Cole (10/26/14):

Hola a todos! 

I know it’s been a while, and I apologize.  Work was crazy busy, with tons upon tons of fruit coming in, twelve to fourteen hour shifts, and only one day off a week which I usually made plans for (only to later regret it when the time arrived, because all I ever really wanted to do on my day off was relax), and although I always had a blast when I went out, didn’t ever regret the concerts I went to, the rounds I fired, or the plans I made once I carried them out, I was really never getting any more than five to five and a half hours of sleep per night, and, well, I just didn’t really have a whole lot of time to write.  There were several times when I wanted to, but those nights I would look at the clock, calculate how many hours of sleep I would lose, and force myself to try to get to sleep, because though I can function pretty well off of six or seven hours of sleep, I found that only five hours was really pushing it for me, and anything less than that probably would have been emotional suicide, or would have at least severely tested my level of sanity. 

Aside from the lack of sleep aspect contributing to my lack of posts throughout harvest, there was one other thing that I was chary to write about while I was still employed at the winery.  I decided to wait until harvest was over and we were all laid off to bring up something that began to bother me toward the middle of September and became increasingly worse as the weeks went by.

There was a woman I was working with there that became totally insufferable to work with.  She started off great.  Fake, obviously forced smiles and insincere compliments, etc, but a lot of chicks are fake, so I didn’t really think much of it, I just knew that I didn’t want her to get too close to me, and I didn’t want her to know anything personal about me.  Once people know your weaknesses they tend to use them against you, should (more appropriately when) they decide to turn on you.  I have learned this valuable lesson the hard way, and it is one I will never forget. 

In any case, I did not mind working with this woman in the beginning.  She was certainly knowledgeable, as she had worked some 14 harvests previously, but I could just tell she had an agenda, and I didn’t trust her.  She had mentioned something to me about how badly she wanted to stay after harvest was over, which I understood, as did I also want to stay on after harvest, but something about her had red flags going off in my head.  If this was her 14^th or so harvest, in the US alone, and she was still unable to land a permanent job, what did that say about her personality, her work ethic?  Why was she working at a new winery each harvest, and not going back to try again to show her face and be remembered as something special, or as a crucial member of the team? 

I guess the thing about her was that, when everyone else was around, she went out of her way to be jovial, and laugh, and come across as a really happy, upbeat, genuinely nice person, to get people to love her, but when other people were not around, and it was just her and I, she became increasingly condescending and even downright rude and irrationally irate and angry over things I could not wrap my head around.  Examples of her behavior are difficult to provide, it was sort of just something you had to see to believe and understand the underlying hostility, but she most certainly did some weird and shady shit.  One day I was asked by one of the bosses to grab a pump that had just been freed up, after pressing off some red wine from skins and into a tank, and I went and was unhooking the pump and getting ready to move it and all of the sudden she yelled at me “I was just trying to help you!” and she made this gruesomely unattractive face and shrugged her shoulders and shook her head at me.  I sort of just looked right back at her, then around at my surroundings, blinked my eyes and thought, “what in the fuck are you even talking about?”  To this day I have no idea what she was trying to help me with, if anything, but she certainly had her panties in a wad that day over something. 

She always wanted to be some sort of authority over someone else, and toward the end she even started trying to boss around the full time employees.  She clearly had a very high opinion of herself.  It was so high, I would even sometimes hear here being slightly rude to the cellar master, or the wine maker, saying their methods were strange or inferior, or suggesting that they do things her way instead because her way was better.  One day I overheard her telling the cellar master that once more fruit started coming in we would all need to work independently.  I remember thinking she was right, and that I should step up my game and master more jobs so I could do them confidently on my own, yet when the fruit starting pouring in, I was always by myself, doing sometimes several different tasks at once, and sometimes tasks that would ordinarily require two people, and she always had a little sidekick she could boss around, though she was clearly more experienced and less likely to need help, whereas I was so green, yet so willing to please that I would never complain or ask for help.  Instead, I felt proud of myself for being able to accomplish things that someone else as fresh and new as I was would probably not be able to do on their own.  She liked bossing people around.  I understood that about her very quickly, and tried to distance myself, because I didn’t want to spend the entire harvest being her bitch that she would talk down to, and then being left to clean up her mess while she ran off and did some other, more glamorous job.  I didn’t mind cleaning.  I cleaned all the time, but primarily I wanted to learn.  I wanted to experience every aspect of harvest, not just the menial shit, and not just the glamorous shit.  I wanted to do everything, to better prepare myself for potential future employment.  Anyway, she was pretty easy to read, and once I started distancing myself from her, once I was able to work alone and do the work I was doing alone well, she started to sour on me, and her hostility toward me began to build. 

