Announcement

So I'm gonna be in the T-town area from the 25th to the 29th for T-giving. Then I'm NEVER COMING BACK EVER. If anybody reads this, let's hang and party til we're grandparents.

Gift giving

Shitty day at work. My stories this week are boring, which is my fault, and no one calls back the newspaper on Columbus Day, which isn't exactly my fault. On days like this writing goes especially slow, and I was there for about eleven hours before the office finally closed down completely and I was forced to leave.

On the way home it occurred to me there wasn't much food at the apartment, and I was starved. Rather than acting reasonably (say, buying food at the grocery store), some combination of inertia and self loathing propelled my car into the drive thru line at Wendy's. It was on the way, sort of. I ordered a Crispy Chicken Sandwich, a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger and fries. None of that sounded especially good by the time the voice asked me for my order, but there were cars in front of me and it seemed a little too late to escape. At the second window I handed a fat guy a $5 bill and he handed me change.

A fairly gloomy thirty seconds passed while I sat in my car waiting for the food. The workday had sucked, prospects for going anywhere at night seemed bleak, and I was watching the sun go down from the front of the Wendy's drive thru line. Jeez. The fat guy, who had curly dark hair and looked about 25 years old, must have been bored and he asked me how I was doing.

"All right, what about you?"
"Good."

Ok, nice to know. Fat guy at Wendy's says he's doing good. Put a check next to that one — finally an accomplishment I felt satisfied with.

But he wasn't done.

"Hey bro, you want a Coke?"
"Um, no. Not really. Thanks."

I didn't order a Coke, mostly because I didn't really want one and it seemed like a waste of money. It seemed odd that he would ask.

"You sure? The lady in front of you ordered a Coke and then changed her mind and said she wanted a Diet Coke. I've got the Coke right here and you can have it."
"Oh...ok. I mean, yeah, I'll drink it, I guess."
"All right, it's on the house."

He handed me a huge plastic cup filled with probably 40 ounces of soda. Somehow I managed to think "Wow, it's nice of this guy to give this huge drink to me" instead of "What kind of stupid bitch orders an XXL Coke and then changes her order so that this nice fat guy has to pour her a new XXL Diet Coke." It was a truly beautiful moment, I think. Somehow, if for only a second, I forgot about tedious news stories and dead imperialist Europeans and about how this guy was really just handing me another menu item that I only sort of wanted. Even though all he did was hand me a drink he was otherwise going to throw away, it seemed like I was witnessing the performance of a genuinely good deed.

Then the fat guy maneuvered his tubby torso back through the window and walked away. I'll probably never see him again. A minute later some high school girl with a lip ring handed me my food and I drove off.

I was thinking about the big soda and the fat guy and work tomorrow and how humanity's not all bad when I accidentally pulled a little too far past a stop sign next to the restaurant. My car was sticking a few feet out at the three-way stop and there were two other cars waiting to go. A woman in one car scowled at me and raised her shoulders — a guy in the other car revved his engine and flipped me off. It kind of irritated me, and while carefully watching the other oncoming traffic, I made a left turn in front of both of them. Yeah, I'm sure they were both REALLY upset.

An hour later, I'm at home drinking a watery soda. And in all seriousness — it's not too hard to tell the difference — I'm almost sure it's a fucking Diet Coke.

Words of wisdom

"It's like when you're tripping on acid, you know. You're living in what feels like an alternate reality. You learn a different kind of knowledge when you're on that plane, and you can sort of see through people. You realize how extremely naive you've been in the past. That's how you have to think when you deal with people around here." - my boss, trying to explain to me how to conduct an interview in northern New Mexico

More bullshit...

Three weeks after evacuating the Midwest, I'm still not too sure what to say about the move. It's pretty easy to answer the general questions, I guess, as long as I keep to short, simple answers. How have you been? Pretty good — busy. What have you been doing? Work mostly, but also a little writing and music playing and generally hanging out. How is work going? Really fun, but incredibly overwhelming. Are you homesick or anything? Not really, but it's not been that long.

After that, it's a little fuzzy. So instead of trying to write something coherent about what's been going on, I'll just post a few short but unrelated experiences, observations, etc.

1. I have stumbled into the perfect animal ownership situation. The dog's name is Zuki, and she's a mostly black, medium-sized mutt. It's a perfect situation because I don't actually own her — she's just a stray dog the neighborhood has sort of collectively adopted. This means I have a fucking awesome dog to hang out with whenever I want, but there's no responsibility. She wags her tail and acts excited when I come home, but it's not up to me to figure out what's eventually going to happen with the litter of puppies she seems to be carrying. I just make sure not to run her over (she only has three working legs, so she's a little slow) and occasionally feed her some scraps. No need to worry about buying her food or taking her to vet because she's NOT MY DOG. We just hang out all the goddamn time and don't worry about anything. This dog is probably the best thing about my apartment.

