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.
