Grindin'

What is it that actually motivates you?

What actually makes you see in focus, see things that you wouldn’t have noticed before, wouldn’t have remembered, wouldn’t have let yourself see?

I’ll bet it’s not happiness. Happiness tends to make you take in the big picture, because it’s a happy picture. That’s why happy people write mostly shitty songs. Because you don’t have to dig deep for meaning when things are great, you just look around and feel like it’s all it’s supposed to be. The sunrise, the beautiful ocean, the flowers, the pretty girls or pretty boys, it all is simple and fun and exactly like you want it to be, why the hell should you dig into it? Ladi-frickin-da.

Or maybe you want to just be remembered for something. It’s not a bad goal to have. To be a reason for something with impact. Shit, I want to make an impact somewhere, at some point. I want to have been relevant and unique and different when someone looks back later. I think most people want that.

Some of us want that on a slightly lower scale. As in, some of us want to go viral. Being a meme is a possible way to be remembered, albeit it may be for a really dumb reason. One of those quick little videos that we laugh at and pass along to our friends, saying, “did you see what some idiot did last week?” And that can be a lot of fun too, I suppose. Being the first or the most notable person to post some new trend, perhaps there is nobility in that.

The only problem with that, from my standpoint, is that like an actual virus, going viral only lasts so long. The quick rise and spread of some little post tends to come and go like an actual common cold might. Put simply: people tend to get over you and not remember you. Really, do you even remember the colds and flus of your life? Don’t you just shrug them off and move on to things that matter more? Years from now, will you reminisce about that nasty cough that you had a few months ago? Likewise, you probably won’t have particularly fond memories of that YouTube video about the guy who skateboarded into getting hit in the balls or those cats that did something adorable for 4 minutes straight. It’s just not going to matter for that long.

So what then? What motivates us? What the hell are we all trying to get done here? What keeps our engine running?

I tell you one thing, the things that motivate you make an impact on you. The grind that a person goes through makes a difference that is never appreciated right then and there. Always takes time to let it put things in perspective. It takes a while to go out and earn that big screen TV or that brand new sports car. It takes time to write that paper or book that you want to do justice. It takes time to create that new recipe and get the taste exactly right, I mean EXACTLY where you want to get it.

I'm talking like, food tastes different. Cars ride differently. Clothes feel different while worn. Of course, it's not the food or the car or the clothing that is different from the grind. It's you. When you go through something as draining, you have to push yourself past your norms. Doing so may end up changing your norms. You know, you push your limits enough and you not only get new limits, but you realize that your old limits may have never really been enough. You start to understand yourself and what you're capable of. You may even start to desire to push yourself further, to see how much more you can really do. When you push and push and reach the mountain top, the mountain top is exactly like it was before you arrived. You're the one who's different.

Now my thing is, how do you get in grind mode? It’s an honest question. Just because you know that you can get into grind mode doesn’t mean you know how or why. How do you flip the switch from calm to calm like a bomb? How do you make it known, to the world but really more so to yourself, that shit has become real? Because I know people that want to be serious but cannot ever fully take the plunge and flip that switch, no matter how serious they tell themselves they are taking things. Then again, I know people who flip the switch all the time without meaning to, like they themselves aren’t in control of their own mind and their own emotions. And no, I am not about to go into a tirade about a woman’s menstrual cycle, and I feel like I could, even though I’d surely pay for it later.

The point is, inner motivation is not always automatic. This is not a unique problem. I’ve found many people in my life to be of at least two different types of minds. Contradictory. Hypocritical. Just plain lost. It happens. It’s another wonderful hallmark of growing up that I’m finding. The idea that we no longer know who to turn to for information, we now have NO IDEA AT ALL as to what should inspire us. And perhaps we shouldn’t know exactly what inspires us. Perhaps it should be a mystery to us.

Nah, screw that. We should definitely know.

