Redefinition In Midstride

I stepped out of the warm and cozy beer factory into a winter wonderland. The entry for packaging, where we fill the umpteen freeking cans of beer, pop on lids and wrap them in nifty packaging to send to you is a good city block or so from the stairs to the parking lot. And, seriously, for the last 6 hours, all I did was feed this machine caps – 500 caps in a package, take one off the pallet, put it in the slot, take off the paper, do another… It could have been hailing frogs outside, I wouldn’t have known; I was just doing my best to not spill can lids all over the stinking’ floor (only about 1300 or so hit the ground; average for a new guy, they say…).

Well, it wasn’t frogs, but it was a good 8 inches of snow. It wasn’t even that cold, just, like, snow. Everywhere. Who knew?

Life is kind of like that, you get sort of heads down in it; whatever, you are raising kids, or you are caring for a parent, or you are a this or a that, and shit just kind of sneaks in. The good and the bad startle us in the midst of our “important work”. Someone I thought of as a dear friend passed just this week, and I hadn’t seen him for a while. Taken in retrospect, again I have to ask, who knew that when we passed for a few moments at the folks’ house, that would be my last handshake? And the truth is, you don’t know. You never know.

The ugly truth is, I have reached that age where it could just as well be me that doesn’t come back. It’s not a bad thing, but facts is facts – I am closer to the end of the road than the beginning. Doesn’t matter, here, what you think happens when that road ends, it does. And, it is a funny road. I will be damned if I saw myself as a factory worker at my age, but here I am; you drive the road you get. You can plan all that you like – I think that the Powers What Be enjoy our little plans and goals and daily affirmations. That is why They throw curveballs at us.

I am trying really hard not to drift into cliché, here, but things are cliché because often they are obvious (in hindsight) truths, often as not. I know that you, like me, are doing the best with the hand you were dealt. I know that, sometimes, you feel like you are over your head, that there is too much stress, like you are forgetting something important. It’s OK, we all are there. Take a deep breath, remember who you love, why you are doing what you do; clear your head for just a minute. If what you are doing isn’t right, it is OK to stop. If what you are doing is right, it is OK to do it. Living your life is the hardest thing you will ever have to do, so give yourself a break.

Oh, and the next time you say goodbye to someone you love, be sure they know that you mean it.

A Small Wonder

So, the thing is, there are things you can do when you are young, and there are things you can do when you get older. If you are like me, you should be ashamed of yourself. I mean, really, stand up sometimes or something. I have driven a desk for a long time. Long, long time. You were probably still a baby, man.

So, there I am in a truck bay, unloading cans, running up and down stairs; great job, if I was 26. But, alas, 26 is a number with little meaning in my life now. 26 was another man, living another life, who could no more imagine my life than I can relive his. So, with great misgivings, seeing as I have not had so much as a nibble for these years, since the great layoff at IBM, I went to turn in my gear.

Quite seriously, this was as hard of a decision as I have had to make in a couple of decades. You do not – DO NOT – walk away from guaranteed overtime, indoor(ish) work when times are hard. While we do some great work at e426, and while I love the job, I have also burned through the savings of our 30 year marriage since ’09. The fact that I didn’t have to touch my 401k or pension funds is more a testament to my lovely wife’s frugality than to my earnings.

So, I walked in pretty much knowing that this was the exit door. I had already cleared my locker, had all my gear ready to turn in, and we went through the dance – all but saying that I am too damned old to do this. I was resigned to my fate, wondering if I could get a lower paying but maybe easier job over at the emissions testing place. We shook hands, I started for the door. Then I remembered.

See, I think I got it bad, but there is this cat I hired in with, and he had a choice between his mortgage and his car insurance. So, he parked his car, and is taking the bus to work. That isn’t the worst; hell, I rode the RTD for nearly 15 years, and… Oh, yeah, that sucks really bad. On like his second day, he missed the bus by a couple of minutes, ended up walking home. Just a couple miles. After a 12 hours shift, on his feet, on the go. I gave him my phone number, told him not to do that. Last night, knowing I was going to do this today, I remembered that this cat had a buddy who wanted my slot. Now, I don’t really know either of them, but I highlighted the paper, and put it in my pocket this morning. All I could offer was the guy I know’s name, and that he had a buddy who wanted to work the 12’s, and that he was afoot and that could work out good for him.

And then, the boss said, “So, what was the worst again?”. And I said, you know, it is this unloading business, this working in the truck bays, in the weather, lifting and toting and running up stairs. And he asked if I could stand, well, the standing; that is something that I can do. Well. It seems, there is a job opening at the brewery, in the capping and cartoning area. It starts tomorrow. It is a quiet place, with some lifting no stairs, no outdoors, no trailers.

Now, maybe there is no link between me trying to help someone I just met and the bosses change of heart. Maybe there is nothing to it, only what you read into it. Maybe. But I don’t believe it. When I went in, it was cold, the wind was blowing and the clouds were out. And, when I left, the sun was shining.

What I do know – never miss the chance to help someone. You just never know.

An Old Dog…

As in a dream, you awake one day to a world that you could never foresee, happier than not to take the job of a younger man, and wondering how you can, at the same time.

This is a strange world. I suppose the truth is, I never expected to be this old, to begin with. I was an idiot when I was young; I expected to pay. Somehow, it just happened. My hair started to come in silver and white, my skin started to get thinner, my eyes got both better and worse, my hearing faded in places…

I worked at this place, it doesn’t matter so much now where, but I thought it was somehow important, and I had what I thought were friends there. It wasn’t, they weren’t, and it was over and gone, stealing something from me that I didn’t know I had to lose, making me mistrust all that came after. That proved to be valuable, because the pattern repeats, the pattern is the way of the world…

And the world grew more twisted, all my John Wayne and Father Knows Best childhood blacks and whites fading themselves into grays, and who can tell the bad guys from the good guys any more? The CIA sells heroin and cocaine to the ghettos, and Presidents lie, we arm a tyrant when we need him, then invade his country and kill him when it suits us.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I don’t know where exactly we took the wrong turn, but it was not supposed to be this way. The song is wrong, the soundtrack is off half a second to the video, the words are spoken correctly, but it is the wrong script. We all see that. We all know that starving children are bad, that poverty is bad, that war is wrong, that equality is right, but we don’t care enough to change the world.

We are just dumb enough to keep at it, knowing that we are ass-backward wrong, that we are fucking up the whole fucking enchilada, not just for us, but for everyone and everything, for now and for all time. We will just keep telling ourselves that we can not make a change, that we can’t change the world, that it is not our problem, that we are just trying to get through one more day. But that is a lie, too, and we know that just as well, a sweet little lie to ease the pain.

And then here we are, smack dab in a world that everyone tries to paint in stark blacks and whites. Oddly, though, each person paints-by-number differently, and what is white to one is black to another, or white, but for a different reason, and we are painted by every side as traitors if we don’t believe in the same things in the same ways as they do. And there is no way that anyone can work with anyone else, no way we can move forward as a group – every man for himself, this is a zero sum game, after all.

Phillip Dick was right, we live in a Black Iron Prison, and it is up to us to break out, to validate each other, and recreate the world where everything that you do which enlivens you, which brings you joy, brings me joy, and the converse – a state of consensual bliss, wherein everyone gets to live the life they dream of living.

We have proved that we can make hell on earth, we have done that more than once. Maybe it is time to try and make heaven on earth. I mean, if even this old dog can learn new tricks, maybe there is hope for us all.