Beach Day

Hey! Here to tell you how the trip to Santa Cruz went! How can I express my feelings on such a momentous event?

Oh! I know! It FUCKING SUCKED.

Part of it was my fault. I got wrapped up in playing Demon’s Souls the night before and stayed up for far too long. I didn’t go to bed until about 7:00 or 8:00. I thought that three hours would be enough to keep me going for the day, while also leaving enough time to get some decent sun at the beach, so I set my alarm for 11:00. However, I slept through that alarm and didn’t get my ass out of bed until 12:15. After showering up and driving to Tanya’s, it was 1:00.

“Okay,” I thought, “it’s a two-hour drive. If we get there by 3:00, we’ll still have four or five hours of hot sun to enjoy on the beach.”

So I gathered all the crap we packed for the trip, threw Tanya into the car, and hauled ass onto the freeway. An hour later, we hit a throbbing tumor of traffic and crawled most of the way. It was a stressful, painful crawl, and my lack of sleep didn’t help matters any.

We didn’t make it into Santa Cruz until 5:00.

The beauty of Santa Cruz

After fighting our way into an overpriced parking space, Tanya and I hit the crowded, smelly bathrooms, and then waddled, weakly, to the beach.

That’s when the clouds rolled in.

Yes, Tanya and I enjoyed a cold, windy afternoon at the beach, huddling close together to keep warm.

Eventually we accepted that it was simply too cold to remain on the beach, and we got up to get some food. The Boardwalk was packed, so we wormed through the crowds until we found a place that served clam chowder. Hot, creamy clam chowder, served in a sourdough bread bowl.

I have to say that eating that clam chowder was the best thing I did all week. After that tense, frustrating work week, that miserable drive, and the beastly wind on the beach, that soup was the most magic of all magic bullets. It warmed me, and it stuck with me all day. I didn’t have to eat anything else.

It’s too bad we were surrounded by screaming, misbehaving kids.

Seriously, why the fuck do people bring fucking babies and toddlers to places like this? Do they think the tots are going to retain warm, glowing memories of their trip? I can’t remember anything earlier than when I was five years old; what the fuck are these parents thinking? Judging from what I saw yesterday, the only memories these kids are bringing home is of weeping madly and wiping snot from their noses. Listen up, you inconsiderate “good parents:” keep your kids at home until they’re six or seven! Show them the world any sooner than that, and they're not going to appreciate it!

The beauty of Santa Cruz

Tanya and I wandered a bit, looked at some store, bought some souvenirs, and generally tried to make the best of a bad situation. When we finally agreed that we’d had enough, we limped back to the parking lot and hit the road home.

And then stopped. Once again, the freeways were frozen.

There were times on that drive home that I honestly felt like giving up. I just wanted to stop concentrating on the winding roads and the fucking traffic, and let my poor, tired soul go to sleep. Obviously, this was no kind of solution, so I put that idea to bed instead.

After another four hours, Tanya and I pulled into her driveway, bringing our long, waking nightmare to an end.

That’s a peaceful, suburban nightmare, naturally. I wouldn’t know anything about the kinds of horrors that people are enduring in Libya or Afghanistan right now, but considering that I have a choice in how I spend my precious weekends, it was pretty horrible.

What the hell happened? All I wanted was to lie on a beach, take in the sun, and eat Doritos. Even with all the stress and effort, I couldn’t get that. I’m having a more enjoyable time typing this in my stuffy, one-bedroom apartment today than during any given moment from my trip yesterday. Why didn’t I just stay home? I would have been happy, and for twice as long.

This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this sort of disillusionment. It seems like every attempt I make at realizing a quixotic adventure ends in disaster. The sunny beaches, the open roads, the girls holding beer bottles in the bars - all the shit on TV that represents “the good and interesting life,” is little more than a travesty. Like the people forced into tent cities through zealous money-borrowing, I have fallen prey to the illusions of Cache Creek, Anheuser-Busch, and Oprah. That exciting life, that life of the rich and powerful, that life which seems just at fingertip’s reach, isn’t worth the price that must be paid for it.

