[307] Screed City

[307]

12/23/2024 Monday. Assorted square things on top of a Mike Kelley book on top of the dryer. The Chalet. Granville, Vermont.

I mean, not to immediately get sidetracked, but 307? 307 was the number of my room at the Holiday Inn Express in Fort Lauderdale last night. 307 is the Wyoming area code. 307 is the number of this screed. Whoa! How blown is your mind right now?

Now back to the laughs.

If you are wondering why I am writing a Screed City at 1a on a Monday, why I am writing the third one in nearly a week, well, I am going to tell you precisely why that is. This shit is fucked up! That's why. Let me take that back a bit, I don't want to create false hopes for how fucked up shit is, but still, things are not normal right now and its getting harder and harder to maintain the thread.

Yesterday was wild, by yesterday I mean two days ago, Saturday. Atlanta is known for bad traffic. Or I know it for bad traffic, mostly because I have been there a bunch of times these last couple years and every time I am there the traffic sucks. I kind of feel like it is known for other things too, like something to do with a the end of a conflict or something, like back in the 60's? If I remember right. The 1860's that is! Zing! But now the city is known for crappy traffic for no god damned reason. The weather is always fine and there is no construction or even tricky roads. I think the people of Atlanta are fond of traffic and like to have lots of it. That is fine by me, but it sucks to drive in, so me and Scott left the hotel at 6a on Saturday morning. The truck filled to the gills with expensive drapes, wonderlust in our hearts, fresh coffee and tea in our bellies, and Florida on our minds. The trip was supposed to take 10 hours. Well, nine hours and fifty two minutes. It did not take nine hours and fifty two minutes, it was 7:31p when we finally pulled into the parking lot of the hotel, fighting the desk clerk about a parking space, or four, and Scott saying to me, "Ya know, Joe, I really don't think I have it in me to..." I stopped him, "No need to even finish that sentence, the thought of going out and trying to do anything makes me sick to my stomach." Thus ended the day. 13 hours of pure driving from Atlanta, Georgia to Fort Laudy, Florida in a 26 foot truck, laden with high end drapes. I mean, between the exceptionally horrible food, the $200 in gas and aside from seeing one measly cotton field and a couple bales of cotton, almost nothing of any interest to see for what must have been nearly a thousand miles, I mean, fuck you capitalism. Fuck you America for all your interstate bullshit. You suck and you should be ashamed of yourself.

But yesterdays morning, Sunday morning, solved all of that. It did not, at all, I am joking very hard right now. It was supposed to be so easy. All we had to do was drive the truck to the big boat and drop off some of the drapes and if we had time, hang them up. But instead we drove around in circles for an hour, then we sat around next to a circle for two hours. Supposedly The Man In The Golf Cart was going to come and help us along. But the problem was that we were driving a rental truck. A thing that meant nothing. Our manifest and the paperwork somehow were superseded by the word Penske. It was astounding. The security was run by the ghost of Kafka. At one moment the fork lift was about to show up, but then we were going to be able to drive the truck in, but then The Man In The Golf Cart was about to straighten things out, but then the fork lift was going to show up and are we sure we were at the right gate? Let me see that paperwork again. Hey Joe, you got your ID? It was brutal. And in the end the guy with the fork lift was who showed up. And he took the drapes and Scott dropped me off at the Boarding Area of the big boat with our rolling plastic suitcases of tools. He then drove around the area looking for a place to park at 26 foot truck while I watched hungover cruisers leave the ship from one door and fresh cruisers enter the ship from another door.

Twenty minutes later Scott arrived in a taxi and we took the plastic suitcases inside the Boarding Area and showed our passports and boarding passes on our phones to the first security person. We got a pink sticker with the number 19 on it and stuck that to our shirts. We went through a metal detector, our suitcases went through an x-ray machine. We walked to the ship. Showed our passports and boarding passes to the second security. Waited for an escort. Walked up a gangway. Showed the third security our passports and boarding passes. Sent our suitcases through another x-ray machine. Went through another metal detector and finally we were on the boat. When we got to the pallet of drapes we had fork lifted off the back of the rental truck, somebody had destroyed the box they had been packed in and left us with a huge mess to try to deal with right as The Publisher, who was driving to Boston with The Grit to fly down to Kentucky messaged me with an emergency to let Scott know that his truck had broken down somewhere on the interstate south of Vermont.

