mask. Everyone at the table looked up from their holiday cards and turned to regard this sight. Kim-Chee looked back at us for a moment, the moment where I always wonder if something violent is about to happen, and then he turned around and walked out. My patients wordlessly returned back to their holiday cards.

This is one of the first jobs I have ever truly enjoyed-- which is funny, because I've had a lot of jobs in my life, and if you told me that I would enjoy being inside an acute mental institution, one of the most unpredictable and potentially violent places in the state, well, I would have told you that you were crazy. But I guess there has always been some part of me that thrives on a delicate mixture of predictability and chaos. The predictability is provided by the schedule, and the monotonous, mountainous paperwork, and the chaos is provided by, well, duh. But there's hope here, too-- it's not just about the zany antics and the unreal shit that they say, which shouldn't crack me up, but sometimes does. There is great, deft humanity here ensconsed within these cinder-block walls, and I'm privileged to be a part of it. You never know what you'll find. Sometimes it's an eerily familiar last name on the admissions sheet. Sometimes it's someone trying to choke themselves in the shower with a torn pillow case. Sometimes it's a faker, or a cutter, or a genius, or a soloist, or a racist. Jesus is here almost every day, in one form or another. A patient gave me a little card with his picture on it just yesterday. I put it on my wife's pillow.

Yesterday found me running art group on the acute ward again. An elderly man, white hair and a beard, frail and gowned with a flannel shirt on, too, was brought back onto the ward after being transferred here from prison. Who knows what he did. The nurse sat him down and covered his bare, spindly little legs with a blanket. As she did, she noticed that the front pockets of his flannel shirt were bulging impossibly. She told the patient to empty his pockets, and out came twenty or thirty ketchup packets, napkins, and plastic forks and spoons. She stood him up and had him reach into his diaper, which I thought was a little much, until he pulled out more forks and spoons. The nurse turned to me and we made eye contact as she picked up the utensils with a gloved hand, throwing them into a trash can nearby.

"Take your feet out of your slippers," she said to the patient, still looking at me. I smiled uncomfortably.

The patient sat down and slipped his feet out of his slippers. The nurse turned to me again.

"Are you kidding me? Really?"

She wrinkled her nose and furrowed her brow as she pulled out two sausage patties, one in each slipper.

You never know what you'll find.

Imagine

When I walked into work yesterday, I slid my identification card into the electronic time clock, signed myself up for my assignments for the day, nursed my coffee and nonchalantly eavesdropped on some of the pre-workday conversational chatter I'm not yet confident enough to join in on. See, when you arrive for work for a 7am shift at 6:40, you sign up for assignments inside the nurses' station and you are actually not permitted to enter the unit until 7:00am on the dot. So, you sit or stand and you chat or you listen.

Yesterday, I listened. And I heard that a patient, a 23-year-old young man who was discharged just a few days ago was dead.

"He just walked out into the middle of the street, right in front of a car."

They don't know for certain if it was a suicide, but, when you have an incident like this, befalling a recently-released former patient of a mental institution who had been expressing suicidal ideations and bizarre behavior, well, even I can put two and two together and get pretty close to four.

For the purposes of this blog, we'll call the recently departed "Ellis." I first met Ellis about three weeks ago. I was sitting in the activities room on the Acute Unit, writing a report, and he was shuffling towards me. I saw him from out of the corner of my eye. When you work in a psychiatric hospital, filled with prisoners and assaultive patients and convicted murderers, mixed in with the just plain manic, bipolar and disorganized, you tend to use the corner of your eye a lot more than the eye itself. I guess that's why a peripheral vision test is part of the pre-employment physical. It's kind of a big deal.

Anyway, Ellis was shuffling over to me. He had no shoes or socks on, and he was wearing a pair of black and red checked pajama bottoms and a black t-shirt that was full of holes. He had stubble, but it was kid stubble, the kind you could shave dry if you wanted to, maybe once a week and nobody'd notice. His hair was, well, fucked up. Light socket style-- Emmett Brown kind of a thing. It looked as if a bird, or several birds, had been nesting in there for a few months. His teeth were in disarray and, as he approached me, I put down my pen and looked at him.

"Can I talk to you, please?" he said to me in a small, meek voice.

"Sure," I said, "pull up a chair."