The good news is that I didn't overspend on this trip, and that means that I'm still a free man, and that means I’m free to make mistakes and learn from them. Well, I certainly learned something from this. Fuck you, Santa Cruz; advertising makes you out to be a paradise, but it’s also exactly what turned you into hell.

The Buffalo Society

Psychologists would call this a "breakthrough," but I think it's just the expected result of obsessive personal analysis. Basically, I've pared and defined the reasons why humanity makes me miserable. I've gotten them down to three.

1.) I'm disillusioned that so many people are suckers who are willing to give of themselves for no good reason.

2.) I'm disgusted that there are dicks who are willing to seize control of these suckers and take everything they can from them.

3.) I'm pissed at myself that I'm not one of those dicks, and not hoarding as much for myself as I can.

I'm sure that philosophers have discussed mankind's overly-trustful, easily-led nature at great, exhausting lengths, but my own recognition of it, and at so many levels of our culture, is still a fresh and shocking experience for me. It's like seeing the world through an X-ray machine: all the secrets are revealed, though I can't make sense of them all.

The structure is recognizable. Anyone who tells a story, starts a business, makes a movie, or attempts to pull an investment of any kind from his fellow human beings, has the potential to be a dick. Anytime a person reads a story, listens to a president's speech, or subscribes to a hot girl's YouTube channel, that person has the potential to be a sucker.

I don't want to be a sucker. I want to be a dick.

If a fat goth woman can become a millionaire by writing out her fantasies of being wanted sexually by vampires and werewolves, if a snaggle-toothed camwhore can become popular enough to wind up on Japanese television, and if the owner of a military contracting company can convince people that a tiny Middle Eastern nation could destroy the United States, then I'm sure I can make a big, bloated, sucker-drawing dick out of myself too.

A dick adored.

When I go out dancing, I'm usually the only short, thin guy on the floor. The rest of the men out there are all tall, T-shirted, beer-clutching, fat dudes who don't dance so much as waddle in place. Many of them wear baseball caps and have goofy half-beards that cover only their chins. They often saunter behind the girls in a clumsy, lumbering fashion, and try to sneak in a dance. They sincerely believe that they won't be rejected, and I find that confusing, because I imagine a dance with one of these towers of gel to be a claustrophobic experience.

I suspect that these bearded blobs were once healthy, popular specimens who were athletic as teenagers, but then went on to ravage themselves with years of alcohol and fast food consumption. Despite their engorged shapes, their young jock spirits haven't faded, and their inflated senses of entitlement remain intact. They still think that the girlies all love 'em.

Now I have to deal with these people. I get to stumble and suffocate as I wend my way between them. When these guys stampede onto the floor, and they always go in groups because it's gay to dance unless other guys who look like them are dancing, I make for the bar and fast. While viewing their collective bulk and dull-eyed swaying from a distance, I often think of a herd of buffalo, grazing and meandering on a South Dakota plain.

I came close to nicknaming these gentlemen "buffalo," but then I realized that it wasn't an especially offensive term. When I picture a buffalo in my mind, I perceive a passive, gentle beast. I wouldn't dare to approach one, but the buffalo seems calm and harmless enough from a distance. The connotation of the word "buffalo," then, doesn't fit with the unpleasant opinion I have of these fat dancers. To call them buffalo would be to ennoble them.

To call them "apes," the common name for hairy, overgrown man-things, also doesn't sound right, as apes, while aggressive and foolish, are also somewhat intelligent. The term is prosaic anyway.

On the other side of the ocean, many of the she-things I've encountered complain about the problems with men, such as their insensitivity, their stupidity, and their smell, and they lament that they can't find a decent man. Some gentle prying reveals that these same she-things demand that their mate be over 5'10" in height. Is this too much to demand? I take it that they don't understand pack behavior. I'm no zoologist, but I can't help noticing similarities between humans and animals just through casual observation. Do they expect an alpha, who usually gets what he wants by walking towards it, to be understanding of a woman's needs? The women are unique in their sucker-ness, in that they recognize that the dicks they pursue for what they are, but they fail to see their own status as suckers.

Then, in their demands for future dicks, they deliberately eliminate a massive percentage of the male population from their radar.

It's a dreary world, ladies and gentlemen! Now it's time to go blow my paycheck on vodka and lap dances.

