The Smoky Dirt Road

                My old dog Ari wasn’t very friendly.  That’s kind of an understatement, really.  Ari was a prick.  I mean he liked me, of course, and he at least tolerated my friends.  He liked a lot of my friends, too, but he merely put up with plenty of them.  I’m not sure if he was the kinda dog that when he really likes you you feel flattered or not, but I’ve met dogs like that plenty of times.  He was pretty smart, he just didn’t see too many reasons to get all excited to meet a stranger.

                Unless the stranger had food, of course.  Like I said, Ari wasn’t stupid.  He knew how to beg with the best of em.  Well, maybe not the best.  He could look hansome but he wasn’t very good at looking cute.  He’d pull it off once in a while but yeah.  The dog wasn’t a cute wittle puppy wuppy.  We were in Tennessee for a while and one of our friend’s dogs taught everybody else that they could sneak off to the gas station a couple miles away and panhandle for chicken and hot dogs.  We’d all be freakin out, wondering if they were ever gonna come back and then you go up to get a beer and the fuckers are hangin out lookin pathetic in front of the Texaco.

                Another thing that would win Ari over was marijuana.  He loved weed.  I only saw him drink beer a couple of times and that was cos he was really thirsty and there wasn’t any water.  But man, that dog liked to get stoned.  I used to get dogs and cats high.  I still would if I still smoked weed.  Like I wouldn’t hold them down and force them but you just kinda hold their face and blow in it.  If they really hate it I just let em go.  But some of them get all into it.  Shit, we had this cat who used to sit on the table while we were smoking pot and we’d all blow it at him.  He’d sit there and bask in it until we were done or until he was good, then he’d saunter off and go hang out on the fuckin bannister or somewhere cool like that. 

Ari, though, Ari would lick your face or at least attempt to while you were blowing pot smoke at him.  He was usually good after a few hits, then he’d go fuck around and be a stoned dog.  Everything smells a lot more interesting when you’re baked, he seemed to think.  And if you were getting high, he’d come up and beg.  And I mean he’d sit and beg like you were eating a fuckin steak or something.  And he’d do this to anybody.  I can think of at least a few times that some random schmuck walked up to me on the street, Ari would growl at him a little or at least give him an attitude of complete indifference until the stranger busted out with a joint.  All of a sudden ol Ari was a real friendly dog.  Stoners get a kick outta that shit.

I remember one time my girlfriend at the time and I were walking our dogs home to the squat in West Philly and this crazy old dude with a fuckin wide brimmed Army Ranger hat and a dirty trenchcoat and about a 4 day growth of beard asked me for a paper.  The guy had about a thousand buttons all over his hat and coat.  Plus it was like June or something.  Not overcoat weather.  I don’t remember what any of the guy’s buttons said, but he seemed like he was gonna tell us all about what the CIA didn’t want us to know or some shit.  I’m not sure why wackos are always revealing all these secrets about the government.  How the fuck does some guy who talks to mailboxes get classified information.  Hell, maybe the mailbox tells him.  If mailboxes could talk, they’d probably know some pretty alarming shit.

So anyway, the weirdo asked me for a rolling paper and I smoked rollies so I always had papers.  I gave him one and he asked if we wanted to smoke a joint.  Of course we did.  What kinda question was that?  The dogs looked a little annoyed that we had stopped cos we were getting close to the park where we’d usually let them run loose.  The guy twisted up a joint and asked for a light.  I gave him one and all of a sudden Ari turned into a tail-wagging doofus, deciding that this guy who’s all bundled up in buttons was okay in his book.

After the joint had gone around a couple of times, the old man asked if he could get Ari stoned since it was so obvious that he wanted to.  I said “sure” and was about to tell him how to do it when he took a big hit off the joint, picked up Ari’s tail and started blowing smoke at his asshole.  And I mean this dude had his face right up in the dog’s butt.  Ari kinda flinched playfully and spun around, wondering where the warm breeze was comin from.  By this time I was kinda high and me and my girl exchanged glances, trying not to totally lose it.  So the old man starts explaining to us that dogs get really high if you blow smoke in their asses.  I sorta mentioned that they seem to get pretty high if you blow it in their noses, too, but he ignored me and blew another stream of marijuana smoke at ol Earl’s butthole. 

I don’t think Ari was very high for his experience at the park after that, but I’m pretty sure he had a good time sniffing around and chasing squirrels anyway.  Dogs like that stuff.  Weed or no weed.

Greetings from Jerkland. Glad You're Not Here.

                So yeah.  Back to the seemingly never ending saga of my war with society at the Goodwill on South Wadsworth.  It’s getting late and I’m listening to bagpipes while I’m all hopped up on Prozac.  Who would've imagined that life would become this?  I think this is why they gave me the goddam prozac in the first place cos I did fuckin imagine it and I figured it’d be simpler for everybody if I just drank a bottle of rum and overdosed on heroin.  Yet thanks to modern pharmacology, I’m talking about this instead of being nothing more than a goddam memory.  Whoop-De-Doo.