If you know what inspires you, you can also keep an eye on whether or not you’re burning it out. You can make sure that the inspiration is never overused, and protected, and that it can always be trusted, Our inspirations, like many other things that we idolize, are not infallible. We can be manipulated by so many other things, so why not the things that we essentially allow to manipulate us? Just permitting something outside of yourself to take the keys and drive you. You don’t know where it’s going to drive you. Just rev it up and see what happens, see what you’re capable of.

One of my motivators is amazing, it can drive me to do anything with energy and vigor and maybe even a bit of a chip on my shoulder. And I’m a bit of a nerd and can generally be pretty calm and reserved, so when I get going with this source of inspiration, it is dangerous.

What is this motivator? It’s the song by DMX called “What’s My Name?”. Here’s a link to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FFK5Oh10os

And that song is scary to me when it comes on. Why? Because it doesn’t matter what needs to be done, I might do it now, because we’re playing that song. The other day I was in my car, waiting for it to warm up, and I was tired and a bit hungover, and really didn’t want to go to work. I couldn’t have given any shit about getting the snow off of my car so I could get moving. And then the CD player went to the next track. And I lost my mind!

I got hyped, man! I got amped up to put my gloves on and start shoving snow off of my car hood while moving to the rhythm of the song. Not even using scrapers, just swiping wildly at the snow while it was still falling, just muttering out the lyrics as neighbors walked past me, most of them slightly terrified. I think they knew I wouldn’t hurt them, but they still seemed concerned for my sake. And after I got done shoving the snow off of my car, I almost felt let down, so I turned the volume up a bit more and started wiping off the car next to me, just until the song ended.

Because Ride Or Die.

But see, that’s what happens when the song comes on. A few years ago, that song came on when I was riding the bus home from work. I had to get off the bus a few stops early because I came way too close to jumping up in the face of an elderly Hispanic woman and yell, “D-M-X!” I’m not even kidding, I had to get off the bus to avoid rocking out that hard to this song on my iPod. It should be something that I’m more embarrassed about, in my opinion, but that’s what it is for me. It’s a stick of dynamite that I am only sometimes prepared for when it turns up on shuffle all songs.

I’m skeptical that the song would hold the same meaning if I played it all the time. If that was my morning song, I feel like it would work for a while, like I’d wake up jacked and a slightly more angry than really necessary, but I just don’t know if it would last. I’d wake up mellowed out, very calmly asking “what y’all really want”. I don’t want that. I want the song to always be intense. I want it to always make my adrenaline spike. I want the song to always make me feel like i just snorted some cocaine and chugged a double vodka redbull.

But the flipside to that is obviously if that adrenaline is just an average reaction now. Imagine if you did that so much that you got used to it. Like, you’re used to cocaine and vodka redbulls, to the point that you do that just to get into the swing of things in the night. Like, that’s just how you start to ease into things. You start with that. "Hey Bob, can I get you some coffee?" "No thanks, Frank, I already had my cocaine and redbull. I'm all set for today, and really the rest of this month."

Yeesh.

But I don’t want to keep myself too tame. I don’t want to look back on any of my time and realize that I was bored. i don’t mind realizing I’ve been an idiot until recently. Actually, I usually feel like I’ve just started being smarter, or more responsible, or more anything else that’s positive. But i can also usually say that doing so had been a lot of fun while I was doing it. I don’t want to look back and realize that I’d been boring myself.

I should probably clarify, I don't do cocaine and redbull. Nor do I advocate it. But if you ever happen to notice me muttering "D-M-X", then you already know. I'm in my zone. I'm Grindin'.

Quarter Life Crisis

A boy in a village is given a horse. Everyone in the village says it’s a great thing. A wise man of the village says, “We’ll see.” Then the boy falls off the horse and breaks his leg. “Everyone in the village says it’s a terrible thing. The wise man says, “We’ll see.” Then there’s a war, all the other boys are called up to fight in the war, but the boy can’t because of his messed up leg, blah blah, you’ve probably heard this. I’ve always hated this story, because the very lesson that it teaches is that we may never know if the things happening to us are good or bad things. The moral of the story doesn’t seem to be to look for the good in things, but merely wait and wait to be able to draw a conclusion that may never actually be realized. What if the boy actually wanted to go to war? What if all of his friends went to war and were killed but the boy would have helped save a few of them? What if the friends all come back and it turns out they really like wars, and they’re all like, “Aww, man, you missed it, that shit was awesome! You gotta come to the next one!” Or what if the people they are fighting a war against really need to be fought? The story portrays the going to war part as something best avoided, and that’s just doing more assuming of the boy’s fate, thus the final “We’ll see.”

