(283)
04/25/2024 thursday. Stool on table. Room 407. Home 2 Suites. tampa Bay, Florida.
We got the band back together. three modern day pirates hanging track and drape. Me, Scott and Dirty. How long has it been? Over a decade, I think. I work with Scott all the time. Dirty sometimes. Even earlier this year. And the three of us worked together in 2020, I think. Up in Buffalo. But not like this. Four bucks of blue scaffold caked in stucco. tying borders, hanging track. roping track. It's a good thing I am a drape man, ya know? you know what I mean?
I wrote a play about it. Just finished it last night as a matter of fact. the first draft at least. About two guys, just like us, sent to a public school in Brooklyn to swap out a drape and how easily things in life go horribly wrong. About how sometimes in life all you need is an apology. I have been meaning to write it since probably the last time me and Scott and Dirty did a job like this together. I guess maybe it has been twelve years? Dishwashers were still together. I was starting to go to Norway all the time. G was a puny little thing. Professor Curly hadn't been lured into my zesty enterprise just yet. I mean, I remember the exact day I had the idea. I was working with Billy Burns on a stage in Oslo. He'd come up from Berlin after being bedridden with pneumonia for a few months and he was much larger than he'd used to be. He was wearing a striped long sleeved black and white sweater. the stripes were going horizontal. He joked that the lines on his sweater were supposed to make him look thinner, but he'd gotten the direction wrong so it backfired. While he was talking I remember there was a guy working on a scaffold and I could just see his bottom half and below him was a ground guy who was yelling stuff up to him. A rope tied to a bucket hanging down so he could send things up to the guy doing all the work. And I was all like, that would be something I would like to see on stage. Just two jerks talking about stupid stuff for an hour while one of them is barely visible on top of scaffold and the other one is moving the other one around.
Meanwhile, twelve years later I am working in troy, Ny with Jayboo, building a pipe grid at G's school when the inspiration really hits to finally write the thing. Mostly the idea is animus based. Every time I go out on the road to do a job I find the frustrations of working fascinating. the nature of the work we do fascinating. Because it is so very specific. Esoteric. yet the employers we work for treat us like garbage and don't care about how we feel about anything at all. Which, first of all, let me qualify that last statement. this job we are doing now, the company seems great, the pay is great, the work is safe and clean and they want us to succeed. Even the work me and Scott did in NC and tenn. fell into the category of well paid and want us to succeed, safe and clean? Not so much. What I am talking about is working for companies that don't want to pay you what you're worth, don't care if the job is clean and safe, don't want you to succeed, cant and won't commit to any work before the weekend before the following week. et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And maybe that is all it is? travel. Buying a plane ticket makes the work finite. My, our time is limited. Gives us value to them. If there is never any consequence to how they treat us, then why would they ever change? It's like dating in the 50's or whatever, you can't put out because nobody will buy the cow when the milk is free.
My point is that I think about working all the time when I am working and I find it fascinating, but the second work is done my brain forgets it ever happened. But once again, after many many years, because back in the Aughties, did that ever become a thing? I know that some people call it the Aughts, but it really does sound stupid. I can't wait for the internet to die. Its too much of a succubus. Shit is too shitty, I understand, but can't I just go find the shitty stuff I like instead of your shitty shit being shoved in my face? (says the man whose entire premise of the newsletter he writes is just him complaining about how the world owes him an apology) And another thing! can't5 writ5e t5 or y6 wit5hout5 doing t5his and I can't5 use bracket5s any6more because t5hey6 give me minus signs [- or ]= equal signs. And! Somet5imes, randomly6 my6 key6board makes noises and t5he caps lock but5t5on get5s engaged and I have t5o use t5he one screen key6board t5o make it5 st5op.
In case you have been wondering why I am even worse than normal with my grammer and stuff. It5's what5 It5's.
And I am sure you would rather hear about Florida and what things are like down here than my keyboard and work politics and what kind of play I wrote or didn't write, but that is what I was getting to if you would just let me speak and quit forcing me to backspace every time I wrote a t5 or a y6 or a [- or a]=. All day long I work my fingers to the bone and then I come back to my hotel room and I have to type double time? Are you fucking kidding me?
Florida is weird. It's been weird for quite a while. Where we are working is basically in a swamp, but on top of that swamp is a mound of literal trash that is so large that you can see it from space. I tried to take a picture of it, but it is like the moon, you can't do it justice. the hotel is filled with little girls competing in some cheerleading competition so at the breakfast nook they all have huge hair and are wearing makeup. Seven year olds. there is a car vending machine outside for some reason, even though there is hundreds of square miles of wasteland. All the sidewalks are perfectly constructed but nobody uses them and if you do use them people slow down in their cars slow down to look at you wondering if you they should call the cops because you are too poor to drive and they end abruptly for no reason forcing you to bushwhack until you find where they start again, yet all the intersections have an option to use the crosswalk. We even saw a dude covered in blood who got hit by a car because he crossed in the middle of the road. the grocery stores still use dolphin choking plastic bags and nobody brings their own bags. the construction across the street from the hotel is of two differnt minds. One building is all concrete and the other building is all chemical soaked wood and if you go down the street there is another building that is using only tin studs and drywall. the birds are all weird, half turkey, half goose or just odd sounding and wild colors, I mean, the people seem nice, like actually nice, this guy I talked to in the gas station earlier said he was living the dream when I asked him how he was doing. And then he even complained about his job. And I said that even a nightmare was a dream. And then he fist bumped me after I paid for my two soda pops and walked back to the hotel on the beautiful sidewalks that led to nowhere. I guess what my point is is that I don't know if we are engaged within Florida culture or if this is an outlier, but the truly insane politics this part of America is famous for don't seem to entirely ubiquitous. then again, I didn't say gay a bunch in my wanderings and sexualizing little girls seems okay, and I didn't have to drive 20 hours to, I don't know, North Carolina, to see a gynecologist, but I did see a turtle. And cigarettes are cheap from what I saw when I bought the soda pops and gas is the same price as in New york and you can turn right on red here, so?
(insert car vending machine photo)
(insert Kid Rock)
Get5 in t5he pit5 and t5ry6 t5o love someone
Nobody tells it like you do, Joey 👍