When the fashion statement itself
Is the victim of my internal quills,
Consciousness becomes a hazard
And expedited distraction
An illuminated item in demand.
.
Still, it’s in their eyes.
.
They play the game —
The whole thing is still a phenomenon
To enough of an extent
In their minds
That their gazes narrow and their
.
Voices mouth out
Purposeful constructions
To efface Charybdis
Under neon lights.
I’m in the cell phone shop and the dude is doing it in style — a heavy-set Hispanic chap of about 30, with a gentle demeanor, describing to me the condition and potential of my phone. It’s a unit that looks like it’s been run over by a semi-truck, roughly. He’s got a shop about the size of a dentist’s office lobby, with about 60 different sku’s of phones and cases on the wall. The only person in there is me. I feel kind of bad for him, suddenly, envisioning his imminent business demise, and think about the possibility of using all this space for a little flat-top lunch eatery. Wouldn’t that be ironic — the Hispanic in a button-down shirt, talking to people with a gentle demeanor and the Gringo cooking nachos and quesadillas?
He does a little research on my phone, goes to his little back laboratory for a little bit, which is just an open area 10 feet behind his desk, and comes back pretty much singing the death knell of my phone. But I can get a new 8 online for $200, he says.
He’s getting my phone ready to give back to me, finalizing the plans, and this heavy black girl comes in, and, while I’m talking to the guy at his desk, and in heavy breathing, starts ranting about her phone, interupting our conversation. She doesn’t really seem angry — more just wielding of this maniacal sort of focus regarding her product within the American economy, ironic, again, given her garb of spandex pants and tight workout shirt that’s way too small for her.
The thought enters my mind to start chewing her out. 10 years ago, I undoubtedly would have done just this, and then it’s another tab to keep open in your mental Chrome browser all the time, it’s another person harvesting homicidal thoughts of you, when they gauge your persona and skills in articulation. I sit back down, nodding at her when she makes idle commentary at me, which if course, is delivered at approximately 100 decibels.
When she leaves, temporarily, after not getting anything done, I voice to the retailer, “I was so close to chewing her out.”
He laughs. And we all feel a little bit better, until she returns again, looking at us with this senile, glazed-over confidence and ascribing the utmost importance to her phone within the eye of the universe.
And I feel like this is only the beginning. I feel like I’m looking not only at the face of the 2020’s, here, but the 2030’s, 20… eh, I’m rambling. Anyway, I’m happy as a little mouse with my little cheese in the corner, and I thank the dude and get out of there. He doesn’t charge me a cent. I know I should have tipped him 10 or 20 but I’m flat broke. Plus, I’m a little addled from that loud girl who’d barged in and interrupted us, who, mind you, was decidedly not my type, her primary shortcoming of course being a little “unstoppable today” for my tastes.
The populace itself is degraded to a vulnerable brand of detritus
After the passing of time,
The propagation of man
Into the open spaces
Where psychological need replaces
What was once an idyll.
.
In my car, I sit, persecuted,
Stalked and hunted
By a name tag with a face and
Incisors bent on order
In a world that’s been prodded
Like livestock.
The patrons walk into the bar,
Caulked smiles occluding eyes
Of dark, uncertain desperation.
.
In general,
The behavior tends to be uniform,
With mimicry informing most
If not all acts and
Degradation of others a pressing,
Pervasive concern.
.
Dark, mocking
Eyes scroll the list of taps.
.
In minds, thoughts
Race back to big,
Shiny objects, to
Times Square,
To any number of figures
Dressed in name brand clothing and
.
The choice is made
As a cultural statement,
Perceived as a broad, fervent
Stroke handling
What kind of person the customer will be
.
By engaging in the
Theoretical, non-tactile
Act of ordering a beer.
Sitting in your truck after work
With your motor running,
You were the very vista of America.
.
It was six degrees out
And the snow was falling.
.
I started scraping my car
Next to where you were
And you didn’t move
And I could feel your non-movement
Like a chasm bored before whom you had been
And like your own incisor
Back into these cold environs.
.
But when we were in work,
Joking around,
You were like a volcanic explosion of light,
And there was no one else like you.
