Stupid America

                I was gonna write about the Salvation Army drug rehab center but it was turning out kinda boring so I’m writing about this instead.  That’s what I do.  I change my goddam mind right in the middle of everything and hit delete and then start yammering about who knows what.  And if you wanna know the truth about it I don’t even know what .  Not until right….  Now!

                Okay, well I was just recently reminded of this story by an old friend so I guess I’ll tell it.  This old friend was my girlfriend at the time.  Or pretty much like my wife except that we didn’t see any reason to get god’s or the government’s approval so she was my girlfriend.  Jesus I’m getting old.  It’s kinda bullshit, really.  Whether or not it’s bullshit, it’s definitely strange.  I’m sure it just gets stranger and stranger, too.  I mean, I’m fixin to relate some forgettable little anecdote that happened 14 years ago and it seems like it only happened 3 years ago or something.  I knew a guy who was almost 80 who’d refer to people in their 50’s as “kids”.  Then he’d say, “Kids?  What the fuck am I talkin about?  They’re 57 for Chrissakes!”  Minus the profanity.  The guy was a Catholic ex-college professor.  Still, when you’re 77 just about everybody else is a kid.

                Hell, I might even say that this story that I haven’t even begun to tell happened when I was a kid.  Fuck it.  Kid or no kid, lemme get on with it and quit bothering me about my philosophies regarding age and mortality and all that.  Oh yeah, you didn’t ask, I’ve just had a bit too much coffee. 

                Okay so anyway my girlfriend and I had just finished working in Southern Minnesota at a sugar beet harvest, a job that I could probably write a goddam book about but which for now I’ll just say that it was a reasonably lucrative albeit boring job that we were both glad to have wrapped up.  I believe we were headed down to Tennessee to visit some friends after the beet harvest, but in the meantime we were hanging out in Minneapolis, living on our friend’s floor with our dogs and blowing all our beet money on booze. 

                Between the two of us we came up with the idea to work out of a day labor place just to replenish some of the savings that we were rapidly depleting by being unemployed drunks.  Not really caring what we do, figuring we could make fifty bucks a day each for the rest of the week and justify being unemployed drunks again for a little while, we stumbled into a temp place in Northeast Minneapolis.

                They called us in at some terrible time of the morning where we staggered in to get the address of the job that they had lined up for us.  It was in Edina or Eden Praire or some goddam E suburb of Minneapolis.  The Deli Express sandwich factory is what it turned out to be.  In the Twin Cities you wind up eating sandwiches outta the Super America dumpsters all the time.  Or you don’t.  You probably don’t.  But we sure as hell did.  God those things are terrible.  They’re even worse if you buy them cos then not only are you nauseous but you paid to get that way.  In fact, don’t ever buy one of those goddam things.  Steal it if you have to but if you buy one then I’m cutting you outta the will for being a fuckin moron.

                But yeah I don’t even know where the hell you can find a Deli Express sandwich in town, but I know where you can make them.  In Edina or Eden Prairie or some stupid suburb Southwest of Minneapolis that begins with the letter E.  Once we arrived at the factory we walked in a little sheepishly and asked to talk to whoever.  Whoever turned out to be a short hispanic lady who showed us around the areas that we’d need to know about.  The breakroom had a vending machine with all the Deli Express sandwiches you could eat.  Free of charge.  We’d later find out that nobody in the fuckin building would touch one of those stupid sandwiches.  And who could blame them?  Certainly not I.  Certainly not you.  These people were blameless.  Well, probably not but they weren’t stupid enough to eat outta that vending machine.

                So we got the tour.  Basically there were three or four conveyor belts where the sandwiches were manufactured.  I’m sure you know how to make a sandwich so I’m not gonna go into the details about what comes first and what comes next, but the conveyor belt ran rather quickly.  Most of the people who worked there were permanent employees of Central or South American descent who had been working there for years.  That made me feel a little like a snotty American bastard but whatever.  We weren’t too proud to make some fuckin sandwiches.  Mercifully enough, they’d assign you a different task after each break just to keep you from completely losing your fuckin mind.  And luckily for me, since I was a strapping young buck.  Wait.  I was a skinny little smelly white boy.  Good enough!  I landed the job of loading the front of the conveyor with bread and meat and cheese.  At least I got to do that for part of the day.  It wasn’t too bad, running around and moving shit or whatever.  I can do that without going insane.

                My girlfriend wasn’t so fortunate.  She got stuck on the conveyor belt the whole time.  Fuck.  I got stuck on there for a couple of hours.  I was the cheese straightener.  These pieces of bread were whizzing by and the cheese slicer thingy would drop the cheese on the bread all cattywampus and it was my job to make it look neat and tidy.  I quickly realized why whenever you get some crappy sandwich at the gas station that the cheese and meat are all fucked up, hanging halfway outta the bread, etc.  That’s because some poor asshole who doesn’t care who’s still got whiskey burps from last night is trying to straighten the goddam cheese at 65 miles an hour.  Once in a while they’d turn off the conveyor belt for some reason and then the whole goddam building would be going to the right until they got the machine running again.

