Dear Diary: The Whining Game (11/292)

Published March 15, 2:25 pm

WARNING: Way indiscriminate CAPITALIZING and italicizing follows! 

Good lord. I canNOT believe how bad I am at this. 

And “this” refers to two different things: maintaining my blogs and living like a human being. Last week I attempted to inject some posts into my three blogs, because I haven’t been keeping up with that as much as I’d like. So I attempted a “Blog Post Cram Week,” which, strangely, at face value, actually accomplished a teeny bit of what I was trying to accomplish: create more blog posts within a specific period of time. But, I couldn’t even maintain a daily output. I did four. In a week. Gah. I have ideas for posts (well, “topics” may be more accurate; “ideas” sounds much more original than what I have in mind), I just can’t seem to get my brain on track to process what I want to say and thus articulate those ideas into any coherent or worthwhile writing. Say… maybe that’s my problem. Maybe I don’t actually write as well as I think I can. A fact I’m reminded of each time I try reading the crap I’m trying to assemble together. So, I’m a crappy writer or an inconsistent one at best. I have some moments, but in general, it’s forgettable stuff. And maybe I’m not that inspired or insightful in my observations, either. Yippee… just some more humility fodder for me to gnaw on bitterly. Grrrr….* 

In opposition to this realization of my failings is my self-awareness and public reputation (amongst my friends) for having a penchant for not finishing or following through on my ideas. So as I delay posting pieces that I’m (futilely) wrestling with until I “like” them, time trundles on like it do, has did, and will does (ha ha ha ha… Boy, THAT was seriously self-indulgent… but it cracked ME up)… Which is more important? To try and write better OR try and produce more material for my blog -- my clumsy/gratuitously indulgent writing and lame thoughts be damned? Umm… Well, considering that my attempt at improving something (like a drawing, as a for instance) usually means re-working/erasing and re-drawing a piece continually within an inch of its life, and STILL not finishing it because I continue to be dissatisfied with my efforts, then perhaps it’s time to be focused on completing things FIRST and my so-called “quality control” can take a backseat for a little bit. 

Having said that, be prepared, oh, sweet, disinterested reader, for some lame-ass movie and comic book reviews, among other things, to come. 

 MEANwhile… I am not very happy with the way I’m living my life. I think I’m doing a bad job of it. Since my mom died-- besides trying to deal with that emotional development, which has been going alright (I think)-- I’ve been mostly trying to assert myself more in terms of the way I live. Like, trying to live my life like it means something to me, like actually pursue those things I’d like to do before I move on to the next phase of my soul-journey (i.e., croak). Now, part of me is well aware of the expression, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” A corollary to that would probably be, “okay, MAYBE you can, but the learning of the new trick ain’t gonna happen overnight, that’s for DAMN sure.” 

 Recently, there were some indications at work that things were looking brighter in terms of my shift schedule. A month or so ago, my company bought up another local printing company, which was located in the Hamburg (south of Buffalo) area. We print a weekly shopper type of paper, delivered free to homes and financed through the various types of advertising our sales staff is able to sell. The company we bought out printed a similar product but not as many editions, roughly half as many as we print. Now that we own this other company, we now print their additional papers, too. These new runs are referred to as our “South” editions. Over a year ago, in an attempt to attract more advertisers, my company added a day to our advertising deadlines (at least for two-thirds of our editions), moving it from Thursday to Friday. But, we also tried to deliver our papers on the same weekend schedule that we always had. What that meant was, where we once used to print all twenty editions on a Friday during the day, starting at 5:00 am and finishing when we were done, approximately 10-12 hours later, the total number of editions were now split into three, with one-third to be printed Thursday overnight, and the other two-thirds to be printed Friday overnight, so that the papers would still be ready Saturday morning. With two presses and two press crews available, this meant both crews working a Friday graveyard shift each week, and alternating the duties of printing on a Thursday graveyard shift. Originally the night shift started at 1:00am, which was brutal. But over several months, it’s now evolved to 9:00 pm, which is brutal in a different way, but the way positive side is you get done earlier in the morning, like 3:00-5:00 am. 

