2007-05-07 - 1:58 p.m.
(Note from Johnny Darling! Don't blame ME for how long it took to post this particular entry to you, my dearest Big Blue Blog-A-Roo. Blame it on this stupid Diaryland site, which hasn't been allowing folks to update for days and days. I've been sitting on this one for ages. It's even been up on my Myspace.com page for so long, your hair would be grey reading it by now.)
At the library, I was sitting at my little computer table, from where I oversee my demesne, the sixty-something computer monitors that are used by the homeless wretches, the insane, the poor, and the stupid. It had been a quietish day: Most of the people approaching me were merely asking for me to look up their library card numbers, or they were purchasing debit cards so they could use the printer.
“Hello, can you come here please?” a squawky female voice piped up from across the room. She was a middle aged, plumpish blonde woman, in too tight of a t-shirt and stained black stretch pants, which were straining to contain the rolls of flubber on her thighs. She was waving her hands and gesticulating wildly to get my attention.
First of all, I hate it when people wave their hands to summon me over to them, like I am some kind of a dog. But more than that was her peremptory attitude, which was both entitled and arrogant – qualities that I dislike. However, I pasted on my sugary “helpful library clerk” face and ambled on over to her, all happy-go-lucky like.
“Yes, ma’am? May I help you?” I always say “may,” by the way, never “can.” As you know, the word should be “may” anyway, syntactically speaking. But perhaps I am being a tad pedantic.
“Yes, I have sent an e-mail via Yahoo. Can you tell me how to tell when someone has received and read it?” She turned her beaky nose at me and blinked her beady eyes, very fast, several times. I blinked back.
“Well, I know AIM has a function that allows you to see if someone from AOL has read it – but I don’t think Yahoo has that sort of thing. Certainly, I have never noticed my Yahoo account has that feature.”
The woman peremptorily waved her hand right in my face and sniffed derisively. “Well, if you don’t know, you don’t know,” she snapped and returned to her keyboard, without even a thank you for coming over.
“Can you help me? Can you help me?” shrieked another woman, this time an even fatter blonde woman sitting two computer consoles away. She was wearing a spangle-covered creature, with over-hennaed hair and yellow teeth.
“Certainly, madam, how may I assist you?” I smiled, most genially, I have to say.
“Yes! I need to know – can you tell me which international airport is nearest Flagstaff?”
I screeched, “What the fuck do I look like? The SHELL Answer man? Jesus Christ you stupid cow, if you spent as much time reading a book as you obviously spend slurping dick and chewing cud, perhaps you would have some idea of the world!”
Oh, of course, I did not say anything as dreadful as this. Instead, even though this wasn’t strictly speaking a Library Computer-related question, I suggested she look up Phoenix, Tucson, and Scottsdale as being cities that probably had International Airports.
“Owwww!” moaned another heifer, sitting at another table not far away from the other cow. “Ohhhh! Owww!”
“Is something the matter?” I snapped, turning to regard the second heifer, who was even more obese than the other two women, with heavily dyed black hair and glutinous red lipstick that was melting all over her fang-like teeth.
“Ohhh, my ankle! I twisted my ankle! Oooooh!” she moaned, rubbing her fat, elephant-sized calf. “I was just sitting here, and it just started hurting! Oooooh!”
I was aware that this could potentially be a situation in which a woman hurts herself on city property so as to file a nice fat lawsuit, so I crisply stood at attention and snapped, “Would you like me to call one of the guards? He can assist you with 911 if that’s what you need.”
The fat brunette lady rubbed her ankle and pouted. “Hmmph. Naw, that’s all right. I’ll just get back to what I am doing.” She spun around to face her computer. And then she moaned again, this time grabbing and rubbing the other ankle. After a few moments, she spun around again and simpered, her huge belly quivering with jollity.
“Oooh, can you come over here and help me save this? I can’t figure out how.”
I sighed and peered over her shoulder.
“I’m writing a bunch of ‘Harry Potter’ jokes!” she giggled. “Yesterday, I was at the LA Times Festival of Books and I pitched this person about a book about Harry Potter jokes. So now I am writing some jokes!”
“Goodness,” I marveled. You see, a collection of Harry Potter jokes is not a bad idea for a book. Someone could make some serious coin from a book like that – that is, if you could actually get the rights from JK Rowling to publish such a thing. And if the books were any good. I helped the lady save her collection of Harry Potter jokes. And, yes, I read one or two of them, as well.
“What did Harry Potter give his mother for her birthday?” one read. “Windex!”
I’m afraid I don’t get that one at all.
In my dotage, and I am ashamed to say this, I am afraid that I have become startlingly passive aggressive. It is a quality that I loathe in myself, but, strangely, it seems to emanate from some place in my sub-conscious, so I am really not able to address it.
The more you try to consciously attempt to change sub-conscious behavior, the more the behavior simply goes undercover and manifests itself in some other horrible way. It’s like having some kind of a moral tapeworm that vanishes from your colon to reappear in your nostril, or something like that.
Yes, of course, I am incredibly passive aggressive at the library, where I work part-time. That is to be expected – All folks who work in libraries have a high degree in passive aggressiveness.
