Morning in America

Waking up with the taste of Marlboro Red and Jack Daniels in your mouth kind decides what kind of day it will be. The sky is gray with rain on the way, but there’s a breeze and it’s warm enough to ride with the windows down. I made my usual hungover trip to Waffle House. The ride there was pleasant enough, although I do feel my truck running a little rougher than she did in her younger days, a constant reminder of something else I’ll need to spend money on at some point. Now I’m thinking about money and that I’ll need to pay a five-hundred dollar medical bill by the end of the month. Plus I’m already down to a quarter-tank…

Putting those thoughts aside, I cruise and sing along to my mix of Zach Bryan, Poor Man’s Poison, Kat Hasty and some others. The drive takes me about ten or fifteen minutes, so it gives me some time to just enjoy the breeze and the music. When I arrive, the place is packed full. It’s almost always pretty empty so this is a bit of a surprise for me. As I’m walking in, I notice a foreboding sign: one of the trucks out front has a giant Mexican flag sticker on the tailgate. Sure enough, the instant I walk through the door I can here the jabbering in Spanish. In of itself, this wouldn’t bother me so much, but since it’s full I have to sit at the high-bar in between a family with four young children and a few others, so aside from the small talk I’m also bombarded with the sound of mobile games.

I have a ritual when I’m hungover. I go to Waffle House or a similar breakfast joint. I drink some coffee, eat some greasy food and I read. I have gotten really good at reading in loud environments in terms of conversational volume, so this is usually no problem. However, one of the other customers has set the jukebox as nothing but headbanging metal, half of which is in Spanish. His taste isn’t exactly bad, but it just doesn’t fit Waffle House to me. So I’m stuck reading About Face because I’ve read it enough times that it’s not even cerebral at this point.

The server takes its time getting to me. Oh yeah, it’s an it. I go to this Waffle House for one specific reason: The servers have almost always been red-state white women. Neck-tats-but-polite kind of thing. I like it that way, I can relate to them even if we usually don’t talk, which means that the little details about asking for food and such aren’t crossing a cultural border, (like when the waitress at a restaurant hounds you about coffee). They understand that if a fit young guy goes to Waffle House, he’s probably nursing off a long night so don’t yell in his face about creamer or incessantly make small talk.

Today, however, they have hired a new employee. At first, I thought it was just an ethnically ambiguous woman, but then upon closer inspection I realize that its name-tag says “Bryan”. Bryan is talking to me in that voice. It takes me a second to stop thinking about what a fucked up world we live in where anyone talks to me in that voice, when I realize it’s asking if I want coffee. Then it has the audacity to say to me, “you got it papi”. I almost walked.

But I get my coffee and my creamer and I go back to reading. It’s a pleasant time for a minute, (I’m reading the part where he’s stationed in Germany commanding a really squared-away rifle company, so it’s just good feels all around). Then my buddy Bryan comes over and asks me “is everything all right for you". Everything, so far, is my coffee, but I say it’s fine. Bryan wants to know if I need more creamer. I have more creamers in front of me than I do in my house, so I don’t. I go back to reading.

At this point I realize that I’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes. I look up and I see a family walking out as Bryan yells, “I’m so sorry about that you guys”. Now I understand. Bryan and the packed house have slowed down the assembly line. It may sound like a rushed conclusion to assume Bryan has anything to do with this, but it does and I’ll come back to that. But I know my food is going to be a minute now, and I’m a little bored of reading so this is a problem for me. So I take a look at the menu. On it, right smack in the middle is a big ol’ sticker that reads, “eggs are 50c each for the time being due to the shortage”.

Schizo-theory time: bird flu isn’t real and they ordered chickens killed en-masse so that the media could say eggs became more expensive under Trump. I have no evidence to back this up, but it is spiritually true which is what matters.

Back to Waffle House, Bryan is asking permission to yell someone’s order. Of course Bryan feels that it needs permission to yell an order in a Waffle House. This means that the orders have been slowed down because Bryan is scared to yell. Come to think of it, Bryan mumbled my order. Am I going to get my order?

I do get most of my order, but Bryan forgot or mumbled the bacon so I missed out on that. Not a huge deal, mistakes happen and the bacon was the part I was looking forward to the least. When I go to pay, I am met at the register by an immigrant from somewhere in West Africa. I don’t mind this guy, he’s worked here a while and he catches the vibe from the white chicks so he doesn’t bother me. However, today we have a problem: I need him to take the bacon off of my tab. It’s not that he doesn’t want to help, it’s that the math is seriously daunting for him. 15.75 - 2.00 is scribbled onto the little yellow paper. He’s been looking at it for quite a while. I pull out my calculator and do the math myself, (I’m now realizing, however, that I hit 3 instead of 2, so I got an extra dollar off so maybe I’m not so bright either). He thanks me and apologizes for the inconvenience, (in as many words), I say it isn’t a problem. Obviously, I don’t tip Bryan.

As I’m walking out I notice that someone has parked next to me in their giant Ram 2500 with non-A/T tires at a 45 degree angle, so I have to navigate that obstacle. On the road back, which was as pleasant as I remembered it, I almost get rear ended at a stop sign by yet another ethnically ambiguous individual. She was on her phone. Otherwise the drive home was okay.

