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Jay
Alien Abductee
Vatican City
2279 Posts |
 Posted - 06/10/2004 : 10:39:38 PM
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Last time, it was Johnny Cash...Now it's Ray Charles. Shit. The two old guys I wanted to see before they died...died...
You can't deny Ray Charles. Don't touch the merchandise, a Ray's Music Exchange Representative must be present.
Too much bullshit, man. I'm sick of people bullshitting me and bullshitting eachother.
So, I'm on summer vacation. It's no big deal. I have a job, two or three days a week at the most, 10 bucks an hour, busting my ass for rich people that really don't give a flying fuck how sweaty and thirtsty and miserably burned out I am as I rake their driveway to make it look "pretty."
This summer opened up with an argument with a good friend of mine, now we're kind of...I don't know...It's one of those. Hence my bullshitting comment. Of all people, why'd she have to do that? Oh fuck it, who the hell wants to hear that?
But uh, Tuesday...God dammit, it was hot. I slept for maybe two hours the night before, I was stoned in the black light, listening to Neil Young...Well anyway, I woke up from some crusty dream, about nine in the morning...I did not feel alive. I felt as if I had been crudely prodded through some god damn Play-Doh fun factory with a rotten carrot by some god damn six year old Korean orphan with fang-like baby teeth, a demonic grin stretching across his little face as I am ommited forth in tiny noodles of flesh-colored matter. I lurched downstairs like some kind of pissed off elderly man with hip problems and fetched a small glass of fake fruit juice, grabbed a smoke or two, and went back upstairs. I was just beginning to curl back up with my blankee, noticing how insanely wonderful the fresh breeze felt as it made it's alergin-filled way through my open window, over my body (which has a consistency of raw pork that has been put in a blender for three hours), and into my dripping nostrils. It didn't matter, it's summer, after all. Well, just as my usual paranoid thoughts were being replaced by the sound of Chris Whitley's churning National Steel, I hear my brother pull into the drive and charge like a wounded buffalo into the house.
(very distantly, for full affect play "Indian Summer" in the background)
"MOM! Where's Jay? I need help!!!"
(mumbling...mumbling)
"knock on his door, he's AWAKE...do I need to make him a lunch?"
"Naw, this'll only take an hour or two."
(creaking stairs, footsteps, dog barks, coughing)
(KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK)
"JAY!"
"Whathfuckdiyewant?"
"Come on, man, gotta work today!"
"Shit."
So I get up. Again. Pull on a belt, put my Smucker's shirt on. Smoke a smoke, toke a hit from the 'ol steamroller, and I'm off.
Well, there's a pile of gravel on the end of the drive, there's a pile in the middle of the drive, and there's a pile in the turnaround. This house looks like the kind of place that hot chick next to you in English lives, but she doesn't live here. Oh well, you can imagine these things.
Matt tells me to start leveling out the drive, and then to start spreading the gravel in the turnaround. So I rake a little, then grab the shovel. I toss gravel my the shovel load around a fairly large turnaround, rake it even, ya know, the whole shitty bum deal that a landscaping job is. Now it's ten or eleven in the morning. I'm starving. I'm tired, I'm burned out. I have a gallon of very warm and chlorinated water to soak my torn and parched throat. It took maybe an hour to shovel this gravel around. Matt had left me to go do some other work, so I was there...alone. I looked up at the house from time to time, and almost every time I saw the matriarch of the household, staring at my from various windows (albeit one at a time), moving the blinds over to the side with one wrinkled and cracking hand. I was terrified. Of course, my terror turned to embarassment as my dad, with good intentions, pulls in (how in the hell did he know where this was?) and shows me a bag of McDonalds. Oh well I think, it's food. So I sit in his FourRunner, eating double cheesburgers, all the while fully aware that the woman is probably watching...plotting...schemeing...to cause me unimaginable harm as soon as my father leaves. I scoped the manicured lawn for an escape route should such an event occur...I found only one. Because I was so fuckin sick of gravel, I did not want to charge full speed down the drive. Plus, this action would only encourage the woman to chase me full speed down the road in whatever the hell kind of machine she kept hidden under a camoflauge tarp in her garage. So just as Duane finished his slide solo on...shit...ONE WAY OUT!!...I found my designated flight path. I'd scare the shit out of her by running AT her...then I'd hightail it through the woods like a lumberjack on speed until I got to the nearest road, which is Girdled. (Interestingly, this was the very first road laid in the Western Reserve...it was, for a period of about eight years, the western-most roadway on the continent.) So that was my plan. It didn't matter. It was noon, I wanted to get the hell out of that place and smoke the rest of my reefer. Well, I was there for another SIX hours. Well, I had a long break when Matt's partner called him in Kirtland, about twenty minutes away (see my post, Kirtland Cult Killings). The wheelbarrow tire had gone flat.
So, by six in the evening, I was tired as all fuck. I could not stand. It was so horribly hot and humid outdoors and I could scarcely inhale. We finished, though. The driveway was three feet wider in some places than it was in others, but neither of us really gave a shit. I got out of there.
Dad took me to Borders, I got Chris Whitley's "Anthology," and I love it dearly.
Home Is Where You Get Across, muthafucka.
Rest in Peace Ray, you will be missed. |
"Hey man...you smell..."
"Oh yeah?"
"yeah...like dinner..." |
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dan p.
Alien Abductee
Uganda
3776 Posts |
Posted - 06/10/2004 : 11:04:19 PM
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i don't think anyone saw that coming.
particularly not him. |
death to false metal. |
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PJK
Alien Abductee
USA
4159 Posts |
Posted - 06/20/2004 : 11:04:04 AM
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WOW Jay, how did I miss this, gosh I have been missing a lot of threads lately.
As always, very entertaining. Now not to sound like Pollyanna but even though landscaping is hard physical work, I think it would be right up your alley. I mean, you shovel, no one bothers you, you are outside, even though it's hot, but those are just the kinds of situations where you can put your body on "autopilot" and let your mind and spirit soar!
(there are always worse places to be, like Iraq or now Sudia Arabia)
Oh and if you get to feeling down on a job, you can always just think $$$$$$$, that usually makes up for it. I think for you $10/hr is pretty good. More than most kids make.
Can't wait to read the next chapter in the life according to Jay! |
"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!"Friedrich Nietzsche |
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victorwootenfan
Alien Abductee
USA
2128 Posts |
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Sorry I have to do this...
