The Masked Man Versus Middle Management

That FTW Feeling

Oh what news, what news!
Friends it's time to examine the reasons we are wearing a mask.
And by "we" I of course am referring to The Royal We, and by "a mask" I of course am referring to self deception.
Or is it public deception?  Self preservation?  We, of course, do not know.
The bathroom calendar this month shows Queen Anne's Lace.  A plant I am told is edible if only it grew around here, named for Queen Anne, who is dead.

Speaking of dead things and calendars, remember when Wednesdays used to be Game Days around here? (yay?)
Well we are going to play a fun little game that should take anywhere from 18 years to the rest of the royal life.
I told you this would be news folks, buckle up or suckle up, here we go a-wampening.

After stopping by the Walgreens on my way in to work (not the one on the way, the other one.  No, not that one, the other other one) I fleetingly saw a statuesque blonde woman, older, in a low blue car.  
She looked like Stiffler's Mother.  
Does that reference date me?  Will only a small window of pre-millenials understand the kind of woman I am referring to, and the rest of humanity from now until the end of time see that reference and stop reading immediately, put off by a dated reference, relegating me to the back shelf of history?
Probably not.  I mean, they can just google it.  But that won't have the same emotional resonance as the impression that I am trying to convey.
You see, American Pie came out when I was in high school.  American Pie II, whatever it was called, came out when I was in college.
These characters weren't just roles in a long dead Shakespearean play.  They were real.  Possibly more real to me than my actual friends and family, especially at that time.

How do I put myself into the right context?  Let's start by reading through my last 10 years of journal entries.
[15 minutes later]
WAIT!!! Don't do that!  I'm getting ahead of myself.  I'm getting tied up in my own net.
I think I've figured it all out now.  There's been a conversion in Dustburg.  A pale one.
I wouldn't invest this much reading into it if I were you (modesty).

You see old 'Masky's got some news that he's reluctant to share until he's sure that the sleepy little town's residents are all hidden away, like in the livery and the saloon, only trouble is we don't have those kinda towns anymore.
We live in a multifunctional commercial/residential mix-zoned condiminium area with nice clean sidewalks, walled parkspace, an expensive organic bakery on the corner, and trees in the courtyard that double as USB powering stations.And anyway I was at Walgreens the other day before work when this whole thing started so let's not place any more boulders in our path.
The thought occured to me, (before I saw the blonde in the blue car) that if this news were true, then I would need to change my ways.Stop just looking at blondes in cars, for instance.
Inside the halogen-lit aisles of skin cream and hair potion I found what I was looking for, only to be stopped dead in my tracks by a beautiful woman, in a poster, advertising hydro-vitalizing makeup.
Should a man want to drop everything when he sees this?  Should anyone?  Who works on the committees that put these things together and what exactly is their threshold for titillation?

She had a moon face, both open and shielded.  Stark, strange, and intense.  The white lighting was perfect, except one half of the face still had wrinkles on it.
Tiny crow's foot wrinkles at the corner of the eye and the less-than-Mona Lisa lips.  As if a very small ghostly whisp of a crow had landed  and flown away from a barking dog.
You blink and you miss them, or you look to the other half of the face, where the hydro-vitalizing makeup ad agency people had done their clean up shop.
She looked familiar, in that forgotten until now sort of way-- like the name of the actress who was in 10 Things I Hate About You but not Julia Stiles.
She looked straight at me.  Straight at everyone in every other Walgreens hawking this brand of makeup.  And that's when it hit me.

Before I tell you what hit me, let me tell you that before I left the Walgreens, I picked up a hockey puck shaped container of hair gel, along with my chips and Dew.
I've habituated stopping before work to get nibblies, hair gel wasn't ever on my list, but this was a Friday, and something told me I should look good that night.
Actually, that's not quite accurate.  Someone told me I should look good that night.  Someone named Duggard, with whom I've been paired up at work with for the past few weeks.  Someone higher up's idea of a joke.