Assumption: We’ll see in time and understand which were the good things and which were the bad things. We may never see if any of this means anything. If the boy gets stabbed a year later after all the soldiers return from war, was the horse a good thing or a bad thing? How do you even determine which things make a difference?

Better yet, why do you? Are we really so entitled to understanding the world that we deserve to know our own meaning? We constantly ask what the meaning of life is. Assumption: life has meaning. Or maybe the assumption is that life can, or is even supposed to have meaning. If life has meaning, that means all things that are given life have some sort of purpose. And I’m not even talking about people that live shitty, painful lives with illnesses and defects. I’m not talking about murderers and psychopaths that basically make life horrible for others before dying. I’m not even talking about babies that get to live for a week before fading away without the slightest clue of what time on earth really entails. If life has meaning, lives of animals have meaning. Dogs, cats, squirrels, racoons, deer… their lives mean something. The zoo animals? That’s actually easy to see. They entertain people too chicken to go out into the wild but who still want to see animals. But animals out in the wild? That get hunted and hunt, that stalk and kill their own food just to have something do the same to them? There’s some sort of meaning, apparently. It’s not just chaos and entropy on the Serengeti plains, there’s a plan. Like a football play, where this lion hunts that wildebeest, and then these 3 hyenas pick at the carcass.

I could go on with this idea, but the point is really this: we constantly make an assumption of the fact that our previous assumptions were wrong, or at least that we were flawed in thinking them at the time. Take the point of all this writing, for a perfect example.

A Quarter Life Crisis.

So I am only ¼ the way done with my life right now, based on my ‘calculations’. Hell, have you checked out mother nature? I might be over half way! I’m 26 now, I may not live to see 50. This could very well be my actual midlife crisis and I would have no way of knowing. I’m not even sure if I want to live to be 104, although I may actually have the genes for it. My grandmother on my dad's side lived to be 79 despite the fact that she smoked since a relatively young age. My great great grandmother lived to be 109. The fact that I met my great great grandmother bodes pretty well for my lineage. But on the other hand, I saw the condition she was in, and I don’t actually know if I want to live to go through THAT.

I’m thinking in all of this though, what is the point of all of this?

My personal crisis, does this mean anything? Is this doing anyone any good to read this?

I have absolutely no idea.

I’m not writing this, at least as a whole, to be read. I’m writing because I need to write. These are all thoughts that need to get out, even if they end up going the wrong way or to the wrong direction. But the expression, that’s what needs to happen from where I’m sitting.

In my experience, expression can save your life. Getting these thoughts out of your thick skull may be the thing that allows you to stay sane in your own right. Which is interesting, because a lot of the thoughts we share sometimes make us actually appear crazy, but it still lends a hand in making you less crazy than you would have been. Think of the people you know that say crazy things. Now think of how crazy they would be if they had to hold all of that in, if they were forced to be normal all the time. Think about if artists had to only draw inside the lines, songs that had to use simple rhymes that everyone knew before they were even said. Coloring books and country music, that’s all that existed. For some people, maybe that’s fine, but for others, it would be mind-numbingly painful. Imagine that you no longer get to express yourself as anything different than what has already been expressed. Every emotion that you feel needs to simply be likened to something that has already happened. Is that scary for you or relieving? It better be scary. Who the hell wants to give up their right to feel different? You have a right to complain, a right to say, “Hey! That’s bullshit!” or say it calmly and eloquently, I don’t care. “Pardon me, but in my own estimation, that’s quite pure manure.” Whatever you want.

