Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Is the converse true?

If I can't have a bad day in Bell Bottoms does that mean I can't have a good day in plain beige cargo pants? I tested this theory today and let me tell you it was a shit storm from start to finish with the bulk of the abuse laid on Oggy's wallet and lungs.

Awoke to the smell of latex paint and fumes from the painting going on near Oggy's bed. The guy was trying to get work done around my old socks and dirty thoughts.

Next step was to ask advice on how to assemble a pedestal for my wood stove. That's right. It went from a simple stove to a damn set piece from Citizen Kane. Now who is the Pharaoh? But all the metal came from the Wentworth scrap and salvage yesterday where they gave me the stuff for free because I was wearing plaid bell bottom pants. The guy next door who trades penny stocks and counts his nickles and memories all day advises me that the plate metal is no good for my 23 pound stove. "It's flimsy," he says as he leans his 250 pounds of impacted fecal matter on my pedestal. No shit! This isn't true but he thinks so in his bulldozer dreams. The other guy who nearly amputated his finger with a metal grinder laughs at it and says, "he don't want to listen..." which is a clear statement of ignorance and condescension which will always lead me to listen even less. That old bag up in Laconia said the exact same thing to me and she was very close to ending up in a carpet along with the scraps of aluminum heat sink fabricated from Vietnamese slave children. The only people who don't listen are others when I say that I live my life by a vast set of unwritten rules so complicated that I'm still trying to return to Alaska to pick up a piece of trash that blew out of the back of the pick up truck I was laying in as I hitched down to the Kenai peninsula to see eagles. But does anyone listen? No. I'm the stubborn asshole! Ok. Keep up the good work in the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe one day we'll light it on fire and eat cooked crab as they leap from the flaming water.

All of this taking place with normal old pants on as my damn plaid bell bottoms were so wet because the fucking rugs in my van are soaking from an ill-advised bath I gave them.
Yeah, I'll have clean fucking rugs when I freeze to death in Labrador. Idiocy. I'm sure all the Inuit villagers there would look down on me if my rugs were dirty

So, everyone has great advice about how to weld plate metal onto a platform except I've got a leatherman tool and a drill with no battery as tools so how to cut the piece is beyond me. So it is off to another scrap yard where a Maine junk man with a limp like a wounded moose gave me a piece of plate metal from the inside of the naval shipyard prison and with the screws I fished from the inside of a computer housing I think I can manufacture something ON MY OWN. Of course no one wants to help a guy in cargo pants so they charged my ass to take a piece of rusty metal from their bin. Great.

Then the fucking starter on the van starts making sounds like it is mixing glass marbles in a blender and all this reminds me of the traveler's adage which is, "Go. Go. Go." because if you tarry then the universe will close its ugly fingers around your plans and will laugh in glory as you fumble for recovery. If you can't solve problems on the road then you should just stay home and watch Jeopardy. But I can't leave with actual problems so now I'm fucked. Joseph Campbell said, "Follow you bliss" he didn't say "Watch your bliss fade over the horizon until it is out of sight and you have a broken washing machine and the parts will take a week to arrive," which is exactly what I did following the shitty advice of NASA engineers and car salesmen. Bullshit!

So, the starter is fucked...I've got moldy rugs...numerous rusty pieces of metal on the moldy rugs which are now as dirty as they ever were...$60 worth of stainless steel flex pipe that glowed devil red hot when I accidentally fed it particle board with toxic glue...the brakes are juddering...my bank account dwindles every time I go and flirt with the fake tan\hair extension girl with the nice ass at the BBQ shack...and I'm wearing cargo pants. FUCK!

Wish list:
plaid bell bottom pants for every day of the week.
pac boots size 10.5 good for -40 or below. preferably used.
remanufactured starter for 1969 E 200 5.0 liter Gypsy van
tall glass of vodka
new cartilage for spine
a sunny day SO I CAN DRY OUT THE RUGS
a cure for my eyelid affliction that leaves my eyelid skin peeling like a snake in the desert.


My quality of life index is proportionally related to my bell bottom pants index, which is also zero.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.