You see, most jobs they don't take kindly to the mask thing.  I wear one.  This I've decided is mostly non-negotiable, which means that I rarely get past the interview stage.
But this job didn't even have an interview stage.
I've been working construction in new multifunctional commercial/residential mix-zoned area going up in what until recently was a fine high meadow tucked above the road and railway lines to the north of town behind a buffet line of hundred year old trees bracketing mostly-dry, sometimes-sparkling creek bed.
They were looking for people, warm bodies really, and the work is well suited for guys with less than half a functional brain.
I find it contemplative and exhausting.
I spend my six days a week carrying heavy things to a place.
Carrying other heavy things away from other places.
Carrying-on conversation-wise, thousands of long unreasonably poetic internal dialogues that I am constantly telling myself I should jot down in a notebook and be too exhausted to transcribe when I get home after dark at the end of the day.
Unless I'm paired up with someone, and then the conversations are clumsily real and unregretably forgettable.

Two weeks ago they paired old masked me up with Duggard.  An ironic joke to someone because half of his face is also masked, albeit not with a mask at all, but by scarring.
Duggard was in a terrible accident some years back and lost the bulk of the left side of his face, a loss which numerous subsequent surgeries have failed to fully rectify nor adequately redress.
He's about five years older than me, but from his good side looks a good deal younger, and he's in much better shape.  He's a good worker, strong and fastidious, and he's got great weed connections.
That's what I'd surmised anyway, that he had good weed connections.  I'd even told him so, more than once last week, "Duggard, you've got good weed connections."
The kind of compliment that belies an invitation.
Just not the kind of invitation he had in mind.  He didn't tell me what his connection was, instead in invited me to a party.

"It's a wolf party, man."
We picked up some heavy things  and carried them to a place.
For a panicked minute I thought he meant it was a furry party, then he added, "you know, because, the full moon."
He laughed.  Duggard had the laugh of a small boy.  
"Howl even, you can if you want to."  He told me where to go, said there would be girls there.
We carried other heavy things away from other places.
I made a mental note to look good Friday night.
A note I was too exhausted to transcribe when I got home after dark.

Beneath the Queen Anne's Lace the bathroom calendar showed a full moon on Friday. I showered and shaved, even the hard to reach places, and took pains to mask my scent with other scents, from rarely used dusty bottles stored in the cabinet under the sink.
I put on my pink shirt because, reasons.  The only pair of clean pants were work pants, sole pair I hadn't worn that week, but if all went exceptionally well I wouldn't have time to change again before clocking in Saturday morning, so...Life is nothing without an aspiration for best case scenarios.

Turns out Duggard had got himself pretty carried away before I even arrived.
It was about 10 pm and his eyes sparkled, not subtly, less than half listening to me, and more than half invested in polishing off the green bottle pulled loosely and persistently to his lips.  I found out later it was his third.
The moon was already out, I had discovered, rounding through a red at the last mile to the place, a ranch house in a hilly multi-functional commercial/residential mix-zoned neighborhood of ranch houses that all looked more or less exactly the same in the dark.
From the cars out front I had guessed there were about a dozen people inside.  I was off by half.  In a severe daze, Duggard, retaining limited verbal ability, made a couple of quick slurred introductions to those closest to the door and then sauntered off.
No one offered me a drink so I haunted the counter for a few minutes before helping myself.  Double whiskey ice.  Works every time.  Two competing wannabe DJ's were sparring for control of the bluetooth speaker and in the pauses between songs I zeroed in on the pneumatic ticking of a dirty wall clock cut out of a hard plastic cartoon cloud.

"What's with the mask?"  asked a guy with a crew cut.
I said nothing for a long dramatic pause.
"I was told this was a masquerade ball," I told him. A lie. He looked as if he had forgotten he'd just spoken to me.  "Obviously I was misinformed."

There's a certain cadence to overheard conversations that sets them apart from the havoc at ground view within the eye of the small-talk tornado.  Two girls were talking about their kids and judging from their tone I was satisfied to hear that they were not engaged in any kind of subliminal competition about it.  They were simply exchanging pleasantries sans judgement.
A guy with a beard was talking about a problem at work with another guy named -- Jenny?  Hard to tell.
"I recoded the whole system like six times today, that's like thirty times this week."
"What'd you find?"
"It keeps moving.  Every time I re-sequence at the axial another sack toggles out of alignment further down the chain. Once I get to the end it starts at the beginning again."

