[309] Screed City

[309]

12/28/2024 Saturday. Laundry hamper on top of kitchenette. Room 513. Sandalwood Suites, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Its like the olden days all over again! All these screeds. Maybe that UNSCRUBSCRIBE guy will come back and yell at me again. The irony about him is that he still sends manuscripts to Whiskey Tit all the time and asks for them to be read and The Publisher has no way to UNSCRUBSCRIBE him. Irony? Double standard? Either way he can suck a big fat fatty.

Back in Fort Laudy, like Pitbull and Ke$ha. This place though, Florida. I am not rich enough or poor enough to appreciate it, apparently. On the interstate earlier there was a bicycle in the middle of the road. Just random. Who the hell loses a bicycle on the interstate? Part of me thinks that somebody was trying to ride across the road and the chain jumped off the sprocket and instead of getting off the bike and pushing it across they just ditched it and ran to the other side. I mean, there was a guy walking along the highway smoking a cigarette and looking sketchy as hell. For once it wasn't me.

Speaking of sketchy as hell, earlier today when I was inside the boat waiting for Scott to deliver the goods to loading port I watched the cruise ship cops walking a middle aged man wearing handcuffs behind his back to what I assume was an interrogation room. Once again, for once it wasn't me. That's wild though. I asked the liaison and his assistant if maybe he was a stow away. They told me they don't handcuff stow aways. I asked his assistant if they instead just put them to work? He laughed. A non answer that meant, maybe they just put them to work? I asked Scott later, at lunch at the buffet on Deck 14 what happens if we were to accidently be stuck on the boat when it disembarks [because we have such a limited time working when the ship is docked] he said, "Nothing good." I kind of would like to find out what happens if we don't get off in time. Maybe they send you to Shanghai like in the olden days? Which would be crazy. And I don't know if that is true about being Shanghaied, but supposedly someone would get you drunk at a bar and then your barstool would drop down into the basement of the bar with you on it and next thing you know you are on a boat heading to China. True or not, life used to be way more interesting than it is now.

Today was easy for once. To negate Michael O-Mahaney's creed that the only easy day was yesterday. Well, easy might be the wrong word, but it wasn't miserable entirely, see above where we got lunch. The drive to the ship was interesting. Cape Canaveral, where they used to shoot all those shuttles into space before Douche Central colluded with Capitalism Central to make a disgusting amalgam called, Fuck All of You Now and Forever the Rich Win What Can You Do? Central. Free Luigi is one way to go about it. Just sayin'.

But the drive was easy, I got onto the boat easy, Scott unloaded and parked easy, the goods made it inside easy, the people helping us were easy, the goods got onto the stage easy, the goods we installed were easy, and in the morning I was just a Drape Boy, but by the afternoon, I had become a Drape Man. I am like Pinocchio that way. I guess. But instead of all my lies making my nose grow, I expand in other areas that I suppose you know where I could probably be going with this. But I won't because somebody invited teenagers to this screed party and I do not want to scandalize them. Although I should maybe think about doing a Screed City After Dark for the hardcore amongst us who really like to get it on. I know who you are, you perverts. Just direct message me or whatever, we can work it out.

This job is endlessly bizarre. It is surely relentless, but it is finite. We can't get onto the ship before 9a. Well, 8a, if things go well. And we have to leave the ship by 2p otherwise we get Shanghaied, supposedly. Theoretically. Hopefully. Which means we can only do so much. And you would think moving a pallet of drapes from a port hole loading dock to the back of a boat would take just a little bit of time. What? Two hours, max? Done by 11a and then see ya later, suckers, we're moving on to the next port! Ah, but then you decide to hang some drapes. And Scott is always the optimist. And me, well, I find work the most satisfying when I can wad it into a ball and shove it up a donkey's ass. You know? To go back to Douche Central getting together with the Capitalist Cunts. This might be one of the most odd jobs I have ever done, but it is just a stones throw as the bridesmaids say from working at Micky D's. Replace the goods with complicated french fries and suddenly the wheels fall off. I mean, watching the dock workers loading and unloading the ship is astonishing. There is so much commerce we have to navigate around that quite literally our job is to just get a very large box from mid ship to the stage. Six times. Over six days. $10,000 in labor. $10,000 in transport. $10,000 in operational costs. Half a million dollars worth of complicated french fries. And these motherfuckers claim we can't raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour because businesses will fail? I don't want to laugh, I would instead prefer to puke. I am not saying we are unskilled labor, I am just saying it is astonishing how much commerce there is in America that most of us have almost no ability to benefit from even though money is literally just falling from trees. They own the trees and the trucks and the processing centers and the boats and the hotels and the gas stations and the gas and the food and the government and all we are is just disposable labor? I am not saying Scott and I are unskilled, but there is a very thin line between us doing our job and somebody figuring out how to take that job from us. And right now, even though our daily work, extrapolated to a daily work schedule where if we were to do this shit five days a week, fifty two weeks of the year, we would be considered upper class, nearly $160,000 a year, that is truly peanuts in comparison to what and who we are doing this work for. Free Luigi is all I am saying.

But it was nice today. All, well almost all of the fork lift drivers on the dock were women. A good sign for things to come. Good union workers too. Their job being mostly moving pallets of Solo cups and toilet paper and napkins and frozen shrimp and ice cream from the back of a truck onto a ship. Where all the men, mostly, move that same shit from one place to another place down in the bowels of the ship while thousands of hungover non-Americans disembark and thousands of soon to be hungover Americans embark.

And meanwhile, we are not staying in a Holiday Inn like normal. There is one next door, oddly enough, but Scott did a earth view look upon the hotels in the Fort Lauderdale area and this Sandalwood Suites had the biggest parking lot. A good place to put our 26 foot truck with hundreds of thousands of dollars in drapes. When we checked in the man at the front desk took all of the money Scott gave the hotel, three nights, two rooms, nearly $1,800 and when he asked Scott to tell him the make and model of the vehicle we were driving Scott told him what it was. Suddenly there was a problem. We were taking up too many parking places. Scott pointed out that there was no mention of parking on their internet site. The man, quoting policy, declared that it didn't matter, that there was no way we could park the truck in the parking lot. When Scott pushed back the man said we could park for one night but then we would have to park the truck elsewhere the following two nights. When Scott pushed back the manager came out and said the same thing the man had said. When Scott asked her to call the owner of the hotel she stuttered and tried to find the words to explain their situation. She did not have any words to explain their situation. All she said was:

"We can't call the owner of the hotel. That is impossible."

All that meant was that they, the man and the woman, were purposefully telling us that we could not park the truck in the parking lot for absolutely no reason. The choice was theirs and they were choosing to be assholes about it. Keep in mind that we have had this truck in our possession since December 20th. Eight days. In those eight days it has spent every single night parked in the parking lot of a hotel. In Florida. All I am saying is that it was on purpose. The system wants us to fight each other over minor details so we don't notice we are all getting fucked by a reality that has so much money a single person can be worth half a trillion dollars and the government will just keep giving such an asshole all he wants because somewhere along the line we decided rich people were smart people when in reality rich people are just the most biggest pieces of shit out there and somehow we have to suck on their big fat fattys because we can't get our bicycles across the interstate because the chain jumped the sprocket and now we are all just sketchy as hell smoking cigarettes walking next to the highway wondering what to do.

[insert pallet jack image]