                When I was being the bread and meat loader guy I saw the 55 gallon drum of meaty goop that fills the burritos, stuff that made you definitely not go for one of the burritos out there in that evil vending machine.  Stuff that nightmares are made of.  Oh yeah, I just remembered carrying the big meat logs to throw on the slicer kept making me think of Maggots: The Record by the Plasmatics, which if you've never heard is about giant maggots eating everybody in New York.  Big slimy cold meaty things.  I mean, the turkey loafs weren’t writhing but I used my imagination.  "Some of them are the size of a large knockwurst..."  My girlfriend got stuck on tuna patrol.  That was horrible looking.  Later, she assured me that it was as horrible as it looked.  What it was was a 55 gallon drum of tuna salad with a pump on it.  The bread would fly by and the pump would poop out these tuna salad turds onto the bread, whereupon whoever had the misfortune of being stuck on that line stood by with a butter knife and smeared the turd around on the bread as it whizzed by them.

                We could’ve finished out the week but we decided that being unemployed alcoholics was a little easier on the dignity and the sanity.

ROUND AND ROUND

                Well, good news for anybody who gives a fuck.  As for those of you who don’t give a fuck, well, you don’t give a fuck so no news is good news to you.  No news is generally good news.  And I generally don’t give a fuck so there you go.  But right now boy, lemme tellya.  Yeah.  I give a flyin fuck.  About what, you might ask?  I will tell you that I forget.  But I thought of a series of blogs that’ll be fun to blog, and that brightens up my world just a touch.  I’m pretty easily amused, it might seem. 

                It all came to me today when I was serving out a sentence at my local Goodwill store.  Serving my community.  It turns out that if you get caught driving around shooting crack, one of the things they make you do is to listen to a whole bunch of music that you rollerskated to for a while when you were 9 and then realized that you couldn’t fuckin stand the radio.  This caused you to give up on music altogether until you overheard your sister playing the Dead Kennedys and what have you.  She’d act like you suck most of the time so you’d swipe some Black Sabbath compilation tape that had the best goddam Black Sabbath song ever played on it that nobody seems to care about except for me and the first Ramones LP (also on cassette).  And then you forget all about all the other terrible horseshit for the remainder of your fucked up life.  Until.

                Until you’re caught with a couple grams of crack.  Fuck.  Now you’re trapped in heck, listening to fuckin what’s his name and Lionel Richie and Chicago and Leo Sayer and shit.  Not only that, you know who sings all these songs (except for fuckin what’s his name), which amounts to psychological torture.  No really, and after hearing “Love Me Tomorrow” by Chicago.  Wait a minute.  Did you catch that?  LOVE ME TOMORROW.  What in the everloving fucking hell were those dingleberries thinking?  Jesus….  Anyway, that got me wanting to hear me some Air Supply.  That desire prompty deserted me as soon as I got in my car so now I’m listening to something a little heavier but whatever.  Maybe I’ll go on a little Air Supply bender after this.  Maybe I’ll download a best of and put it on my mp3 player and kick myself in the ass for it later when it actually comes on.  Maybe I just talked myself out of doing that.

                Anyway, I also spent a bunch of time in jail.  I would’ve gladly spent a few more days in there if I could’ve avoided all this nonsense.  I was thinking what they could do is make me stay in my room and read a Dean Koontz book and go on a diet for a couple days.  Fuck it.  It’d save the taxpayers a bunch of money and I’d probably be doing society a better service than I am when I’m acting like an annoying jerk at the Goodwill all day long.  You know, now that I think about it this is the second time I’ve written a blog about doing community service at a Goodwill and listening to some rotten bullshit while I was doing it.  How sad is that?  Only last time it was some Brittney Spears song that I had been lucky enough to have avoided until that point and some godawful accoustic rendition of “Round and Round” by Ratt where the moron who was singing it was all serious and shit. 

                I guess I could start bitching about all the paradoxes in “Round and Round” but we all know what they are and I’m pretty sure I pointed them out 6 years ago when I was working in the Goodwill for a few days cos I had gotten busted with  crack in my car.  Wait a minute.  Round and round indeed….

Haters

                I work for some goddam place.  Some goddam place that requires us to wear uniforms.  Uniforms that make you look like you’re workin at some goddam place.  “Are these uniforms blue?”, you’re probably not asking yourself.  No, dear reader.  No, they are not.  They consist of green pants and a tan shirt, tucked in, with a tan belt to match.  I don’t feel embarrassed to wear the uniform.  Fuck it.  At least I’m working and I look like it and who cares?

                I’ll tell you who cares.  Fuckin just about everybody.  I’ve never felt so consistently disrespected in my entire life than when I’m wearing the TruGreen uniform.  And I’ve been the kinda guy that you’d think generally draws some pretty disrespectful looks.  I lived on the streets for years, rarely showering or washing my clothes.  I’ve driven around for days on end breaking down crack with Koolaid and shooting it up in my beat up, hot pink Geo Tracker that had no muffler and sounded like a goddam Cessna airplane.  I’ve walked into stores with blood all over my elbows and hands, hallucinating and sweating and walked the hell out with hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise without drawing any suspicion at all.

