Fired?

I have a feeling I’ll get fired today. Friday. I’d deserve it. I’ve been burned out and barely showing up. The hours feel like days. I’ve gotten everything I wanted from this job, without articulating everything that was in the first place. I wanted to make friends here but that just seems impossible. I have contributed some chaos to the world on account of connections made here but that’s between me and me.

People here are soft, and brusque. It’s a real New York vibe. I don’t know how much more of this I can take, though. If I let them fire me I cash in on unemployment, but that would probably not amount to even a month’s living expenses. I can still cash out a savings plan but taking this job was supposed to be a means of preventing that from happening.

My daily work schedule is there, as usual, suggesting I’ve not been fired… yet. That’s part of the trap. Or is it? I don’t even know if the people here who have disappeared were fired or left on their own.

I am a lot of talent going to waste, that’s for damn sure.

…

Dreams last night included an incident where someone spilled mercury onto a table. I said to be careful, it was poison to the touch. In my zeal to keep others from touching it I got a small amount on each of my hands. They quickly turned dark black, with red or purple pockets of blood starting to burst along the edges of the blackness. There was no escape, no cure for this spread, which would envelope my body and suffocate me.

…

Strange encounter last night with a woman from upstairs. I had received an Amazon package that I expected, at least I thought I did. It was at my door and I kicked it into the apartment upon entering, leaving the package on the floor for a couple of hours.

I thought it was a first subscription shipment of soap, and the package looked a credible size and dimension for such a shipment.

I opened the box around 7:30, I think. By this point I was wearing only socks and underwear, and with a couple of beers in me I didn’t have my best manners on when I heard someone knock on my door. I opened it part way, revealing my head and neck and in so doing making it clear as needed to be that I was largely unclothed.

She explained that the package I was opening was hers. I’m not sure how she knew t had been left at my apartment, unless they photographed the delivery for her and she could tell which door it was at from that photo. I’ve never received the photo proof of delivery from Amazon but I know it’s done.

I handed over whatever it was in the box. It was not soap. I kept the packaging, from which I had learned her name. This happened when I checked the packaging to verify it was, in fact, not addressed to me.

I looked her up online and didn’t find much. She seems to be a new arrival in that apartment upstairs from mine, where I know two women lived for a few years. One of them had an extraordinarily lengthy last name, over 20 letters.

I’ve had a few occurrences of misdelivered items which I typically get to the intended recipient, but sometimes circumstance makes it seem awkward. I still have a huge bottle of lube intended for a dude who briefly lived next door to me. As with this package yesterday, I was expecting something which would or could have been about the same dimension. That was a bottle of shampoo. I didn’t need the new bottle right away so the package sat there for at least a week, during which time the actual delivery of shampoo occurred. That’s when I opened the lube and discovered the name on the package.

What should I have done with this? Getting it over to the person who ordered it would be embarrassing, no doubt, in that it would be known that I know or that someone knows the dude’s lube got lost in transit. So he’d been lubeless all this time, and what kind of crime is that when he paid good coin for that stuff?

Ultimately I kept it on account of the embarrassment factor. He seemed like a nice guy and I’d rather he concluded the lube just got lost in the mail. I didn’t think he’d need the tension of knowing a friendly neighbor opened his lube by mistake.

He also moved out within a few weeks, eliminating the lingering agita. I used the lube a few times, reminding myself that it’s not really my thing. I like friction.

Can’t remember much else from dreamland last night, but the hands turning black was pretty real. Unstoppable. I was awake at 2:11am, finding return to sleep a challenge. Went from sweats to cold to perfectly calm. I masturbated to some low-brow porn. An American woman whose travels I do not understand but I don’t stick around long enough to learn.

I showered with all the lights on today. Typically I shower in the dark, or with a nightlight. It’s been dark earlier and it’s probably not wise to shower in total darkness. I keep a camera recording me, though. Its night vision is amazing, even if it makes my leg veins look far more varicose than they are.