[255] Screed City

[255]

06/21/2023 Wednesday. Kitchen Microwave. Beaver Haus. Lower Granville, Vermont.

Back in Vom. A quick in 'n' out. Professor Curly 's birthday on Monday, Grit's birthday today, Sea Bass's birthday tomorrow, maybe? Friday? There is a big blowout this weekend, but I need to get back to the City and meet up with Sister Megan and kids and Nana, and then on Sunday Agustin gets to town! Wild times. So it's a quick turn-around. You know, deal with some things, make sure the plants are doing okay, do a Tickler re-up and head back down Friday morning.

The Tickler operation is running at peak efficiency. One hour to bottle and prime, two hours to initiate the brew. Makes enough of the good stuff to keep me cash neutral for at least a month, maybe more. I mean, it's important now. Austerity and all. The salad days are over, sis.

Junior Mint is having exhaust problems again. The fucking flex pipe. I can't believe it. And I don't know if I have to worry about it or not. I know that I do, but I got my oil changed in Bennington on the way up from the City and the guy that changed the oil at this Midas place came into the waiting area like a doctor and spoke to me like a dear family member needed a very tricky and expensive operation in order to save their life. I mean, he was quite serious, but he was also great, he seemed to kind of love his job and spoke with a stutter, told me that my car was a little loud and the flex pipe was compromised and it would cost $240 to fix it. I asked if I could see it. I had been watching through the viewing window, they didn't have a pit, so he had raised the car on the lift, a thing I had never seen Junior Mint do before, he looked so vulnerable, his wheels hanging down, almost drooping, like he was on an operating table. I followed him into the garage. There was a weird family hanging out under another car, doing things I had no idea of what. One of them was smoking. There was a kid running around. The mom was wearing jeans shorts pulled up so high that I don't think I had ever seen a camel toe like that. It was almost like I didn't know what I was even seeing. I worried about her hoo-hah. It seemed like she was asking for trouble. I mean, maybe I had fungal infections on the mind because I had just read an article about a certain pop singer getting one from a particularly suspect pair of yoga pants she had been wearing. But still, I don't know if you should be biting denim, as the kids say, and hopefully she was wearing clean underwear.

But, my god. Junior Mint, I have spent so many hours over the last three years worrying about his undercarriage. You know, all the salt, and then I ran over that thing on the interstate and broke the flex pipe like, oh shit, you know what, I just realized when that was, it wasn't like six months ago like I thought, it was a year and half ago, back when I was doing that racist Albany job with the Union Goons. Fuck, but still, it shouldn't be broken again. But that is not my point, my point was that I finally had a chance to have a look underneath. To examine my fears, and guess what? Fucking immaculate! I'm talking no rust. And it was great to be under there having a look-see. I kind of wanted to ask for some time alone with the car. But the doctor had a little peanut gallery with him now who was making obvious observations and I was making declarations and indictments, and speaking candidly about my fears and anguish over the years, how the car only had four inches of clearance so I had never been able to see underneath and boy was it beautiful. But then the doctor took me on a trip down the exhaust system and pointed out a few places where I was going to have trouble in the future, and I asked how much it would cost to replace the whole thing and he said, Well, there are two converter points that need to be replaced, this one here is what makes me nervous, you see how bouncy it is, how the metal is starting to collapse, that's not good. I can ask Tiffany to get you and estimate. I mean, I had just replaced the muffler, a thing that was kind of expensive, and I felt poor so I said I didn't want to do the flex-pipe fix at the moment. And that was that. I thanked him and went back to the waiting room. Ten minutes later he came into the waiting room and said I was good to go and did I park the car under a tree? And I said, Yeah, and he told me about how his car needs to get a good washing every week or so for the same reason. I can't remember what the name of the tree it was he said he parked under, but I am sure it was the same for me. And I said, Yeah, I was hoping for rain. And he said, No, that won't do, you really need to do a scrub down. And then I remembered why having a car is such a fucking pain in the ass. Especially living in Vermont. I thanked him again, and he told me Tiffany would get me the estimate.

The estimate Tiffany gave me cost more than the car cost. I am living on borrowed time. It was always going to happen, but now it is here. I think the car has quite a few thousands and thousands of miles left on it, the engine is nice and tight and I take good care of the car, but come Winter, I am going to need new snow tires and come next inspection, I will probably have to get that flex-pipe fixed, and who the hell knows how to even think about these prospects. I should probably cut bait as the bridesmaids say and look for a new $3,000 car, but because the salad days are over and work is inchmeal at this point, that's an impossible feat, and in a great big sense of irony, I am sliding right back sideways into poverty. It's wild. What separates working class from middle class. Just a few months ago when I was middle class, I would have just eaten the $240 and floated the next costs until something major happened, but since I am now working class poor, that isn't an option. I am once again choosing between being able to get to work or paying my rent. Paying my bills. And it just gets so fucking exhausting that it is almost funny. And the biggest irony of it all, is that if things worked correctly like the people in charge of deciding whether people like me can afford to live or not, the people that decide how much austerity should exist in the economy, they can't seem to understand that when people like me don't have money, then nobody has money because nobody can afford to buy anything. And that doesn't help the economy at all. I mean, it is all so stupid. AI is not the problem. Robots won't buy shit. I mean, you can program a robot to buy shit, but that defeats the purpose of a robot. Because if you have to pay a robot to do it's job, what is the point?