And some crises aren’t really crises.

Some things only seem like problems while you’re in them. And then they end, and instantly perspective allows you to see that they were just things that happened, that don’t even matter. Sometimes we assume we have a great story to tell, and then we share it and the audience hates it, and upon reexamination, we realize that what we shared isn’t really a great story at all but just stupid, or something worse, like admitting that a crime took place, something like that. You may ask, and of course I have a ton of stories like that. Here’s a tame one.

I once tried to start the wrong car. As in my friend gave me her keys to go and pick up her car, and I in turn took them to the incorrect car and tried to turn the engine on. And I don’t think it was completely my fault either, because they left their car unlocked. Why would I not think I had unlocked the car? That’s all I’m saying. The lock seemed to disengage, so I thought I had the right keys, I get in, and the keys do nothing for the car. And I thought I had done something wrong with the keys and then I realized by looking around the car that there was no way that this was my friend’s car. But I had already called her to say that the car wouldn’t start, so I jumped out of the car and pseudo wiped my fingerprints off of everything i thought i had touched, not so much because of anything I had done but because I didn’t know if the car’s owner was ever going to be implicated later and the entire car would be dusted for prints, who needs that shit?

The point is, there was nothing wrong with my friend’s actual car, but there was a crisis in determining that. Plus she ran over to the area, frantic, and decided to flag down a nearby police officer, and her exact words to the officer, I was told later, were, “Officer! Have you seen a black kid in a black jacket and black pants trying to start a car over here?!” The officer, clutching his holster, replied, “No…” as if he was going into arrest-making mode. So out of just needing to locate the right car and there not really being anything wrong, a crisis of sorts was created, and then another potential situation was lopped on top of that afterwards. 

This is what i do. Or what I can do. Create chaos where there was none. It's not like I was doing anything else that night, this way I will remember that night for the rest of my life. That's one thing I have noticed about these so-called crises. They stick out much more than the normal days. You know, you won't remember so many individual moments that are easy. A crisis will probably be noteworthy a few days from now. I might always remember being told after the fact how there was about to be a call made out to local authorities to find and detain (and likely beat the shit out of) a young man with my description in the area. But hey, false alarm, right?

The Drummer

There once was a Tom. A bald-headed, silly, squirrelly old dude that we'll call Tom.

Tom worked at the newspaper I worked at for a while. He had been there so long, he didn’t know anything else. He didn’t want to know anything else. He legitimately seemed to love everything about what he did. His expertise was the page design. Meaning he was the guy who took all the things that were going into the paper and he would arrange them in the manner that was the most efficient use of the space given the amount of material each day’s news had. A whole lot of news to report? He had to cut things out or skim them to make them fit. Not a lot happening? He had to stretch what was given or work with local ads.

Now it probably doesn’t sound like much to you. It didn’t seem like much to me either, to be honest. I don’t know how he did it with such joy, it would have driven me crazy. Worrying about that as my primary responsibility in the world, I might have jumped out of a window onto a pile of cacti first.

But it worked for him.

It took me a long time to warm up to the guy too, you gotta understand, he wasn’t always easy to sit next to. He was a constant source of noise, not just comical anecdotes or unsolicited advice or poorly whistled tunes from the 70’s or famous musicals, just random noise sometimes. Like clicking noises out of the side of his mouth, which became louder and more frequent and always accompanied a specific problem with the format of that day's results. One thing he did, he used to drum on his desk. With his fingers, his pens, rolled up packets or programs, didn’t matter, he was holding down the beat to his own… whatever. And that’s what he did, he sat there at this desk, he talked shit, he cultivated cholesterol in that chair night after night, and occasionally he lined up the pages and he drummed.

But it worked for him.