.
So maybe that’s how you were supposed to be:
A jagged piece of a jigsaw puzzle
Echoing the mooring blades
With a closed circuit and
Reptilian breast plate.
There’s a bar in the suburban town next to my hometown. It’s the type of place where it helps to have your wits about you, for your safety and also to fend off sh**-talkers. I kind of like it for that.
As should hardly come as a surprise to anybody familiar with the area, there’s a dude who goes to the bar every day, during the day. It seems that every such establishment has one of these. What’s funny, too, is that all of these people are a little different. You’d think there would be some common thread between all of them, given their shared behavioral folly. Yet, you get some of them introverted and some of them outgoing, while, perhaps, all furnishing the tendency to be a bit gross with the ladies.
Indeed, the guy I’m talking about at this particular bar is someone whom I’ve heard deliver inappropriate conversation to female bartenders. This was a while ago, though, and for all I know he’s cleaned up his act in this regard and withholds whatever sexual rhetoric he’d otherwise be aiming at the girls.
What I’ve seen developing in him recently, anyway, is a bizarre impetus to kind of regulate the proceedings, like making himself the arbiter of people’s respective level of coolness, more or less. I couldn’t believe it, that is, when, last time I was at this place, this pretty cute girl started talking to me about all the problems in her life, and then this dude who’s there every day acted glad when she left, saying something like “It’s a lot quieter in here now that she’s gone.”
Now, you’d think somebody who was a big enough loser to go to the same bar every day and stay for an average of about five hours each of those days would be grateful that any good-looking chick would let him anywhere near her. This is a dude, also, who, per his own report, has been to prison, and has had some unmentionable stuff happen to him in there, too. He was sure to make this clear to all of us who were present in that bar this one day, the fact of whether or not I was in earshot dictating his admissions perhaps up in the air still. Somehow, I don’t doubt it.
Well this was a trick he could only do once, you might say, and now his thing seems to be taking up gripes with other patrons who don’t seem, at the time, to be bothering anyone else in the whole establishment other than him. What would possess him to take issue with this girl in there, who was not only good-looking but also pretty kind, friendly and pleasant, if perhaps a little chatty and plaintive? There must just be some impetus for conquest in him, like the need to be at the top (almost like a Fascist dictator’s personality, in a sense), like a superiority complex. And as funny as it seems to see a superiority complex turn up in someone who’s such a barfly as he is, it’s equally troubling and ominous, almost firmly indicating that something bad will happen in there, at some point, as a result of him. People will surely see through, and quickly, his laughable attempts at infusing himself with this element of “coolness,” like the alpha male, mischievous group leader in high school, more or less. (For the record, I’ve effectively stared him down before, and he definitely doesn’t come across as tough.) But it seems inherent that this hunger for conquest and superiority is what got him in trouble in the first place, with whatever it was which initially landed him in prison. His restless social disposition, that is, bespeaks the inability to feel contentedness, to benevolently joke around and to just be happy with miscellaneous moments, the type of thing surely beneficial to the variant level of happiness in a given tavern mainstay such as himself.
I’m reporting to you now from the breakneck dog show of sensory overload and machine conversation that is post-COVID America. Sitting here, on a Sunday, I have a decent amount of energy. Part of this, though, stems from me only having two jobs right now, instead of the three which I really need in order to make enough money to pay for my apartment, bills, and hopefully, some savings here and there. I live in northern Indiana.
So now I’m looking for a new “third job,” hopefully one where I’m not the oldest person on payroll in the entire restaurant.
Last year, in 2025, I had four different line cooking jobs. The first one I procured, somewhat luckily, in the wake of my position at The Armory, from which I’d been laid off, for seasonal reasons. This prep cook position had paid $18 an hour, so it was an extra sort of bummer to have to part ways with it.
Anyway, the first cooking gig I lined up in ’ 25 was at the Oakwood Resort Hotel in Syracuse, Indiana, full-time. If you can believe it, the kitchen was pretty much all run by Jamaicans. I expected them to be really laid-back and stoned all the time but they were actually some of the worst micromanagers I’ve ever encountered in my life, and their kitchen closing routine would sometimes take up to an hour, with all of us back staff having to spray every single surface with two different chemicals, and wipe, even the areas down in the cooler drawers, and surfaces which obviously wouldn’t touch food. To top it off, the chef, this Jamaican dude, was a total horn-ball, and had this Hooters mouse pad with which your wrist sat on a set of two big foam boobs.