Who wouldn’t be passive aggressive when dealing with the lowest elements of the human public, particularly those who approach you with the same entitlement of movie executives and millionaires, when they are really no better than tin foil hat wearing bag people?
It is quite the done thing for someone to come up to you, ask you a question, and for you to give them a smirking, semi-apologetic “sorry, you can’t do that.” The heart of passive aggression is in the “I’m sorry, but I just can’t…” as you know. It has to seem almost totally sincere and from the soul. And it has to be the marmalade atop the croissant of being totally obstructionist.
But I have discovered that it is simply impossible to perform six part time jobs without being almost entirely passive aggressive at all of them. Just now, I was on the phone with the editor of the New Paper, and I was asking if I could come over there and pick up some movie (which, of course, I didn’t really want to watch). It goes without saying that I sort of scheduled the call at a time when I was certain he’d be about to go out for the evening, so, of course, I could not go over there to pick up the movie. Passive aggression!
And, on Friday, when the story editor at Pathetica this weekend send me a script via e-mail that had a different title than the one I was expecting to receive, I hemmed and hawed and waited until about 10 PM on Sunday to call the office and see if I had the right script, thus making it obvious that no one could correct the situation until Monday, after the report would be due anyway. Passive Aggression! As it happened, it didn’t matter, I just covered the script I was given and it turned out to be the right one.
You see, the same script is often submitted to different places under different names, so no one will know that the writer is “shopping” the material around. But for all I knew, it could have been an old style mistake on the part of the idiotic story assistant.
I must confess, I dislike the signs of passive aggressiveness deep within me, but as they are instinctual, I am also rather powerless in their thrall. So what is to be done? Just enjoy ‘em, I say. I don’t know, though: If, several years ago, you had told me that my lot in life was to become a sort of functionary who lives to spite others, well…. Actually, I suppose I would say “sounds like Johnny Darling, all right, really it does.”
Since I returned from New York, I have to admit to a weird malaise. No matter what I do, everything feels as though it’s in black and white. I know I have said this sort of thing before, but it is a recurrent theme, I suppose. Part of it is that this time New York was looking particularly wonderful: The clubs! The books! The restaurants! Even the engaging elderly relatives!
LA more than ever feels like it’s a city of exiles. I don’t care what people who like this city say – it’s not as good as New York. I don’t buy the bullshit statement that “oh we have the music center and Disney Hall and LACMA and The Getty!” All of those places would not even register in the top third of decent places in actual New York. Over the next several years, I really am going to have to triangulate things so that I can move to New York. LA is empty and revolting and bland and tedious.
But I have also been suffering from a lack of affect over the past few weeks. I just feel so unenthused about everything. Even this blog no longer delights as much as it used to –I can’t say that I get the same buzz that I used to get when I posted an entry. That is why you see me so much less, I suppose. Mind you, I am not ready to totally call it quits, either: I’ll keep posting for a while, but it’s not the same joy that it used to be, I must tell you.
My 43rd birthday has come and gone, by the way, and thank you so much for your kind wishes. It was a fairly dreary day, though not as bad as some that I have actually recorded here. My mother gave me a very pretty ceramic fish, which I have put on my coffee table. I did not get any birthday sex, alas, but that’s all right: Sex is over-rated, you know. Coldstone Ice Cream is better than sex -- take it from someone who has had both.
Since I have been told I have diabetes, all that has happened is that I now feel a horrible guilt over eating anything at all. Diabetes truly integrates brilliantly with Jewish neurotic guilt. I can enjoy getting a Coldstone chocolate ice cream, and then feel terrible about it for about six hours afterwards. But I feel the same way about whatever I eat nowadays, whether it’s an extra piece of sushi or a Hostess Ho Ho.
The only thing I have been expressly forbidden from actually eating, though, is a Starbucks pumpkin scone. I am told that they are 700 calories apiece, and full of hateful disgusting super-fat. But, they were also my greatest treat. Oh, I did love them: They were all crumbly and with just a hint of fake pumpkin juice flavor – very Harry Potter Halloween. No more! And no more of the Starbucks Cranberry-Orange scone, either, even though those were, frankly, a great step down from the glories of the pumpkin scone. Cranberry Orange Scones are to Pumpkin Scones what hamburger is to steak. Or what boiled chicken is to Thanksgiving Turkey.
Because I am a newly minted diabetic, twice a day -- once before the morning meal and once before the evening meal -- I must inject myself with a syringe containing this appetite suppressant. It’s revolting! You uncork the stupid device, prime it by twisting a knob about, and then stab it right in the stomach. You shove the dagger-like needle into your belly, and, before you can howl and scream, you pull it out and recork it, leaving a tiny drop of red-blue blood to form right at the point where the vicious needle went in.
I am pleased to not be taking insulin, mind you, but it’s still a pain in the neck to have to inject these appetite suppressants. To their credit, though, I must confess that they work – I am eating about a third as much, and, as a result of a regimen of fairly efficient exercise, I am losing weight. My goal is to drop about 20 pounds in time for the hike up to Bearpaw at the end of July. It is a doable one, I think.