Put It in the Den

There are clouds in the sky and an itch in my lungs, so this can only be winter.

The days were pretty bright before the fever came. I was feeling pretty good about myself. The heat has passed, but somehow my sinuses got involved, so I've been coughing a lot. The back of my throat tastes like copper. The soup I just ate for dinner had no flavor. The shower gel my friend got me for Christmas smells like a shrimp cocktail.

With the skewing of my senses came a bend in my outlook. I have no patience for traffic, for telephones, or for people at all. Activities that I thought I loved are joyless. It's like my days of depression have returned, but now I want to destroy other people, and not myself.

I'd like to lie down for a while and clear my mind, but I have to go to work soon. What's more, my dad is working out in the garage, and he doesn't know how to use headphones with his music player, so there'd be no peace. He's listening to to some really crappy rock music, too. I often want to relax when it's least convenient.

It's confusing. I have my life arranged in a smart way right now. All I have to do is keep going to work and things are set to improve by the third quarter of the year. Still, I feel like shit.

About a month ago now, I purchased a new computer, an iMac. I am happy with it, and although my mother and father were uncomfortable with the idea due their concerns about my finances, they've come to accept it. Even so, they continue to chafe me with their repeated suggestion that I move the machine from my bedroom to the den.

I don't want to put the iMac in the den. It fits right where it is. Dad's already got his PC in there, and I don't want to add the clutter. Still, everyday, Mother and Father remind me of the option.

They say they are worried that I will never leave my bedroom if I keep a computer in there. They say this quite seriously, even though I've been working, visiting friends and family, and performing errands regularly for the last few years. I guess they're basing their concerns on the events of a few years further back, when I was crying constantly, avoiding job interviews, and drawing lines in my arms with a utility knife. I can see where they're coming from. The Paxil works, though, and I've got the muscle that I need to get the boulder up the hill now. At this point, relocating my activities from a common area to a private one is not going to trigger a relapse. Trust requires testing. They don't trust my stability, and they don't trust my financial responsibility. They think this computer represents a desire to withdraw from them. Well, no shit. That doesn't mean, however, that it also represents a desire to withdraw into myself.

Maybe my life isn't "busy" enough to warrant the purchase of this iMac, or the iPhone that inspired me to get it. My iCal is pretty barren, and I receive one or two emails on a good day. Meanwhile, my friend in Tennessee has returned to college to get her degree in accounting, and she's extraordinarily busy. I can't imagine attempting to get a degree now. I feel like I've already been subsumed into the machine, and that meaningful recognition now depends on the diligence I show in my spare time.

I refuse to have children. Only now have I begun to give shape to my identity; I won't allow it to be rubbed into featureless flatness. I'm already pouring too much of my energy into the accomplishments of the business that pays me; after my child is born, how much energy will I have left to really do anything?

The women in my society, many of them Mexican like myself, call that sort of thinking "selfish." I call it sensible.

As though they understand the meaning of the word: during a recent visit to a local club, a girl I was dancing with gripped me by my hair and pulled my face into her cleavage. She stared at me like a cocktail-thirsty cheetah. Is that unselfish behavior?

I didn't buy her any drinks. I like my real-life thrills cheap. She probably wondered if I was gay.

The storms are affecting everybody. Some people at my work are getting sick, some are throwing their backs out, and others are acting like assholes, though that may not be entirely the fault of the weather. As miserable as I am, I try not to share my misery with my co-workers. It's tough to drag myself to work, and I know that I wouldn't want other people wearing me down with their endless bullshit. I can't always find the strength to smile, but I refuse to complain. That's what this blog is for.

I've been at my current job for a good long while now. I'm due for a review in a couple of weeks. My morning shifts have become uncomfortable, as I'm noticing new workers being given responsibilities that were never even offered to me. I know I am a small and easily replaced component in this great machine, but there's a caustic fear spreading in me just the same. I've been running down this alleyway with the knowledge that it will end in a brick wall, but the sight of that wall, the sickening, breathtaking confirmation of it, is frightful just the same. I know now that I'm going to have to look for a turn somewhere, or else punch through one of the walls on either side of me.

