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20 October 1998 |
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I feel like shit. I feel all hung over and I didn't even get to drink anything. No booze, no tussin, and only four cigarettes for the whole day. That's prolly why right there. I am quitting the smokes again. I didn't buy any after dropping my sister off at the airport Sunday, and just bummed those four from El Prez yesterday, and that was it. So mebbe I'm in withdrawal. Zach beat me to the yellowjacket discussion. They are wasps, you know, not bees. We've been struggling with them about three weeks now. They are attracted to the breakage around here, sticky sweet soda and tea and fruit drink. They come inside and everyone freaks out, because everyone is allergic. I myself am fiercely allergic, but I have a Way. When I was in college, the first time, my friends and I had a yellowjacket friend, not so much a pet really, but this little being lived near the bench outside the guys' dorm, and as I waited around for whomever I was waiting around for that day, the little buzzer would come and hover all about and attempt to climb into soda cans, the usual yellowjacket mischief. Somehow, by accident, we found that if we pointed a finger and moved it slowly, the little creature would follow the fingertip around, dancing with it through the air. I learned a gentleness. See, bees and I get on great. The more common types of wasps, however, used to have an instantly hostile reaction to my presence within 30 yards. I'm not exaggerating, it must have been something in my body chemistry. Red and brown wasps would leave the nest far behind in order to initiate an attack on me. Now, they blow me off much like other insects do, so whatever it is has changed. Anyway, yellowjackets didn't pick up on whatever it was the other wasps hated about me, and I came to understand what drew them, and why they fluttered here or there, and how to persuade them to leave when they came to be in a dangerous place. Our office is, for yellowjackets, a dangerous place. They wander inside from the breakage outside, and Joy shrieks, and El Prez starts swatting. I cringe, because most stinging insects, in fact most well-armed animals, only attack in fear. Now, being swatted by a being with exponentially greater body mass than you is surely going to scare the shit out of you. You have one weapon, and by god, if you can, you will use it. If however, you are very comfortably led out to a less hostile environment, then who needs a stinger? My way is nothing special, just to guide it gently, carefully, nonthreateningly out the door with my hands, if it will follow. If there is something really sweet smelling drawing it, then that thing goes out too. Whatever will calmly attract it. Past few days, they haven't really been a problem. Someone spilled a huge quantity of tea on the tarmac outside, and the buzzers have hung out partaking of that rather than come inside and see what's sweet in here. I was talking to El Prez about my goals and dreams, and frankly my lack of same. I want to work for D&T and be beneficial to the company. Some days I want to be a mover, I want to cut the big deals, to get out and market and get us in people's faces. Some days I just wanna punch my ticket, do something boring and go home. I'm weary and my memory is faulty and I drop a lotta balls. I want so badly to go to Interbev next week, and can't. El Prez says I shone, and I truly did enjoy it, going to the trade shows we worked in Albany and NYC last year. Making contacts, disseminating information, these things are exciting and fun. Actually making something out of these contacts, that's damn hard. El Prez says I should write. He says I do it well, and I'm missing my calling by not being published. I dunno, I've read good stuff and frankly think my stuff is mediocre. I fight cliché every day and use the word "I" far too much. I don't sculpt the words the way a real craftsman does, they just spill out of me as does my breath. But maybe that's the point. "So," I said, "What would I write?" He said that I have a story that needs to be told, to teens and young adults. He said I should write the story of my first son, how he came to exist and how he came to belong to another family. That's a very messy story, though. There are no good guys in that story. Even my sainted grandmother showed an evil side in this tale. Even my beloved father, even my god, even I myself, who glared down at others from a teetering tower of self-rigteousness, I myself was evil in this story. I don't like Seinfeld because there are no good guys in the show. Flawed but fundamentally good people I like fine. Unlikeable people, you can keep em. Well, in that tale, we all are unlikeable. Is it that it just wouldn't make good reading, or that it would cause me too much discomfort to write it? Who would want to read such a thing? There is only a sorta happy ending, really. The real ending we won't know until eleven or more years have passed. It's a complex story, not just about love and betrayal, about the loss of virginity, about misplaced faith in a lover, but it's also about religion, it's about seeing the truth of the world, it's about infidelity and selfishness, about vanity and guilt. It's about wounding the ones you love, and being wounded by the ones you love. It's about unsealable rifts. It's about standing alone. I don't know how much depth to go into, how many details to describe. I don't know how much I can remember. I don't know how much is true and how much my subconscious may have painted over to make my conscience feel better. I'll ponder this. I might do it. There's actually another dilemma I'm wrestling with. It's about the D&T website and dynamic content and design and stuff. I've finally been given completely free reign on site design, so I'll be taking a few weeks polishing up the graphics and trying to make it look a lot less amateurish. We've added a guestbook over there, java-injected ordering forms, a deal with Link Exchange, and a Yahoo! club. I've listed the thing with all kinds of search engines, planted its name and link on newsgroups, and networked with fans and collectors, and you know what? We still aren't really getting anywhere. We have hits, and that's good. But it's not really like what we need. It's not like the Jones site. The thing I'm agonizing over is whether to link to this journal from there or not. I mean, it's dynamic content, and sometimes it even has such juicy things as sex talk and curse words in it, but that may be the very reason not to link it. I don't want people to get a mistaken impression of D&T, especially beverage suppliers and potential customers, like chain stores and such. I mean here is the personal life of a punky haired (it's blue now by the way) mom who's always broke, who can't keep her heart in line, who has an STD, who's probably emotionally and mentally unstable, I mean who can tell. Is it likely I'll reflect good on the company like this? Then again, to see the fallible human side of a beverage company employee...could be entertaining and endearing. Who can say? --Spring
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