Venting

4^th September 2012

Dear Cassi,

In all the letters I send and the overall talking about my day I thought I was venting. To me these letters are the lancing of infected wounds, and as I watch with fascination the pus runs. Now it seems as they are something else to you.

       

You apologized for venting in your letter and here I had felt bad for venting on my own. We express pain in different ways I guess. I look back and laugh because I’ve no more tears to cry or sobs to utter. As a boy I cried a lifetime in the darkness.

       

I never new comfort for crying so I guess I left it behind. Then tears are they to wash our eyes and perhaps my eyes have been made clear. Perhaps my pain should be my own and I should keep it to myself. So far as I can remember expressing pain has never done well for me and so I have kept it as a thing within.

       

When the hair on my had was still soft as a boy’s should be my pain drew

laughter and my blood drew jokes. So when I am struck I stiffen and the pain sobers me. This is who I am so worry not if I cry no tears and cry no tears for me. In my time on this earth these thinks have been well looked after and so I move on to more functional bits of life.

Find your strength, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal

You Don’t Get it

I don’t recall what I was responding to with this letter, but it was the practice of the addressee to try to get me into situations that I found stressful. He tried his best to sabotage my life, and then he got vengeful when I finely walked away from him.

Human decency is so rarely human that I must consider it a goal to aspire to rather than a fact of our nature.

8^th August, 2007  

Now look, (Soldier on deployment in Iraq),

 Once again you just don’t get it. I could get another job, yes, but not a better one. I’ve now been hired by twice as many security companies then I’ve worked for and the biggest obstacle on my way to getting another job has been school. Read “The Applicant” I go over my problems.

Getting another job as a security guard is not consistent with getting out of college and getting into what I want to do with my life. You said I was wrong in what I did with (my first job), but if I hadn’t done it I would still be at (that job) making twelve thousand dollars a year. I’ve made up my losses, and now I can pay for school.

This is much like the time that I gave those two hundred dollars back to my dad. That was me making it totally clear that I was done with his bullshit, and you couldn’t understand. Now, two hundred dollars is pocket change. When you said that you were looking at used laptops I said “maybe I should send him my old pile of shit and go by a new one, I can get an Apple for eight hundred”. If I didn’t just plunk down eighteen hundred for school the thing would be in the mail for you right now. As it stands I really should hold off, but you get the point.

I’ve said time and time again that my life is going to suck, and that I need to let it suck, but remember that my experience as a security guard is conducive to my work as a writer much like your army days are for you. I get something out of my every day shit storm, and that’s important. I’m working on a set of one acts involving security and “Welcome to the Gurd Shack” is about my experience at (my current job).

I’m trying to move up, and you’re telling me to move sideways. Frankly, one of the guards who was giving me problems has already quit and two of them are realizing how idiotic they sounded. One of the guards was really upset about what happened, and he is a long standing officer.

Not that I’m upset with you over this but the point remains that I’m just telling you what is going on with my life and not complaining. I don’t have anything ells to talk about so I talk about work.

You should probably save all my letters and read them again when you’re on leave so you can get my meaning better, but then it’s all not that important.

Stay safe out there,

Richard Leland Neal

Drive Yourself to Poverty, Work for Use

A true account and there is little more to say. Some would tell me that some job is better than no job, others would applaud me for saying no. I say it is what it is and it is time to move on.

25^th July 2011

Dear Cassi,

 The latest of my job search woes was a growing security guard company. I sent them my resume online and was called in for an interview. I met a man with my own first name. This fellow told me that the amount of time I had spent with my last company was an exceptional reason for them to hire me.

    

I was then called in the next week to become a “Flex Officer” in the Orange county area. As I sat filling out paperwork, I found a page about steeling within the company. It stated that the company had four accounts of theft by security guards in the past year. That would be four accounts they know of indicating that there were at least forty in reality.

    

They asked if I lived anywhere near the job site, and I informed them that I did not. It was when they glazed over that point that I knew something was wrong. I brought up the point for a second time and the operations manager said “You’ll never get a job right next to you.”

    

I was informed that if I wanted this job I had to be willing to drive fifty miles to work every day at a paycheck that would hardly cover keeping my car running.

    

I have always thought that this came from the idea that if a person needs the money they will come to work. It is an idea that fails to take into account what this will do to job performance. Financial problems place a worker under stress. Where as it is true that a worker under stress is less likely to be able to get another job they are more motivated to do so. The stressed worker can put less into their work and is less productive.

People work these jobs because they have little alternative. The need for work holds them like the manacles of a dungeon. So many companies right now are held together by the bad economy that if it ever got better these companies might just disappear.

In the end they referred me to another office but I have not heard back,

Richard Leland Neal