Right now I feel too weak to even lift my arm, let alone punch anything. I need to prepare myself for work again, where I'll gather the stress and experience that will start this little component burning and screaming.

Daniel Rocha, Work Killer

There's a DVD in my room right now that a co-worker lent to me. It's the movie Snatch, and I'm not terribly interested in watching it. I've never seen it, and I don't know if it's any good. Lots of folks say it is, but then lots of folks think Two Weeks Notice is terrific, too. Rather than plunge the DVD into my computer's disc drive and hope for the best, I prefer to think about what else could I do with those two hours. I'm a pretty negative guy.

I found the DVD sitting on my desk blotter when I came into work last night. I'm a billing clerk at a local shipping company, a position that sees me slouched behind a computer similar to this one, but older and with two monitors, transferring the data that appears on one of the monitors on my desk to the empty fields on the other monitor on my desk. I was surprised to see the movie there. Either I had forgotten that my co-worker had promised to lend it to me, or I had anticipated that he was being faux-friendly and had never intended to follow through with his offer. Whether I'd done both or neither, the result is that I respect him a bit more than I did last week.

My work during the night shift is occasionally complex, but after doing it five nights a week for a year and a half this August, I've become intimate with it, and lately the boredom and resentment have come to visit. Every night I bring a can of Diet Pepsi and my iPod to the office with me to keep me chemically and emotionally stimulated, but over the past few days, they haven't been working nearly as hard as I have. No matter how many cans or bottles of soda I drain during those wretched work hours, I keep yawning. My eyes flick to the whiteboard on the wall showing the performance numbers of the office billing clerks. For the past few weeks, the number next to my initials has been the highest. Have I earned the privilege to slack a bit? I think about ripping my fingers from the keyboard and resting my head on my arms. Then I sigh and drag myself back to bleak consciousness. Is the neurotransmitter for boredom so potent that it overpowers caffeine, or has my body built an addict's resistance to the stuff?

I call my 80GB iPod Classic Daniel Rocha's Work Killer. That's how it's labeled when you hook it to iTunes. I've been using it to ignore my workmates and to dull the pain of exercise for nearly two years now. The constant shouting it provides was a fine distraction when I first purchased the damn thing, but these days it has to shout pretty hard to overtake my thoughts anymore. I don't listen to the radio or watch much television, so I'm not often exposed to new singers, and my library is getting stale. The night before last, I put on a couple of movies to kill my shift and ran the battery to an inch of its life. When I got home and hooked it to the computer, iTunes told me that it needed to be restored, and thus cleared of all data, in order to function again. I was irritated at first, but then I thought it would be a good opportunity to start over with my music, to forget the playlists I'd made, and to try a new system for music-listening. I would put nothing but songs on my iPod this time, no movies or comedy shows (though I did include George Carlin's audiobook When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops), and I would forget about setting them into exclusionary playlists. I would listen to my entire library on shuffle mode from here on, to shake up my dusty musical diet, and to remind myself of songs that I'd come to neglect.

It didn't work out. What I'd hoped would be a vibrant palate-cleanser ended up being a icy slap in the face. I slouched behind the work computer, put the earphones in, and hit Shuffle Songs, and through some odd electronic miracle, I ended up skipping through the first dozen songs that came up because they were all the same overplayed ones that I listened to before in my "best of" playlists. That was frustrating. What was more frustrating, and a bit eerie, was when I noticed that a great and terrible percentage of my library is made up of video game music. I felt like I'd been punched in the back of the head. Song after skipped song was something from either Vagrant Story, Mother 3, or Grim Fandango, which are wonderful games all, with wonderful soundtracks, I'm not about to argue the contrary; but it disturbed me that I was trying to entertain myself at work with music that wasn't written for its own sake. I felt sick and sad about that, and it made working a hell of a lot harder than it already was.