                Don't worry.  I'll be brief.  We all have other things we'd rather be doing.  I just wanted to say a few things real quick though, really.  Like the other day I posted a blah blah blog about doing community service at the Goodwill and a friend asked if Goodwill does any good will.  I replied that they don’t, that Goodwill is pretty much a leech on society, at least as much of a leech as the drug addict who stands on the median with a sign, desperately hoping that he’ll get enough money for one more hit so he can get back out and stand on the median a little longer.  I mentioned that the only claim of altruism that Goodwill can make is that they hire retards and felons, a claim that McDonald’s can also make.

                Well, today I went in to the Goodwill early cos I had shit to do in the afternoon.  At 8 in the morning, some disgusting fat-ass brings a little gang of wingnuts and retards into the Goodwill for them to perform what custodial tasks need to be done before the store opens.  I don’t know who sponsors this field trip but I’m gonna go in and actually volunteer next week so I can freak out on the pathetic slug who’s in charge of these poor guys without getting into hot water with my probation officer.  I know I call them wingnuts and retards, but that’s just cos I’m a fuckin jerk who’s writing a fuckin jerky blog here in Fuckin Jerkland.  The miserable excuse for a human who’s responsible for these folks is loud and mean and abusive to them the entire time that they’re cleaning the bathrooms and emptying the trash.  Why the management of Goodwill tolerates this defies any kind of reason.

                Fuck Goodwill.  Spend your money somewhere else.  Donate your stuff to somebody else.

Jumpin Jesus!

                I was court-ordered to go to some kinda drug rehab this last time around.  Volunteered, one might say.  Of course, one might be totally delusional.  There are few treatment options available to a drug addict or alcoholic who’s smashed his life to smithereens.  In my experience, if I still had money to go to treatment with, I’d be spending it on drugs.  I haven’t met many crackheads or junkies who were running scams and stealing shit to come up with money for rehab.  Out of the few that were available to me in the city where I happened to be when I washed up on the rocks, I settled on a 6 month stay at the Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Center.  It’s a Christian place.  Go figure.  It’s the fuckin Salvation Army for Chrissakes.  And I’m not, nor have I ever been a Christian.  If you are a Christian, I may wind up ranting and you may find yourself offended, to which I say too fuckin bad.  I’m offended by Christians all the goddam time.

               

So yeah, I elected to go to the ARC cos it sounded better than the other rehab center around here, some place that’ll make you sit on a bench with a dunce cap while they tell you how bad you suck for a year and a half.  I’d rather listen to some moron talk about invisible people for six months.  Actually, I’d rather not have gotten myself into the situation in the first place but I might as well wish for something more interesting than that.  Like I’d rather be able to fly or to set shit on fire by blinking.  None of those things are gonna happen.  I don’t think.  I keep trying with the fire thing but I just look like I have some mild form of Tourette Syndrome.  If there was a god in heaven I guess I could try praying to satan in hell for pyrokinetic powers, but I haven’t seen any satanists do anything of the sort.  There’s just a buncha assholes running around, god or no god; satan or no satan.  And none of them are flying or setting shit on fire with their minds.

               

Where was I?  Oh yeah, how could I forget where I was?  I was in the goddam Salvation Army ARC, technically allowed to walk out the door but knowing that no good would come of it.  Turned out the place was pretty easy to get kicked out of, but I managed to get through it.  I’m a real fuckin survivor.  Eye of the Tiger.  All that shit.  I could go into what a day in the ARC was like, ala “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” but I won’t.  I probably will, but not right now.  I wanna get to the meat of the story I suckered you fuckers into reading.  I’m not doing a very good job at though, now are I?  No, dear reader, I am not.  Well, here I go.

                I stumbled into the ARC on Friday of Labor Day weekend, so I didn’t get to see what normally happens at the place until the following Tuesday.  Some of the guys who had been there for a while would warn me that I’d be cursing the place in no time, that they just work you like a fuckin dog and try to jam the bible up your ass.  Now that I think about it, that’s what I’d say once I had been there for a while.  Nobody said that to me.  Whatever.  On the Tuesday after Labor Day, I began to work like a dog.  I don’t mean I was chasing cattle or hunting raccoons or pulling a goddam sled.  I was doing normal human stuff.  Or abnormal human stuff.  But I was doing it for my dinner and you better fuckin obey until you figure out what you can get away with.  And if you’re stupid and unlucky, forget it.

                After work, we’d have some kinda class or group or something, depending on which day of the week it was.  Monday was Labor Day so they skipped the normal routine.  By the time the next Monday rolled around, I was already sick of working in the goddam warehouse 6 days a week and being forced to go to church twice a week.  I would eventually realize that I could read “A People’s History of the U.S.” in church and everybody would think I was reading the bible.  I saved that particular book for chapel.  I’d read other shit the rest of the time.  But Monday was “Drug and Alcohol Class”, followed by a bible study.  I didn’t mind the drug and alcohol education, but god I hated fuckin bible study.  I hated every fucking second of it.  Hated it to a level of intoxication, as I’ve heard it said before by some satanic moron.

