The Target Clerk Dipshit Conundrum

I don’t know what it is with me and clerks. Maybe it’s just that I have more contact with them in usual life. I have another short anecdote about a clerk. It may not be as embarrassing as the “I love you” incident, or as fascinating as the “trapped in the car wash” scene, but its up in my top five cause it happened a week ago and I still can’t shake it.

So wife got this lovely shirt for me for my birthday. The T-shirt is run of the mill screen print with this design on the front:

And that’s it. I love it and wear it on weekends. What’s really nice is I get compliments on it from fellow fans of the Doctor. That’s right, random strangers stop me and tell me, Nice shirt! One of my coworkers squealed in delight when I wore it on casual Friday, the other two had no idea what the big deal was or really heard of the show.

That’s all preamble to the following conversation had at Target last week. I was wearing the shirt. I was with the Wife, and we were checking out with a small hand cart full of items. The line below is when I slip between what was actually said, and what happened subsequently in my head. Enjoy.

Clerk: What’s with the shirt?

Me: Hmm?

Clerk: What’s the deal with the shirt?

Me: Oh, it’s just a show.

Clerk: I get that, the Daleks and all, but what’s the deal with it?

Me: Um, it’s just the Daleks crossing Abbey Road.

Clerk: Yeah, so, is there a point to it?

Me: Um, well, I think it’s just mashing two well known British icons together into one image.

Clerk: Huh. Whatever. I don’t see redfoot. Where’s redfoot?

Me: Um, I don’t know.

Me: Listen here you dickwad. I love that we live in this new internet age where you don’t have to feel bad for having a hobby and apparently feel that no one can love something as much as you. You remind me of  a hipster version of simpsons comic book guy, and you need to take down the superiority a notch. Really, it’s a show, I like it, I wear a shirt to display that appreciation, which is the only shirt I own with anything, not even a logo, on it (besides the subsequently bought tshirt with a Sherlock design). Just because someone doesn’t go through the trouble of learning every fuckiing nuance of a decades old tv show doesn’t make them less than you in whatever fucked up version of reality you live in. There’s no mystery to the shirt, it’s a mashup of two images. That’s it. No mystery to solve. No clever little Easter eggs for only the “true” fan to appreciate. What you see is what you get. Now go choke on a fucking adipose  you twat.

Me: have a good night.

Clerk: (shrugs and turns to next customer)

Off my meds. Feeling OK.

Part of being on antidepressants is the kooky thing where when you have been taking them long enough, you think you don’t need them. You feel fine. Which is what you took them for in the first place.

I don’t always feel that way, but I am a guy, so sometimes I just plain forget to take them. I put the pills by the sink in the bathroom, in the kitchen, or anywhere else I am sure to be in the mornings, but invariably, they become part of the background decoration of that area of the apartment and I just look right through them and don’t remember to take them. Then the next day, I’ll be freaking out about something, or feeling panicked or shitty, and then it occurs to me that I forgot my pills.

I had that happen again three weeks ago, however, I didn’t notice missing my pill for four days. And by then, it wasn’t because I was panicking. I just noticed I didn’t remember taking a pill for several days.

I had started to take the pills back in Fargo, when I was trying to help fiancé find work in the area while keeping going at a job I no longer found challenging or fulfilling. I had started to skid down the sadness road. I thought about death a lot, not like suicide, but  just a sort of thinking about death a lot way. It’s just easier to think about death than a job you don’t like, a family that doesn’t support you or your fiancé, a job market that is insane, and a world that thinks so little of everything you do.

Yeah, so I got some pills. They helped. I didn’t think about death quite so much. But things were still shitty beyond reckoning. By this point, we’d moved to the cities, wife had a job but not me, I had cut off my family because they didn’t support my wife and any attempts to explain my feelings about the situation were met with a general statement about how it was all in my head. To be frank, I haven’t tried speaking to them since March and life has gotten a lot easier without them. They’ve tried to get in touch 3 times since then by email. The last one had the sentiment “We miss you and will welcome you back whenever you are ready” which is nice, but again asks me to accept all blame and that I’m nuts and that they did nothing wrong. Also, wife sent a lengthy response in May or June about what they could do to make things right, but they haven’t taken us up on it.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I accidentally quit taking my pills, and by the time I noticed, I also noticed that I was OK.

Part of this, I think, is the general state of life affairs right now. I’ve got a job I love, I get to work with Wife and have lunch with her, I don’t have to deal with my family, and wife is out of her own hell hole of a job at Hennepin Technical College. Things are going well.

They could always be better. Wife is now applying to job after job and going through the same mindfuck I was going through in my job hunt: mostly that you can take two hours out of your day to go visit with an interviewer, send a thank you, send a follow up a week later, and still never get the common courtesy of a thank you for applying call or even a note to say they went with someone else. I go balls out and want to send a snide letter, but wife still thinks it may be possible to be hired after three weeks of hearing nothing and doesn’t want to send anything even slightly aggressive. I talk a big game, though. A few weeks ago, against my better judgement and at wife’s request, I reached out to the mnartists.org editor to see if she was interested in another piece from me. Though she can’t explain what she wants, and the pieces she publishes are far less professional than she seems to think they are when my own pieces weren’t meeting some professional standard she said she had, she seemed to think that it was me who couldn’t meet her expectations. Rather than get snipy, I just let it go and wrote a piece for the blog that I still haven’t had time to retool for pitching to other publications.

