Almost there.

 So here we are, the Inglorious Ninth of June, wherein I celebrate the 39th anniversary of my employment here at the egregious mold-pit wherein I labor for my daily bread. Next year there will be parties and perhaps an interview with the local media, although I wouldn't bet on it, and I will no doubt go home afterwards and weep into my pillow at the waste I have made of my life.  But as I said, that is next year. This year, I can only contemplate the noisome mess that I will be in one year and wonder how the hell I got myself into this situation.  I didn't want to be a minor bureaucrat; I wanted to play center field for the New York Yankees, a common life fantasy in these parts and one that I could never realize given my complete inability to hit a curve ball. How swiftly was ambition crushed, my life torn from its preordained path and sent down the loathsome path to the lower depths of the bureaucracy! How wretched are the cruel twists of fate that lead some to the pinnacles of glory and others to the soul-sucking monotony of life in triplicate!  Life is not fair, which what I will be annoying everyone I know with for the next year. By the time the 40th anniversary rolls around I am sure that everyone will be sick and tired of listening to me and will be conspiring to hit me over the head with a shovel and selling my carcass at the weekly farmers' market for meat. I have great things to look forward to this year.

Staff meetings, or shootout at Durango Gulch

The monthly staff meeting was today precisely at noon, as it always is, and I was there on time, just as I always am, and just as always I spent much of the time during this monthly staff meeting sitting in my uncomfortable chair wondering what it is about monthly staff meetings that make me wish I were dead. I can’t say for certain why this is my inevitable reaction to monthly staff meetings, but I strongly suspect that the reason I feel this way is that, as the late and much lamented dearly departed Akaky Bashmachkin, no one could require me to go to monthly staff meetings, and if, like the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who attends all staff meetings held at the University College London despite his having died in 1832, my presence was a requirement no matter what my state of temporal being, I would not care one way or the other, apathy being one of the salient characteristics of those who are blind, deaf, dumb, and dead.  Unfortunate, I fear, but all too true; the dead are the very embodiment of the low information voter whose lack of historical knowledge and pride in our civic institutions are the bane of our modern political discourse. It is no wonder then, I think, that most of the dead vote for Democrats. 

The interested observer can usually distinguish monthly staff meetings from other congregations of like-minded people by the monotonous drone. In this monthly staff meetings differ from baseball games, for example, where the crowd noises are generally happy, especially if the home team is winning, horse races, where the crowd noises are imploring, particularly if the horse you’ve just bet the ranch on is starting to fade coming into the home stretch, and the St. Patrick’s Day parade, where the crowd’s noise is generally both loud and peristaltic; green beer will do that to you.  Monthly staff meetings, on the other hand, drone on and on and on like a set of out of tune bagpipes, although that in itself poses the question: if the bagpipes you are listening to were out of tune, how would you know?  Yes, the drone, like the beat, goes on, its monotony enhanced with subtle undertones of minutiae and spiced every so often with fresh organic ennui just brought in from the garden, where even the woodchucks wouldn’t eat the stuff. Woodchucks have standards, after all, unlike your average organic vegan locavore, for whom the taste of dirt is the imprimatur of their moral and cultural superiority over the unwashed and unenlightened masses of their countrymen, who delight in stuffing their pie holes with hamburgers, French fries, and other such disgusting rot.

And what do we discuss at the monthly staff meeting?  Nothing of any consequence. Directives will be promulgated, policies will be implemented, staff inputs will be sought, actions will be discussed, it is all very passive voice, as if the directives and the policies and the staff inputs will pop up all by themselves like poison ivy or a long lost relative at the reading of your rich aunt’s will.  And what are staff inputs, anyway? I have been on the staff of the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread for longer than I care to think about and in all of that time no one has ever asked me for an input. People have asked me for help, people have asked me for money, and one guy asked me to stop banging on the men’s room door until he was done banging his girlfriend—yes, that was embarrassing, thank you for asking—but no one’s ever asked for an input. So I have no clue what a staff input is, except that the people who run this place think so much of them that they call monthly staff meetings in order to bore the staff to tears talking about them. Perhaps they do it because they can.  In The Rebel, Albert Camus wrote, “tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes.”  Well, there’s not quite a million of us—we wouldn’t all fit in the building if there were—but we do have some people who like to talk whether or not they have anything to say and some other people who like to talk when they know that the people they are talking to have to sit there and listen.