Personally, I disliked working this so-called third or graveyard shift. My body and mind always fought against having to go to bed in the late afternoon to rest up for the upcoming shift, and generally speaking, when you’re working a third shift, you usually do a whole week of it, so theoretically your body adjusts to the different schedule, not just one or two days suddenly tacked on at the end of the week. Plus, working Friday night into early Saturday morning always screwed up my sleep and rest on Saturday, so my weekend seemed like only a partial weekend, like one and a half days. But, what are you gonna do? Well, I suppose if it really bothered you, you could find another job, and when I say “you,” I guess I mean “me.” And apparently it never bothered me enough to do that, never bothered me enough to go beyond being bitchy and crabby on those days I did the “stupid” shifts. ANYways… so we now have these new guys added to our web press staff from the company we bought. The Thursday night and Friday night shifts are staying the same, but Friday also has a day shift running the “South” editions, starting at 6:00 am and finishing when we’re done, which has been around 5:00-5:30 pm. So I figured we were going into a big rotation of schedules: one week you do Thursday night, one week you do Thursday and Friday night, and finally, one week you do Friday day. Rinse. Repeat. ‘Til you die! Well, after a month or so of the Hamburg guys working with us, I’ve been scheduled the Friday day shift three times out of four. The second time I was scheduled (rather than getting the double graveyard shift) the reason I got was that one of the pressman was on vacation so this was more of a seniority issue. I somehow have become the “senior rollman,” mostly through other guys quitting or getting fired, not through some cool Thunderdome scenario, and my boss who was helping one of the Hamburg pressmen run the “South” editions on Friday wanted me to do the rolls (loading the paper into the stands). Normally my boss just supervises, he doesn’t actually run anything. Well, okay. That made some sense. But then, last week, it seems that the new guys don’t really like the new Friday day shift. When they used to run their papers at Hamburg, I think the editions were split up over a couple days. But for our company’s purposes now, it makes more sense to gun through them on one day at the end of the week, hence... So, they don’t seem to like the extended shift. They’d rather run a shorter shift (6-7 hours, more or less) on the graveyard shift. Huh. So, my boss asked me if I had a preference for the Friday day or the graveyard shifts and I coolly said: “Ooh! Ooh! Friday day! Friday day!” Starting work at 6:00 am and working 11-12 hours be freaking damned: it would be a return to “Thank God it’s Friday!” and going home to a Friday night at home ALL NIGHT long, and waking up in my own bed to a whole day of a Saturday. 

Plus, the other issue was the serious possibility of my flirting with a car accident driving home from a graveyard shift. I’ve had my issues staying awake in the past while driving. There are numerous anecdotes of me sort of zoning out while standing up at work around 2 or 3 in the morning. So, I figured from a safety perspective alone, the biggest plus to working Friday days and saying adios to the night shift was safety. Which is why rear-ending that car driving home from work late Friday afternoon pissed me off so fucking much. Usually, when I leave for home after a night shift, I stop by at a McDonald’s and order me a bunch of food to eat on the way home. Well, I sometimes do that after a regular shift, too. That’s how I usually deal with being tired when I drive, unless I have no food or am REALLY tired. Then I just pull over into a convenient parking lot and snooze for a half-hour or two. Well, I was about 15 minutes away from home and I was starting to get really tired. There was a market I was passing by but I figured I’d only be picking up cookies or potato chips to eat if I went there, which didn’t seem very healthy. Tim Horton’s was also nearby but a bunch of sweet Timbits also seemed a bad choice. Five minutes later, I’m thinking, no, I should really get something to eat to get me home the last little bit. I keep drifting off. Suck! Maybe that Arby’s coming up in a couple minutes, get me a couple cheddar beef sandwiches...? Shoot, I’m always eating fast food! If only I could focus on getting home, just get home. Crap, I think I really need to eat something, though. Okay, Arby’s. Haven’t eaten there in a while. Cheddar roast beef sounds… BANG! I zoned out just long enough, that the guy in front of me, who had to suddenly slow down because the guy in front of him suddenly turned into a parking lot, had the swell fortune of me introducing my Ford Contour to his car’s ass-end. Yeah. Oh, yeah.** God, I was in SUCH a crappy mood after that incident. The guy I drove into was nice and calm and seemed content, if not eager, to try and fix his loose bumper himself. Yeah, his car looked fine. The bumper moved a little when you pushed on it. I asked him if he could still open his trunk and he tried it and could. (Unfortunately, this question comes from a previous experience YEARS ago of me inflicting damage on another poor motorist’s rear-end). Anyways, this dude didn’t seem anxious to get his insurance company involved and I was miserable and guilty enough not to pursue it. Okay, I did scribble his license plate number down from memory on a greasy napkin, just in case I actually screwed myself by not having any of his info. Meanwhile, I must’ve slid under his bumper and his trailer hitch destroyed my grill and punched a dent into my car’s nose above my bumper, just right of center, shattering my driver’s side headlight frame, and crimping the edge of my hood. “Safer shift,” my ass. I suck. That night I was in a plenty shitty mood. I said barely anything to my wife. I had no words. I was just bile-filled and darkly clouded, which really made me a prick to deal with because I was cleaning up our living room. My wife had some people visiting the house the next day, so I had to remove my clutter, so, you know, they had some place to sit down. I had dragged down a bunch of crap from my workroom to the living room in an effort to clean it out, but that (the workroom rehab) was still taking forever. So I was slowly returning said crap to same messy room. But my dark, bitter silence was being misinterpreted by my poor wife as anger and resentment towards her for having to clean for her benefit, which was not the case at all. But I never corrected her. I just stewed in ugly silence. It wasn’t until the next morning that I finally blurted out to her about my accident. She was very understanding, undeservedly, and said I should be able to tell her things like that. I can. I really can. I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind at the time the previous night to do so. Anyways. Cue long, long, long sigh. Eh. Que sera sera. 11/292 Project 365: first / previous / next *Hey, look at me! I’ve magically turned into an irritable little dog! **For a suitable interpretation of these last two lines, you may want to check out Rod Steiger’s performance as a Mississippi police chief in 1967’s IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT when he learns that Sidney Poitier, the black man he picked up at a train station for suspicion of murder, is a homicide detective from Philadelphia visiting his mother. Totally different circumstances. Similar emotional reaction.