I tell ya, I used to hate this man. I mean, the paper was part time for me at this point, I was busting my ass at another job elsewhere that I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t get any peace at home without my girlfriend letting me know all the things I wasn’t doing well enough for us as a couple, I had insane student loans so I basically wasn’t working towards anything at the time, no real idea on what i was supposed to be doing with my life, and just felt like i was slowly losing my sense of what sanity was supposed to look like. Sometimes the newspaper was a scene of tranquility. And it never seemed to be peaceful once he started the bup-dididi-bup-dididi-bup-bup-bup next to his keyboard. He could shatter my peaceful moments with something so quick and easy, like the exact phrase he would use to inquire about how our local basketball team did. He would interject into conversations the most useless of all trivia known to man. And it seemed for so long like everyone else just didn’t care, they were able to just get over his existence and just kind of shrug it off, and only I was tortured by this incessant tap-machine of a man.

But after a while, I began to wonder about the drumming. I mean, he actually seemed pretty articulate with his rhythms, he could mix it up with all 10 fingers, with just 2 or 3 on one hand at a time, with fingers on one hand and a pointed object in the other, he seemed to be dialing into something. Curiosity began to set for me? Was he really a drummer somewhere else? Had he been musically inclined in a past life? A past career?

Turned out, no. He had never actually drummed but had played a few other instruments and regretted not going back to the drums. he had, in fact, taken 3 drum lessons in his life. He seemed to look back on it with a certain sadness, a certain regret.

But it also seemed to lighten him up just to be asked about it. It was like he had wanted for someone to at least care enough to inquire. As it turned out, others in ear shot took the same opportunity to zing him about how much a pain in the ass he could be, but I honestly hadn’t meant it that way.

Anyways, it made me look at the drumming differently. The drumming may not have just been driving me insane. it may have been doing the same to him. I mean, think about all the things in life that you wish you had done and may have ended up being great at, but you never tried. Or think about things that you tried too late, and were really good at but still didn’t get to really enjoy it or do in the right time of your life. To me, that’s what the drumming on the desk represented for Tim. it was this constant reminder that maybe, maybe just maybe, there was something out there that he would have been even more in love with than putting newspapers together. Having a reminder like that all the time, that would truly drive me into an early grave.

But it worked for him.

This made me think of something terrible: not all of us get to be truly happy. Or rather, not all of us get to be the same kind of happy. I mean, happiness and satisfaction are very different things to different people. I wonder about Tim, tapping away on the desk as he did something much different than he may have been thinking about. Like in his mind, maybe the drummer was the reality and the newspaper job was a dream. Another world. Just another person with another life, foreign from his own. Would he have spent a life as a drummer, wondering how his life would have turned out if he had just gone and taken that newspaper job instead?

The CEO in the penthouse seeks a type of happiness that the bum on the street corner would not necessarily understand. And definitely vice versa. Think about it. Think about what the rich executive with a full bank account, a healthy 401k, 3 houses and a supermodel girlfriend. Someone might think that this guy should just walk around happy, he shouldn't even have sadness. But anyone that is at that level probably still has a lot of aspirations, so maybe this guy has to be successful to be happy, like stay successful. The bum on the street? Maybe he wants to just be off the street, and back in the comfort of any home, have a regular job, a single apartment or room to himself, and just someone to talk to, even if it's not romantic. Which makes for more happiness:

1. Someone with nothing who finally gets to have something, or gets something back?
or
2. Someone with everything that keeps it and gets a little bit more?

So, it stands to reason that the bum on the street could be significantly happier with incredibly less stuff than the CEO, under pretty reasonable circumstances. Or maybe ten thousand bums, for that matter. Ten thousand people could live the rest of their lives relatively comfortable and very happy with the same amount of stuff that the millionaire will very possibly get bored with by the end of this year. It doesn't seem outlandish, does it? But what do you want to bet that exec up in the pent house with the townhouse and the mansion and the condo in Vail doesn't give much of any thought to the people on the street that he strolls right past? Even if he stops, what does he give up? A dollar? A twenty? A fifty? What is that to him?

