I darkened up the hair over the weekend with the "Blue Panther" blue-black dye, and it is now much darker and looks far better than the original electric "Voodoo Blue" color. I've also noticed that while the Voodoo Blue had a very high level of rinse-out -- meaning every time I showered I would see a lot of it washing out -- the Blue Panther does not. It did the first shower/rinse, of course, but I've seen very little rinse-out or dye transfer ever since. That stuff seemed to lock in and bond with my hair way stronger than the Voodoo Blue did.
I don't really have any great pictures of it, honestly, but here's one I just snapped with my phone:
Again, it is darker than it looks. This is pretty close to the shade I actually wanted when I originally dyed it. Over the course of the next few months I'll probably re-up it a few times until I'm out of the Blue Panther dye, and then will just let it grow out until spring when I tell the local SuperCuts (or whoever it is that does my hair) just to cut off all the color -- and then re-do it anew with new bleach and a new shade.
No, I haven't decided yet what the next shade will be.
Daisy mentioned to me this afternoon that she plans to re-do her own coloring in a few weeks' time, shortly before we leave for NC. Actually, I asked her first if she planned to do so, because her hair has really faded out over the course of the past month and now looks mostly dirty blonde with some green and blue in it here and there. Her hair also tends to grow faster than mine, so she already has a quarter-inch of roots showing (part of why I wanted to make the blue darker was so that when my roots grew out, it would blend in better).
In other news...
I have reached the middle of my work week and I am weary, my friends. It's not just that I'm tired, or that the temperature outside has been nearly 100 every day -- we are in the middle of a heat wave here in Omaha -- it's not even that my allergies are going bugshit as well. It's that after a decade of this, I've reached the point where I'm seriously beginning to have creeping thoughts like yes, I know I'm good at this, but I do not know how much longer I can do this same bullshit day in, day out.
Of course, I am not in a financial spot where I can just up and quit -- take a self-imposed run of unemployment and get a break -- and I likely never will be. But as the days go on and the people I deal with get dumber and dumber almost by the week, I feel the box closing in just a little bit more every day and I feel more trapped than ever. I've applied for a few jobs over the course of the past few weeks and months, but nothing that I have high hopes of getting a callback on.
To be fair, this is mostly my own doing on several fronts -- for one, I am not a particularly high-demand person for prospective employers. I was a decade ago; I am not now. I am a poet, a creative writer, a guy who used to be a newspaper reporter for awhile and a college professor for a few years after that, and I've now worked in a very dead-end and mostly thankless office middle-management position for ten years and have had all the motivation to learn new processes and new skills beaten out of me by multiple corporate overlords for multiple companies.
For two, I have stuck around doing that for ten years. That means I've become very specialized in my particular field but have little to offer of value in any other field. My brain doesn't work now like it used to ten years ago -- it is very difficult for me to learn and retain new procedures, new programs, new training and new things in general. I used to be able to pick up new things, learn them quickly, and master them before almost anyone else I knew. Now, I am reticent, easily confused, forgetful of some of the processes that have been thrust upon me even within the past year, and am just trying to skate by on what of my knowledge base I still have that's still applicable to the job at hand. I do very well at this most of the time, but because I can't pick up on all the new stuff, I have a hefty sense of imposter syndrome and mental fatigue.
I manage people very well; I am a very good leader of people and all of my underlings (a term I use lovingly) would very likely agree. But I don't want to do it forever. I don't want this to just be my life.
It is not lost on me, of course, that 2024 marks the 15-year anniversary of me leaving the grocery store job I was working when I started this website -- the stories I heard while working there are what led me to start this site in 2007 in the first place. Those of you who have stuck around with me for a very long time -- I'm talking about my lifelong friends, the ones from high school and college who do still read this -- know that everything prior to 2011 on this site was removed, edited, and turned into a 400+ page manuscript for a humorous book that I sold very briefly self-publishing on Amazon. It needs an extensive re-edit and reformatting, and one day it will see the light of day again in some form. As always, time and motivation is a factor in all of this. Energy is too. I only have so many hours of every day that aren't devoted to sleep or working my current job.
I did reflect on this mentally a few days ago, though -- I do not know where almost any of the people I worked with at that grocery store are now. I am sure some of them have since died (I know for a fact that two of them -- older folks -- indeed have). I'm sure many of the others have retired or have since moved on, moved away, etc. And yet, I am almost certain that some of them are still working there. I don't know for sure as I have not stepped foot in that store once since I left that job, moved back to Kansas City, and then to Newton later that year. I have not even been in that city in fifteen years. And most of the people I worked with there were either kids -- my age at the time or far younger -- or were on their last job before they retired anyway. There were a lot of what I call "transient" employees -- people who would be hired and would work for a few weeks or months, then get fired for doing something stupid or would just up and leave and never come back. We likely went through close to 100 cashiers/stockers while I was working there for three short years.
During that time the store also changed ownership, changed its name and its colors, changed some of its management, and changed its hours. I don't even know if the store still exists, to be honest with you, or if it's now owned and operated by yet a different company with a different name. Again, I've not been there in fifteen years.
There are but three people I worked with there who I am still friends with on Facebook. Two of them were fellow night-shift employees who were far younger than I, and both of them now have 2-3 kids and are working in completely different fields. The third disabled his Facebook profile some time ago and hasn't been online since, but he also left the job before I did -- like, a year before I did.
Likely some of my best regular customers are now dead as well -- at this juncture most of them would be in their 70s or 80s if they are still alive, and if they are alive they're likely not stopping at the grocery store every night after work like they used to.
People come into and leave our lives in waves, it seems. I can't remember the last time I talked to anyone I went to grad school with, and some of those folks were in my wedding. I try to keep in contact on a regular basis with the few close friends I still have, and even at times that can be difficult if my social energy -- or energy in general -- is low. It got to the point that during my last two visits to West Virginia there were old friends I didn't even bother to contact because I knew they wouldn't respond or wouldn't want to see me while I was there, or they wouldn't have time to see me, or they now lived in different parts of the country (much like myself).
No, I don't know when I'll be back to WV again. With my grandmother now long dead and with my parents living in North Carolina full-time, I don't really have any reason to go back aside from for nostalgia's sake -- and nostalgia itself is not enough to fly back home for a "visit" given airline prices.
Just for funsies, I looked up the price of the same trip to NC on the same days, but flying from Omaha into Morgantown instead. Round trip economy is about $475-600+ per person. Yeah, not planning a trip back home anytime soon, but it's fun to look at.
I honestly don't know what I'd even do back home. Sure, there's family still there that I could see, and there are a few friends still around the area -- all of them are Trump supporters and if he wins in November that would be a very uncomfortable visit for both Daisy and myself. My parents aren't there anymore. There's some shopping, restaurants, and touring of Morgantown I'd love to do with Daisy but we did a fair amount of that when we drove out there in 2017. I just think it would be a very lonely, very hollow (no, ahem, puns intended here) trip to make. My best memories of West Virginia are better left in the past.
Anyway, I've gotten far off track.
My point was, circling back to it now after a few relative pages of inner thoughts, is that I need to find a focus in my life and something to center myself that isn't work-related. I need to get away from the job I currently have and need to get into something new that isn't too difficult to learn or acquire yet will pay me the same amount or far more than I'm making now. I need to get out on the open road in a vehicle of my own, preferably something old and fast. I need to get out of Omaha before I can no longer climb out of the rut this city has put me in and get to a coastline somewhere, permanently. I turn 42 this year and I may be finally entering into my "midlife crisis."
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