The reason I decided not to write about it until harvest was over was twofold.  One of my co-workers pretty much blatantly told me that my facebook profile was unblocked, meaning anyone could look at it and see basically everything I had on my page.  So after mocking him for facebook “stalking” me, I thought that maybe I should be more careful about what I write about, so that I didn’t say anything that might potentially offend a current employer.  The second reason was that I was starting to think this chick had some sort of morbid obsession with me or personal vendetta against me, as she was becoming increasingly more hostile and uncomfortable to work with, and I didn’t want her reading anything I wrote about her and going to a boss personally and getting my ass fired for calling her out for what she was: a completely ridiculous, hostile, bitter, cunt.  She was only happy when she was bossing someone around or else alienating someone.  Talking shit on people behind their backs seemed to make her the happiest, and she loooooooved to gossip!  I was dumbfounded, watching her try and tell the winemaker the “right” way to make his own fucking wine.  I’m surprised he didn’t sock her in the face.  I would have, which leads to another ridiculous portion of this convoluted story…

Once it had become glaringly obvious, not just to me, but even to some of my co-workers, that this woman had some sort of vendetta against me, one of my homies got out of one of his homies what her beef was with me.  The answer he received had us both in stitches, because it was just so ridiculous!  She had told one of the full time employees that she just straight up didn’t like me (far out.  And the reason???) and she even said that I cussed her out and had threatened to kick her ass!  I found that hilarious on a few levels, but only because it was just so untrue and tragically ridiculous. 

Primarily, the beast had a solid fifty pounds on me, I mean, my co-worker and I didn’t nickname her Shrek for no reason.  She could have passed for him any day, aside from the lack of green tint to her face and her ears looked different.  Not that I don’t think I could take her, I’m just saying, why in the hell would I say that to someone and not just do it?  I don’t threaten.  That is not the way I roll.  I am not bark and no bite.  I am bite and no bark.  I don’t advertise my strategy.  What would be the point in that? 

 

Aside from the fact that I would never, ever threaten someone at work, because work is my sanity and my lifeline, and I think getting fired for something so reckless and unprofessional would be terrible, I would never threaten to kick someone’s ass anyway.  What I would do, if I ever really felt that much anger and hostility toward someone, would be to meet them somewhere outside of work, and verbally provoke them to the point where they would take the first swing, and then I would be down to scrap!  Shit, I would even let them make contact, just to feel the pain and get all worked up, let the adrenaline consume me, lay on the ground for a bit, laughing my ass off like a mad person, and then, and only then, get up and release any and all anger and emotional tumult that has been building up pressure inside of me for however many years.  Then it would be self defense, and I couldn’t legally be held responsible, and I would unleash every last bit of anger and frustration I had inside of me, some of it I probably wouldn’t even know I had.  That is the way I would like to think it would go down, anyway, but how could I know until it actually happened and I was given the opportunity to see what I was really made of? 

The thing that was driving me crazy, and that I couldn’t believe, was that I was beginning to think that I actually hated the woman, which blew my fucking mind, because I could not wrap my head around the fact that I could care enough about someone so tragic and insignificant for me to hate.  It disturbed me so much, that I could feel anything more than indifference for this miserable, insufferable person, that I confided in my roommate how much it upset my psyche that I might actually care, and, to my horror, hate someone who, in reality, should not factor into my life whatsoever.  It just seemed insane to me.  I mean, I have never in my life hated someone that I can really recall.  Shit, I don’t even hate the jackass who got my access pulled from the nuke plant.  Hate simply takes to much effort and emotion.  But at the same time, I have never had to work with such a manipulative, conniving, backstabbing, shady, sneaky, backhanded, undermining cunt either.  So perhaps some level of hatred was justified?  I don’t know.  Foreign sensation.  I’m glad it’s behind me.

Marge quickly cleared things up for me, and assisted me in seeing things more clearly.  It wasn’t the woman I hated, it was what she represented.  The woman was ugliness personified.  She was just sort of a sad shell of a woman, who went from harvest to harvest, never landing a job, always trying her best but in such a hostile manner that no winery ever took to her.  Add to that the fact that she had been with the same man for seven or so years and he hadn’t proposed, though she was hopeful, only reiterated to me that he probably wasn’t content enough with her to propose, but was just comfortable enough to not break up with her either.  I mean, honestly, if I were in her shoes, wouldn’t I be just as miserable? 

