Saturday night I had a conversation with American Geisha. Obstensively about whether or not this BiB post was a rehash of another — it isn’t! — I eventually dragged out of her the revelation that she didn’t feel the same way about my blog as she did when first across it she stumbled. “You have to get out more,” she said, complaing about how I post about every little incident that happens at work. (At one point, earlier in the day, I’d told her I was cleaning my apartment. I was. Well, the kitchen anyway. I even bleached the floor. She said one of the — oddly — nicest things to me: “Dude, I’d rather you lived in a pig-sty and got out more!” How sweet!)

I had a falling out with a friend earlier this summer — and I’m paranoid that those friends we have in common might be avoiding me as a result, but I’m too afraid to confront some of them directly (because I’m afraid I really am being paranoid). As a result, I’ve been turning to my blog much more than I have in the past, seeking in it some sort of creepy cyber validation. I will often get home from work at eleven thirty at night and type posts until two in the morning, then “time delay” them throughout the course of the next day. I look to sitemeter every night with this undefinable craving for attention, that can best be described either as “needy” or just plain “pathetic.”

I’ve been blogging lately simply for the sake of blogging. I e-mailed someone last week and actually bragged about how many posts I had on time-delayed posting. To sum up someone who once said something very profound without realizing it, “Double-you-tee-eff?”

I think many of more recent posts have been missing that same “heart” I complained about being absent from Pirates of the Caribbean II. As I took deliveries, I thought about what she said and analyzed some of my feelings. Generally I blog about stupid stuff — stupid customers, stupider coworkers, toys, DVDs, asshole drivers. (I don’t generally do a lot of soul searching, so enjoy it while I’m being all honest and shit). I’m not going to stop blogging about any of the things that interest me, or piss me off but I’m not going to come home at night and force myself to crank out half a dozen posts. I’m going to stop taking this blog so fucking seriously.

I need to get out more, and experience life. Geisha laughs at me when I told her I needed to check my calendar. The message in her laughter was clear: “You’re a pizza guy! How busy can you be?” Truthfully? Very. Yes, my social calendar is very clear, but between the Indy and the Franchise, my only day off is Tuesday (and then not always!), and the only days I’m off before eight o’clock are Fridays (if I’m only scheduled rush), alternating Saturdays, and Sundays. I have very little free time to actually go and do stuff in, and this sucks, because …

Among my “to do” things are to reconnect with childhood friends Russ & Kryss (both of whom live in Silver Spring, and don’t know the other, and I’d like to spend a full day with each, but would settle for a half a day), and possible day-trips to DC & Harper’s Ferry. Here’s where work has thrown another complication my way: I’d proposed August 1st as a good day for the DC trip, and was still waiting to hear back from my friend, when I learned that the Franchise has me scheduled to close that Tuesday evening, meaning the DC trip would have to be cut short (assuming, after all, that’d we go that day). You’d be pissed, right? Then I go in yesterday and I’m off the schedule for the day again (Yay? Maybe if I hadn’t torpedoed my plans already…). I get so fucking frustrated with that place sometimes.

I’m hot under the collar, lately, and desiring an excuse to express it. The last couple of days I was at the Indy I was almost hoping Gary would get in my face about it so I would have an excuse to explode on someone and get in a verbal shouting match. Zap and I came close to a fight the other day over something stupid. I already blogged about me and OMF getting into it. August 21st can not get here soon enough. I need to unwind, and thankfully tonight, I will — just a small get-together with some friends in Towson at a bar. Yes, just what I need, beers. Except, oh, here’s the best part: I’m the designated driver. So I’ll be having, at the most, one beer.

Which, truthfully, I’m totally okay with. When I’m in a good mood, beer makes me a happy drunk. Happy drunk me is full of happy drunk (albeit rib cracking) hugs. But lately, I’ve been in such a foul mood, I think I’d be more a belligerent and nasty drunk. So I’m not going tonight for the alcohol, but the company, and it’ll do me a world of good. Doesn’t hurt that this place has — or at least, had — some killer fucking crab dip. Course, this’ll be my first time there in years, so hopefully the crab dip recipe didn’t go down the shitter.

With that limited availability, and my much anticipated four-day three-night vacation to West Virginia (guess what I’m picking up this afternoon? The key!), my summer has effectively drawn to a close, to be immediately proceeded by my fall semester schedule: twelve credits, and working at least forty hours a week atop that until finals are over. My buddy Chris is taking one of the same classes I am (the awesome Folklore), except he’s got it 11-12:15, while I’m 9:30 - 10:45. We’re going to meet up at Bateman’s after our night classes on Tuesdays for study-sessions (we’ve got the same professor, so we figure our classes will be mostly the same, and, let’s be honest here, we’re not going to be studying at Bateman’s … we’re going to be drinking!)

So. I’m going to start making definitive plans for the remainder of my summer’s free time. Oh, yes, did I mention I also have a birthday coming up in August, as does my sister? Good thing Geisha decided to cancel our improptu Dylan plans, or I’d have to rob a bank so I could do everything I want to without working! Lots of scheduling fun to do, and I’m going to start calling and sending e-mails.

(Side note: Novaspace did this really cool cover of Midnight Oil’s Beds are Burning. It’s a little bit rock & roll … and a little bit not. Check it out).

So here’s the deal. Greg threatened to fire me if I don’t stop blogging about my lazy, stupid, insipid, flatulent, asshole, retarded, impotent, incompotent, illiterate, asstastic co-workers. He toned down the rhetoric — “you’re like a cancer that needs to be excised!” — when I think he realized he couldn’t really afford to follow through on them — he’s got four drivers, and minus me? ain’t no way they’re getting that schedule covered, particularly with some of those drivers, and it isn’t like delivery jobs are hard to come by — but I don’t need to be getting in pissing matches with the Bossman everytime we work together, and the money’s pretty good here so we struck a sort of devil’s agreement.

It didn’t hurt — our coming to an agreement, that is — that after our initial shouting matches (I think I may, at one point, have called him a “fascist un-American interested only in the destruction of the Constitution and the First Ammendment!”) he agreed that the problem wasn’t that I was writing a blog and occasionally posting negatively about coworkers, but that some of the coworkers in question were going around to new employees telling them I was writing mean things about ‘em.

I’m a little befuddled about the timing. I’ve been blogging for a month less than I’ve been working there (two years there next month, two years blogging in September). I haven’t even been writing anything particularly inflamatory about any key-employees, at least, not since I was writing stuff about the GM & his girlfriend a year ago or so. It seems like its the loudmouths making themselves heard (as loudmouths are wont to do).

So here’s our agreement: I will stop publishing posts about my coworkers. Note that key word: “publishing.” I’ll still be writing them, and saving them to be posted either when I’ve left the Franchise’s employ, or when this blog has a log-in feature with exclusive content (like Standing Cheese’s “Behind the Cheese”). Congratulations, guys — at least before you knew what I was writing about you! :O

(The reaction to my blogging at the Indy? “Jeff, none of us care about your stupid blog, or what you write about. Besides, you always seem to capture my assholenish perfectly.”)