I work a split shift, so I go in mornings at 9:00 and clock out at 12:30. I go back at 6:00 and work until 10:00. I've found that trying to enjoy the afternoon hours is impossible because I think of them as a sort of terrifying countdown, so to dodge that fear I take a nap. Lately this afternoon nap has become difficult to wake from because I like to stay up late, so it cuts into time that I would use to exercise on my dad's elliptical. It can be a drag sometimes, that elliptical. He's only had the wretched thing for a little over a year, and already it's junking up. The motor keeps setting itself to the highest resistance and has to be constantly reset, the rollers crack and come loose, and the central handles that you can grasp to measure your pulse are made of such cheap plastic that they've nearly snapped off from being gripped by a pair of hands exerting no more pressure than is necessary to push a shopping cart. I hate the thing, but putting up with its eccentricities has been worthwhile; I've lost a lot of weight since adding it to my routine.

I've been using the predetermined "workouts" that were programmed into the elliptical's console, and I've been climbing their ladder of increasing challenge steadily, but I've been hesitant about moving from Program 4 to Program 5. Program 1 is fifteen minutes long, Programs 2 through 4 are twenty, and Program 5 is buffed up at thirty. I've spent a lot of time on the early programs, and I've gotten accustomed to working out for twenty minutes at a time. I liked being able to counter my desire to be lazy with the notion that "it's just twenty minutes, for crying out loud." Telling myself that it's "just thirty minutes" doesn't seem so effective. Still, there are arguments for moving on. My weight has plateaued with Program 4, I was allowing sleep to preempt my exercise, and I was getting angry and depressed with myself. A change needed to be made somewhere. At about 2:00 this morning, not two hours ago, I went into the garage and slammed through a thirty-minute, Program 5 workout and, if the console is trustworthy, burned twice the calories that I did with a Program 4. It's a small victory, but I guess I can say I feel good about it.

This is important, because I haven't been feeling good about a lot of other things lately. I haven't felt very creative, and I don't have much desire to work on my cartoons or my novel after spending hours working hard at a paying job, a job that is getting duller by the day. I am finally hacking some sizable chunks out of my mountain of credit card debt, but there is still a mountain, with some sizable chunks missing, left to conquer. The projection for my escape from my parents' property is heartbreakingly large. Earning the money I need to be debt-free and ready to get my own place will require the patience of a Buddhist priest. It will likely take another year. Damn.

I've been trying to save my money by prioritizing the activities I pay for and the foods I buy. It's like weeding a garden, only I'm tearing out a few of the less-favored vegetable plants, too. Over the past few weeks, I've been going to various restaurants, fast-food and otherwise, to find out which ones are still worth visiting. I'm noticing that many of the places I once enjoyed dining at are pretty crappy now. McDonald's, Carl's Jr., Denny's, El Jardin, Susy's; they're not all that great anymore, and they're not worth the gas and cash I need to spend to visit them. Taco Bell, however, is still pretty good. As a Mexican, I should be crucified for saying that, but I don't care. I eat there twice a week, and even though the three items I buy each time don't cost me more than four dollars, my budget will thank me to have that money back. Why do I even go to Taco Bell, when I can get food for free at home? There's something about escape and individualism somewhere in the answer, but I'm getting too tired to think about it. Plus Mom and Dad will be up soon, and I don't want to deal with their probes about why I'm not in bed at 4 in the morning.

I don't like living with them. They're good people, and I love them, but I don't want to live with them. Like so much of the rest of my life, dealing with the comings, goings, and questionings of my parents is a tense and tiring dance. I have to hide my mail from them at this point. Emotionally, I am ready to be away. It took twelve damn years after the debacle at the university, but I am ready. All that's stopping me is the cash. My brother moved out of the house and into an air force base at twenty-two because he and Dad had made fighting part of their daily schedule. I was playing Secret of Mana on my Super Nintendo when, from the next room, I heard my dad smash my smart-mouth brother into a wall. I was scared, but I didn't stop playing. A couple years earlier, I was playing Solar Jetman on my 8-bit Nintendo when, from another room, I heard my dad smash his drunken brother into a wall. I didn't stop playing then, either. My parents and I don't fight like that, but I'm smothering my boring night shift in the music of Mother 3, but I'm getting a little sick of it.

I'll be thirty soon. I've been controlling life for a long time, steering it by the throat, strangling it, turning its every challenge into a painless, mindless, limp thing. It makes the falls a little softer, but the view while standing and moving and running loses a lot of color too. People my age are becoming doctors. Maybe they didn't have much choice about it, but I do.