A Superbad ID: Just call me McLovin

Yep, that's me from a June 1999 CSI employee id. (Not that CSI, the popular super-sleuth, technology-will-find-the-killer show, but Cold Storage Integrated.)


For some reason I was happy on this my first day working in a refrigerated warehouse of 380,000 square feet, 7,500 forward pick slots, over 30,000 reserve level, 95 dock doors, and nearly 200 pieces of lift equipment. Each day, CSI generally saw 200,000 hand picked cases shipped to nearly 400 Kroger destinations. The record, while I worked there, was 271,000 outbound about a week before Thanksgiving 2000.

I actually was a more than content while I spent my days creating labor standards, doing analysis on better efficiency, working on Pro Forma statements and going other places to see why this industry is so hard on people. (A good picker will handle 2,000 medium weight cases (average 13-15 lbs.) in a 8-hour shift at this place. (The house standard was between 195-200 cases per hour.)

I think most of all, I was finally in a niche that worked for me.

After a year there, I got to the point where I was doing other things that were positive. I took a Con Law course at IUPUI and joined up into a community organization. My time was spent well.
I didn't drink for over a year. I still went to bars, drinking diet coke or coke, but just more for the "scenery" than the practice of blowing off steam or getting beer muscles to join the typical fray of college, post-college stupidity. Sometimes it was relaxing, but under it all, a tension inside evidently built. I wanted more to come of the future.

My best friend, will call him Jethro, was moving in with his future wife. He hadn't exactly been a model character, but he was a long time cohort, defender and supporter of whatever our weird little minds came to as a crossroads.


He is a Green Bay Packer fan in Minnesota. He's a sharp dresser (unlike me.) Loves, absolutely loves music. (Was a producer at a now-defunct local Music station, 93.7 The Edge and a trumpet player at Purdue.) He was terrible with finances and used me as a calculator on more than one weekly phone convo. And we both found most of this noisy ass life amusing, at least then. (South Park was a soundtrack we really dug together.)

But I became "Superbad", at least in the minds of some, and sadly, to him.


We tend to overblow the bad deeds of people, to shame them into some conformity to the rules of an often harried society, and in a stark way, that happened to me. Around this Holiday time in 2000, as I faced my worst challenge - and made some rash and rude statements - my then best friend no longer wanted much to say or do with me. Avoidance was the operative word.

My concept of obtaining a meaningful relationship took a sharp and dangerous curve and I fell off the cliff of life. I went back to drinking. Didn't do much at work - except get an offer for a new job, which offered me an escape from the situation, but wasn't an escape - and starting hating all the people around me. I was mad at myself...guilty about things I wrote in an email.

I was so sorry.

I wish I had had McLovin's guidance somehow. Even in their raucous ride, these cops meant well for the kid.

In the end we all have to learn how to make it day by day with the losses, the lessons and inevitability that we are going to fuck up more than grow up...

But as Officer Michaels aptly put it in my case,"Prepare to get fucked by the long dick of the law."

It kinda is like that...