Then I watch shows like New Girl, a show I like, but last episode the main character is trying to get a job, is sitting in a waiting room with 5 other applicants, which NEVER happens and if it did you should run away since they don’t know how to stagger schedules so people aren’t waiting for hours. She breaks down and cries during her interview, freaking out the interviewer. Later in the episode, she goes back and interviews again. We are meant to believe that this attitude got her the job. BULLSHIT. There were five other perfectly reasonable people in that waiting room who probably didn’t break down and cry during their interview, and you’re telling me she got it over them? I hate America. Still like that show though.

Another thing along those lines is movies about mental illness. Everyone gets cured through sheer force of will. How fucking American, right? If “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” has it right, all we need to get through crippling depression is to spend a week in a ward, and all our problems will be magically solved.

So anyway, I have been off my meds for three weeks now, and I’m doing OK. It’s weird to get emotional over things now. Songs can get me misty if they hit me at the right time. I wept through the last half hour of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which is a really awesomely good movie, but probably not worthy of a good cry. This is painting me as a crying conundrum, but it really isn’t that often, and it’s during genuinely emotional things and not over seeing something like a puppy in a teacup. I’m enjoying these new emotions and the catharsis they bring rather than not feeling or bottling to boil over later.

Not sure if I will continue to try life without meds, or if I will go back on them. Wife is in my corner either way, so that’s nice. 

Emotional Gut Punch at the Minneapolis Photo Center

Today I went to the Minneapolis Photo Center because a friend of mine, Dan Koeck, had a couple photos in one of the three exhibits they opened up yesterday.

I'm planning to write more eloquently about the exhibit to see if I can't get my foot in the door at one of the magazines in town that cover such things. Tonight though, I'm still trying to come to terms with what I saw and how it affected me to the point where I just had to leave the building, go back to my car, and cry it out.

First exhibit:

Mark Seliger, a former Rolling Stones photographer who has probably shot your favorite photos of bands and actors, has a book out of the same name as the exhibit. The poster is a bit misleading, since the other 20 or so photos are portraits of Holocaust survivors, and most of those seen out of context don't scream Holocaust survivor. Take this picture for example: 

What was tough about the exhibit wasn't so much the photos as the quotes from the interviews. I don't have a copy of the book, so I don't know how they got these people to give such mind-blowing quotes, but I would be reading along and come across emotional gut punches that turned any preconceptions I had into dust. "The day we received the tattoos was a good day for us; we had received them as if they were passports for life."  

"Sometimes people ask, "Did it make you a stronger person?" I don't think suffering makes you strong." 

One sole survivor of her family talks about leaving her mother in the bunk, knowing she would be dead when she returned, how she escaped and moved to New York. "I never discussed the Holocaust with my husband." 

Another: "I find that the best ones went, and we who survived are the worst. My father and brother could never survive, not even a day. They were fine, sensitive, idealistic."  This same person discusses suicidal thoughts after the war. "I gave myself a year. I told myself that, if I could make a human being out of myself, I would continue. And if not ..." 

Those three dots still bring the tears to the surface. 

Holy fucking shitballs, I was glad to be the only person in the exhibit, reading these stories, writing down the quotes that suckerpunched me. 

Then, in the hallway, the second exhibit. The theme and name is "The Human Condition: A Survey of Humanity" 

So after reading the stories of Holocaust survivors, I was taken through a wide array of photos showing the best and worst humanity has to offer, the joyous and the depressing, the weird and the amazing. Here's the winner of this show, titled "My Father, Pensive" 

And it just makes you want to fucking wrap yourself up in puppy kisses and orphan dreams cause I see myself, too, sitting there in 40 years wondering what the hell's next. 

Another photo had me creating a hell of a story for two little girls and the state of their lives when this is where they live: Check it out here. They apparently live in those mini-tubs? Shit, man. 

And this one, the second place winner, must be seen in person. It's called Before the Briss, and the lighting is just unreal. 

So, after being primed with Holocaust survivors and then washing through decades of photos that detail atrocities and triumphs of the human soul since then, (more here), you come to the third exhibit, Photographer Doug Knutson's portraits of Nobel Peace Prize winners. 

Now, you'd think after the raw nerve scrubbing of the past two galleries, that portraits of nice people would be just the thing to help salve the open wounds of your soul. Not so. 

Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, The Dalai Lama and others look right at you, in you, and you can see their goodness and feel how you pale in comparison, and you finally can't hold it back any longer and have to leave to go back to your car and back to your wife who is in her fourth day of sickness but getting better, and back to your life of personal and interpersonal struggles. It's a cold day. The first layer of snow sticks to the pavement in this rather dismal, industrial section of north Minneapolis. Winter is coming, and we're all going to need some emotional super-juicing to get through it. The exhibits run through Jan. 4, so go see them.