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.