And he did. I really don't remember what we talked about, to be honest with you. He told me that he'd been a drifter for a while, I think, and that he'd gone off his meds, and that he was looking forward to "getting everything straightened out." I asked him the standard question we ask everyone, "Do you have any thoughts of harming yourself or anybody else?" He said "No." He appeared able to carry on a legitimate conversation. Five minutes after he walked away from me, he was taking off his clothes in the middle of the hallway. Maybe half-an-hour later, he had to be redirected for wandering in and out of other patients' rooms, ignoring directions, and for trying to escape onto the general ward through a secure door.

He shuffled down the hallway as if he were impervious to his surroundings, as some of our patients do, and believe themselves to be. He had to be watched closely, his behavior was unpredictable. But, after three days of good behavior, he was moved onto the general ward. There, he isolated himself, occasionally going to a group or two. Just a few days ago, I was monitoring the hall, and he shuffled towards me again.

"Can we talk?" he asked.

"Definitely, Ellis. Have a seat."

He talked, and I listened. Again, nothing remarkable. Not much I can really recall. Maybe that says more about me than it does about him. But it's kind of funny because I usually have such an uncanny ability to memorize dialogue and recall what patients say to me, but not Ellis. For some reason, his complaints or questions or statements just sort of blend into the milieu with dozens of other patients I've seen and talked to and interacted with.

But Ellis will be remembered by me as the first patient I ever heard play the piano at our hospital. One day while doing rounds, I walked towards the piano room, which is really never used for its intended purpose, and I heard a sound that made me stop for a moment. It was music. Music amidst the paranoid ramblings, the swearing on the payphone, the frustrated refusals of patients who won't take their meds because they "distort my face" or because the nurses are "poisoning the Crystal Light." There was music. I softened my step, so as not to disturb the beautiful, soft, pedaled strains of a song I recognized, but wasn't too big a fan of.

John Lennon's "Imagine."

As I walked past the piano room, pretending to be more interested in my rounds checklist, I glanced out of that trusty corner of my eye and saw Ellis, sporting his unmistakable, haphazard hairdo, seated at the piano, playing from sheet music-- I don't know where he got it. And, standing there singing, in a soft, sweet voice, was a one of my favorite patients-- "R," the religiously-preoccupied lady with a tidy sum in the bank, who won't use it until God speaks to her, and remains homeless to this day. "God," I thought as I passed the room, on my merry way, "what a pair."

And now Ellis is dead, "with God," as R would say, and I wonder if she knows that her accompanist is gone.

Speedwagon Rides Again

If I understood everything that went on in my brain-- every calling, every craving, every interest and every inclination-- I think I'd be a goddamned genius. Either that or I'd be a twitching, incomprehensible, foul-smelling, eye-booger-eating societal reject who finger-paints on the walls of his cell with his own diarrhea.

Fortunately, I'm neither a genius or a... that.

I made the decision that, when my contract at my small non-profit is up in August, I will return to the streets as an emergency medical technician.

Last night in the kitchen, my wife, looking very nonplussed, I am relieved to say, said in reply,

"Can I ask why?"

"It's been calling to me," I said with a shrug and an assuredly earnest look in my eye. "It's been calling to me ever since I left."

And it has. And I don't know why.

She looked at me with the same love that has been in her eyes since we 2003 and said,

"Then you need to do what you need to do. And I love you."

There are so many things that I miss about the job-- the pride of putting on a uniform. Being of service to an organization and to a people. Taking charge and taking care. Driving an ambulance, lights on or off. The back-and-forth with dispatch. The indescribable feeling you get when it's time fo flip on the auxillary battery and turn those red lights on. The smiles people give you when they see you come in for a cup of coffee, that coffee sometimes free. The feeling of importance, of meaning. Of applying knowledge that I have, of getting my skills back. Of being able to say, "I am an EMT" without having to add, "but I don't work on the street anymore."

I worked from May, 2005 to February, 2007 and they were some of the best months and worst months of my entire life. I remember the day my first steady partner threatened to kill me, throwing a clipboard at me in the front of the ambulance, shattering the windshield instead of my face. I remember the day I got him fired. I remember transporting suicidal alcoholics and paranoid schizophrenics and homeless people with City Paper underwear and cardboard shoes. I remember bringing leftover slices of my wedding cake to my co-workers at base. I remember educating my Ukranian coworker about the Holocaust in the parking lot of a hospital. I remember busting my supervisor's balls, moving his van while he was inside the base taking a leak, and changing the radio station from country to classical, and placing a male urinal on his gearshift lever. I remember sitting next to the same man in the same ambulance every single day for thirteen months. I remember the patients-- the obese ones, the severely malnourished ones, the diabetics, the congestive heart failures, the addicts, the prisoners, the women in emergent labor. I remember the one neonate I transported, and I remember how petrified my partner and I were that we would kill it. I remember driving down I-95 with my lights on, going 40 miles per hour, fearful that every pothole would break its brand new ribs.