2. If you walk or ride a bike in any Northern New Mexico town (except Santa Fe), people assume you are homeless or a prostitute or hitchhiking. Drivers don't slow down or move over for cyclists and there are no bike lanes. People will, however, pull over to the side of the road and ask if a walker needs a ride. This is just one of several areas where this area is a quarter century or more behind the rest of the country.

3. It is acceptable here to wear the tacky Western-style clothing I've bought at thrift stores to an occasion at which, in Illinois, people would wear suits. Politicians often show up to formal meetings or events wearing snap-button shirts, the kind with crudely sewn designs (like wagons or horses or whatever) near the lapels. These are the male politicians of course, but there really aren't any female politicians (see #2).

4. So far, I can think of three black people I've seen since entering New Mexico. This realization hit me the other day when I walked into a gas station and was totally taken aback by the presence of a black guy in line at the counter. The population of Española is almost completely Hispanic, Mexican or Native American. There are quite a few white people in Santa Fe, but there seems to be almost no one of African descent in this state.

5. I've probably known this about myself for a while, but I've just analyzed the thought process recently: I have an unreasonable, nonsensical distaste for anyone who says they smoke weed "for artistic inspiration." Otherwise beautiful people suddenly look like moronic slobs once they say "I just love to smoke weed and paint." Fuck you, and I'm now positive you paint shitty paintings. Like I said, nonsensical.

6. I've been listening to CFCF on repeat for a few days.



That's all for now.

I don't usually put "how I'm doing" notes here, but...

During the past several days I've received a handful of texts and emails, the synthesis of the messages being "Hey...are you still alive and doing all right?" Naturally, I don't spend a lot of time wondering about my own status as dead, alive, happy, sad, injured, imprisoned, strangled by drug kingpins, etc., but it's nice that somebody does. Thanks.

I'm fine. Actually, the first week in New Mexico has been really fun, if a little overwhelming. The new job and figuring out a living situation have consumed most of my time, but after quite a while spent screwing around in the Midwest, the distractions are welcome. There have been a few spare hours, which I spent seeing Death Vessel in Santa Fe and taking a day trip to Taos with some people from work. If I can get past the "Jesus Christ, I'm never going to be able to keep up with this all" feeling at work, I'll be set. Except I need some furniture (other than my lawn chair).

There are sort of a lot of other things to say about this whole adventure, but that's all I really feel like writing for now. Instead, I'm going to post something I wrote a long time ago documenting a trip Chris and I took to Indianapolis. I meant to post this then, but ended up just telling the story verbally to quite a few people. Here:

The toasted sub sandwiches felt like big rocks in my guts - we'd eaten too much because the food was cheap. I trudged through downtown Indianapolis with Chris as we both tried to walk off that stuffed, sickening feeling. I was an unemployed glutton.

After strolling past what seemed like miles of city parks and elaborate veterans memorials, we stopped to sit at a picnic table and wait it out. There was apparently no exercising (exorcising) the fast food from our systems. About fifteen yards away from us there was a group of a hundred or so yuppy-looking folks in all white — white dresses, white suits, white shoes, white hair, white skin. The postmodern KKK was apparently hosting a gathering. A country band was playing a Patsy Cline song for them while they sat at neatly decorated tables and guzzled champagne. Chris and I sat watching the bizarre festivities while we waited for Eric, who we were visiting in Indianapolis, to call us.

It was about three minutes before one of the bleached partygoers, a fairly inebriated older woman, approached us. "I don't mean to insult you," she began. Clearly she was about to insult us.

She continued: "But would you two like to make a little cash by helping us clean up?"

Ok, better than I expected. She easily distinguished us from her party because we were dressed in T-shirts and jeans, and then guessed from there that we would be up for making some quick cash. Not that insulting. Actually, the worst part of her statement was the suggestion that it would be possible to offend someone simply by asking them if they would help clean a couple tables for a few bucks. But people of her status, I guess, might not take kindly to a request they join the ranks of typical hired help.

Anyway, the answer was yes. Sign me up. I'd been un(der)employed for three and a half months, so any income was welcome. All of these socialites appeared pretty well to do, and I was in the mood for some wealth redistribution. About ten minutes later the cream-colored woman signaled that our help was needed, and we wasted no time getting to work. And by work, I mean we dumped a little leftover champagne into the grass, put some crystal dinnerware into plastic containers and boxed up some tiny candles — for about fifteen minutes. Not a very stressful workday.

