Some moments are like dreams, inexplicable in their bizarreness but somehow familiar. When we are thinking of moments such as these, we are thinking of the surreal. Working in the restaurant business and meeting people in general has given me a lot of experience with the surreal. A favorite of mine is when someone interrupts you to ask a question when you have impeccably explained yourself already. You just wonder to yourself, why did I even speak? If I cannot be understood in the terms that I have just provided, then can I be understood at all? Maybe I don't actually have a mouth. Maybe I'm just this awkward mouthless thing that goes around making muffled grunting noises at people and they just sometimes humor me with responses.
So it mostly boils down to miscommunication, this surreal stuff at work. I asked you what you'd like to eat this evening and you just stare at me like I used to be a painting and I just walked out of the wall and started asking you questions. You tell me and everyone else that comes near the table something different each time and then wonder why our service has no continuity. Your wondering is as puzzling as anything. To be so lacking in self awareness is really a miracle. Perhaps you think that restaurant workers are operating using a hive mind, in that whatever is communicated to one, the others will all know automatically. In this way, we are all paid the same, because we are all chefs and dishwashers and managers. When one of us comes into work stoned, we all begin laughing at the customer's unfunny jokes.
The Surreal in dealing with people is when you have absolutely no context of what is supposed to be happening or rather you have a general idea, but something totally different is going on that seems to have no logic behind it. Almost every time that I've encountered the surreal at work, it has been on a day when we had a detailed plan for how things were supposed to go. At some point I'll walk out into the front of house and see that not only has the plan gone up in smoke, but the place doesn't even look like real life. There could be customers walking into places where they should not be, people asking questions that nobody could ever predict and varying degrees of stress written on all the faces of everyone involved. Sometimes the most surreal thing is that there is absolutely no stress written on the faces of the people involved, when there definitely should be. It would be like if your friend wrecked his car in a ditch off the side of the road, then just decided to live in that ditch for a few weeks. It's the kind of thing that just cannot be figured out.
One of the surreal aspects of my life is that I own a Russian to English dictionary and I know absolutely no Russian. Nor have I ever wanted to learn Russian. I don't know how or why I came to own the book, yet on my desk it sits. I'm definitely too scared to travel to Russia, so the book serves me no purpose. But I might run into someone who may want it, and then I'll hand it off. It will be like one of those scenes in a dream where you've been divinely tasked with carrying out some mission that seems incredibly mundane. In this life I will have been the man who carried the Russian to English pocket dictionary until I was able to give it to the chosen one, who would make some use of the thing. It's not half bad being a part of a few prophecies here and there.
The Surreal can be frightening but once you've watched people and observed them enough, surreal becomes your preferred state of mind. There is an endless amount of entertainment in observing your fellow man. He or she can claim to be, and act like literally anything imaginable. People are as crazy as the internet is big. And not even Google knows how big the internet really is. Keep in mind that Google knows everything there is to know about you. Google can probably predict when you are going to order another case of Cheerwine and bacon flavored crackers. Google knows that you sometimes go for solo masturbation or violent tranny gangbang in your porn searches. Kinda makes you a little uncomfortable huh?
Experiencing the surreal is fun after the fact. You get to think about what happened and how could things have ended up as weird as they did. You can weigh the benefits of the different actions that you didn't decide to do. You can wonder about how you got in that situation and how you were able to get out unscathed. But mostly, I just reflect on how my life has less love in it each day, and how I'm increasingly not the person that my friends expect me to be. Imagine if our gravestones just said what we thought most often in life. Mine would read "Never met even the slightest expectations." I'm not depressed about it, this website or anything else in as much as I'm depressed about everything to begin with. It's redundant to discuss issues, so I just dream that the people I miss are still around me. At some point I want to convince myself that the life that I live is just some surreal dream that another guy in another reality is just dreaming. He wakes up from my life thinking "Some of that dream was pretty funny, but it was a little too dark for my liking." Me too mate, me too.
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