I tried to feel sorry for her.  I tried to put myself in her shoes, and imagine how much self-pity I would feel for myself if I were her, but I just couldn’t, because somehow I knew, in the marrow of my bones, that this woman was just inherently evil.  There was, in my mind, no excuse to blatantly treat a coworker so ridiculously unjustly for absolutely no reason at all aside from the fact that on some sad sort of level, she hated herself, and was unleashing her own self-loathing upon me. 

But enough about work!  I have vented and I feel exponentially better!  And after all, that is mostly what this blog is all about.  Venting, assisting, growing, learning, educating, ourselves and others, and moving forward gracefully.  My harvest stint is over, and though I do feel I made the right friends and the right “enemies” where I was employed, at the end of the day I decided that was not the right winery for me, anyway.  I would like to stay in the industry, to be sure, because though I did hate some of the loathsome people I had to deal with, the work itself was incredible, and I fucking loved it!  Now I want to find a winery that is more loved and respected in the industry, and more importantly, I would like to work with a “mad” group of avant-gard, freak flag waving individuals who will respect my own madness, my individuality, and what I have to offer as the person I am.  I don’t want to work somewhere I have to kiss assholes’ assholes.  I want to work somewhere where I am free to be me without fear of being undermined, alienated, or backhanded when no one else is looking.  I want to work somewhere that character is appreciated more than brown nosing and ass licking, and most importantly, I want to work somewhere that back stabbing cunts are kicked to the curb, with or without a chair smashed across their face beforehand. Is that too much to ask?  Probably.  But I am going to look for it anyway!

On another note, seeing as how this blog is about relationshis, failing, functioning, past, present, and future, I would like to touch on another situation that has somewhat consumed me over the past week or so.  It’s a bit complicated, but shit, these days I’m beginning to think that nothing with me can ever be simple and straightforward anymore.  The older I get I think the more convoluted and tumultuous my relationships become.  Is that a sign of becoming an adult, or a sign of emotional deterioration and elderly disgruntlement, irritability, and dissatisfaction? 

 

So the other day I was hanging out with the Tempest.  The Tempest still lives with Mother Hen, but as of that night, it’s all about to change, as she kicked him out.  The hostility between these two very dear friends of mine has been brewing for quite some time, but I wasn’t privy to it, as I had been too busy working to keep in touch with both of them on more than the most basic level.  I knew that they both had their own issues independently, but I did not know that they had been at each others’ throats for so long.  I basically saw the entirety of eight years of friendship crumble before my eyes.  I had one of two choices: Stay and have to pick a side, or go home, and mourn the loss of a mutual friendship between the three of us that would probably never again be the same. 

I went home, but for the rest of the evening I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to cause such anger, hatred, and tumult in a relationship that, two years ago, could not have been stronger.  The three of us have had our ups and downs over the eight or so years we have known each other, but nothing, until that point, had ever really broken a single one of us to make us permanently sour over the other, or cause our friendship to become irretrievably lost. 

I was not myself for the rest of the evening.  I sat in my room alone, and I was sad.  I was sad for things I could not grasp, and I was sad for things I could, but mostly I was sad for the fact that relationships sometimes have to end so terribly, especially when there was still obviously so much love and emotions, and perhaps the love and emotions were the root and stem of the necessity to end things.  I wasn’t drunk, but I was feeling a bit vulnerable, a bit nostalgic for good times gone sour and curdled, and for love that perhaps was not stale, but was no longer essential or vital anymore either.  I started thinking about the Rapist, and the way I ended things with him, and whether or not, to him, it was an ugly way to end things.  I started to feel like an asshole, started to wonder if he was even capable of emotions, or of being hurt or sad at the way I decided to cease our relationship, or whatever one would call it.

I hadn’t thought too much about the Rapist since I had ended things.  Of course, the first month was pretty rough on me.  But once I started working so much, and had other things on my mind and bills to take care of and a financial hole to pull myself out of, he slowly slipped out of my mind and I rarely thought about him at all.  I really don’t recall.  But a couple of nights before I went over to see the Tempest at Mother Hen’s, I had a dream about the Rapist.  I do not know what provoked this dream, as to my recollection, I had not been thinking about him.  In the dream, I was back working at the nuke plant, and I wanted him back, but every time I saw him, he did not see me.  I do not recall anything else about the dream. 

