Lobster Blues

 Next time your lobstah roll is next to your gray whiskers I want you to think of my arthritic toe and chew long and hard on that monster from the deep. I'd like to type out a nice essay on this lobster topic but I have no time and my fingers hurt too much.

They say blues can not be faked because it is the music of the broken man.

Well, nothing like a week in the lobster processing biz will turn you into a broken man. And if your fingers are so swollen that you can't play a single note on the guitar without searing pain then that's even better. Why do the cotton pickers like Howling Wolf play and sing so well? Because they don't give a shit and their fingers hurt and they are beaten and poor and disrespected and you get what they feel. I started playing this song and it was like someone else was singing and playing, not a pretty kid who wants to be Jackson Browne. It's because my fingers are so swollen and bleeding and cracked and my voice is weakened and my neck is still throbbing. That's 62 hours in 5 days, my fucking friends. Give me shit about my lazy ways and I invite you to come down to the pound during holiday rush season and put it 62 hours. Better yet, I want you to go pick up two stacked car tires and throw them across the garage...FOR 19 STRAIGHT HOURS...and I will stand next to you and blast Slayer and Metallica in your ear and call you a motherfucker as I rip two packs of marlboro lights (along with 6 other chain smokers). You do that and then you can write your own message to me on toilet paper and shove it down my throat. Until then, you will need to shut the fuck up and keep your opinions to yourself because you'll be a fraud and a fucking asshole. "Use your big boy voice" is how the lobstermen describe it. That's my big boy voice. shut the fuck up. this is my domain. I'm lord of this castle. Me. Oggy. Not you.

They say, "Lobster processing ain't rocket science." Yeah? Well, I've worked with engineers in their calculator world and I can say that "rocket science ain't lobster processing"

If You Don't Like It You Can Suck My Dick PART 1

"I love pill whores," shouts Bill, my new coworker. "I love dirty pill popping whores who strip on the side and fuck in the middle!"
We're standing in a cold second story apartment complex under construction. I don't know what I'm doing but I need the money and as long as I don't break a window or lose my temper then I'll probably get paid.
"Do you have carpentry experience?" the temp agent had asked.
"You bet. I wrote the code book for the White House. Frame to finish," I had lied with a straight face, desperate for money, tired of my principles getting in my way. So I ended up here at these apartments, on the clock, wasting money looking for my hammer, living the dream like the roofers from Honduras...
"If you don't like it you can suck my dick," Sings Bill as the Blood for Blood song coming from his phone speaker reaches a guttural climax.

