[258] Screed City

[258]

07/14/2023 Friday. Kitchen Microwave. Beaver Haus. Lower Granville, Vermont.

The Publisher's birthday tomorrow! Happy Birthday! We had a little birthday party tonight. Scott has to haul ass to Seattle tomorrow. There was Scott's famous Chicken Piccata, I brought a bottle of Mescal as a present, but it got uncorked directly. SeaBass made apple cake. Prosecco flowed like wine. The phrase, More chipped beef than a toothy blowjob was uttered a few times. We talked about the Aughts and the New York downtown music scene. Grit is at Summer camp, so it was only adults, adults and dogs and a thunderstorm and lots and lots of words. Not a single lull in the conversation. I mean, it was great! Happy B-Day, Miette! You look very young for for 24!!! May all of the fat fattys you suck be HUGE!!!

That last phrase was written three times tonight. Once here, once in the birthday card and once on Threads. I joined threads because apparently I need to say more things on the computer, @joeytrumanwords, follow me if you want to have hilarious good times on the regular. I don't think I understand how the site works, much like I don't understand how anything works, with regard to the computer, including this dumb thing I am currently tickling away on, but it's always the same with me, throw the thing like a hand grenade and run away, hope it works, I mean, it is so frustrating being part of the transition generation, I'm too old to see the internet as something other than an annoying place that I have no choice but to participate in, but too young to have benefitted from the word of mouth system that existed up until the mid-to late-90's.

But I have a plan, you'll see, I'll unveil it soon enough. I started to organize this afternoon. Stay tuned.

My mustache is coming in pretty good. Scott said with my haircut and my mustache I have a bit of Willem Defoe vibe, minus the huge dick and poop jokes. Well, minus the huge dick part. The poop jokes I can do pretty good. There is a honey bucket at the job site, RoachTech where me and Scott goldbricked like maniacs this week, that has the words: There's a dick written on the ceiling! And when you look up the word: Fag is written. I won't lie, I chortled when I engaged in that brilliant social experiment. I mean, it was both incredibly stupid and absurdly brilliant. Plus it has the added measure of, whoever wrote it, probably actually meant it. Even though what made the joke hilarious was that I didn't look up because I was hoping to see a dick on the ceiling, like I was thirsting to look a dick on the ceiling, but because a thing written on a wall in a porta-potty told me to do something and I did it and the joke had a great punchline. I mean, it reminded me of all the ballgazer jokes from the early 90's. Where the homophobia was actually homo-erotic. I want to show you my genitals, but because you look at them that makes you gay. Like, who has the emotional connection to playing a joke on their fellow work-mates in the bathroom that would even think that joke up? I am sure they stole it from another porta-potty from some other job site, but still, the commitment to the thing was kind of astounding to me. And I applaud whoever it was for exposing me to it.

The Roach Tech job site is pretty toxic. In a confusing way. Because there are some pretty good guys on the site, but the place is a shit-show and I think there is a tender underbelly that is creating a work site so chaotic that emotions are quite high. Nobody is making any money, the companies, I mean, yet the workers show up and do what they have to do. I mean, there is this one guy, the guy that is polishing the floors, basically running a sander all day, a giant, cube-shaped, concrete sander, whose eyes are so dark and his emotions so strong, that I have more than once wanted to take him aside and as if he was doing okay, but if I did that on that job site, he would probably punch me in the gut and then later that day, sneak into the Honey Bucket with me and suck my dick as I looked at the word, Fag, written on the ceiling, maybe it was even he that wrote it.

On Tuesday, when we were loading in the lumber for the dance floor the company we were goldbricking for, we needed to get these pallets up to the second floor. And the only way to do that was to unload the pallets from the flat-bed trailer with the Lull and then bring them to this opening in the building and then transfer them to a transitory hoist that was inside the building, a crane with tank treads. And nobody knew how to use the hoist. It had about seven different levers, plus buttons and some other smaller levers, and this dude showed up, who looked like Jose Canseco, the baseball player, like almost exactly, a real beefer of a man, he sat down in the hoist and took a can of chew out of his pocket, shoved three inches of the chaw into his bottom lip, and sat there trying to understand the operations, spitting onto the floor. And he wasn't the only one chewing. Chawing. The whole group of workers seemed to be chawing. The drywallers, the iron workers, even the floor guys. I kept seeing chaw spittle on the ground, thinking it was just one guy, the Jose Cansecco guy, but I was wrong. Ten years ago I would have just ignored it, thinking it was stupid, that shit is the stupidest shit you can do to your mouth. Aside from the cancer, it just destroys your mouth. I know, from experience, but now that I have receding gums, I cringed every time I saw a dude slug a chaw under their lip. You're going to regret it, I would think. Thinking I should do some sort of intervention, but see above with the guy whose eyes scared me.

Yesterday when me and Scott were leaving, the head dude, who is this very sweet older man that is very close to retirement, whose body is breaking down pretty quick and is very much over it all, who hates being on his feet all day and has seen everything, 10 times a day, every day for who knows, 35 years, me and Scott were about to use the Honey Buckets before we got on the road for six hours and the head dude creaked over and said to me:

"Hey, can you do me a favor, if you have to pour water on site, could you please not pour it next to the concrete partitions, just do it anywhere else, please."

"Oh, shit," I said, "I'm sorry, when I did that I saw the look you gave me. I apologize."

