Day: October 10, 2020

Back from nature just in time to post the last few days and to freewrite on the word of the day…

Pertinacious

I knew the moment he walked up to the counter that he wasn’t going to let it go. It was a Sunday afternoon; the time we always get those customers who’d normally be eating at Chick Filet, but thanks to God, that can’t happen, so I get stuck with them.

Stuck is perhaps too strong a word. I’ve worked at Popeye’s Chicken for six years–since I was fifteen and all they let me do was wash dishes. I worked my way up the ladder to manager despite everyone in the place telling me a a do nothing in a do rag didn’t have a chance to do more than work the cook lines. Well, I did that too and mop floors and clean stalls and eventually I made it to the counter and eventually I made it to the back office. I’m nothing if not determined.

I have this thing I used to do. Every day Webster’s dictionary puts out a word. If I like it then I try to work it into a conversation with people. If I can’t I keep it on a piece of paper in my pocket. My pockets are full of little slops of paper torn off the register reams or rescued from the edge of a used sandwich bag. Tenure, Letimotif, meliorism. The list goes on and on. I even try to find the words that best apply to me, and I did: Pertinacious. It means stubbornly willful in pursuit of a task. I recognize that in me, which is why I recognized it in that man.

He had small eyes that darted around behind his narrow glasses. He wore a jacked and a button up shirt in this 90+ Arizona heat. People like that make me anxious and a little wary. Like, what are you dressing up for bro? What is it you think you’re going to get into at 4PM in a Popeye’s Chicken?

There was this viral thing the company did once about people getting shot over the chicken sandwich. Nobody actually got shot. It isn’t like we’re selling Jordans in the eighties or anything. Nah, it was the kind of thing that gets popular on snapchat. He was the kind of thing that gets turned into a meme on snapchat. Heck, everywhere. He was pudgy enough and atwitter enough that he made me think about the fat guy from Jurrassic Park–you know the one who does the meme where the comedian dude says ‘Hello, Newman’ and he makes the face? Yeah, it is a bad meme. This was a bad meme waiting to happen.

I am still in a type of mourning over the job loss. There are indeed stages to such things. I am, I suppose in a bit of a revenge mindset. This is a relic of my distant past where everything I did was out of spite for those who said I could not. In this particular instance I am aware that I have the ability to become a faculty member, earn the right to run the center, and fire everyone who was involved in this debacle. Still, that would mean devoting my time and energy to a pursuit that was ultimately about them and not me, so instead I feel my best interests lay in focusing on the words.

To that end, I am grateful for the loss of job (not income… that is still a conversation to be had). Last night I woke under the kiss of the moonlight and I began to think about how to revamp my screenwriting class. Those moments would not have happened before, because my subroutines were dedicated to processing the anxiety, responsibility, and organization of the initial managerial job post. That is gone now. And, as I continue to process why, it is more and more clear that the job was largely extraneous to the functioning of that organization. They did not need me and having me be the voice of that team functionally separated that team from the upper management, which was the goal and was the obstacle because I wasn’t the docile mousy person that they needed to push around in that spot.

I glossed over this yesterday in pursuit of getting the waiver out, but I got fired. I was working for a creative writing center in an administrative capacity and it was clear that the work was very catty corporate nonsense and, sadly, led by people who are not actually writers or about the writing life. I brought that up. I combated a great deal of the nonsense and incompetence going on and in response they promoted the most incompetent person while firing me for an error that was largely (almost entirely) his fault. The error they fired me for was an excuse. It was an environment where they often made excuses for this individual and took no measure of excuse from other individuals. They chose to end my employment because I was combative and because I would not follow status quo. The entire thing pissed me off for the day, and I am still angry today, but honestly, I am angry about the loss of income and the fact that they fired me before I quit (stealing the power from the situation and sullying my name if only in that small circle where they maintain the power to say I was bad at something when I truly wasn’t). I am dealing with those two things.

Life presents opportunities and failure is an opportunity. I have the opportunity to remind my kids that bad things can happen. I have the opportunity to rebound. I have the opportunity to turn this failure into a greater success and a better situation for myself. So, it is time to get on my grind and turn this around.