And yet I can't help but think of all the different unfortunate souls on all those different street corners out there, who won't get to leave those corners. Doesn't that chill you to the bone just a little bit, that they started out as kids, full of hopes and dreams and goofiness and all this good energy, and the end of the line is nowhere? Isn't that horrifying, that this can actually happen to people in our own country, in our own city? I mean, one part of me thinks that's so crazy, that the same things couldn't make those two happy, but I know elsewhere that it's true. I know that everyone is not on the same playing field. And it's not even like I can change it. There are some things in life that you can aspire to change, but how do you even make personal peace with an idea like that? How can I, someone with at least a few dollars here in my pocket, accept that there are people across the world or 7 minutes away somewhere that are both just dying, and no one is coming to help them? Isn't that heavy, when you really let yourself think about it? But we don't let ourselves think about it. I know I don't, in most cases. We tell ourselves that there are finite resources, that we do the best we can, that some charities are shams anyway, that he'd probably blow it on booze, that he chose his path, that you can't save everyone, that you can't save people that don't want to be saved, all this shit. And some of it is absolutely true but it doesn't change the fact that knowing it makes us feel way better.

If we were all on the same wave in life, we are in all sorts of places when the wave breaks, and some of us get to ride it out and have a great time, and some of us get sucked under and tossed around and pulled under, and some of us never really get anywhere close to any real action and we just sit around waiting for the wave to subside. But the end of the story remains the same: we don't all get to be great, or to have fun, or to be...anything. That's what I learned about the world, in my own mind, while working with Tim. The horrific idea about how unfair life is to the sound of tap-tapa-boom-tap-tap.

And it worked for him. Should that work for me?

The Donut Heist

We all lie.

Or maybe we don’t. I haven’t met all of us.

But plenty of us lie. We make ourselves believe what we want ourselves to believe, and then we try to convince others of it. Anything you think, you think it because you want to think it, whether you think you do or not. It seems very likely that you have certain thoughts in your head that you tell yourself you wish that you didn’t. But honestly, if you really didn’t want them there, you would be in complete control of making those thoughts disappear.

See what I did there? I lied. I don’t think anyone truly controls the way their mind works.

Lying is almost another language. It can be learned, adapted, practiced, and ultimately perfected. There are different styles to it. There is acting, like on a stage or in a recorded performance. There is auditory performance, such as phone sex, music, or even some customer service lines. There are professions where lying isn’t technically encouraged, but is probably vital. Used car saleman comes to mind. There is lying for different reasons, like not wanting to have to deal with consequences (“Officer, I had NO IDEA that the speed limit had gone down to 35 here, and would NEVER have sped otherwise!), like hoping to gain some kind of financial or material gain(“I SWEAR, they delivered the television to me and it was ALREADY cracked like that, honestly…”) there is lying out of fear (“Baby, I don’t know who that woman is or WHY she would ever think that it was me that got her pregnant”) or out of habit (“I didn’t see nothin’, I ain’t hear nothin’, and I ain’t saying nothin.”).

Lying is sometimes very necessary. Sometimes you straight up NEED to lie. Sometimes you need to feign ignorance, sometimes you need to have not seen or heard something. Plenty of times in my life I created an embarrassing moment that no one else needed to know, so I just omitted it from things for other people to learn about. Later on, if anyone asked if anything had happened in a situation, I would neglect to mention such instances. Easy, simple, and still a lie. I mean, how many times have people asked you how things were going, and you just said, “Oh, you know, good. How about you?” and your entire month was pure shitty, dreary, horrible time in your life? Your dog had just been hit by a car, or your boss was making a pass at you and threatening to fire you if you didn’t flirt back at least, there was a fire in the house that you grew up in, or there was some terrible storm in your area and you were sick with the flu and had thrown up literally half a minute ago. Or something in the same league as the horrible things I’m describing. But someone asks how it’s going, and rather than be honest and bring them down to your level, you just shrug it off and turn the subject back onto them. I’m not saying you do it all the time, but you totally do it sometime. Everyone does. The world would be so much more exhausting if people said exactly how shitty of a time they were having with life at the moment. It would be horrible, and people would stop asking each other how it was going because they’d already be so depressed and wouldn’t be able to take on anymore pain and emotional anguish of even one more problem from someone else.

