By: Aramie “the Waitress” Bloom
September is Suicide Awareness Month. We at Gonzo Today are not going to do you the disservice of pretending these feelings don’t exist, or acting like everyone who feels them is on the brink of disaster. Sometimes feelings simply must be felt. However, if you are having serious thoughts of wanting to harm yourself, please seek immediate help. You deserve a pro to listen to your pain. We at GT are not mental health professionals; we are simply the Weird turned Pro. We may, in fact, be completely mad. Or maybe we are just your average Gonzo, searching for a light that we can actually see.
The Shift
I’ve come off yet another shift of restaurant serving – in a shit mood and feeling fatalistic, though I cannot fully understand why. I don’t stop to reason; I sit down to write.
Tonight was my best shift ever, money-wise, and let’s face it, why else would we do this? If you’ve been in the industry at all, you know that it’s all about the people. Restaurant coworkers are fun. Unless too drunk or high to remember anything, we’re a lot like theatre people: quick, clever, with dreams bigger than our current capacities, and it leads to dynamic energy and a certain amount of sass that’s both endearing and hurtfully sharp at times. I made $500 tonight – and had a few good laughs and a meal – so what’s my fucking problem?
My Fucking Problem
My fucking problem is this isn’t what I want to be doing. I want to write. I want to be writing each day, with a purpose and a place to present my work where it connects to others and helps someone else push through a place they feel stuck or alone in. I want to feel. To feel truth. Feel real. Feel good. Feel love. Feel better.
Not feel like I want it to all be over. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have “a plan.” But this year of 2026 has brought more moments of suicide ideation than any year prior – including the years when substance abuse was at its worst.
Ain’t no prayer like “please don’t let me wake up again” right beside “Dear god – or whatever – or the devil – or nothing at all: please, please, I just can’t do this anymore.” Never again. That’s the whole point of suicide ideation. We don’t want to end it; we just want it to end.
Don’t get me wrong, it feels good to make money. Lord, don’t it!! But the stress of having to navigate the impossible (7 people sat there, 6 more sat here, then another party of 4, all at the same time) – it’s enough to catapult into the excitement of existence and the depths of existential dread. I can never decide if I feel dead or alive during busy server shifts, and they’re almost all busy. It may sound exciting if you’re only sitting here reading about it, but it feels like a drug trip. Feels like being pushed, pulled, yelled at, and hugged tightly by either a lover or an abuser.
Basically, it feels like a toxic relationship. A continuous, scheduled toxic relationship that pays you to be in it. Even toxic relationships have their moments of clarity and fun. It’s why we stay, and why they’re so hard to leave.
The Misleading Fantasy
I want to leave. I want to hand in my notice. Not to screw anyone over – I’m not mad at anyone in particular – I like these coworkers – but just to reclaim my space. To be free. And then. And then I remember what it was like for the first half of 2026. To have no money and to drive my old car into the dirt, brakes squealing and paint flaking off as I rushed down the highway and into and out of strange neighborhoods delivering Taco Bell and Target purchases for what amounted to $5-$8/hour when all was said and done. I imagine the face of my boyfriend when I tell him I have quit, him trying to be sympathetic and supportive but knowing I would be making him go to bed with worry once again. A worry we thought had abated once I got this job in the first place. And I feel like a piece of shit. But I’m going to use the time being unemployed to study much harder for my real estate license, I tell him in this maladaptive daydream. And I’ll be making money by next month! –well – by next year! – hmm – by the time we’re about to get evicted I will have thought of something, honey!!
Yeah. That imaginary scenario is worse than the stress of feeling my hair on fire trying to get to every table I have in the perfect amount of time.
So I don’t quit. I joke with a shift leader that I did well enough tonight that I’ve decided not to throw in the towel and go waitress at a steakhouse – where they make they real money.
“It’s a boy’s club over in those places,” she tells me. She knows way more industry people than I do and has been working front of house for much longer. I figure she knows. It sounds awful.
