The Vending Machine

I'm not trying to be introspective or reflective or contraceptive... err... Yes, but if I had to be any an 'ive it would be... protective?  No, wait.  Decisive?  Curse it all!  No.  I've given up on the 'ives.  They're dead to me.  Dead.

Contemplative.  That's it.  Yes.  Moving on.

It's crazy what can happen in a year.  I found the short poem below in My Documents folder.  Notice the date I wrote it?  A year to the day before my future wedding date.  A cosmic message of things to come?  Probably not.  However, for me it was interesting to be sucked back in time to the moment I wrote it.  I was only a few days from making an enormous turning point in my life; taking a new job position, moving out of the 'rents house (yes, for the second time...), and a general feeling of content was settling into the back of my mind reassuring me that I finally caught up with who I wanted to be, even if just for a moment, and was ready to start the rest of my life.

And then the vending machine was upon me.

This poem is a true story, to be sure.  It was at my last place of work and I was working at my office late at night.  I was one of only a few people to have a key to our building and I had stayed behind to look up apartments in Asheville, NC since in only a couple weeks I was to move there (Well here actually.  The vending machine did not do anything as awful as hospitalize me or lower my credit rating after all).

I was feeling like I wanted chocolate and a soda.  Twix candy bars and Cherry Pepsi were singing their sweet siren song from down the hall and I peeled myself away from the computer screen longing for that caramel-y goodness.  I jostled my pocket to unsettle the change resting along the inseam and I smiled as it's perky jangling called back to me.  I had exactly enough for what I wanted.

I approached the vending machine void of any guile for the device; It always rewarded me for my intrigue in the past.  This time, however, the machine did not want to play.  It did not want to play at all.  Like Walter from the Comedy Central edited version of "The Big Lebowski" a stream of PG-13 friendly obscenities spewed forth from my mouth as the money hungry device transformed from friendly solicitor of sugary goods to a contraption of unspoken evil, wickedly retaining my snacky sustenance.

The events that occurred after were accurately recorded on post-it note paper and left scotch-taped to the front of the vending machine of doom for the little old lady who came by weekly to restock and collect money.  It read as follows:

THE VENDING MACHINE

 

A post-it note to say

In the nicest of nice ways

If this machine hadn't ate my change

I'd be having a better day

 

I'll admit some words were shared

When I thought no one was there

To see me issue vengeance

Upon a machine that wasn't fair

 

When it wouldn't just vend nice

I ninja kicked it twice

And now not only are my pockets light

My foot is under ice

 

With my brains now quite long gone

And my arm I once thought long

I reached up through the exit hole

Where I know I dont belong

 

So if you think you could be kind

I would like what should be mine

Though if you can't return my decency

Fifty cents will do just fine

 

- Tyler Kneisly      11/03/05

The next day I happened to be in the office again at the time the vending machine lady returned to do her job.  There was boistrous laughter coming from the break room and I just knew she wasn't going to return my decency.  I sulked and walked down the hall to her to collect my fifty cents.

What does this have to do with getting married?  Absolutely nothing.  Except as a strange matter of coincedence this was the very first original piece of writing I shared with my wife-to-be.  She even kept it tacked on her fridge for a while.

So we don't come full circle.  Maybe we come to some other geometric shape, like some crazy Witch of Agnesi mathmatical equation where we miss the circle entirely.  I don't know.  All I know is that I ain't getting any kudos on my blogs so I'm obviously writing this for my own benefit.

I wonder what will be happening a year from today?