A Happy Monday Story — My Own Personal Monster:

I just checked the school website on the progress of my application for a job in admin and saw that, while I did pass the HR review (some weeks ago), I didn’t make it through the five person committee review process for an interview, the first of three interviews in the gateways to a permanent, full time job with benefits and a pension. I guess I’ll save a couple hundred bucks for now on some new dress clothes, but my beard and haircut sure do look sharp. The funny thing is that I knew two of the five people on the hiring committee, which probably worked against me, because they knew me and worked with me and my glowing personality and ability to smile/laugh all of the time…while saying some horribly funny yet sometimes unnerving psycho-babble. I have that “gift” of being able to see the comedic silver lining in any dark storm cloud and get people to uneasily chuckle while looking around to see if anybody else saw them laughing at something woefully inappropriate. While this ability that I’ve honed through my lifetime and is, to be honest, a psychological defense mechanism to keep me relatively sane and amongst the living in this world full of thoughtless, rude, self-serving morons, it is rather thoughtless, rude, self-serving and somewhat moronic on my own part, a lessor variation of the Nietzschean proposition of becoming a monster while attempting to stop other monsters, and I have become my own personal monster.

In other words, my personality doesn’t make me the kind of material to work in the field of admin, especially in academia, a world that must, to quote a contemporary writer, “cleave to the dictates of the corporate Deathstar” that is growing like a tumor in the shape of Betsy DeVos’s head and is part and parcel to the privatizing element in our public schools while simultaneously walking a PC tightrope that also helps to strangle any sense of individualism and fun not deemed sanitized and wholesome. To put that in simpler terms, I’m an asshole and very open and truthful about it. And it doesn’t matter if I have my Charles Manson like beard and hair growth shorn away and dawn the button down haberdashery appropriate to the office, because my cleaving to their sense of uniformity is only a temporary ruse and a façade and would probably require a partial lobotomy through ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) and long term psychotropic meds to facilitate the complete change necessary to enter this rank of employment and maintain it for any period of time.

To be honest, I don’t know how these people do it. The outward uniformity — the dress slacks, button up long sleeve shirts, Topsiders and other well-groomed accoutrements of the job — is of course the easy part. It is how they are able to maintain that consistent calm demeanor, easy going smile, and almost Orwellian like flow of positive and simple self-affirmations projected outward in a seemingly unflappable, even keel that mystifies me to no end. Some would tell me, “It’s called being a professional, you idiot!” But, to do it day in and day out without slipping up is still impressive to me. Are they actually like this all of the time? Is it who they truly are? Or are they able to take their inner monster, compartmentalize it, contain it for their time at work, and then explode elsewhere out of sight?

Is it something simple like turning their car into a Tourette’s primal scream chamber for their drive to work as they howl a litany of “Mother-fuckers!” “Cunts!” and “Cock-suckers!” for half an hour until they hit the off-ramp approaching the college, wipe the spittle off their faces, paste on their temporary, Mona Lisa, lithium smiles and lock it down until they get back in their cars eight hours later for the “Fuck-face!” drive home? Or is it more complex and deviant? Is that high and tight, bespectacled nerd in the Cardigan who lectures on diversity actually the de facto and secret leader of an online White Pride/Aryan Separatist group who drops more N-bombs than a Doctor Dre song or a Samuel L. Jackson movie from the 1990s? Or, does that fountain-tailed, former cheer-leader turned cookie baking, prim schoolmarm who constantly lectures on sexual harassment and toxic masculinity while telling people to “just be nice” spend her weekends as a leather strapped Dom in an exclusive LA dungeon kicking the shit out of a high dollar douchebags for fun and profit? Or, is that somewhat conservative, milquetoast Mormon who doesn’t like dirty humor or talking about religion or politics actually spending his weekends at the bukkake business end of glory-holes in the downest, low rent gay bars from Palm Springs to West Hollywood? What do they do to keep it together and keep their mouths shut at work?

In the end, they probably are true believers and are just as they seem: predictable and boring but really nice and naively hopeful for the future. It’s like they don’t keep up on current events or really know what’s happening in the world around them or just for the sake of their jobs don’t mention or even heartily laugh at the horrible realities beyond their, for lack of a better phrase, “ivory towers.” If things somehow go the same, and the status quo somewhat maintains over the years, they should make it through this life with relative ease, making no waves and leaving no discernable wake in the course of their travels. I guess a little financial security kind of helps in that respect, and it would have been a nice change for me in my life. Maybe I would have also changed inwardly to match the outward appearance and increased cash flow, but probably not, and people in that world don’t want a reminder of what may await them outside the high walls of the city gates or the court jester making light of the cloud of doom coming in over the horizon like a hammer of the gods. And on that cheerful note, it’s off to my miserable, temporary, part time job with no benefits, no pension and a rough future. Here we all go. Smile you fuckers, shut the fuck up, and don’t make any waves if you want a comfortable future.