Personal

I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently as to what I want to do in the upcoming months. I’m currently working as a temp employee at Xerox, which is all fine and dandy, except for two things.

The first is simply that after nearly a decade of “pushing the green button,” I’m getting a bit tired of that. Well, more than a bit. It got old a long, long time ago.

The second is that Xerox’s policy allows for holding someone as a temp for up to 18 months, at the end of which a hire/fire decision needs to be made — either they hire the temp on as a full Xerox employee, or they let the temp go to find other things to do with their life.

My eighteen months ends in mid-February, and I’ve been considering just what to do when the hire/fire decision is presented to me (that, of course, is assuming that it is presented to me, and they don’t just opt to kick me out the door). I’m not entirely convinced at this point that I’d want to sign on to Xerox full-time — I’m already pretty tired of playing with copy machines, and to be entirely honest, I can’t say I’m overly highly impressed with Xerox as a company, after my years of working with them both as a customer and as a (pseudo-)employee. Besides, pushing the green button only has so much of a future to it, in and of itself.

So, a while back, I’d gone poking around Apple’s job site, as it was rumored that they were going to be opening an Apple Store just outside of Seattle, in Bellingham, and I signed up for their job search. Tonight I got e-mailed details on four job openings for the upcoming Bellevue store, and decided what the heck — it’s worth a shot! So, I’ve applied for two of the positions: Mac Specialist and Mac Genius.

Who knows if anything will come of this, but hey — it’s worth a shot!

Back when I worked at TimeFrame, I worked with a ‘gentleman’ by the name of J.C. Truly a piece of work, this guy was — I mean, I hate to call the guy a prick, but the only reason he’d ever wear a tie would be to keep the foreskin from snapping up over his face. At one point, he moved down to oversee TimeFrame’s Juneau branch. Apparently not too long after he took over that store, his employees were going over his head and calling the store owner directly to complain about him. He managed to rub everyone the wrong way.

I first met J.C. during my job interview, but I didn’t really get to know him at all until I actually started working there, when he was my shift supervisor. My first day working with him, I hit my break time, and told him that I was heading out back for a smoke break. “No problem,” he said, “I’ll join you,” and we went into the back alley. I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. J.C. reached into his pants, pulled out a pipe, loaded the bowl with pot, and started taking hits.

Two hours into the day, on break, and my supervisor is getting stoned in the back alley. He offered me some, of course — one must be polite, after all — but I declined. Quick tip for employers: this isn’t the best ‘first impression’ for a new employee to get. I formed a lot of impressions about J.C. and the business itself on that smoke break (many of which, unfortunately, were confirmed in the months and years to come).

Of course, to hear him talk, J.C. could do no wrong. Any mistake around the shop was due to the incompetence of the clueless idiots that he had to work with, and he never could understand why all of us couldn’t live up to his example. Needless to say, he was a joy to work with.

Flash forward six or seven years to this afternoon. I’m carrying a stack of copies into the bindery area of the print shop, when I overhear Karen mention J.C.’s name. Not sure if it was the same J.C., I asked her about him, and she confirmed that he’d just moved down from a print shop in Alaska when she worked with him at Ikon a couple years ago. As it turns out, three of the people I work with now had worked with J.C. at Ikon after he left TimeFrame and moved to Washington. Funnily enough, they all have the same impression of him that I do — and, in another stunning coincidence (for I’m sure that’s what it must be), all three of them turned in their resignation at Ikon so that they could move to Xerox on the same day, three months after J.C. started working with them.

I know it’s a small world, especially when you’re dealing with the Alaska/Washington traffic (which seems to flow both ways fairly frequently), but it’s always something of a shock to hear a name from six years ago being bandied about.

Everybody’s got a ‘Happy Place’ of one sort or another. The mental refuge you keep for when nothing’s going right, or something you’re witnessing is just too disturbing for you to deal with at the moment. Back off, find your Happy Place, and relax until things have calmed down.