As the emergency unfolded, the logistics of getting the two, two hundred pound drapes grew more and more complicated. The task was quite simple. To get the drapes from one place, the holding area to another place, the stage. A matter of taking two very large and cumbersome floppy objects just a few hundred feet down a very busy corridor, a corridor dedicated to getting the ship ready to set sail in just a few hours. It was nearly noon and I needed to head to the airport by 2p if I was going to make my flight. In theory there were multiple people to help us, but nobody stuck around to actually do any helping. We needed muscle, but it seemed like everyone was looking for an excuse not to lift anything heavy. First they tried to find a cart, then a pallet jack, then the cart came, then the pallet jack, then the pallet moved down the corridor until it couldn't turn and the guy running the pallet jack got pulled off to go pallet jack something more important, then suddenly we were worse off than before because there was less room and the corridor was extremely busy and everyone that was supposedly helping us kept disappearing and the people that remained kept talking to them on their walkie talkies yet nobody came back and the drapes were too heavy for just me and Scott to move and suddenly there were skinny doorways to get the drapes through which we were trying to keep clean and not get ripped but everyone that stuck around was kind of wimpy and didn't want to lift anything heavy and in the end it took us nearly an hour to move two drapes one hundred feet to the atrium lift and get them on stage. By that time nobody knew what to do with them so there was a whole bunch of micro conversations about what could go where and for what reason. But Scott, always the optimist, figured out a way for us to hang one of the drapes and then, when it turned out that two of the other drapes were hanging from the same pipe as that drape, it was possible to hang those drapes as well. The very large drapes, the ones that had given us all the issues would need to be stored until we or somebody like us, probably us, could come back and deal with them. Aside from me needing to get to the airport, the ship was also disembarking at the same time we needed to be heading to the airport.

We worked quickly at this moment. Finished what we could finish. Thanked everyone and spent twenty minutes doing a reverse security maneuver getting off the boat. It was not easy. There were so many special entrance guests in wheelchairs that needed to use the security point we were leaving from that our pole position kept getting shifted until we had to force our way through. Suddenly we were back were we started, but it was twenty degrees hotter out now. We took a car service to rental truck where Scott had parked it on the street. The man, Jorge was very helpful and seemed quite interested in what we were up to. He dropped us off. We put the plastic suitcases in the back of the truck. I took my duffel bag out of the truck and brought it with me to the cab and Scott drove me to the airport in the 26 foot truck. Soon I was waiting in line at security. Unrushed and feeling hungry.

My plane was delayed. I got to Boston at 8:45p. Just as the last bus to West Leb was leaving. A thing that would have been a nightmare if The Publisher hadn't been able to get the truck to the airport parking lot. Feeling harried because I still needed to drive three hours to get back to the Chalet, I rushed to the parking area. I found the hidden key and opened the truck. I threw my duffel bag into the passenger seat and put the key in the ignition. It was seven degrees out. I could see my breath. It had been 70 F when I left Florida. When I turned the ignition there was a clunk and then nothing. Not even the truck trying to turn over. I sighed. Resigned to my fate. I was either going to be stuck in Boston for the night or I was going to have to get a jump start. A thing that should have seemed simple, but it was the Sunday before Xmas and all the parking was full so nobody was coming around looking. I don't know why I did this, there was not logic to my thinking, or at least not conscious logic, but I popped the hood and got out of the truck. I looked at the battery and punched it a few times. I walked back around and saw lights on the dashboard and the key reminder was chirping. I started the truck no problem. Moments later I was driving around the parking lot looking for a place to park so I could pay the parking ticket. Which I had to run back to where I had come from to do. Which meant running up three flights of stairs. Which meant leaving the truck parked in a fire zone. Which meant that I was worried somebody would tow it, but also worried it wouldn't start again.

It started again. Soon I was driving north on another interstate. Where I would make a wrong turn and cost myself 30 minutes of extra driving and also almost run out of gas. But HO HO HO, I made it back to Vom just in time for Xmas!

[insert Celebrity curtain photo]