I awoke somewhat disturbed.  The dream bothered me.  Why would I dream about him if I hadn’t been thinking about him?  What might have provoked this dream?  Why did I dream that I wanted him back when in reality, that could not have been further from the truth?  I was content with my decision to cut ties.  I knew it was the right decision for me.  Totally weirded out, I texted Marge.  She did not respond to my text, nor did she later discuss the issue with me, but she and I were on totally separate schedules, both working similar hours, and we really never had time to catch up on anything, let alone something so trivial.  After that morning I let it go and did not think of him again until the night I returned from Mother Hen’s, after witnessing probably one of the saddest and ugliest falling outs I had ever seen. 

So I was sitting on my bed, sort of just staring into my closet, but really at nothing, and I started to think about the ugliness in the world, the ugliness I felt at work, and how I somewhat understood it but that didn’t mean I liked it.  Then I started to think about some of the ugliness in my life that I could control, and I made a decision.  I would email the Rapist and apologize for the way I handled our break up.  I did sort of feel bad for the way things went down, even though I knew it was the only way I would ever be able to leave him, but that didn’t mean that I was proud of the way I handled things.  I just didn’t know what else to do.  So I sat down behind my computer, and I wrote. 

This was not the typical novel of an email that I am known for.  It was nothing more than three or four lines, just to get the point across.  I didn’t want him to think that I was fishing for round whatever in the fuck it would have made between us, and I didn’t really want to chat, catch up, or shoot the shit.  I really was not that over it, to have to hear intimate details about how great his life was going without me in it.  I hoped that it was, but I didn’t need details.  The wound was still not entirely healed.  The slightest bit of salt would have provoked a negative reaction.  I just wanted him to know that I was genuinely sorry for the way I had handled things.  I don’t even remember what I wrote, since I have since deleted our short correspondence, but it was something along the lines of:  “I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry about the way things went down.  Despite everything, I don’t think that you are a bad person.  I hope you’re doing well”. 

It was short, it was to the point, and most importantly, it made one less thing I would have to feel guilty about in my life.  I said what needed to be said, and that was that. 

Over the next few days, or about a week, he and I emailed pretty impersonal “pleasantries” to each other.  Really nothing more than a few sentences, at the most a paragraph, about pretty mundane shit, and I realized that I missed emailing him, texting him, talking to him on the phone, telling him about my day, etc.  It was a somewhat rude awakening!  After all I had gained!  After how well I was doing!  How could I allow myself to fall into this little game of emailing back and forth, no matter how seemingly innocent?  Doesn’t matter.  The sad reality was that I did miss him.  But then I started thinking about the things I didn’t miss, and ultimately, the things I didn’t miss outweighed the things I did…

I didn’t miss waking up at his house with incapacitating anxiety, when he would leave early for work, and I felt like a tatted up little punk rock intruder in his perfect sanctuary of a home where nothing was ever out of place.  I didn’t miss the fact that I never again felt truly loved by him after our brief separation in April.  I didn’t miss being forced to wait on his back patio, despite the fact that he knew damn well what time I said I would be over.  I didn’t miss being disrespected, deceived, or being treated like some trivial, superfluous aspect of his life.  I didn’t miss feeling like he was embarrassed to be with me when it suited him, and feeling like he was proud to be with me when it suited him.  I didn’t like the fact that he would ask me to hide my car in his garage when his carpoolers would come to get him.  I didn’t miss the fact that he would make promises he wouldn’t keep.  I didn’t miss knowing that he would never truly welcome me into his life or introduce me to his friends.  I didn’t miss the fact that he never cared about my feelings, only his own.  I didn’t miss the way he made me feel about myself.  I didn’t miss his selfishness.  I didn’t miss the fact that he never trusted me.  I didn’t miss the way he tried to make me feel guilty for a past that had nothing to do with him.  I didn’t miss that I was the only one making sacrifices he never seemed to notice or appreciate.  I didn’t miss the fact that he demanded the world of me, yet in return I did not receive continents, states, towns, villages, or even a stinky little bodega in South America. 

There may have been things I missed, but the list of things I did not miss far outweighed the things I did, and no amount of morning sex and coffee and The New York Times in bed could make me miss him more than the things I did not miss…

Have a great fucking week, everyone, and kick some ass!