                The first Monday that I was there that they held a Alcohol and Drug Ed/bible study, we were in for a special treat.  The dingbat who normally lectured us gave the floor to some schmuck in a wheelchair and his dipshit buddy.  It quickly became clear that the wheelchair guy wasn’t even an addict, so who knows why he was talking to a bunch of junkies and drunks.  His sidekick was a member of one of the 12 step programs, and everything he was doing seemed to be in violation of all of the 12 traditions of AA and NA and all the other A’s.

                What followed was completely surreal.  It was like the kinda shit you see on some 60 Minutes segment or on a stupid rerun of MacGuyver where MacGuyver has to rescue some poor family who got sucked into Jonestown or something.  The kinda shit that you doubt actually exists.  It exists.  This doesn’t lend any proof that god exists, like before I doubted it but now I don’t.  What ensued and what we were subjected to that evening was some hysterical bullshit.  The guy in the wheel chair would frequently say “whoa” in a surfer/stoner accent for no apparent reason whatsoever.  Once in a while he’d shout really loud that he wanted to talk about what happened at the cross.  He’d tell  us he was drunk on spirit wine, that we could all drink the spirit of Jesus too.  Then he’d throw his arms in the air and shout “WHOOOO” like some cheesy ghost in some lame-ass’s front yard on Halloween.  At one point during all this, he wasn’t feeling too well so he had his dipshit pal hand him a few pills of some kind, which he promptly gulped down with a beer.  Just kidding.  He didn’t have a fuckin beer.  He had spirit wine.

                So the wheelchair guy did all of the aforementioned things repeatedly, repeated everything he said multiple times.  He only gobbled down pills in front of everybody once, though.  *SNAP*  Finally, he asked if anybody in the room had lower back pain.  Christ, my fuckin back’s been killing me since 1995 so you bet your ass I raised my hand, as did a couple dozen of the 110 or so folks in the room.  The guy in the wheelchair promised to take the pain away with the help of his lord and savior.  I was ready.  If this jerkoff could make my lower back stop hurting, I’d go ahead and drink some Jesus juice or whatever.  But then the wheelchair guy told us all to have the person next to us put his hand on our backs while he said a prayer.  At that point I just sat down.  What the fuck….  It was over not long after that, at which point I turned to one of my buddies and asked him why the wheelchair guy didn’t just heal his own goddam back and walk the fuck outta there.  Nobody had an answer for that.  According to a couple of dumbasses, I guess the reason why all of our backs still hurt was that we didn’t have enough faith.  Your fuckin a right I don’t have any faith.

                There were many good jokes to be had over the next week.  You  could hear slaves shouting “WHOOOO” and saying “whoa” in surfer/stoner accents and shouting about drinking jesus juice.  You could hear it echo through the warehouse for 9 hours a day.

I Never Asked To Be A Volunteer

                So I had a dream that one of my housemates was clipping his fingernails into my sugar bowl.  I’m not gonna get all analytical, mail my mother a bomb for not potty-training me early enough.  Nothing like that.  I just thought I’d mention it.  I also had a dream that some cocksucker stole my little, banged up, spray-painted Toyota Celica that’s really not all that bad ass but which I like a whole bunch anyway.  Then I woke up from this exciting nap at 5:20 PM in the dark, thinking that it was tomorrow morning and that I had to get up and go slave at the goddam Goodwill again.

                I’ve been slowly chewing away at the time that I owe for community service at the Goodwill store a couple miles from my house.  They refer to us as “volunteers”, implying that we’re volunteers.  Right.  Volunteered by some jerkoff  who couldn’t mind his own goddam business, the same way that all those poor fuckers who went to Vietnam in the 60’s were volunteers.  And all those Africans and their progeny who toiled in the miserable heat under threat of grievous bodily harm?  Volunteers. 

                You may think it a bit extreme to compare cleaning the bathrooms at a Goodwill  for no money to getting one’s legs blown off in a jungle or to be starved, beaten and raped for the duration of one’s lifetime.  Perhaps it is a bit extreme.  It’s still bullshit, though.  I’d rather be working at the humane society but since I’ve got drug charges I’m evidently unfit to clean up puppy puke.  And as unsavory a task as cleaning kennels is, I think that I’d come off it feeling as if I had made some poor, sad, scared creature’s life just a little bit better by being a nice guy, even if I was volunteered to do be there.  Maybe take them out one by one to let them sniff around or maybe play a little fetch if they’re into that kinda thing.

                As things are, half the people who work at the Goodwill treat us all like slaves.  “I’M NOT PAYING YOU ZERO DOLLARS AN HOUR TO TALK TO THE OTHER VOLUNTEER WHILE YOU PUT GARBAGE THAT I GOT FOR FREE ONTO SHELVES SO I CAN SELL IT AT THE HIGHEST PROFIT MARGIN POSSIBLE!” one of the lazy jerks who works there for 8 bucks an hour barked at me as I was doing her job for her.  Well, this is an embellishment.  That person has no idea what a profit margain is.  Hell, they have a big sign by the punch clock that informs the management that 30 minutes isn’t .30 of an hour, that it’s .50.  And 45 minutes isn’t .45.  So I guess I am helping out some poor, sad, scared creature who can’t leave the miserable existence in which he finds himself after all.  It’s not very fulfilling.