At the rate I’m gong on the karma wheel sort of spinning and shit working out, by the time I’m at death’s door everything will be just jake. OK, I don’t know what jake means, well I guess I do now, on account of looking it up, but yeah, I didn’t.
The point is, the longer I live the more shitty people just seem to right themselves right into their own shittiness, or they redeem themselves or otherwise I just keep on keeping on and everything works out OK. Here’s what I mean. I moved across the fucking large North American continent. Drove right to left over the landmass and ended from one ocean to another. I got a new life, springing out of the old one, I didn’t like dye my hair black and change my name, and I got a job and I commenced to living.
A few months into the new job, I was guarded with the new folks with their own earnest, Northern California culture. I remember the anxiety and the gut-level fear when I realized I’d be going to a foreign country on something they called a “retreat” with my new co-workers. Holy shit. Trying to be the mousy one who blends (my new, incognito life change persona I had fantasized) would be tough whilst sweating out whether to drink the water (not) and actually eating the bugs on tortilla chips my new boss ordered up at the restaurant.
Nervous I was, and nervous I stayed. But there was seismic shifting (you know like on those loose tectonic plates among which I now live and work). Just the year before I came out here, I was sitting in serial visits to a Human Resources freak and a psychologist’s office trying to explain the world-wide interwebs and the not yet felt in those corners the burgeoning weblog phenomenon. No one with whom I worked knew what the fuck I was talking about, so like fearful peasants everywhere they grabbed up the pitchforks and went a-witch-burning.
So, there I was, literally marching up the side of a mountain toward an ancient Aztec pyramid, of which incidentally between the steepness of the path, the altitude and my pussiness I never saw the top, worrying about new people and still not having shaken the ignorance of computers and web technology that assaulted me and lost me my last job. Minding my steps. Only, in this new world, well, I guess not so new, as we were walking where the Aztecs and Toltecs and whatnot had trod, I happen to be talking with a true, dot.com, trend-setting California entrepreneur. Not only is the company he founded web-based, but it has legions of rabid, dedicated fans and supporters, buoyed up in the blogosphere, word of mouth and technological grassroots. Seriously wired.
How the fuck does someone fired for a ‘blog end up in Mexico talking with a dude who is prince of the technorati? (Even now, I realize I’m being a complete wuss and not linking to his popular site. Don’t want to be that one degree closer to the bill-paying gig I need to go to every day.)
But, none of that set up is what I really mean to be talking about, or typing about in my customary ramble.
Nope, it was that one chick on the trip that had me thinking. Now, this chick has been referred to here obliquely, and it was she that has had me itching, aching, dying, beating myself into submission to not full on vent and rant. The birthright radar that Pat gave me to spot a bad egg, and just fucking know in some gut place that a person sucks, full on blasted party-fireworks-red when I met her. She was DEFCON 1.
It was the uncomfortable shift, which I learned about in status games in improv workshops, that signaled me. I was “low,” and she was “high,” and in our first couple of conversations, she spoke to me in the slow, patronizing, patient tones usually reserved for children, rascally puppies and dimwitted, 19th century servants. In my head and heart, I declared her a bad egg and stayed on my guard. I also made a point to sparkle to the top of my Noel Coward wit and intellectual depths whenever I engaged with her.
Here’s the magical part. The part that makes me believe in karma. The part that makes me mostly like living and keeps me laughing.
Not only have I worked on through to a place where this particular nemesis can’t touch me, I’m helping in the recovery of others who came to the bad egg conclusion on their own paths. So today, in that aftermath, someone evoked a movie scene that moved me deeply.
It was just the kind of workplace fantasy, albeit a movie scene, I would have evoked myself before inhibition got a hold of me and the fear of losing an income. I mean, what does one say, shell-shocked as I am when someone at work, in confidence and CLEARLY in jest, conjures up a blade and a rib cage?
I’m pretty sure that’s what you call full circle.