The interesting thing about monthly staff meetings, perhaps the only interesting thing from a purely scientific point of view, is how the monthly staff meeting refutes key aspects of Einstein’s theory of special relativity.  Einstein postulated that as a physical object grows nearer and nearer to the speed of light, time itself would start to slow down, until a few seconds at near light speed for that object could see the passing of years, decades, centuries in normal time. And yet this mycological cesspit moves no faster than the rest of the planet, and despite this, time slows down to an unendurable crawl during the monthly staff meetings just as surely as it does at near light speed. Why time would make an exception to the physical rules of the universe for a monthly staff meeting is not known, but as someone who has to endure these temporal slowdowns twice a month (once for the entire staff and another for department heads) I cannot discount the possibility that time does this because time is a big jerk.  This makes as much sense as any other reason that is out there, I think, and frankly, the idea appeals to the broad streak of rampant paranoia that makes up a good part of my personality.

Explanation

Strange as this may seem, I actually do have something to put here other than this attempt to explain why the thing I have to put here isn't actually here at the moment. Things have been very busy hereabouts in the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread--the boss is retiring--and I haven't had the time to type the piece up and to upload it. Mis apologias, and no, I don't know why I am saying that in Spanish, unless it is to ingratiate myself to the soon to be new owners of this our Great Republic. In any case, I will attend to the matter of uploading the newest screed as soon as I have the time, which should be sometime this week, God willing and the river don't rise, as John Wayne used to say.

The civil service, or how to stay out of the slammer, in one easy lesson

My apologies for being nearly invisible here for the past few weeks, but the best laid plans of mice and men aft times gang agley, as Robert Burns put it. Life has a nasty way of imposing its own demands on one’s writing schedule, whether you want it to or not, or even if you know what agley means or not; I know I don’t.  This morning my co-workers here at the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread reminded me that I have been laboring here for my daily bread  for twenty-six years, yesterday being the anniversary of the inglorious day that I first wandered into this dump as an employee.  This, plus the fact that we have had a slew of recent retirements here, now means that I have been laboring here longer than anyone else has been laboring here, which in itself, apart from the actual number of years I’ve been doing this, is pretty damn depressing.  Combined with the actual chronology, it was enough to make me vaguely suicidal in an annoyed sort of way. I tamped down quickly on my immediate urge to sever an artery with my own teeth and went out for some pizza.  There’s not much that a nice hot slice of pizza can’t make better, and if can’t actually make it better, pizza makes the bad news seem less depressing.  I’m thinking of wangling the pizza concession on the Day of Judgment; I figure the saved will like a nice hot slice to celebrate and the damned will need something to lift their spirits before they become toast on a more or less eternal basis. 

In any case, I should point out that twenty-six years in the civil service has convinced of one great lesson: no matter how well you’ve covered your ass, you can always cover it better.  This leads inevitably to the scandals the Internal Revenue Service has gotten itself embroiled in.  If we listen to the big shots in Washington, the targeting of the Tea Party in particular and the American conservative movement in general was just something those crazy kids out in Cincinnati dreamt up all by their lonesomes without any sort of input from the head honchos, and especially without the input of anyone within breathing distance of the former junior Senator from Illinois.  Yes sirree, no one here in Washington was involved at all.  Cincinnati is out there in flyover country, Mr. Chairman, and flyover country is a nice place to visit, or so people have told me who’ve been there, but I’ve never been there myself and I’ve never talked to anyone who has.  They do strange things out there in the Ohio River valley and it may be the fault of the funguses.  I have to tell my rheumatologist if I ever want to go to the Ohio River Valley because there are funguses there that might interfere with my medication, so no, I couldn’t tell you why those people out there might want to do this sort of thing.  It’s Ohio, Mr. Chairman, and they do things differently out there.

