Day Ninety-six - Roscoe

But sometime during 2001 I ended up returning to the convenience store where I'd worked between '98 and 2000. I think one day I was just passing by there and saw that they had like a 'now hiring' sign, and I went inside and flat out asked the manager if they'd take me back. He said sure, and probably the next day I was back there, filling the necessary paperwork, and starting again. And this time around I promised myself that I wouldn't be up to my past antics. And I did keep true to my word... at least for a while. I have no idea what prompted me to start doing that stuff again, maybe it was just too easy, maybe the temptation was far too great, but soon enough I was at it again, and very very soon - maybe a few months only into my return - I was already on my way out. I can't place the timeline, but I'm guessing that this was even before 2001 was up. Because what I do remember about late 2001 was the night were me and Dora almost broke up - something or the other happened that precipitated a sort of state of the union kind of conversation, and she was adamant that the best for us was for us to call it quits. Nothing had been working out between us, there was no intimacy whatsoever, our family life wasn't great either. To top it all off, somewhere along the line our boiler had broken down and we had to resort to having to wash ourselves with water that had to be heated on the stove and on the microwave oven. It didn't make much difference in the summer, but come winter it got really tough. Add to that that Dora was still the only the one getting a regular paycheck, that meant that our budget for anything was rather limited. We survived on basic cheese and ham sandwiches for a lot longer than I care to admit, sometimes there was pasta and rice and soup, but not always. I can understand and empathize with just how tired she was all of this. How tired she was of me. And I can't blame her. I was tired of her as well, but most of all I was also tired of me. I couldn't give anymore, I couldn't find in me the motivation to do anything worthy of neither myself nor anyone else. And then, also somewhat out of the blue, my friend 'James' started working at a big box retail store that back then was kind of our dream job. We used to go there all the time to buy CDs and we always thought how cool it muste be like to work there. So through a guy who he'd worked with, who used to date a girl that was one of the customer care supervisors, 'James' started working at one of their locations. Oh, how I envied him. But I also used him as an in into that gig - I gave him a copy of my CV and shotrly thereafter I was going to an interview which led me to working there for roughly the next two and half years.