"Hey, don't sweat the small stuff. I like your chin strap." My chin strap is a green shoelace that I tied to my hardhat to keep it on my head when I look up at the ceiling. Because, as a rigger, I always have to look up, and when I look up, my hardhat falls off unless I have something to hold it onto my head. In the moment I was impressed that he was giving me a compliment. You know, dealing with men, compliments don't come easy. But then he turned to Scott, who has a very nice hard hat, one that has an actual chin strap, who looks professional, and he said, "Can you imagine if he wore what you are wearing? With that big ol' head of his?"

"Yeah, it's certainly something." Scott said.

"Have a good night, guys." It was 3:00p. Have a good night, guys. I mean, I had been up since 5a, I didn't know when Scott got up, but it was still only the middle of the afternoon, and sure, we had a six hour drive to get back home, but still, have a good night, guys was a strange statement to make. We got on the road and drove for four hours to the shop and then exchanged the work van for Scott's car and drove back to Vermont.

When we got off of the interstate we were driving next to a lake and suddenly all traffic stopped. It was confusing, because Vermont doesn't have traffic, and lately there has been some pretty bad flooding, so it was only confusing in the sense that the confusion was, what disaster has befallen this part of the state? We waited for a while. The cars in front of us were turning around. One by one. There was a man in high viz directing traffic, he was a very large man wearing overalls. When it was our turn in line he looked at Scott and said:

"Oh, by the looks of your mustache, I can tell you are a man who knows what is goin on. Where are you heading to?" Scott told him and the guy directed us on how to avoid whatever it was that was causing the traffic stoppage. We turned around and back-tracked for a few miles and then came back around to the other side of the emergency. Whatever the emergency was, it was not quite clear.

My point is that, in both of those situations Scott was complimented. Once for doing nothing other than having a better helmet than I had, and once for having a mustache. I had a mustache too, what am I? Chipped beef? I mean, I was denigrated during the first interaction and totally ignored during the second one. I can't catch a break!

It's been some wild times up here. The rains, the flooding. On Monday, before Scott and I hauled ass to New York, Professor Curly and I watched as the river broke the bank and started pooling around the Dog House. She was supposed to head to New Ham, her father is doing better, but hospitals are hospitals. We spent the day looking out the window, watching the rain, watching things get worse and worse. I went into the basement and removed everything that I thought was worth saving. Old art things, old, useless computers that have useless writing on them but things I feel like need to be held onto until I can move on from the past. My DISHWASHERS archives. The idea was that the water would keep rising and eventually the basement would become flooded. And as much as I would love to be free of the past, it is one thing to watch it all burn to the ground, it is another thing to see things slowly become inundated and then ruined. I have no sense of sentimentality about any of it, aside from a few singular items, but the wholesale destruction of everything down in the basement was not an option. Which meant the living room became a mausoleum of my past and what a depressing past it was. Too many ideas and not enough follow through. The life of a working-class artist. Dusty chaos, stacked and crammed into milk crates and reusable bags. I mean, I went to Middlebury today to buy plastic containers to deal with my shit, spending $75 on three clear receptacles that will hold the shit that I don't need for another indefinite amount of time until I don't need them somewhere else. But so what? I sure the hell am not going to do a death cleaning during a flood-storm. I mean, one of the things, the best thing I never did, was this writing project. From 10 years ago. I took every page of the book I had written, it was called, GRAV3DIGG3R, it's a shit book, it only has value because it was me, myself, moi, teaching myself to write a novel, and I had written it out free-hand, on very large and elongated pieces of paper, some of them green, some yellow, some white, and I cut them into strips, there is hundreds of these things, cut into strips, then taped back together with packing tape, and I was going to find a wall, a wall big enough to secure all of the papers, the hundreds of papers to make a tapestry of what it looked like to write a novel, even if the novel was garbage. The art work, to me, seemed like it would have a Jackson Pollock feel to it, consistency in greatdth. Like, what makes you appreciate his work, when you see it in person is not that it makes you understand the chaos of the world or whatever, I mean, I won't lie, I never really understood what his work brought to the table, artistically, his paintings look cool, and he isn't pretentious, so I like that, and as a person, he was kind of a big fuck-up, but what blew my mind seeing his shit in person was his consistency, and how fucking huge his works were, or are, like the scope of whatever vision he had, what made him good, was that he was able to hold it together for the whole piece. He was making novels on paper or whatever, I guess canvas, shit, now that I think of it, I don't even know how the hell that fucker made his paintings aside from layering his paint drips and splurges and slugs. Did Jackson Pollok have gigantic canvasses as well? How the hell did that work? I guess I need to look it up! Thank god for the internet!

My point is, all those dumb writings were cut up and taped back together and they are ready to be attached to a wall and the wall has to be huge and because I wrote them all in the same year and used the same paper, using my same writing style, when it happens, if it ever happens, it will have the same consistency as a Jackson Pollock painting because that is how art works, but because it hasn't happened, I have a stack of cut-up, taped together writings in a laundry basket that used to be down in the basement of this flood vulnerable house, that are now in the closet of this flood vulnerable house, on the second floor. And, one day, when I can find a wall big enough to show them to the world, I will do it, and the working class artist will prevail! Until then, I have to get back to work and figure out how to pay my rent.

Speaking of which...[These last few words, Speaking of which, are not supposed to mean, I need to get back to work, I mean them like, Speaking of which, my Landlord, that fucker, but I need to go to bed and it's nearly 1a now, and I don't want to go into it, well, I do, but I don't have the time, and I have so much more to say, but I will leave things right here for now. Sorry? My bad?]

[Insert Table Photo]

[Insert Police Story]

More chipped beef than a toothy blowjob.