I spent the day Tickling in the morning and Log Dogging in the afternoon. It was nice to be hanging out at DogBoy Beach again. The Last Good Summer Part Three. It's funny how Vermont changes so quickly. Six months of misery that suddenly becomes a very pleasant and kind of amazing place to be. I planted a pumpkin patch. A thing that luckily the sprouts were only up a little bit when the mowers came and sliced the edges off of the few little guys that were sprouted. Those fuckers. They almost killed my trees last year. And the pine branches that the New Landlord asked me to move, that out of principle, I haven't, they are still piled up and ugly under the giant pine. I don't know what to do. I might move them tomorrow, or I might not, I haven't heard from the guy for months now. I have a rent check for him and I know I owe six months of gas and electricity bills, but I think he might think I am mad at him, which I am not, I am annoyed, surely, the boiler operation is untenable, and doesn't seemed to be high priority for him to fix anytime soon, but good ol' capitalism strikes again, as we are now officially in Summer, that means three months before this problem is a huge problem again, and when I stop paying rent because the heater doesn't work, I mean, I guess we drain the pipes and have cold storage for six months free of cost. Because I am not spending another Winter up here playing will they/won't they with fucking boiler. Three years is already too many years of that. One year was too many.

But it was Grit's birthday. 11! Remember when she turned eight and had such an epic meltdown because everyone telling her happy birthday was making her hot? And it was the height of the Pandemic, and everything was insane? Oh, The Last Good Summer indeed. But tonight we had a fire in-between the Rockwood Freedom and the Rockwood Roo which Sea Bass had christened the BassHole. On a picnic table. We had beef fondue and then chocolate fondue and then a chocolate cake and Grit was exhausted, but then the deserts kicked in and suddenly she was running around the campers while Sea Bass clocked her and Putney dog got over-excited and barked up a lung and me and PC hit the skids around 9p and everything was quite fun and we gave Grit a card with a picture of a horse on it that I bought when me and G went to Woodstock, was it, to buy riding boots last Summer, that said: When I heard how old you were, I nearly choked on my oats. And I got Professor Curly a pair of Crugs, Crock/Uggs, with fur on the inside and the Publisher bought her some cool lights to hook to the Crugs so she can go to the bathroom outside and see where she is walking. I mean, happy birthday, everyone! Glenn Danzig turns 66 on Friday. Which is slightly unrelated, but I got to thinking about and that dude is a millionaire. I don't know why that bugs me, but it does. Not that he doesn't deserve it or whatever, but does he? Does anyone? I mean, I love the Misfits, they were a huge influence on me, but where they? The music is cool, but is it? I just have this weird reaction to what was once a thing that was so, I mean, I find it problematic that money comes to those that are well known just for being well known, and I Glenn Danzig is one of the biggest assholes in the industry, and everyone knows he is a prick and he is also a dum-dum, but that doesn't matter. He has been making music since I was born. 45 years. And a lifetime of work, sure, but I am not sure he could make it today, and I am not sure what is what, really, because I listen to his music now, maybe not as much as I did when I was 16, or whatever, but it is still there, floating around in my mind. And he going from the Misfits to Samhain and then Danzig, and the whole, Mother song, I mean, what went on in the music industry and art and punk between say, 1989 to 2002, I mean, the shift in how things operated, the internet and whatever, I kind of want to laugh about, it's like Cormac McCarthy, RIP, there was a changing of the guard at some point and all of us losers at the bottom didn't know the ship was sinking and so we just hung out in steerage, clueless, and by the time we understood how much trouble we were in, it was too late. But Glenn Danzig somehow getting out just in time, I mean, there is an injustice there that I find hard to swallow. Not that any of you would care. This is my own person beef with somebody you probably have never heard of, or if you have heard of, haven't spent any time thinking about at all, but for me, it has been 30 years watching this guy and to know the he Ok Boomered his career into millionaire status at this point kind of rubs me the wrong way. I can think of hundreds of people more deserving than him, and I do wonder what the secret thing is that makes someone like him become successful, while everyone that is way more talented than him dies penniless, free of healthcare and food, because they weren't absolute narcissists, I mean, that must be the thing, right? Shameless narcissism? Oh, right, you don't know who I am talking about. I'm just saying, the bulldozing affect of the Me Generation into the What the Fuck Generation is really something kind of hard to watch. And this is why I think Patty Smith and David Byrne need to get on a donkey and ride off into the sunset. Not because they weren't seminal and didn't do good things in the 70's and 80's and part of the 90's, but because they are so loud and so irrelevant in the last 25 years that they are riding around on fame alone, and fame does not equal talent, and it was an accident that they are what they have become at this point. The got in under the gun and now everything they do is grandfathered in and because media favors the Status Quo, all you really have to do it be established at this point. Merit plays no part in any of it. You don't really think Travis didn't know that Courtney was pregnant, do you? I mean, another cultural thing that maybe a few of you will get. I mean, nobody announces that they are pregnant until at least three months because people have miscarriages all the time, especially when you are 40, which Courtney is, and you think that Travis didn't know before the concert? If he didn't he is a terrible partner, or they have a very fucked up relationship where Travis just goes around fucking until somebody tells him they got knocked up?

Whoops, I guess that was a diatribe. Sorry. But for the road, here are a few things you should know about.

[Insert John Anderson Straight Tequila Night]

[Insert Glenn Danzig Getting Punched Out]

[Insert Stuck In Lodi Again]

Glenn Danzig is from Lodi, New Jersey.