trepanning

The man said, "That's the way the Universe works." It was a good omen. The man spoke like Joshua. He spoke of accepting the little losses and a faith that life works its own way out. Joshua noted this well. The ideology was not novel to him, but he was very comforted that he encountered it outside of his own hamster wheel of a head.

Rebecca slept in her bed, her hair snaking a semicircle around her eye. He loved her. She was beautiful in so many ways. Today would be a good day, and he was glad to be alive. For whatever reason, life had dealt him a 50/50 hand. He'd play today. It looked good.

Hours before the sun lit the horizon, he arrived at the small, spartan headquarters for the banquet server staffing company. It was his first shift. When he walked in the door he felt his whiteness, like all the african eyes were responding as one would to a prominent skin disorder with averting, staring, making contact with other dark eyes, dancing eyebrows and creeping smirks. His reasoning quicky neutralized the fear, a rationale that they wouldn't have asked him to come work if they didn't want him to, further rationale that no one cared or should care, and still a still further case for the defense of his skin that it didn't matter and if it did it shouldn't.

With all of that early morning darkness, his body language became rigid, it became jerky. He was so aware of his stride, how his arms hung, how his eyes and their tell-tale brows tuned the focus of his insecurities, his lips and creeping warm smile that, so paralyzed with anxiety, just wouldn't bloom. His presence became uncomfortable. The awareness of all of this made it worse. Still, he spoke with a projected voice and made eye contact with whomever he was speaking to. The test of endurance came when he wasn't speaking to anyone, and he fell to feel like a pink elephant no one wanted to think about.

He was asked what size uniform shirt he wore. Somehow he was comfortable saying "small" even though he didn't like the fact that he had to wear the clothes for small chested men. In spite of self-appraisal that his greatest present growth was in learning to be small, it was a challenge to voice this to Miss Mystic in the presence of other black men. Wondering if anyone felt he was challenging their entitlement to work, he spent his psyche on quelling a chromatograph of defensiveness.

They asked him to drive and to follow Michael. After Miss Mystic finished photocopying his license and social security card that was made of paper as weakly constituted as his sense of self, he went out to the car and the intersection to wait for the blue van that Michael would clip down i-95 to Wilmington for the gig. He left the radio to Baron, but Baron chose not to bother with the suffrage. This evoked more neurotica, more suffering for Joshua. Around then, he fell into the mode of driving, with great concentration to safely follow the speeding, careening blue van down the dark highway where police cars gauging speed could make nice pickings of them. The hyperfocus was a relief from the racial anxiety, the insecurity, and the exhausting self awareness.

By the time they arrived at the client, Joshua was exhausted. He followed the rag-tag army into the building and stood around visibly uncomfortable waiting for a mission to start, something to rescue him by consuming the time left to steep in his anxiety. Nervous smirks and nearly constant repositioning behind men and women who seemed more at ease with the environment, the client's site, and comfortable in their own skin. He imagined he'd be more comfortable in their skin and he felt a silent nervous twitter that emitted and resounded in his innate encyclopedia of mendacity, bringing the ordeal closer to an end. His clothing was clean and sharp, the only flaw he felt was in the very unnoticeable white branding text on the tops of the tongues of his shoes. Even though he looked around at the escape of the floor and observed two other pairs of the same shoes, he was tolerably dissatisfied.

Without further ado, they took up the list of items to check off in setting up the immense banquet hall. Quickly he encountered the house-employed banquet servers taking turns making a point of correcting him one way, then the next in contradiction until he voiced his frustration to an approachable waitress and carried on with the best, most obvious compromises he could find. The clock began to pick up momentum and the service swayed into seating, pouring, and slinging plates. To his own pride, he wisely anticipated some questions the guests would conjure up, and asked the team captains for those resources before the guests even seated themselves. Things like tea, lemons, napkins, etc. can cripple a server during service if the waiter has to take the time to find them or find someone who knows where to find them.

The choreography for this lot of rag-tag jolly-roger varlets needed work. There was a sadness for him that such a crew were in parts and at times stifled when it came to working together. The same selfishness, contemptuousness, and arrogant sense of self so painfully out of scale that singed him when he watched television or encountered cavalier personalities in social life crept between and divided the mates as they handled the business. One of our number was asked to leave the client site, leave the building, and do so presently or greater problems than the exile itself and its inconvenience would follow. He was unable to rally behind this mate, because in truth the cur was out of order. The occluded message he saw was that these transgressions were ones that he himself had made, thus so much less tolerable. It was beautiful somehow, that what he could not accept for himself was understandable when he witnessed it as it clashed for another misadjusted personality.

As he worked, he identified his errors and corrected them. He observed banquet servers who moved with confidence and natural grace and purpose and emulated them, he saw that planning and experience in seeing what was to come next granted him this ease. Once he saw how something was convened upon to do, he quickly fell into sync and felt that comfort. In a way, it was a competition with himself. He thrived on competition, even when it consumed him and even when the way he thrived was not more than superficial and dismissive.

At the end of the service, a team leader came to Joshua and asked, "Are you working tomorrow, Saturday & Sunday?" "No, I don't thi..." "You are now. Can you?" "Not tomorrow if it's before 12, but this weekend absolutely."

It was a great compliment. In a way he was, as he had been called, "a machine". He -could- handle it. Even when he couldn't, he did. Most women and men have that characteristic. It's one of the beautiful ones, the trait that we just find a way. For someone that capitulated so often the minutae before beginning for the childish fear of fucking it up, Joshua managed very well when the pressure was on.

There were times when he cried because he could not solve a math problem. There were times when he cried because he could not meet his own expectations of surpassing expectations. There were times when he cried because he, for everything he tried, could not manage to live as a modern man. This small day set up a frame for yet another new way, a way to win. He loved Rebecca and the image if her with her hair curled around her heavy eyelid stayed with him. She deserved to sleep and sleep well. He had miles to go before he wept, and miles to go before he wept.