A coworker backstory, both recent and far distant.

So, it turns out that my one (tall) (skinny) (techie) (Thai) coworker returned to the restaurant because he was laid off from his local programming job during a recent downsizing.

And, he had had a good severance package for like a year, but he put out over 700 applications and wasn’t getting any bites, so he decided it wasn’t worth it to apply to tech jobs anymore, and so he sought out other non-tech jobs that were easily available to him.

He said he’s also working at a bike shop, but that’s more so because he gets a discount there, like for this amazing carbon fiber bike he got, at the mention of which he pulled out his phone and showed me this super specialized bike with an aerodynamic frame and special pedals and whatnot, etc. etc. etc.

“I hadn’t realized you were into biking,” I was like.

And, he said that he used to bike semi-professiionally in his late teens and early 20s, like he would place in races and make money and stuff, and at one point he was eating upwards of 5,000 calories a day.

Then, he showed me more pictures of the bike,and how it was carbon fiber this and carbon fiber that and whatnot.

“You really like carbon fiber,” I was like. 

Then, I was like, “After the Singularity happens and we can upload our consciousnesses, you know what I think your body will be made out of ?”

“Carbon fiber,” he was like.

“Exactly,” I was like.

Two winter sights…

…during an early winter snowstorm earlier this year in the one college town that I now live in:

1) The bookbox out across the street from the local library is gone, leaving just a stand with ragged nails sticking upwards from a large squarish flat board that forms the very base of the top pedestal.

2) By the pathway to my back cottage, there’s sheets of discolored snow towards the house, and there’s just enough of it to make me look closer and realize that it’s not from some animal pissing, but rather dirty water dripping down from the roof and trickling down through heaps of snow that had fallen off of the roof, creating sheets of like light beigish-brown snow on the top.

. . .

(At the local public library, the deskworker there wasn’t aware of the bookbox issue, but asked around and found out that it wasn’t vandalism or something, but rather a precaution that people take whenever there’s a huge snow and there’s a risk that ploughs or something will go by and the snow they kick up will take it down inadvertently.)

Another day…

…at the one (Thai) restaurant that I work now, as of several months ago:

1) My one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker comes in with her two young daughters after they got let out early from school, so I go back to our odds-and-ends workbox where we keep pens and scissors and corks and stuff  and where I had put a bracelet that I had made with her youngest daughter at an event that we went to a few weeks earlier, and I slip it on so that I can wear it over to their table.

And, the youngest one notices it immediately, that I was wearing it like I had told her that I would, and she just lights up and is so excited. 

2) I think that I hear someone playing the marimba that’s part of our holiday display up towards the ) of the restaurant, only I look down the length of the restaurant and I don’t see anyone there, and it’s only when I go and help the table next to that display and a woman there is spooning ice cubes out of her glass and the metal of her spoon hits the side of the glass and makes a ringing sound, it’s only then when that happens that I hear that same ringing sound and I realize where that sound must have been coming from, all that time.

3) A group of three (late middle-aged) (STEM?) professors including one who looks very (Romanian) share a meal, and then when one of them pulls out “the T-card” and starts talking about what can get included as a professional expense, I’m like, “Oh, is that for the tea?”, referring to the tea that two of them had ordered and were drinking, only they hear that and they’re like “No,” and they don’t hear my joke at all.

4) A (fatter) (middle-aged) (white) woman with a pudgy face and glasses and curly curly blonde hair just loves our homemade salad dressing, and she is all smiles about it and just beams her big round face up at me and is like, “I could drink it through a straw.”

Signs of increasing local homelessness:

1) The local supermarket co-op does away with its seating in the covered area outside its doors, since (homeless) people had been congregating there and harassing staff and local customers.

2) The (older) (white) (female) (townie) bartender at the local brewery tells me that with the one sandwich shop that moved to a few storefronts away from them like a year ago, everyone there has been extremely happy, since they lost the homelessness problems that they had had at their last location, like people coming in and using tables and stealing bags of chips from the open racks that they had out, in addition to staff sometimes being afraid to close alone when it got quiet and they were like the only ones there, apart from the homeless people who were maybe around.

Glimpses of past selves…

…at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) I ask a solitary (brown-skinned) man if he’s picking up or dining in as he walks through the door, and as he says “For here” he devoices the final R, so I ask him if he’s (Turkish), and he seems surprised and says that yes, he is, so I’m like, ‘Two words, that’s not bad” as I go to seat him, and then as he sits down at the table I explain to him that his devoicing of finals Rs is a dead giveaway.

2) As I discuss local problems with the one (thin) (bald) (jittery) (older) (Jewish-looking) local business owner who comes in a lot, he’s in complete agreement with everything I say, and he says that I should run for office, he'd support me.

A cottage door-step surprise…

…on the first day of the new year, when I step outside to go to the basement of the front house and go do laundry:

A big brown jagged hunk sits there on the concrete slab in front of my cottage, and at first I think that it's a brick like maybe some prowler with bad intentions had put it there, somehow, but then I look more closely and it’s a dry and gnawed-up hunk of brown bread that had become vaguely block-like in shape, one presumably dropped there by squirrels who were “over it,” and so I kick it away with my flip-flopped foot and it flies towards the fence on the other side of the backyard before coming to rest under the edge of the woodpile there, and as it does that my flip-flop comes off my foot and shoots up in the air, tumbling end over end as it falls like six-to-eight feet away from me on the pathway that leads around the front house towards my cottage, as I start hopping in short stunted hops on one foot to go over to it, to fetch it.

Addendum.

A bit after this, I was talking with the one (thin) (bald) (jittery) (older) (Jewish-looking) local business owner who comes in for lunch regularly, and I mentioned how weird and even unemployable and low-life a lot of app delivery drivers are, like people who couldn’t get a job anywhere else, and how many of them come in smelling like marijuana smoke and stuff, to the point that I can smell it under my KN95 mask that I always wear at work, which is really saying something.

And, he was shocked that Doordash actually has automated driver report commands that specify things like intoxication and stealing orders and stuff, like that just goes to show you how often it must happen at places, he was saying.