I smile uneasily and motion my hands down.
"Ok," I whisper in my library voice.
I can hear workers downstairs banging nails in blue plastic power outlet boxes. Latino roofing crews put more Americans out of work on ladders outside. Their banging on the roof comes in morse code patterns: bang-bang-bangbangbang.
"I don't give a fuck if people hear. I'm a recovering addict," says Bill. "That means I smoke crack off the clock. Hahaha! Look!" Bill reviews his contact list in spite of my obvious discomfort. "I can get pills from him, meth from him, that skank still owes me money, cocksucker, cocksucker....pot...whatever."
"Ok. So you have contacts. I get it," I say with a fake smile.
"Fuck that. I don't deal no more. I used to pimp pill whores out of my pad. Three fucking years while I was recovering from my bulging disk. Pills and pimpin'. Fucked up, yo! I got pictures..."
Our other coworker, Nick, has been grinning nearby and suddenly pipes up in a clear and loud voice, "When I was serving time, because my public pretender was a jerkoff...I..."
Bill interrupts him as though he wasn't even speaking, "Look at this bitch. Look at that snatch!"
He shows me a self taken duck lips picture (in a mirror (could be fake)) of a twenty something girl. She's got a tattoo "BITCH"  on the area above her panty line and below her navel.
"Her tattoo says 'Bitch'," says Bill, in case I missed it. He scrolls up her thin (devoid of subcutaneous fat, indicative of meth use) hip-less stripper body.
"What's her name?" I say, to humanize her in my mind.
"Jen. Her stage name was Kitten or Charlene or something...She was a rock hard stripper/prostitute."
"Escort," I clarify. "They like to be called escorts."
"I don't give a fuck," says Bill in what is his trademark phrase, impossible to imitate, almost musical, definitely rhythmic rap based, uttered with emphasize on the fuck and with almost monotone expression and deep loathing for whomever is in his presence, his accent almost southern but not quite innocent of Northern heritage. His routine arguments with the roofers begin not with "Ah-mee-go" but with "A-mee-go" as in "No, a-mee-go, you can't have that fuckin' ladder cause we gotta get this shit done." His phrasing is as beautifully and expertly executed as an Italian aria by Puccini.
"I mean...," I begin before Bill interrupts me with his last and final word on the subject.
"No! The only thing they're escorting is my cock into their vagina."
Then Bill and Nick begin to shuffle/dance around in their big steel toe boots singing, "If you don't like it you can suck my dick..." over and over, the sawdust from a hundred Honduran roofers is stirred from the plywood floors into my delicate nostrils and I begin to sneeze.
"I'm gonna play some baseball after woooork. Hoooo! Mothafuckah!" sings Bill, referring to smoking a pipe loaded with drugs. (He made good on this promise)
"If you don't like it, you can suck my dick..." sing the two of them, stomping around, as I sneeze and wipe my dripping nose with an oil soaked rag.

By the end of the day, a day filled with major and minor mistakes, misunderstandings, malicious attacks, malingering, misery and malaise, I calculate the three of us earned $180 ($60 each) while the foolish contractor paid $370 (total) and I estimate that if they (the contractor) had come down to the temp agent and paid all the employees there $10 each to NOT go to their job site, then they would save at least $100 and whatever they have to pay to fix our blunders, so possibly $500 of savings.

But that's only my opinion and my experience at construction sites has always been burdened by my endless pondering to determine the best plan of action. This irreconcilable clash manifests itself when I am tasked with fitting 2X4 wood coated with fire proof putty into a corner in order to comply with safety codes regarding draft stops and smoke chambers. I cut the 4 pieces of wood to fit but neglect to write the corresponding location on each piece of wood so when I return to the room (the saw being 100 yards away) I must fit each piece of wood into the space to determine where it goes. Then there is sheetrock that is jaggedly preventing the wood from seating all the way into the corner. So, after hunting down my hammer, I chip the sheetrock away and pound the wood into place, planning to remove the wood once I hunt down the fireproof putty. Enter Bill:
"WHAT THE MOTHERFUCKER?? ARE YOU STILL WORKING ON THIS?"
He's screaming, I believe, because he's learned that if you are yelling then you are considered valuable. But if the boss doesn't hear him yell then it would be pointless so he has to really scream for his voice to be heard down below in the boss trailer. It's worked so far because he's had a few weeks on this one job and now he's earning overtime, a gross violation of the agency's frugal methods. However, his insistence that he "Knows every motherfucking thing about construction" has been put in serious doubt by some of his commands and the subsequent outcome.
"I'm almost...." I begin...
"HOLY SHIT! YOU DIDN'T PUT ANY CAULKING ON THESE!"
"Not yet. I..."
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE IF YOU CAN'T PICK UP A HAMMER?"
"Well, those...."
"WHY AREN'T THESE DONE? DO I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING AROUND HERE?"
Bill screams this last line as loud as possible, slightly turning his head in the direction of the boss's trailer as he yells it.
"I put them up so I'd know they would fit when..."
"No. NO! IF YOU PUT THEM UP THEN HAMMER THEM THE FUCK ON! DON'T DUMMY THEM UP! DO IT ONCE!"
This remark has me laughing inwardly as we spent at least 3 hours running in comical circles as his earlier direction was totally contradicted by a code inspector.