A lot of us cooks were white in there, anyway, and I got along with most of them pretty well, although I sensed some jealousy from one of them when this April girl would smile at me and press her whole body against me. Again, it was a surreal experience of way too much physical contact with back people, and dealing with Sadistic fronts, sometimes old lady servers who just seemed He**-bent on disliking you, like react-walking-away every time you accidentally glanced at them for a nanosecond, etc. I ended up quitting when I was afraid I was going to get into it with one of the front-of-house servers, who’d do things like telling me she farted, and stuff. By this point, last March, I’d lined up my job doing grocery resets, which actually I’m still doing and only pays $13/hour, hence my needing to work three jobs.
A little while later came The Reserve in Middlebury, a swanky little place whose chef was this friendly chap from Connecticut who’d lived in my hometown, South Bend, for a while, working at random places and being, as he called it, “a downtown South Bend degenerate.” By this time, anyway, he was dating the other chef, Sylvia, who was also really nice, and an awesome cook. It ended up being a really cool place to work, in the tiny little Amish town, full of unbelievably, gorgeous and friendly servers, this real nice bartender dude who kind of seemed gay but definitely rocked, and a bunch of amenities like being allowed three or so five-minute breaks in one four-hour shift, and a free beer by the end of the night. (Actually, they gave me free beer every shift, but not food, which is kind of disconcerting, when you think about it.)
Anyway, matters came to a head when, from what I gathered, I ran into more tension from co- workers which was related to a female on the premises paying close attention to me. Actually, it was the co-chef, who was dating the chef, and along these lines, I will say it does get kind of annoying working with a couple, especially when one, or both of them, actually, seem a little bit into you. My last night there, there were two teenage dudes working, and they wouldn’t talk the entire time, or smile at me, or anything, but they’d be watching me like a hawk, watching me plate, and everything, so that my hands started shaking. When I got off that night, I hadn’t yet made the decision to quit, but I decided to go to the strip club down in North Webster, Nightshift, which I’d heard about from a dude at the Oakwood,
which about 10 miles north of it. I went in there and, within about 15 minutes, my shakes were gone. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
I ended up quitting on no notice, about a week later, like a chump, kind of, admittedly, and then soon scooped a job at the Shortstop Inn in Wakarusa. Now, obviously, given the size of this town, I expected the people there to be pretty conventional and by-the-book, so I was very surprised to get there and find a trans-gender girl (as in a person who looks like a girl and has a girl’s butt but a guy’s name and who makes you refer to them as a guy), and a dude who listened to Stevie Wonder, Al Green and all this stuff that impressed even me (I have a minor in music studies from IU), but still I think was missing teeth and driving on a suspended license, in true Wakarusa style. It’s hard to believe, but that little trans girl actually yelled at me for rotating the pretzel bites. I’d tossed the old ones out into a bowl and was going to put the new ones on bottom, for FIFO, and she said, “You’re not supposed to do that… Just put them on top.” I was going to keep working there, anyway, but they ended up firing me for calling off one time, after working me five shifts per week for two weeks. I’d worked 68 hours, total, the week before, and was through 62 that week, when they let me go. On Sundays, I enjoyed getting off my job stocking beer for United Beverage, which I’m still doing on Saturdays and Sundays, getting home, getting into my air conditioning and putting on “Keeping awake” by The Innocence Mission.