I noticed Stiffler on the television, got himself a new sitcom.  I noticed the moon rising outside the window.  I poured myself onto a sofa set behind a potted plant and inventoried the books of whoever's place this was while a dog came over and buried his sad face in my lap.  Strange books I wouldn't want to read.
"Are you having a good time?"  I asked the dog.  He looked off toward the moon through the window, as if checking with her before marking off a multiple choice answer on this quiz.  The moon said nothing.  The dog moped away toward some crumbs as dogs do.  The song changed again.
A guy a recognized from work rubbed his girlfriend's belly after she whispered to him that she felt bloated.  I recognized him, although out of his work clothes and in civvies he looked somehow smaller, not so old.  Consumed by the kind of domestic troubles that seemed suddenly so very mortal, so very beneath the work of we, men, beneath we, the Gods of Mount Olympus.  Beneath me anyway.
His girlfriend laughed mirthlessly and with glossy-lips gave him quick kiss.  The dog followed her outside.  I took up the rear, leaving the moon in the window to the potted plant, who undoubtedly given a choice would have preferred being left with the sun.

"Nice lip gloss," I said.  She examined me so I returned the favor.  She had curly dyed dirty blonde hair and wore two earrings that looked like the empire state building, and a loose hoodie, probably her boyfriend's.
"Thanks,"  she said, "nice mask. Do you work with Lemar?"  I didn't know Lemar, so I said I did.  Thankfully she wasn't interested, she offered me a cigarette and I accepted along with a light, and we blew billows of smoke across the early evening air at each other like galleons trading cannonfire in a silent film.  "Nice moon" she said.
"Thanks," I replied, taking full credit where none was due.  Inside the music changed again, and that's when it hit me.
It hit me in one of those rushes when everything makes sense and the ambient light rises two degrees so that everything blurry comes into focus.  It was the same thing that had hit me in the Walgreens with the model, I was doing what I was always doing.  This time, taking credit for the moon.  I was, I realized, always so busy looking for things to take credit for, things that I had no business with that I was neglecting my own personal agency.
I was living a low stakes life.  

Friends, I told you it's time to examine the reasons we are wearing a mask.  Well I straight up said it.  "That's the reason we are wearing a mask," I said, to her appropos of nothing.She laughed mirthlessly and tersed her glossy lips.  "I am not wearing a mask."
"No, I mean the royal we.  It's the moon, don't you see?  Self deception."
"Masks deceive other people, not yourself."  Was she flirting with me?  Another man's girlfriend?  Dude you've got to stop this.
"Okay, make it public deception."  I felt unmasked already.  I suddenly remembered the story of Saint Frances and the wolf.
"So what's underneath?  What are you hiding from?"
"Have you ever heard the story of Saint Francis and the wolf?"
"I don't think so."
"Every saint has a past.  Every sinner has a future."
She finished her cigarette, rubbed her belly absentmindedly and lit another.  I tried not to admire her shape, the way she moved, but I couldn't help it.  
"I'm Kayla."

We cherish the truth in others and fabulate the fantastic about ourselves. We project a shape of ourselves, a mask really, and hope no one notices, and at the same time we look at the shapes other people project, the pretend personas they are shaping, and we judge them.  Critically.  We don't even know we are doing it most of the time because we all know that it's all shadows and air and so we are always comparing the shape of their presentation to the invisible comportments of their true selves within.  How tight is the mask?  We hardly ever know.  Because even with broad strokes, if done well, we chalk up the broad outline to fidelity to the big personality within. 
My mask, it seemed, all of a sudden, represented me.  The man who underneath the sarcasm and deflection refused to settle on a face, or a life, beneath his charade.  A choice.
A choice that was baseless, as choosing to believe that a life is a programmatic pattern is coequal to choosing to believe that it is wholly within our control.

Before I knew it, it was Saturday morning.  I hadn't changed my pants, but since I'd gone home early I had changed my shirt and even put on deodorant.  Hurray for small victories and masked scents.
Duggard didn't look as bad as I imagined he would.  The bathroom calendar says that this month has 31 days, divided into weeks, separated on horizontal lines.  My references all duly dated.  Time moves forward.  Enough time to change my ways?
Saint Francis tamed the wolf and the town celebrated with a feast lasting a thousand days.  I walk out into what remained of meadow beyond our construction site, the creek bed mostly dry.  Saint Francis is dead now.  Soon it would all be gone.  Soon it will be game day again. (yay?) How can you win it?
Maybe I should talk to some more people next time, at the next party, like a normal person.
Maybe I should get a job that doesn't allow masks, start living a life that way.  Maybe I should find Lemar, find a way to ask him for his girlfriend's number.  That's probably bad but not the worst idea.