I remember careening down that same stretch of road with my siren wailing, in a desperate attempt to get a fire-fighter to the hospital after he had collapsed at the station of a heart attack while lifting weights. I remember his wife in the seat next to me, sobbing and thanking me as I drove, sweat pouring down my brow.

I remember a lot. And perhaps I remember too much, and perhaps I remember it in that skewed way in which we remember unpleasant things after some time has passed. I remember reading "The Passing of the Armies" which is a memoir written by Brevet Major-General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain about his time rising through the ranks during the Civil War. He writes about war in a sympathetic, eloquent, flowing, almost romantic way-- the battles long cleansed of the blood and brains, smoke and horror over thirty or forty years. Maybe that's how I remember life on the street.

Maybe.

But, after a long time being chained to a desk, I find myself longing for an opportunity to jump into my car and roam, even if it's just to go to the post office to pick up mail from the P.O. Box. I would never call myself a wanderer, but I know now that I need to be out there, whatever "out there" means.

And, oh, I'm out there alright.

But I think you know what I mean.

For years and years I've struggled with what it means to work. Does a job need meaning? Does a job need to align with your perceived status or education level? Do you have some sort of familial or religious or societal obligation to seek a white collar job if it's what your parents sought, or your wife's family sought? Does being in possession of a Masters of Education degree obligate you to teach? Well, no-- just as my undergraduate degree in Theatre doesn't obligate me to whore myself out in the world of off-off-off-off Broadway or appear in local car commercials smiling while receiving the keys to some piece of shit Ford Focus.

I've come to understand that you've just got to do something, and it might as well be something interesting, engaging, rewarding, and maybe a little bit fun, even if it doesn't pay the best and you may run into elderly ladies who tell you they're going to "fucking kill" you as you're strapping them snugly into a stretcher and covering them with a blanket.

No Comment

You guys are really super-doop good to me-- you know that?

You read-- you're loyal. You comment, some of you, and they're mostly insightful, interesting, engaging comments. Every now and then I'll get innocently flirted with, and that's always good for my ego. Sometimes you'll crack a joke, or reference an item in a column that's 200 posts ago, and that's pretty good for my ego, too. You're nice to me and respectful of each other, and you never ever whine that I'm not much for commenting on comments, probably because you know it's kind of a pet peeve of mine and that, if I have a comment that I feel requires one back, I'll leave one.

In short, you don't expect a lot of me and, in that respect, you're rather like my middle school math teachers. Except that I'm sure most of you shave regularly.

And there are a couple of you out there who stand up to me, calling me out on my rampant, AIDS-like hypocrisy, and I'm most grateful for those of you. (Not that I want all of you to start doing it, that would be a total suckfest.) Yesterday, Colleen was catching up on some of my blogs after returning from her vacation (I know that because, all of a sudden, seven comments showed up in my inbox on blogs from a week ago, not because I look through her mail and obsessively finger her kitchen utensils while she's at work) and she left a comment on a blog of mine about how much I hate my job-- a subject I touch on with frequency and aplomb. After reading my tautly-paragraphed whinings about my passive-aggressive chair and my boss that smells like farts, she responded with:

"'Boohoo, I'm one of the 90% of Americans who has a full-time job.'

Quit your bellyaching. And be grateful for your malodorous chair."

Oops. Was it something I said?

Of course, Colleen's right-- I'm a complete and utter crybaby because, no matter whether my office chair smells like fresh-baked croissants, industrial varnishing, or goat excrement, at least I have an office chair to befoul forty hours every week. Did it ever occur to me that under or un-employed individuals might take exception to a post about how much I hate work in a climate when 10.2% of Americans are unemployed? Yes-- the same way some of my pathetic, acne-ridden, hopelessly single readers might get turned off when I write schmoopie blooperings about my disgustingly adorable marriage, the same way my poor, unfortunate reader who tools around in a funkified, rusted out shell of a1987 Ford Festiva might get his panties in a barb when I complain about the fate to which I have been consigned-- a 2001 Chrysler PT Loser.