Code Inspector: Don't put caulking on the bottom.
Bill: That's exactly what I told them not to do. GODDAMNIT!

Three hours earlier...
Oggy: So, put caulking on the bottom and the top?
Bill: Yes! DO I HAVE TO SHOW YOU HOW TO DO EVERYTHING?


Flash forward 4 hours:

"Alright." I say and get busy coating the fire proof putty onto the wood and hammering it into place. This works much easier than when I watched Nick attempt the procedure with the fire putty on the wood and the piece not yet fitted into the space. His face was covered with putty from when he had to chisel into the sheetrock to make the wood fit. Then the wood fell. The floor was littered with 3'' nails he had dropped as he tried to nail them through 1/2'' sheetrock using a 2' long framing hammer. Then he hit his thumb with the hammer.
"Motherfucker! They don't give us the right tools! If they only knew how to do it right the first time we wouldn't need to do this! Fucking Mexicans!"


This ongoing prejudice against Latino workers on the job irks me. Standing up for a people (Mexicans) I have grown to love and admire, quitting the job to protest the acute prejudice shown toward them, is precisely what has prevented me from getting a job in the first place. And now that I'm on the clock and making nearly $8 an hour, I would be a fool, a dreamy idealist, to risk that pirate's ransom, to defend the honor and memory of the unnamed Mexican. Furthermore, despite the lazy, shiftless stereotypes dogging the Mexican's legacy, they are all doing their work far more efficiently than us. True, some crew completely messed up their installation of the sheetrock on these walls, leading to a huge gap in the corners and between the studs and the sheet rock (some kind of metal band has been used to brace the sheetrock rather than screws into the studs) and that is a fire code violation because now smoke and air and fire can flow freely between the studs. (I can't pretend to understand any of it but I did glean some shreds of information that I will pass on to you).
However, if the roofing crew is indeed made up of politically allied Mexicans, rather than Mexican-Americans who live in Texas and travel around the country doing fast and economical (charging $33 a square foot opposed to $140) installations then maybe Nick has a valid argument. Maybe there is an injustice I'm ignorant of. Or is globalization good for commerce and real estate in general. Would these cottages be affordable if not for low wage roofers? I try to introduce myself to one of the roofers but am ignored. Another one lifts a 3/4'' sheet of plywood with one arm and drags it through the dirt. I grab the other end and he stops and looks at me with his dark eyes peering through the hood of his sweatshirt. He could be Mexican but I'll never know. "No." he says simply and I let go. He drags the plywood away alone. There is a barrier between these tropical Central Americans and my pale skinned companeros.


In the meantime, I'm trying to figure out when I can jokingly say, "We probably won't be getting to the cabinets today." That moment never arrives because the day begins in chaos and ends in tribulation but for those who want to know what cabinets I'm referring to, they are the cabinets that I was originally dispatched to instal, the cabinets that didn't exist on the job site and won't exist for several weeks. Those are the cabinets I'm talking about, which brings me to the section of this memoir where I bring to task my temp agency, the inept Work a Day hall where bad attitudes are required and every junkie can patiently await a job from a condescending dispatcher. The woman, Kim, who had called me during my Library retreat, had offered me a job "Installing cabinets, simple, if you know how to use a measuring tape...little blocks of wood...etc...you say you have carpentry experience so are you interested?"

to be continued....

Richistan

Robert Frank wrote a book a few years back that may or may not be relevant today. It's the book I wanted Willian T. Vollmann to write about the lives of Rich People. It's not as piercing as Vollmann because Frank is a proper journalist for the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the very title, "Richistan", is a tongue in cheek political delineation of a land where the extremely rich set lives. This is how to get books published. He asks the right questions and pulls few punches but it's a lot different to go to a Palm Beach diamond tiara ball and eat goose butt than to scamper down a flood plain in China to talk to the men living under the bridge. What would I know? I haven't done either. Vollmann's book "Poor People" is more my style, painful, desperate, longer than it has to be, equivocal.Stripper poles are apparently standard equipment on a 200 ft. yacht along with alligator lined toilet seats on private jets. Google owners bought a Boeing jumbo plane. But I'm divided on the unfairness. If you can drive a man off his land to later give him the opportunity to pick your grapes then maybe that's fair. IT happened and is ignored so maybe that's the way it goes.

