[246] Screed City

[246]

04/17/2023 Monday. Kitchen Cardboard Box. Hampshire House. Portland, Maine.

Back in Portland and it is raining, real original. Been getting some conflicting information on this job of mine. I am either living the dream still or living the nightmare. Supposedly the work has dried up. Meaning: I am too expensive to hire for piddely shit. I am the fat. Cut the word. The word is fat. The irony though is that by laying me off they may save a few dollars short term, but it will end up costing them way more than they would pay me in the long term. Waste dollars to save pennies, as the bridesmaids say. And whatever, I am not upset about it, it is just facts. It is the reason I have the job in the first place. Half-ass temporary solutions to long term problems lead to sub-par work that WILL have to be dealt with later. Then again, my bosses boss told me that I shouldn't even be doing what I am doing this week, instead I should be working on the bar I started building last fall. The one with the wires that needs a bar top. So, make of that what you will. It sounds like accounting and production are having a communication problem that I am somehow caught in the middle of.

I took the pretty drive here yesterday. It was kind of hilarious. In a Vermont-style way. It's mud season right now, which means the ground is thawing and making havoc on the land. The dirt roads especially. Ruts on top of ruts on top of frost heaves. I knew this when I started driving, like, I didn't take the Plunkton road cutoff because of it, like, poor Junior Mint gets high centered on a cigarette butt. But for some dumb reason I thought the Northwest side of Roxbury Mountain road, the dirt side, would be be fine. And boy oh boy could I not have been more wrong. You see, the road at the very top instantly turns from asphalt to dirt. Goes from very steep uphill to very steep downhill. And man oh man! The car started bucking like one of those cars from the rap videos in the 90's, you know the ones, I don't know what you call them, they have the inflatable shocks or whatever, where one side can go up or down, or whatever. I am not doing a very good job here, but maybe you can picture it. Insanely stupid and hilarious. Like those. But I was instantly in it too far to do anything about it. The bottom was scraping and the sound of metal on rock and I was bouncing around like a rag doll and slamming on the brakes but there was no where to turn, I mean, I it was so very sudden that I thought I might end up rolling down the mountain, like I was going to be bounced off the road. I don't know how I pulled it off, but I did. After that I spent the rest of the decent zig-zagging and praying that I didn't get stuck, because there was no turning back at this point.

I made it through though. How? I don't know, but I did. But then, because I apparently don't learn lessons, I tried to take the Lover's Lane cutoff and followed some car in front of me that got about 300 feet in and stopped, started backing up. They had about a foot more clearing on the bottom than I did, so I didn't even pretend I could make it. So we both ended up backing up all the way to the highway again. After that I was fine. There were no more dirt roads and the drive was quite pleasant.

Last week was kind of rough. The job itself was kind of satisfying, but the job site was brutal and the work was half-price and it made me question what the hell am I doing with my life. Construction sucks. If you are thinking of getting into it, don't. Sure, it is basically recession-proof work, but you have to be there 100% of the time to do it. There is no working from home. It is loud as hell. Dusty as hell. The men on the job site are goons. Although, I mean, I don't even know what I mean, I mean, [Joe S, looking at you. Also, have fun in Berlin, I wish I was there still :(] But there was this guy, I don't think I can capture him, but maybe, I'll try. He was so very obnoxious, in a way that, I mean, he was a wagon boi, first off, his butt was huge, but in a very strange way, I am not body shaming him, he just had this great big butt that he swathed in khaki pants, and he wore a white t-shirt, but he also was very handsome, like not traditionally handsome, maybe striking is a better way of putting it, he had very intense dark blue eyes and very large and black eyebrows, he was young, like mid 20's, and he chewed, like constantly chewed, like eight hours a day chewed, a mouse-sized wad of bubblegum. All while doing drywall. The mud stuff. And he would stare at you. Chewing that gum, with those intense eyes and that huge butt. I couldn't figure him out. He was too obnoxious by half. It gave me an idea for a screenplay he was so unbelievable.

We were working at a college. And the pencil pushers that came in to observe our work weren't the usual client. Like they weren't just engineers or whatever. The company men who's job it is to make sure the work matches the drawings. These were people invested in the outcome of the space we were building. Academic types is what I am getting at. But this obnoxious drywaller, I started to have some ideas about, because one thing about this job site is that they let you play music, a thing that isn't usual because it causes too much friction between the workers, but on this site it was okay. So you were constantly hearing competing noises. Like one bunch of jerks would be playing country music and one bunch of jerks was playing rap music and one bunch of jerks was playing classical rock. So like you were constantly being assaulted by genres depending on where you were going. And the idea, I guess was that this guy, the Bubblegum Chewer happened to have perfect pitch and a vocal range that was unheard of in the opera community, and because he was working on this kind of job site, he would mimic the shit that was playing and blah, blah, blah, it turned out he was a vocal genius and one of the pencil pushers discovers him and blah, blah, blah, Hollywood, but the guy was this obnoxious fucker. With his wagon boi ass and his striking eyes and his bubblegum. I don't know, it would be a movie. Good Will Hunting style, but instead of him being reluctant to get into the business of whatever it was the person who discovered him wanted him to get into, he would just be a great big pain in the ass, leaving everybody wondering whether or not it was worth it to expose his genius.