Here's the thing-- Colleen said something. She even managed to do it in a cute, hey-you're-a-jerk-but-it's-okay kind of way. In case you haven't realized, I can be pretty insensitive sometimes, I can run off at the mouth and I can alienate-- it has been known to happen. Hey-- I lost my best friend simply by opening my mouth. So, I know that.

I know.

And I don't want to lose any of you. I've lost too much in my life already. So, long story short, stick around. And open your mouths when you need to.

I still hate my job, of course-- that doesn't change a thing, and nothing changes.

Happy New Year From the New Asshole at Work

Though this blog will post, like clockwork, at 7:18am EST, Sunday, I'm banging it out at 9:31pm EST, Saturday. COPS ended half-an-hour ago, a pleasing amalgam of a taut, breathless vehicle pursuit through the streets of Las Vegas and some moron in Hesperia who drunkenly plowed his sports car into a tree.

Now? I'm blogging while my wife puts cornrows in my hair.

Were it not for the Victoria League cloisonne pin on my hoodie and my orange, flannel pajama pants, I might very well resemble a suspect on COPS in half-an-hour. Of course, I'd need some tattoos on my hairline and boxers pouring out from my waistband.

It is another luscious, languid night of vacation. The heat is on 60 (that's tropical for us), the dog is snoozing away on the floor, we've just loaded up a bones-cheap shelving unit with my wife's fabric and I'm getting my hair braided or whatever. I feel like a Dionysian God. Except that I'm not drunk. I did have two virgin cranberry spritzers, though, and home-made pepper-and-onion pizza and garlic fries from Trader Joes.

MmmMmMmMMmMMmMmMmmmmm.......

So, why, in the midst of all this blissful, delicious vacationness am I feeling melancholy?

Oh, right. I have to go back to work tomorrow.

In my window-free, basement office.

With my passive-aggressive boss.

And my desk-chair that smells like farts.

I can has cry-paper now?

Seriously-- hold me.

I remember being a little boy and dreading the end of vacations from school. The days ticked by with merciless and brutal consistency. Sweaty-mouthed Mrs. MacDowell and arm-pinching Mrs. Wolpert were waiting for me. Vacations are never long enough. Never.

I wonder if retirement will be long enough. Probably not. Actually, I wonder if I'll ever be able to retire. Probably not.

I could sit here while my wife is twirling and twisting my hair into some ungodly formation and tell you that I've made a whole bunch of life-affirming resolutions about my job, but I like you way too much to lie to you. Besides, you wouldn't believe me anyway.

I know what's going to happen on Monday. I will walk up the path to the basement entrance and, as I put my hand on the door handle, I will say to myself, "Okay, you bad boy: be nice." And I will walk in, and my boss and I will exchange the obligatory pleasantries. I'll last two hours, maybe three. But then, after twelve o'clock passes and I will not have had a chance to eat my lunch, I will open up bastard throttles at full tilt.

You might like me on the blog, but, at work, I'm a prickly little fuck.

And why? I don't want to be there.

I'm restless and listless and feckless and, well, less. Less of everything than I was before. Less attentive. Less focused. Less driven. Less interested. Less into it.

I am always curious by peoples' reactions when I tell them what I do. The reactions range from "Wow, that's really interesting." (adults) to "God, that sucks!" (kids).

I tend to trust the reactions of the kids, because kids haven't learned that it's polite to lie constantly to peoples' faces.

I really don't want to go back to work on Monday, because the first three hours of my day will consist of assisting the Executive Director in interviewing a part-time "Development Specialist" to "help in the office." This individual, of course, is the person who, when my specified contract is up (August) will replace me.

Fucking duh.

So I get to help load the bullets into the chamber of the firearm that is pointed directly at my conk. I love doing that!

The thing is, I don't care. I want to be replaced. I wouldn't care if I were being replaced by some dump-assed middle-aged saddle-bag with nostrils, or an officious prig with a pencil dick and a handlebar moustache, or a Roomba, or a cardboard cutout of Carrie Underwood. I don't care. Replace me with a fig or a ferret. Go ahead. And good luck to you.

I kind of can't wait.

Notice the "kind of?"

Well, that's because I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do when I go, or where the fuck I'm going to do it. I'm kind of sick of being occupationally misdirected, and I'm sure my wife is kind of sick of it too. As I'm approaching thirty rather rapidly, I know that it's way past time to get my shit together.

