squidbag

On the Death of Fred Phelps

 

LOU: Okay, Fred Phelps. 

PETE: Obviously, I'm not taking him. He goes below. 

LOU: I'm not taking him. 

PETE: You must be joking – of course, he's one of yours. 

LOU: Coulda fooled me, breadbasket church and all; anyway, I don't want him. 

PETE: I don't think that's your call. 

LOU: The hell it's not; who else? Anyway, he's not coming here. 

PETE: Well, he's not going topside, that's completely inappropriate. 

LOU: He did work for you guys basically his whole life... 

PETE: That's not really true and you know it! His was work you people created!

LOU: "You people."

PETE: Alright, I'm sorry. 

LOU: Whatever. So if he was one of my guys, why not publicly strike him dead? At one of those stupid pickets? 

PETE: You know we don't do that anymore. Not since the sacrifice. 

LOU: Officially, sure. People get hit by stuff all the time, though. You could have just done that. 

PETE: You think if we can't blow up Hitler, we can drop something heavy on Fred? It's a free will thing. 

LOU: Well, my free will says Fred's not coming to hell. He's a minister, you fucking take him. 

PETE: He calls himself a minister. It's a lie. There's not any ministering to anyone happening. There's a lot of lying and hiding and secret sin and denial and hate in this guy; I'd think you'd want him down below to tour the circles. Besides, his personal behavior has to have had a sin ripple effect, people getting mad and breaking stuff and hurting each other because of him – he's got to be good for your business. 

LOU: That's where you're wrong: for every shouting asshole on a street corner or outside of a funeral, there ended up being a legion of considerate people making human shields, veterans protecting their own, peaceful protesters spreading messages of love and acceptance – turns my stomach, is what it does. A guy like this thinks that he can hate with impunity and show people the way, and all he does is show them who they don't want to be. And they're better for it! At the end of the day, they still honor their beloved dead, they still have their conventions, and they come out in big numbers to fight this guy with peace and love and ideas and solutions...I'm NOT fucking taking him. 

PETE: Shit. ...reincarnation? 

LOU: That could work. Maybe. As who? 

PETE: Definitely a gay kid. 

LOU: Yeah, I could maybe get behind that. Not that you need my help, since he just gets born.

PETE: Sounds like a plan.

LOU: I always enjoy our talks.

"What Are You Doing?!?"

It was never my intention to be deliberately cagey; I just underestimated how much people would care.

A couple of weeks ago, after being a shiftless unemployed student (and being out of a job for the longest time in my life since I was 10 years old) for four years, and after job hunting for about three months, I got a job. The job was with the EMS service, doing dispatch in the county where I live, and I was ambivalent about it. The money was good, the hours were rough and weird and inconsistent, and I needed to do it for a while to see if I was going to be any good at it or get anything out of it.

As it turns out, I am ill-suited for the position and I have just emailed my resignation this day. This was why I didn't really want to go into with the whole world - because I wasn't sure if I was going to keep doing it anyway.

It was a very strange experience which will fade with time - it started with interviews and more interviews and many, many documents to sign, and then me being drug-tested and told that I have weird fingerprints followed by 10 hour stretches of sitting at a desk and listening to 911 calls, typing in codes and echoing radio traffic, which was as far as I got. What I discovered is that many of the people who work in the dispatch center feel "called" to it, and get something emotional out of it. Ultimately, I was never going to be one of those people, so it seemed like it was time to quit wasting everyone else's time, so I did. Plus, there was this thing of never knowing how things turned out for the diabetic, the parking lot heart attack, the flipped over Subaru, or the unresponsive toddler. I was supposed to be able to capture satisfaction from being a link in the chain, but I couldn't do it.

This is okay. I start my job with the downtown library tomorrow, and I've got some consulting work, too. I have a couple of other applications out there, so we'll see what happens next, but in the meantime, mystery solved.