[Insert Drywaller Graffiti]

URNALS! And they are hard to relight! Signed by the Drywallers! GOLD

Also, I did have some good talks with Jayboo on the way back to the shop on Friday. Four hours on the interstate can do that to you. I mean, in another way that art and life can overlap. The same way that going on Road Trips with Scott gave me a million ideas. Because it is nice to spend time with smart people and talk about things even though you are making $11 an hour driving a box truck from Rochester, NY to Queensbury, NY. It hits all the things, the working class drudgery. Jayboo used to be a writer. It turns out. I don't know, spending four hours talking about literature on the interstate in a box truck after working all week at a job site that was insanely intense, there is a little bit of the human condition floating around in there. Modern times.

On the other hand. This new guy, Justin, he is good. He is smart and learns things and remembers things and he doesn't need to be retrained every morning, and he doesn't eat pizza at lunch that makes him spend an hour in the Honey Bucket and he doesn't get so wrecked from being away from his family that he drinks a twelve pack of beer in his hotel room at night, smoking and playing video games that he is a zombie the next day at work. Meaning, it was odd to have an actual third person on the job. And this guy, Bill, who reminds me of Jim Findlay, who was running the job, being competent and cognizant and present and affable, I mean, it was a weird scene. Weird to get work done without the very basics being an issue. I even taught the guys my sliding bowline trick that somebody at some point said to me: That aint a bowline. To which I responded: You're missing my point. And yes, it is a bowline. Just because a knot doesn't get made the way you think it should get made doesn't make the knot untrue, jerk. And then we wrestled.

I killed two chipmunks. I feel bad about it, but it happened. There is a gap under the door of the garbage room and they apparently come in there to eat the mouse poison. But because I also have the rat traps in there, one of them got t-boned by the trap, which led to the next one to smell the t-boned one on the trap, and then they got snapped up, and now I don't know what to do. I guess I need to make the garbage room rodent proof. But, motherfucker, I am so sick of Vermont. The boiler is leaking. That was the problem. And since I am not there, dealing with it, I don't know what is happening. For all I know the heat has been off since yesterday. And sure, it is warmer now, but it is still freezing at night, and my poor plants, and there is a 36 gallon container collecting water by the boiler, but who the hell knows whether the New Landlord will go down there and empty the thing like I asked him to do. Which, I mean, it's his house, so I would think he would, but that lazy asshole got a tummy ache the last time I asked him to do something for me. AND IT IS HIS OWN HOUSE. Let your own pipes freeze for all I care, but really? Capitalism, baby! As long as I keep raking it in, there is nothing to see here. Can we somehow bring Bernie Madoff back from the dead, please?

Anyway. I am in Portland all week. Doing a job that doesn't need to be done, or, it needed to be done three years ago, but is now actually getting done. I am doing a permanent job that had been temporary for three years now. And I am not complaining, that is how the economy works, and they pay me very well, and I very much enjoy the situation, don't get me wrong, but everything is all mis-communication. I killed the golden goose because I flew too close to the sun. But I had no plans to fly towards the sun. My plan was to float around the moon and plug a few holes here and there and do some projects that needed someone like me, a jerk that has been doing this bullshit for a quarter of century, could do without thinking about, but because I stood out like a boner in spandex, as the bridesmaids say, I was the first to be snipped. It's my own damn fault. Why don't I listen to myself?

[Insert New Tasting Room Photo]

I just finished writing a whole book about it. Satire/allegory/noir. Which, at the moment I feel pretty good about, but I am sure I will change my mind when the editing comes around, but still, work is a motherfucker, you just can't win. And the thing is, I am not trying to win, I just want to make money when I need to make money and when I don't, well, I don't go to work. I haven't exactly taken a vow of poverty, but I have decided that making art is just as important as working, so, what? 50/50? Three hours of writing each night, and eight hours of working each day, when I need it? I don't know. The more I try to have a good work/life balance the more shit gets fucked up. I guess I should just get a job. But then what? Professor Curly's career is taking off like gangbusters. I need to have the free-time and the money to chase that red-headed force of nature all over the world, right? I sure as shit aint going to wait around for her to come back home, right? I don't mean to victim blame here, can't I have a job where I can work from home? Wherever, "Home," might be? She really needs to start making shit-loads of money. So much money that my wimpy prevailing wage nonsense becomes stupid. Where things become just an issue of pride. Like, poor me, I need to have a job so I don't feel cucked. I would love to be cucked! As long as it meant that I didn't have to make $11 an hour driving a box-truck to Rochester, New York.

But then again, I would still find a way to complain about it. I just can't win. Woe betide. I don't know. I am an idiot, and I am going to bed.