I know.

I'm hopeful, of course, that, once I figure out where I am and where I'm going and what I want to do that I will no longer be the new asshole at work, or, as time progresses and my ass gets fat, the old asshole at work.

I don't know. But I hope so.

I want to have a job that I'm excited about. That thinking about returning to after 10 days of vacation doesn't send shivers down my pancreas.

Is there such a job?

Maybe not. One thing's for sure-- I know there's no job out there that's better than lounging around in pj's while your wife does your hair.

For now, though, hold onto your dreds, because here comes the new asshole at work.

The Antihero's Hero

First, there was Captain Chesley Sullenberger, III, who landed an airplane gracefully upon the waters of the Hudson River, saving the lives of every scared passenger on board.

Now, there's Captain Richard Phillips, who gave himself up as the sole hostage in the Somali pirate drama, saving the lives of every scared crewmember on the Maersk Alabama.

We do seem to love our Captains in this country lately: men in uniform who are at the helm of some large piece of transportation equipment. Perhaps, in the next couple months, we will be hailing the actions of a train conductor in his mid-fifties for some amazing act that he will then modestly downplay at a press-conference. Or perhaps the Captain of the QE II will be nationally lauded for single-handedly procuring more shrimp cocktail for an elderly matriarch at a Saturday night dress-up dinner event.

Don't get me wrong-- I'm not trying to take anything away from these guys, I just think it's kind of a funny phenomenon (you know, like LMT stories!) and, as you know, it's my job as a blogger to identify funny phenomena and exploit them for my own nefarious purposes.

I have to say, though, that, for all their obvious heroism, I kind of wish heroes would own up to it more. It gets kind of annoying to listen to heroes being interviewed and denying that they're heroes. I mean, come on. Shut the fuck up already. With Sullenberger, it was, "Oh, no, my vo-pilot and crew are the real heroes." Then it was, "Well, all the tugboat operators who immediately dropped what they were doing and came to our aid-- they're the heroes." And, "The NYPD and the FDNY are the real heroes."

With Phillips, the mastubatory debate rages about whether Phillips was the hero, or whether the crew was the hero, or whether the Navy SEALS who blew the heads off the pirates were the heroes. In a CBS News story (which, by the way, referred to Captain Phillips as "Captain Courageous" which was enough to make me vom) published online yesterday, the word "hero" or "heroism" is used seven times.

"I'm just the byline," Phillips said, "the real heroes are the Navy SEALs, those who have brought me home."

Well, goll-y. Why are we so obsessed with who the "real" hero is? Can't there be more than one? If someone is a "real" hero, doesn't that imply that someone else is a "fake" hero? Why is it that we have come to demand false modesty as the automatic response of people that we nationally and unabashedly adulate? It's a routine, a tradition, it's... foreplay.

It's a script.

"I was just doin' my job."

You can't be a hero and not say that to a reporter, I'm sorry. This country will not permit that. And you can't say "doin-g" either: it's "doin,'" Captain Heroman. You are required by law to say it like that because we need all our heroes to sound like John Wayne and, if you're too bookish and add the "g" on to the end of "doin'" well, you've just got too much learnin' for us reg'lar folk who need more down-to-earth heroes.

We know you were just doin' your job, ma'am. But, can't you be doin' your job and be a hero at the same time? Why does one have to preclude the other? There are plenty of people who put on a uniform and "just do their job" but will never act in a heroic way. The people who clock in at 8am and leave at 4pm are "just doin' their job." You're doin' your job and being a hero. And... hey: that's okay.

Oh, and if you're addressing a female reporter, you are also required to add, "ma'am" to the end of your statement. Them's the rules, pard'ner.

I just wish that one day a police officer would rescue a drowing victim from a raging flood, or a fireman would rush out of an inferno clutching a set of twins and a litter of puppies, or a paramedic would successfully perform CPR on the Queen and have the courage to stand before a camera and answer the ridiculous question, "Do you think you're a hero?" with the statement,

"Well, yeah.... Obviously. Look at what the fuck I just did."

Heroism in this society is pretty downright silly. You're only allowed to be a hero if you categorically deny you are one, even if it's absurdly obvious that you are one. When you're a loser, a criminal or a bastard, everybody wants you to own up to it. When you're a hero, nobody wants you to own up to it.

Captain Phillips is coming home to Vermont today, where he will receive a hero's welcome.

But only if he claims he doesn't deserve it.