My friend Casey, for some reason, always reveled in doing what he could to destroy people’s Happy Places. Just one of his kicks, I suppose. For instance, one girl’s Happy Place involved playing with a lot of puppies. If I remember correctly, after discovering this, Casey went out and found a copy of the old novelty song “Dead Puppies Aren’t Much Fun” and gave it to her. She needed a new happy place after that.

He never could touch my happy place, though. See, I’ve always had a strong fascination with a lot of very “dark” things. One of my favorite authors is William S. Burroughs. One of my favorite visual artists is H. R. Giger. For many years, I had a fascination (obsession) with trent reznor of nine inch nails. Happy, sunshiney, cheerful stuff like that.

My Happy Place was an animated movie.

Script by William S. Burroughs.

Score by trent reznor.

Animation and art direction by H. R. Giger.

Directed by Terry Gilliam and/or David Fincher and/or Darren Aronofsky and/or David Cronenberg (either joinly, or each taking a different section of the film, or possibly a series of films…whatever).

Casey never did find a way to destroy that particular little Happy Place. He tried making me visualize slapping a “Smiley Face” in the middle of it, but I started having too much fun envisioning a “Smiley Face” as drawn by Giger, and Casey gave up.

My Happy Place was — and is — safe and unscathed.

(Loosely inspired by BlogFodder.)

I’m a bit late posting this, as I’ve been battling with a flu/sore throat bug that’s kept me in bed and downing NyQil for most of the weekend, but Friday’s fun was seeing Henry Rollins spoken-word act at the Moore Theatre here in downtown Seattle. While I’ve never been a huge fan of Henry’s music (Black Flag, The Rollins Band, etc.), I became a big fan of his spoken-word performances a few years ago after one of the people hanging around the Pit brought over a videotape of Talking From the Box.

Rollins is an incredibly intelligent man, and does great spoken-word performances — cynical, insightful, hilarious, disturbing, and about ten or twenty other good adjectives. I’d been able to see him once before when he came to Anchorage a couple years back, and as soon as Candice let me know that he was going to be in Seattle, I knew I’d want to go again. As it turned out, Candice picked me up from work and we went, then met up with Chad, Rick, Casey, Liza (Rick’s roommate), Kim, and Kayo, and then we all went out to a bar after the show. The show was great, the after-show party was a lot of fun, and I had a blast, up until I finally had to head home and put my sick self to bed.

I’d had the Rollins spoken word album Think Tank for a while (autographed by The Man, even, after the show in Anchorage), and I highly recommend it. At the show Friday night, there were two new spoken word albums available — Talk is Cheap, Volumes one and two, both of them 2-disc sets, and both of them just ten dollars each! At the moment they’re only available at his shows, too — needless to say, I’ve got them both.

Snippets from a couple articles about Rollins from local papers plugging his show:

“In a way, I think it’s good that major labels have charged so much money for their wares,” he said. “Because it’s going to cave in and there will only be one record company. A new release will just say, ‘FM Music,’ and it will sound like Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Jennifer Lopez put in a Cuisinart with the Korn guitar player, who will be out of a job….”

— Seattle P-I: Henry Rollins likes to keep himself ‘off balance.’

“TO ME,” SAYS Henry Rollins, “the way to really get close to the material is to go at it from almost an insane or an absurdist angle. If you just go for the straight facts, you know, they kind of come up to meet you with a fist in the face. It’s like the idea of us getting into a war with North Korea. I can’t see it happening, but the way for me to internalize it is to envision these old guys running around the war room with hard-ons, looking for some payback for when they had to bail out of Pusan in the ’50s. Or Donald Rumsfeld’s thing: ‘Yeah, we can handle two wars! Absolutely two wars! How ’bout fuckin’ three? Come on, you motherfuckers, we’ll start two half-wars over at your house, and we’ll have another one on the White House lawn right now, bitch!'”

— Seattle Weekly: Henry Rollins Brings the Noise

Welcome to 2003, everyone! Here’s a toast I learned from Casey years ago…

Here’s to you,
here’s to me,
friends shall we ever be.
Should we ever disagree…
…fuck you, and here’s to me!

A little crass, sure, but amusing. Hope the new year goes well for all of you.