Ethics

Question:  20 of  20  -   Ethics

---

A co-worker makes inappropriate jokes about a female employee during your lunch hour. She is uncomfortable with the remarks but doesn't say anything about it. You should...

My Answer: ?

A.	...inform your shift supervisor of what occurred.
B.	...hit the co-workers making the jokes and force them to apologize.
C.	...recommend that your co-workers only joke about her when she isn't present.
D.	...make fun of another co-worker so the unwanted attention moves away from her.
E.	A and D ________________________________________________________

  F.  ...go to Oggy's blog and make anonymous comments about it

Wanted

Resemblance to Author purely coincidental

When it seems like the world is out to get you, remember that the layers of graffiti reflect the cultural maturity we've earned. Children mock what threatens them and burn bridges they are themselves afraid to cross. Do I strive for or profess perfection? When it's amusing to me I will, but mostly the work here is an attempt to communicate those opinions which have no market and are thus not valued, but which may allow me to satisfactorily complete my homeless manifesto. Madmen on the underground subway cars in San Francisco or Chicago announce similar views to commuters who would prefer to not hear them and take no joy in being a captive audience. The blog is a gallery of thoughts that allows me to practice entertaining myself under the guise of research. What I can't make up, I must instigate and usually society will accommodate me. Take it seriously at your peril, deface it as a substitute for a sheet metal fence. It's not low resource. It doesn't save paper. I've tried alternatives and that didn't work either. In the dead of night the universe will erase all moral equivalency test questions until the static ringing from my ears envelopes eternity.

Corporate media brands and owns children's opinions and behavior from the womb and I'm not going to participate in that kind of intellectual genocide. Call me crazy. There are enough glitches in the corporate program to allow for independent thought but it manifests as one form of graffiti or another because then it will be criminalized and labeled. What can't be labeled is what corporations fear the most because they can't classify it into a crime. "Failure to disperse, loitering, noncompliance, corrupting minors," these are efforts to define the independent brain struggling to manifest itself. Those who are content with a corporate bottle feeding their sheep are beyond influence. "Boycott Slave Cotton? Why? Sounds Unpatriotic to me." But mostly we are a discontent nation, discontent with wages, lifestyles, culture, law, justice, prices, environment, resources, medicine. Etc. We are discontent until an alternative is thrust into our park and ride parking lots and then we do an abrupt about face. "No no no no, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm totally content with parking lots being strictly for parking," they sputter. "Ah, so, you are discontent but only as long as nothing changes? Health Care must be reformed but parking lots are untouchable holy ground?"
Right.
Tea Party folks argue for radical changes, Occupy America hipsters argue for radical changes, Democrats and Republicans argue for radical changes, just as long as nothing radically changes and the Walmart prices on big bags of Doritos hangs steady at the same price as a gallon of North Dakota gas. Crates full of $1 round Christmas coke pints await early January shipment to Big Lots. It's the way of America and a puzzle with thousands of pieces missing or hidden by the manufacturers of the puzzle. So Oggy tries to find all the puzzle pieces or speculates what the pieces would look like. Because how else can he begin to reconstruct the puzzle? You reach an interstate off ramp. Signs:
We think those are our options. Waffle House is a little further than Wendy's so lets stop at Wendy's. Ok. They have good fries. But Oggy is the asshole if he lives in the Subway Parking lot for three weeks and cleans up their trash but then refuses to buy anything there because it's all picked by raped muchachas smuggled from Sinaloa to the Imperial Valley to pick onions for turkey subs so they can buy diapers for their orphaned kids. Ah! Oggy is the villain. HE belongs in the police blotter. There must be a piece of the puzzle that got dropped in the wilderness. "Go and find it," says Kipling.