                I’d think that if you look like a working Joe, shirt tucked in and stopping in to get a Gatorade or a donut or something that the people at the stores would smile and tell you to have a nice day and all that.  They don’t.  They look at you like you’re the scum of the earth.  If I had been up for 3 days and was writing bad checks they’d be sweet as pie.  If my hands were black with filth from being unwashed for weeks on end, they’d kiss my ass out of fear.  But since I’m in a TruGreen costume they’re sullen and they watch me to make sure I’m not stealing a Twix bar. 

                So you know what I do?  I steal 2 Twix bars and glare at them on my way out.  Fuck it.  Time to go to work.

The Worst

                Goddammit.  I’m worn out.  I oughtta work on writing a book.  I barely have time to write a blog once every 2 or 3 weeks though, so I dunno how I think I’m gonna write a book.  Plus, my book idea is depressing and potentially psychologically damaging for me to write.  I dunno why that’s a problem, but it seems like it could be.  Christ, I’ve done plenty of psychological damage to myself, not to mention what I’ve inflicted upon others.  Might as well write a goddam book.  What’s the worst that could happen?

                Speaking of worst that could happen, when I’m driving with my phone in my hand I always feel like chucking it out the goddam window.  Same with my wallet.  I’ve had false teeth since I was 18 and I can’t tell you how many times I’d be riding in the back of a pickup truck and wind up being kinda half-ass ready to chuck em out onto the fuckin highway.  Now, none of these things is the WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN, but they’d certainly be regrettable.  And not necessarily in the order in which I mentioned them, either.  In fact, I’d say teeth would suck the worst, then wallet, then phone.  But yeah, this cumpulsion is similar to the one that you might feel when you’re standing at the mouth of a canyon, admiring nature, and get a weird itch to jump.  That would be closer to the worst thing that could happen.  Still, there are worse things that I won’t endeavor to explore right this second.  Burning alive, being drawn and quartered, sticking pencils in your nose and doing a swan dive down a staircase.  Etcetera, etcetera.

                This is reminding me of fake teeth situations.  Like once when I pulled them out for the hell of it in front of my friends’ 4 year old daughter.  Her jaw dropped.  Then she frowned and started tugging at her teeth, to no avail. 

                Or the time when my buddy who was a genius at fucking with passed out people took my teeth while I was in a stupor.  This was back when I had first gotten the things.  I woke up and realized that I had lost my goddam teeth and went into a panic.  Especially at that age, cos not only would I be missing the function of having front teeth, but I’d be the only guy around who didn’t have any fuckin teeth.  Anyway, that was funny and haha now don’t fuckin do it anymore.  Except that there was another buddy of ours around who was wasn't exactly the sharpest bulb in the turnip patch who’d try to take my goddam teeth out all the time after that.  You know what it’s like to wake up with some filthy moron sticking his fingers in your fuckin mouth?  It makes you punch that person.

                Oh yeah, and back then we were 19 or so and I was the designated alcohol buyer.  I’d take out my fake teeth and make sure that the person working behind the counter saw that I didn’t have any goddam teeth.  I hated doing it cos it was embarrassing but it worked better than a fake I.D.

                Then there was the time that I was staying with some friends at their farmhouse in Eastern Tennessee.  They didn’t have indoor plumbing.  No big deal.  I mean, plumbing sure is nice but we didn’t have too many problems hauling in drinking water and using an outhouse and showering elsewhere.  Anyway, my friend who I was staying with was a total fuckin stoner.  Me?  I’ve always been a lightweight with that stuff.  So the whole time I was visiting I was baked outta my goddam mind.

                One day I did a few bong hits and decided to brush my teeth out by my pickup truck.  To this day I’m a bit self-concious about removing my teeth in front of people.  Back then I was a bit moreso.  So I took my fake teeth out and set them on the tailgate, planning to brush them when I was done brushing my real teeth.  So I’m pacing around like a zombie, listening to the birds and looking at the sky and all that other stoner hippy shit and when I’m done brushing my teeth, I rinse my mouth out with a bottle of water and rinse off my toothbrush.  Then I go back to my truck and shut the tailgate, even though we’re out in the middle of fuckin nowhere and there’s no reason to shut the tailgate.

                I start walking back to the house  and realize that I’m not wearing my denture.  My stoned brain quickly realizes what probably happened.  I go into a medium panic.  JESUS FUCKIN CHRIST NO FUCKIN WAY! I think to myself.  I jog back to my truck and open the tailgate.  Yep.  There they were.  My fake teeth, all smashed to smithereens.   They looked brutal and gory like, well, like a bunch of smashed teeth in the back of a beat up Toyota.  I didn’t have to feel like the odd man out this time though.  For one thing, I was 30 and enough of my peers were missing a few teeth at that point.  Plus, I was in Cocke County, Tennessee.  Being toothless, I fit right in out there.  So I made an appointment with the dentist and drank some moonshine. 

                When in Rome…