After that, it was a long dry spell, and I couldn’t really find another third job until November, by which time we were on a month-and-a-half blackout period from grocery resets, hence putting me in quite the bind. I slid into Wings, Etc. as a line cook at $13 in my darlin’ hometown of South Bend, on the north side off of Portage Rd. Again, it was a sensory overload of all these girls in booty pants talking to me, their identities seeming less and less differentiable from each other with every explosive passing of the planet around the sun. I got along with most of the guys, except for one, black, who’d constantly listen to mumble rap (he had easily my least favorite music taste of any of the black dudes there), who was on house arrest and had been shot. At first, he said I reminded him of an “undercover boss,” which I played along with, replying that, “Don’t worry, I’ll give you a good review.” He ended up calling me a loser and saying “You have to listen to ME,” to which I said, It takes one to know one. He was insinuating that I was going to get fired (I hadn’t even been written up for anything and did a good job and got along with all the guys on the line great) and then his punk-a** got locked up. But I was still sick of being the oldest person on payroll in the entire place, including management, so I quit, again with shi**y notice, like a fag, somewhat, for peace of mind, rest and relief, which, as we know, is sure to be short-lived.
Now, I have an interview at Antonio’s, and the only thing I know to expect is the unexpected.
I fantasize heavily about the female librarian.
.
She’s about 70 years old,
If you can believe it,
Fosterer of an adorable,
Slender figure featuring
Unbelievably pointy breasts,
Small, pretty hands, etc.,
And a friendly personality,
Which doesn’t hurt.
.
We’ve had some pleasant interactions
And so I fantasize about
Getting her into a hotel room for two hours.
.
Sometimes, I think, she’s married. So I shouldn’t.
.
Other times it’s just full speed ahead.
.
Eventually, football season ends,
The sun comes out,
The temperature skyrockets over 25 and
College baseball season looms imminent.
.
And I don’t need the librarian.
.
I am disinclined to sleep with a married woman,
I float on from moment to moment
Just breathing in the new motif around me,
I savor the beauty of life and
Only A.I. could soundtrack a feeling this good.
I forget why I even wanted to call this poem
“The Teacher’s Vibe.”
.
But I feel the world.
.
I feel its pain.
.
And I used to want to be a teacher.
.
Once, again,
I turn my head,
And observe
The
.
Splendor of the world.
.
I’m constantly teetering between life and death.
.
I’m constantly kicking all of the phony people out of my life.
.
I answer a woman’s call and I
Look for aquamarine effervescence in her eyes
And I finish this poem
With a funny feeling at the back of my throat
Before the world’s splendor
Through my ultra-dark
Winter apparatus.
Something about the maniacal extremes
Of the seasons, the opaque darkness
Of night and the intense
Bloodlusting of the hunt,
.
Seemed to categorize this
Mid-bowling-alley expanse of
Metaphorical hardwood between
Ohio and Chicago.
.
The fat people stomping angrily
And playing lottery tickets motif
Was strong and robust
When my family moved me here
From Pennsylvania when I was six,
.
The feeling then ensuing of
Being a piece of food that is cooked,
In a low, flat domicile,
A “Tombostone” pizza,
Perhaps.
.
Elkhart, Gary and Kokomo
Routinely flood the “worst cities” lists,
In Elkhart I hear a dude pronounce “pasta”
Like “last,” I see unspeakable things
Out in the grocery store parking lot,
I hear swells of commiseration from the townspeople
At the fact that I have moved there.
.
Upon NIL,
The local university
Rises to undeniable dominance,
Tom Petty sings of the supreme, vivified regality
Of the women,
Bob & Tom offer utterly, comedically invincible tidbits of
Juvenile nonsense,
.
A security guard
At the country club where I work
Gets homicidally jealous of me
When I discuss something work-related
With the female dishwasher
Who’s extremely ugly.
.
Well, I have a confession to make.
.
I never wanted to leave.
.
I wanted to be a mailman,
Out in the 12-degree, windy days of winter,
Out in the baking summers,
And I wasn’t even envisioning these fabled “women”:
.
I wanted to walk an old lady across the street,
I wanted my dad to take me to the house of another crazy old lady
Who owned six cats and three birds,
.
I wanted another old, Negro stranger
To start talking to me about God
And about people
In the Blimpie connected to the gas station,
.
I wanted to see another sunset,
Get another look at that pinned-up
Ball of fire up in the sky,
Half-mocking and half-jealous,
Rendering the entire landscapes of our existences as
Starkly apart from what they were one hour before.
.
It’s a fatal enterprise
That strangely
Offers a man all he needs.