I was addicted to Twilight Zone episodes in 5th grade. I watched them all day and night and when the New Years Eve TZ marathon came on I watched them all. So I got the episode book, a full description of each episode:
Businessman Arthur Curtis finds his phone dead. He is then surprised to hear a voice yell, "Cut!" and see that his office is just a set on a soundstage. Everyone tells him that he is Jerry Raigan, a drunken movie star on the decline, and "Arthur Curtis" is a character Raigan is playing. Curtis drives to where his home should be, but finds no evidence of his life. Raigan's agent, thinking his client is having a nervous breakdown, tells Curtis not to worry about returning to the set, the picture has been cancelled and the sets are being dismantled. Curtis, realizing the last link to his world is about to be destroyed, rushes to the set. Just in time, he arrives on the set and pleads not to be left in this uncaring place. Curtis finds himself back in his office, while the agent arrives on the set and finds Raigan has vanished.


It was escapism, escape from the grind of  Junior High School, involuntary erections, baseball losses, absentee parenting, expectations and hair growth. At least I had the Twilight Zone to distract me. Lately, I've been a character in my own movie length version of one episode. The premise being corporations pretend to give you a choice between Pepsi and Coke and we pretend to make a choice. And the hook is so firmly implanted in our cheeks that even this "choice" is recognized as not a choice but is still a choice we fervently defend. "Don't tell me to think for myself."

The background of the puzzle is missing but the little unimportant details (brands) are all provided and in the paint by numbers key they are labeled "the background". I've figured this out (in my unbroadcast episode of Twilight Zone) so the luster has been taken from everything. Cut through the aisles of Walmart to fill up my three year old glass water bottle? Navigate the staggering Downs Syndrome sweeper locking the doors in my face and the tattooed pallet smacker with crates of red Gummi bears teetering near Hannah Montana birth control pills...to suck water from a trickling fountain that dribbles like a clogged drain so that I must use a nearby broken Batman toy to divert the stream off the fountain platform and down a salvaged Conan sword into the water bottle, thus attracting an audience and the ire of the manager who subsequently kicks me out with a warning into the 20 degree night where brightly lit telephone poles cast their nuclear shine on my flat tires and bald patch...but I have half a glass of water which is not half empty but half full and the Puma shoes I found in a clothing patch full of Mexican immigrants fit comfortably when tied...and that water is enough to wash my cock and balls behind the fragments of my ego driven blizzard. CUT! shouts the director and ignores my Fox News boycott. Go to Detention where tough kids direct insecure hatred toward skinny Oggy through spitballs that turn to angry Lexus horn honks at mopeds in twenty years and anonymous blog comments after that. Fear? I know about fear. I'll etch what I know into a granite memorial to my own shortcomings long before the world trade centers are rebuilt in heaven. Fear to build or fear to destroy? That's the question.

I amuse myself, selfishly, and if my brain could retain the revelations I have in the hunger pangs of evening I could be a radio preacher giving hope to hundreds of rats in the doomed apartments of their shame. There can be no victory in a parking lot nation. We do all live in a Walmart Parking lot, processing fast food to survive long enough to complain about the texture of the mashed potatoes in our future long term care facility. "Dirty Bum, dirty bum, dirty bum!" yelled a woman in a wheel chair as I played Autumn Leaves. That's her salvation and her prayer to the world. I don't take myself seriously but I protect the squashed squirrels in their threatened landscape with my words. The seasons change and so do attitudes and alliances, mentors squash trust with idle facebook hands and build ice walls for comfort, the land hibernates and quasars leap to life, laughing at our urgent betrayals.

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