The Worst Job

I was reminiscing on a job I had a few years ago when I was starving in Central NH. I was living at a halfway house where everyone had diabetes and more DUI convictions than teeth. The plan was to get a job at a surgical tool manufacturing factory. Or Gunstock ski slopes where I could help people get on the lift or teach kids to snowplow. These lofty goals all crashed down as I missed the application window for Gunstock and the surgical tool place took me on a tour that was like a visit to a hellish future of wearing all white clean room gowns and fighting with fine surgical tubing whilst my prostate throbbed in wounded indifference. It was bleak but I swallowed my pride and begged for the job...and eventually was discarded in favor of some old women who could knit like river powered sock mills.

I spent my last savings at Funspot Arcade playing Star Castle and Venture in a desperate attempt to go back in time to 1982.

Intracoastal City, Louisiana

I was telling stories of my life to amuse my coworkers at lunch. They asked me about my limp and if I'd ever hurt my back.
"Oh, yeah. I was in the Merchant Marines and I was throwing a line to another vessel and this was a thick, 2.5'' line, probably weighed 65 pounds, and at the last second the guy turned away and so I held onto the line and all the weight transferred awkwardly to my back muscles and went beyond their limit."
"What happened?"
"I was hurt so bad that I got a fever and curled up on the floor. There's still a bulge in my muscles from that."
"Wait, you were in the Merchant Marines?"

Hammerhead

Bosch Hammer Drill Dis-assembly

Here's a test...that little copper coated item is the ass end of a Lightning Grounding Rod. These are planted 10 ft deep and a Lightning Grounding Cable is attached with an acorn nut. It grounds the frame of generators and cabinets the same way a water clamp grounds the electrical system of a house. In case a bolt of lightning hits the $10,000 cabinet the theory is that the electricity might disperse into the LGC instead of frying everything. I think it will all fry because really how often is something like this tested?

Dragons or Princesses

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” Rainer Marie Rilke

I'm not jaded enough to read this quote without feeling some tug from the wounded depths of my shattered pride. It's almost a little too close to the truth. If Rilke was alive I'd have to go punch his face for exposing me in my skid marked underwear in 7th grade picking my bookbag up off the ground as the pretty girls laughed in knee socks and Rick Springfield T-shirts, knowing that if I didn't make friends with the dragons I'd be alone forever and now after decades of feeding these dragons I've begun to pretend to myself they are princesses...to whisper lies to myself to sleep in my masturbatory wet dreams...alone and wasting away, broken, cultivating a damn private SPCA exclusively for dragons.

But who am I to cry with a belly full of half cooked raw meat and day old crumb cake from the mass produced dungeons in Walmart?

Moving

I've moved but not to Guatemala or Puebla but to the absolute heart of an inferno where only the strong survive. This past week would've broken almost everyone I know. 5000 lbs of concrete mixed by hand in 112 degree heat. Three people passed out in the 107 degree furnace. Roadrunners wept. Lizards cried. I Felt ultimately that the world must have the oil and gas and that my life has been risked for less fruitful reasons so I would either perish or grow stronger. I didn't care either way even as my heart throbbed in diseased abuse and I collapsed in a lump at the end of the day. Sweat poured from my face like someone was dumping water on me. What's strange is that I've spent so much $ on my stupid van that I haven't saved anything in the realm of what punishment my body has taken.

Not pictured are the one-into-two flare stacks I welded on as tailpipes

But Uvalde is a place in my past now. I'm living full time at the man camp near my material warehouse.