The Rational Reasoning
At least here, the people are nice. It’s not the place I have beef with; it’s the industry. For better or worse, I feel I have too much to compare it to. My first restaurant job was actually in Switzerland, not in the USA. There was a menu with three dinner options (two meat and a vegetarian), and list of some beer, some wine, a soda or two, and coffee. This was standard just about everywhere in Biel/Bienne, where I lived in a room over the restaurant, and listened to the Sri Lankan cooks speak Tamil and clang around as they closed down the kitchen after each shift. The music of their voices bounced out over the cobblestones of the Old City, around the statue in the fountain of the square, and off the stone of the archways and churches where God was present in a way that was neither pushy nor mandatory nor really much thought of at all. Not like here.
There were no such thing as “menu substitutions,” no special requests, no statements about being soy free, or gluten free, or needing to know if the fryer oil had ever come in contact with nonorganic food, or requirements that the Chef become responsible for serious medical conditions of their diners. You went where you went because you wanted what they served. End of story. If you didn’t, there was no reason to be there. You could meet up with people after the meal, or host at home, or take a hike or a walk if you wanted their company. Working at US restaurants, I couldn’t help but feel we’d begun to overly accommodate and cater so deeply to our individuality that we’d destroyed the concept of what a restaurant was supposed to be: a place to gather and showcase the food of the Chef.
Before I start sounding too much like Anthony Bourdain in his vegan-hating days, let me course correct for a moment and say that I don’t hate diners with needs. Perhaps there is something to be said for being inclusive. But there is a whole lot more to say about people who meticulously stalk the menu for any signs of gluten, who run me back and forth on endless quests to ask every cook in the kitchen to change their gloves at least three times before touching so-and-so’s meal … and then allow me to return to their table to the sight of them downing focaccia bread.
Do we all just want to feel special in some way, I wonder. Or am I just an errant asshole who makes otherwise kind people feel like a bother, if only in my mind?
Like all bad relationships, reality is getting too skewed for me to tell.
What I Want
I don’t want this. I don’t want to feel like I am going to both cry and scream and laugh hysterically each and every night. It makes me feel disposable. Small. Like I am supposed to be grateful for this inhumane setup, because “that’s the biz.”
I want to be free. To wander the cobblestones of an old Swiss village after dark, safe and slightly tipsy, imagining the centuries of human life preserved in the memory of limestone and linen and the colorful skeins of wool inside the glass of antique shop windows. Free to dream. Free to feel so deeply that I am not scared of what I might find. Free to look beyond someone’s possibly neurotic self-diagnosis and see a culture enjoying the world, loving life, and looking forward to sail boating on a clean river.
It’s probably not the gluten that’s ruining your life, I want to say. It’s this. It’s us. It’s the dead culture in which we constantly try to awaken from this dream and can’t. It’s this fever dream established by religious maniacs and the mentally unwell, set forth to conquer and cult-ify the land, to demonstrate sickness, to find salvation in chaos, horror, beatings, and blood. It’s the preservation of hate and anger at the expense of open-minded growth and friendship. It’s the plague-village, the paradox of having the most while holding the least; the rattle of hardened crumbs inside the McMansion.
Free me. Let me loose. Let me breathe. Let me stop in the middle of the busiest shift of the night, spread my arms, and tell everyone to Stop. Have them all look at me like I am completely mad. “I want to die on nights like this, sometimes,” I want to say. “I don’t want to read you the specials. I want you to tell me why, no matter how hard I work, I don’t know where my next tank of gas is coming from. No matter how much you tip me, it won’t matter in the end.”
From Fatalistic to Freedom
So what do I do? I clock out. I drive home. I feel sick. Once parked, I do not linger on the street to elevate the freedom I purport to wish to have. I walk in tunnel vision to my apartment. To dissociate freely with a combination of hot showers and other people’s TikTok captures. I have a life to escape, I tell myself.
Only I can’t escape it. I do the one thing that helps. The one thing I hardly ever do any more: I write this piece. Laid bare is the reality of a good-hearted nihilist who refuses exit this plane of existence willingly.
That’s what I am. Maybe you understand.
Maybe you are just like me.
Maybe we just need art to survive.
And to stop apologizing for our feelings.
The only way out is through. So let’s not pretend our shit is not important. Let’s hold hands and walk. Not toward death, but onwards towards the signs of life. Towards freedom, with outstretched arms. You deserve a life worth living. And so do I.