The problem with blaming the frontline civil servants is this: it’s bullshit.  Sorry if that offends, but after twenty-six years here I can tell you that no one, but no one, at the frontline level of the civil service, even someone in as small a shop as my egregious mold pit, sticks their neck out like this without someone higher up in the food chain telling them to do so.  The only times I have ever gotten my ass chewed out big time here is when I cut people slack I shouldn’t have in direct violation of the policies spelled out in our staff manual.  It is inconceivable to me that long-time civil servants working at the Federal level in an agency like the IRS just did this because it seemed like a good idea at the time and because they didn’t like the political opinions of the applicants; their jobs do not include vetting groups on the basis of partisan politics; civil servants are not, or at least they shouldn’t be, in the business of helping one party or another win elections.  No, the only, and I mean the only, way the people in Cincinnati did this is because their politically appointed bosses in Washington wanted this to happen, and they only way those bosses gave them these orders is because they got the approval from the top.  There may not be a smoking gun in this case, but there is no possible way that people at the frontline, the middle management, and the top tiers all decided to break the law and suppress the constitutional rights of hundreds of thousands of Americans without our erstwhile Illinois Incitatus and his clique of Chicago political thugs giving them the go-ahead.  Civil servants do not think outside the box, folks, we are one with the box, we are in psychic unity with the box, we are the box. We don’t do things that can cost us our jobs, our pensions, and land our sorry asses in prison spontaneously. We just don’t, that’s all.

Post #900, or what am I still doing here?

You may not believe it; I know I didn’t; but this is my 900^th post here at The Passing Parade.  I hadn’t planned to do the blogging thing for so long, but I guess I have, and it seems to me that the occasion calls for me to do something special. The problem here, as I see it and maybe you do too, is that I have nothing special to say now.  Not having anything to say is a problem for me, as I am not a politician. Politicians can rattle on for hours without saying anything in particular or even knowing what they are talking about—the career of Mr. Biden serves as a shining exemplar of this great truth—but for me to write about something I actually have to have something to say about it.

Okay, I was going to go on about how I had nothing to write about, but as I write this at 1:30 pm Eastern Standard Time here in the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread there is an elderly non-Turkish speaking Puerto Rican gentleman singing Silent Night in Spanish while dancing what appears to be his version of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from Chaikovski’s The Nutcracker right in front of me.  We must have a policy against this sort of thing, but I’ve gone through the staff manual more times than I can remember these past few days and I have not noticed any prohibitions against this particular bit of weirdness.   Actually, the staff manual could use a good updating; there are no prohibitions, for example, against copulating in the stairwells, giving birth in the ladies’ room, or dying in the men’s room, all of which have occurred in the years I’ve been here. I am not sure when we became Apeneck Sweeney’s favorite hangout, but I am sure this is not the sort of thing we ought to be encouraging hereabouts. It frightens the taxpayers and makes them wonder what other sort of nonsense we are wasting their money on.  This still, however, leaves the problem I have right now, although it appears that I won’t have this problem for much longer. Our Nureyev manqué is running out of steam; there seems to be only so much en pointe work a deranged Latino man in his sixties or seventies can do in untied ratty sneakers before gravity and a cannabis induced lack of coordination start to kick in; and I think the time has come to invite him to take his artistry outside, where the cops can tell him to knock it off before he starts scaring the various and sundry passersby, their kids, and the family dog.

It is now later and the interruption is gone. He did not want to go; balletomanes are a contentious lot, especially when they are stoned out of their gourds and ballet is not the only thing they are mane about; but his performance had degenerated from the beauties of classical ballet into something approximating a synthesis of modern dance and Friday night wrestling, and we will not put up with that sort of thing here. He also began to sing O Holy Night at the top of his lungs, which are not in tune and are not likely to be anytime in the near future, which contributed greatly to my decision to ask him to leave.  At this point, I really don’t feel like continuing to write this or anything else; I have a headache.  Frankly, at this point, I am not certain who is stranger: our geriatric premier danseur noble, who is certifiably nuts, or me, for continuing to work in this environment.  There must be something in the water, or maybe I just lack imagination. 