Now I’m thinking about how much it would have cost me if she had hit me and how I would reaaaallly rather not spend any more money this month and how much I wish I could go back to my factory job making descent money. I lost that job for a few reasons, politically the one that matters is that the plant manager was Mexican and they were bringing in illegals. For me the one that matters is that my slipped disc went back in on a shift and when they found out I’d ever had one I think they figured I was trying to get workman’s comp. They laid off a whole shift worth of guys, so I think the former contributed more. I’ve been offered the job back, but there’s a bit of pride going on there so I’m not going to take it. Plus, for those of you who’ve never worked in a factory, most of the conveyor belts are designed for malnourished Indonesian children, so you’re constantly slightly bent over and I just don’t have the patience to deal with that anymore. But I do kind of wish I did.

It certainly beat working in retail. When I got my first retail job, I was told that the company’s pay was standard for each position and they only did raises on the basis of position and annual seniority. When I quit, (I don’t have the constitution to work part-time for life), I was offered a raise. Oh, and my replacement was an Mexican who wears his airpods while talking to customers. =)

For now I just do school. I’m paid to do it, (thanks uncle Sam), so I’m still making some money. Eventually I’ll need to get a job again, but I’m holding out until I can get the ol’ leg fixed so I don’t have to explain to some manager that I’ll immediately be taking five weeks to recover after getting hired. But enough about all that, I just wanted you to understand why I’m thinking money.

So all this is just circling in my head while I’m thinking maybe I should just go be a mercenary somewhere. At least then I can work with real people again. I know half of you guys have autism, and I love you, but I hate being surrounded by hyper-autists with no spirit all the time. It wears me down. Sometimes I just wanna go do something a little crazy, and it seems like almost no one on this Earth can relate to that sentiment anymore. Fuck I wish the army was actually cool.

I pull in the driveway and come upstairs to the office to write this while it’s on my mind, (after a mandatory petting of the Border Collie). My whiskey glass and cigar case are still on my desk, sitting worryingly close to the stack of books I’m using as references for the series I’m writing. Thankfully, not a drop spilled. This weekend was good like that; I didn’t get needlessly drunk and when I drank I had friends to talk to around the fire. My circle is getting smaller though, more and more people move on or just change so much I can’t relate to them. I really can’t relate to the friends I have here beyond shared history, but that counts for something.

I feel like every American is going through the same motions with regard to friendships. No one seems to have a large circle or a tight circle. It’s always just a small group of skin-deep friendships. In our sphere things are a little better, but a lot of these friendships are online and that just isn’t the same. It’s way worse for women; almost all of them seem to prefer talking about friendships on Instagram to having one. I feel bad for them, at least men are starting to uninstall their socials, preferring their homelands of video game chatrooms.

I don’t have a good solution to the friendship crisis. Frankly, I think a lot of those who suggest ones are the loneliest among us. It’s interesting that it’s largely a universal at the moment. You would think the fact that it’s universal would mean that it would stop. But every time I go to bars now, no one my own age is there. Even when that’s not the case, they’re in a group. I never really understood going in a group to bars and not talking to anyone else, you just spend more than you would to drink at home. Maybe I’m just a retard.

These are the kinds of things that I think about when I’m hungover. I get contemplative. When it’s a day like today where I don’t actually feel bad, I enjoy it. If I didn’t have quite a bit of writing to do today I’d probably just sit in the woods and listen to music or something. Unfortunately, I met Bryan so I really had to get this one off my chest.

Fuck you Bryan.

Actually I just feel bad for Bryan. Bryan probably got molested as a child, (although I wish he didn’t make it his whole personality). Bryan probably doesn’t have a lot of deep friendships either. I doubt it could, it likely mistakes the platonic for the erotic and ruins them. That’s a common trend among a lot of people nowadays, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it’s more present in homosexuals. Bryan’s working at Waffle House, it’s not doing that well on money either. Bryan probably doesn’t even know its heritage given the skin-tone-fake-nail mix. If you’re reading this Bryan, good luck man.

Thinking about Bryan and all the Spanish jabbering in the Waffle House makes me wonder if MAGA can actually do much to stop the ethnic side of things. Maybe BAP is right and we’re just stuck preparing for Brazil. I’m not one of those hyper-autists whose main concern is building an ethno-state, (doesn’t stop the Iron Prison), but Brazil also has its problems. I need a sparring partner. The boxing gyms here are as ghetto as can be, and I don’t have the money to be blowing it on another gym membership. It’s been too long since I’ve fought, I’m not so confident anymore. It’s not like I can just fight at bars, the Bad People ensure that any bar fight is going to be an assault charge.

Kind of a similar vein: one of my neighbors was bump-firing an AR yesterday. At first I thought it was a SAW with how long of a burst they got off and I’d kinda just figured the day had come. But no, they were bump firing an AR and one of the rounds went through the forest into my yard, close enough that I hit the deck. I don’t know which neighbor it was, but just so we’re clear, my woman was sitting next to me and I’m more than a little bit pissed off. Everyone around here owns an AR or two, so there’s no telling who it was. I drove around today trying to figure it out but no luck. If another round crosses my property though I’ll be going door to door and someone’s getting their ass beat.

Anyways this essay’s gone on long enough. I just felt like getting a rant out somewhere. I hope you’re all enjoying this beautiful American morning.