And sometimes you lie without realizing you lied. Sometimes you tell a lie because you didn’t know you were lying. Recently I went to Woodman’s in the morning because I was going to buy some donuts. I hate going to Woodman’s, because it’s a supermarket that seems set on operating like they’re in the midst of a perpetual going-out-of-business sale. There are tons of lines, relatively good prices, and basically no one working there, and the few that are don’t seem to know anything about what’s going on there. And it’s always packed, no matter what day and what time of day, so it just adds to the feeling that something terrible is about to happen and people are making a supply run in preparation of the worst. Which in turn makes you feel maybe you too should shop a little more. So essentially, it is a successful tactic.

Anyway, I go in, and I pick up one of the boxes that you have to fold out yourself in order to use, and it took me a sec, but I got it. And I choose my donuts, and the selection is pretty good, so I go with a dozen, just all kinds, I throw 6 or 7 types of donuts in the box. I close it up, and I go to the check out. Now for donuts, you’re supposed to write on the box how many you got, so they can charge you the right amount per donut. But the lines were insane, even at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, there were still an unnecessarily large amount of people at Woodmans. But I saw that self-checkout was short, so I went over there.

The machine for the check out wanted a barcode, but obviously the donuts didn’t come with that, that would be weird. In fact, I don’t want a donut that has a barcode on it. Anyway, I go to item search, find donuts, and type in that I had got 12 of them. I pay the amount at the machine, get my receipt, and I go to walk out, and one of the six people that works there stops me, and informs me that I shouldn’t have gone to the self-checkout with something that isn’t scanned. I say, Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I won’t do it again. She said she understands, but she needs me to go back and wait in line with the people that have a cashier so that they can check me out as I’m supposed to. I tell her, no, I’m not gonna do that, one because I already paid and have a receipt, two because what she’s proposing wastes my time. The time of the cashier, the time of the people who have to wait in line behind me, me, her for telling me this, literally everyone in the scenario comes out with less life to live because of this transaction. I remind her that I can just show her the donuts and the receipt, and we can basically go on with our morning.

The clerk there is about to protest again when the customer who was in line behind me walks up, also with a box of donuts, and she says something to the effect that I should be allowed to go because she saw me do exactly what I was supposed to and that the cashier lady was basically just racial profiling and did they need a lawsuit on their hands over some donuts, blah blah blah. I really wasn’t even gonna play the race card, because I could totally see why they wouldn’t want me to do it that way, but screw it, now I’ve got backup. I got this old white lady in green overalls and long frizzy gray hair, who looks like she feeds her seventeen cats milk out of a baby bottle, and she’s on my side and is way better at this confrontation thing than I am.

Anyway, the clerk there totally backs off and apologizes, obviously wanting now to show that she meant nothing racial about her inquiry and have a nice day. That or she remembers, “I work at an enormous grocery store, this can’t possibly be worth the payoff even if I’m right. Who even gives a shit about these donuts?” I shrug it off and say it’s cool and I walk out with this other woman, this older white woman, and as we’re getting to the cars, I say that I appreciate it and that it wasn’t the clerk’s fault, and that she didn’t have to step up in my defense but did and I thought it was a nice gesture. She told me, just before she walked away towards her car, that she knew that I hadn’t stolen any donuts, but that when she saw the clerk bother me, she walked away from the check out machine without paying. So by coming to aid me, what she was really doing was stealing donuts and a lot of other groceries in the exact way that the clerk was trying to prevent! And then we just walked out together, me being complicit in this donut heist.

So I thought about that for a while. Well played, larcenous cat lady. You obviously shouldn’t steal. But then again, no one even asked her if she was stealing, so she didn’t have to lie about it. Maybe she would have owned up to it if the clerk had thought to ask cat lady the same questions she asked me. I’m curious how that would have gone to this day.

The best part about all of this was, when I got to where I was going, and we opened up the donuts to eat, my girlfriend gave me crap for shoving 14 donuts in the box so haphazardly.