Turkish, Coffee, and its discontents

It has been an interesting week here in the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread.  Since Monday, I have been an unwilling participant in an ongoing argument with an elderly and more than a little loony Puerto Rican gentleman about the proper conjugation of Turkish verbs.  I am an unwilling participant in this brouhaha because, as I have told him numerous times, I do not speak Turkish, I have never spoken Turkish, and it is entirely unlikely that I will be trying to learn Turkish any time in the immediate future.  Given this state of absolute ignorance concerning all things concerning the Turkish language, I am not in a position to debate the proper conjugation of verbs in the future dubitative tense with this gentleman.  In fact, however, I should mention that the gentleman I am having this one-sided argument with is in no position to argue the facts of Turkish verb conjugation either—possession of a small and incredibly ratty Turkish dictionary  bought for a quarter at the second hand bookstore down the street from us does not make one an expert on the Turkish language, Turkish culture, or the long-term ramifications of current Turkish foreign policy in the eastern Mediterranean region and beyond, a position, I feel, is something that Turks  of all political persuasions can agree with. If not, please let me know.  After he finished lecturing me on how wrong I was in all matters concerning Turkish verb conjugation and grammar, our Puerto Rican gentleman asked for the address and phone number of a Spanish botanica in the city, saying that he wanted to go there in order to find something to help alleviate his loneliness.  No one at his group home wants to talk to him, he said, and he did not understand why not.  I must admit that I was about to snicker when he said this, but then the chuckle died aborning; it struck me that it must indeed be a lonely life for a mentally ill elderly man without a family when even his fellow crazies think he’s nuts.

Television advertising constantly reminds the American public these days that America runs on the baked goods and coffee of a large chain of restaurants that will remain unnamed here. If you are an American, you know which chain I am talking about; if you are not, then there is no point in bringing the matter up; and if you are an advertising executive for this chain who wants to do some product placement I should point out that the advertising rates for such placement are very reasonable here.  Getting back to the facts, I was sitting at the red light waiting to make my right onto the highway that leads into the heart of our happy little burg.  Unlike many red lights, which simply serve as a device to justify cops handing out traffic tickets, this particular red light does serve a practical function. While it is possible to make the right on red at this particular red light, it is not advisable.  The lay of the land and the curvature of the road are such that in order to see if anything is coming down the highway, the hurried motorist must inch out almost halfway out onto the highway, thereby increasing the risk of having the front end of his car sheared off by some impatient doofus hurtling through the intersection before the yellow light turns red.  Needless to say, I have, over the years, been the subject of so many near-misses at this light that I no longer go inching out onto the highway; being an extra minute early for work is simply not worth risking my neck for.  This attitude, however, is not widespread hereabouts, as demonstrated this morning when the incredibly angry obese woman with a face like a cross between a Vietnamese fat-bellied pig and a rusty fire hydrant in the car behind me began leaning on the horn in order to move me along.  I was not going to move, for the reasons aforementioned, and because that moving along is not a big deal at this light. This light, unlike so many traffic lights, actually goes through its green—yellow—red cycle quickly, so motorists in a hurry are never left sitting there wondering, when is this damn light ever going to change, for long.  

In any case, after one prolonged and very unnecessary horn blast, the woman opened her window and began screaming at me. I did not shout back at her; I simply adjusted my rear-view mirror in such a way that she could see what I was saying and used a short but definite phrase to let her know that I was not going to move until the light was green.  Our automotive Brunnhilde saw what I said, and promptly backed up and went around me even as the light was changing and went roaring out onto the highway without looking to see if there was anything coming. Now, if life was fair, this avoirdupois ass would have had her avoirdupois ass smeared all over the road by a tractor-trailer, but alas, Nemesis would not have Her way with this gelatinous dolt today.  She roared off down the highway like a Macy’s Thanksgiving balloon in a high wind even as the light turned green. I went out onto the highway a moment later and without worrying about the oncoming traffic.

I saw her only a few minutes later.  She was in the parking lot of the unnamed coffee and baked goods chain whose products keep America running, trying to hoist her very substantial and circumferential self out of the driver’s seat of her car.  I laughed out loud, a not terribly polite reaction on my part, I know, but one I could not help at the time—the idea of charging blindly out onto a highway without checking to see if there was anything coming was just so stupid to me I could not believe it, as was knowing that the object of this stupidity was because this onnazumo manqué could not bear someone keeping her from her doughnuts and coffee for an extra twenty seconds.  Those guys must make a damn fine cup of Joe.