Throughout our quarter-hour of labor the aristocracy treated us fairly predictably, awkwardly commenting about Chris's "long arms" and occasionally asking me questions insinuating I was an experienced custodian (I've put in my time scrubbing shitters for minimum wage, but they probably didn't know that).

Maybe because Chris and I are both pretty skinny, several of the women insisted we take home a box of the croissants left over from the meal. And possibly because we were both twenty somethings and dressed casually on a Saturday night, they assumed we would also want two half-full bottles of champagne (sparkling wine, actually). They were "just going to throw them away anyway."

Chris and I ended up accepting the offer to bring home their trash — it would have been a shame to let pride get in the way of free food and drink. We also walked away with about twenty boxes of sparklers (they had been performing some ceremony with them earlier that night — again with the KKK similarities) and a bouquet of white roses that would reek badly in our kitchen for the next few days. That was all in addition to $20 a piece, which was the previously agreed upon rate. So we were basically working for $80 per hour plus someone else's garbage. It was a pretty sweet deal.

During the ten minutes between when the drunk lady approached us and when we started "working," Chris and I did a fair amount of joking about the situation. One stunt Chris suggested was outsourcing our new job to one of the nearby bum-looking dudes, paying them a very low wage, and therefore making a profit without doing any real work. It was pretty easy to dismiss the suggestion as absurd — until I realized that plenty of these wealthy partygoers almost definitely made their fortunes doing that exact thing. Whether they owned businesses or "invested wisely" or whatever, lots of these assholes almost certainly made their fortunes primarily by simply existing in a privileged position — their "work" was manipulating others who worked for cheap.

So they would have been pissed, yes, if we solicited bums to do their dirty work, but surely they would have admired our ingenuity. These rich dicks had thought they were giving a few bucks to a couple squirrely college-age liberals, but they had in fact contributed cash to their soon-to-be rivals, the future of the American upper class. It would have been ethically destitute youngsters like us who would have pushed those fat fucks out of the limelight one day — and we would have been taking the first steps toward that end at their own creepy party. It would have been stunning to watch, I assume.

But of course none of that happened. Instead, Chris and I gratefully accepted their offerings and ran off like thieving raccoons before they could take any of it back. Twenty minutes later we strolled up to Eric's front porch with two open champagne bottles in tow, and set a box of half-day-old bread and several packages of sparklers on the kitchen table. There was a small party going on, and we were very well-received.

I gulped down nearly a quarter bottle of the wine during the half-hour before the party collectively decided to stab about twenty of the sparklers into the croissants and light them in Eric's front yard. It was a hell of a good idea. There was a beautiful fireworks display for a few seconds, the bread was rendered totally inedible afterwards and at least one person burned himself pretty badly. I will never have money.

A losing battle.

This motherfucking apartment building.

Just now, as I was walking up to my room on the third floor I saw a good-sized cockroach crawling up the white wall along the stairs. It was about 2 a.m. Prime cockroach prowling time. It stopped crawling as I passed it, moving its long brown antennas pretty strangely. Maybe it was anxious - it should have been. I was carrying my bike up the stairs. The past couple days have been a little boring, and I had been riding around the area for an hour or so to kill time and get some exercise.

These fucking roaches have been hanging around here for a couple months. I do the dishes, take out the trash, vacuum every so often, whatever. It doesn't matter. The whole building is infested with them and they keep strolling into my apartment looking for food or other roaches or something. A couple of them were breeding pretty intensely in my shower the other day, so I beat the hell out of them with an old book I've been using as an exterminator. It's just some old, nasty novel from the 1950s. The title is "Space Satellite: The Story of the Man-Made Moon." This book just happened to be the most disgusting weapon-worthy item in my apartment the first time I saw an insect worth terminating earlier this spring.

Tonight, carrying my bike up the stairs, I decided to take my offensive a step further, do a sort of preemptive strike. So I gripped the center of the bicycle's frame, moved the rear tire a few inches back from the wall (and the roach), and then swung the entire bike like a baseball bat. It took a couple hard swings, but I eventually broke the roach in half. The bug didn't actually fall off the wall - its guts seemed to adhere to the paint pretty well. It just stayed there, bent into a V shape and still twitching those gross antennas. I proceeded to carry my bike the final story and a half up to my floor and walk into my apartment.

It was a pretty satisfying kill, but not at all analogous to my relationship with this building (and its bug problem). I'll leave here soon enough, but this place will probably last for at least a couple more decades. The ancestors of these roaches will almost certainly outlast me, my relatives and any of our spawn. We can't get rid of them. Cockroaches were here before us, and I assume they'll be here close to last.

Basically, I need some roach spray and a fly swatter.

Recap/plans.

Saw some really really fucking great bands last week. Drank a little Ten High and tossed a tooth into a field.

Canoe Trip starts Sunday. Might kill me.

See ya.