It sure has been a week.
Forces outside of my control conspire to keep me away from the keyboard.
I'm not paranoid.
It's just the way it is.
Work tends to get in the way of life.
Not that I don't enjoy my work and don't thank my lucky stars that I'm not trying to support a family as a U-Haul guy or a cook at a teriyaki take-out restaurant.
Food service sucks. Too many inherent flaws totally negate any enjoyment or nobility that the job might offer. Many folks are particular about their food. They want it the way they want it. By the time they walk through the doors of the teriyaki take-out joint, they've been thinking about how hungry they are for a while. In other words, they want what they want five minutes ago. People are not at their best when hungry.
U-Haul sucks as well. Either you're a small-time operator, laying on the icy parking lot under the back of a customer's pickup trying to get his mud-crusted wiring to work while cold water seeps over the collar of your raincoat and soaks your spine or you're working as a mindless cog in the spirit-crushing machine of über-capitalism, reading phone scripts to naïve folks calling for quotes and doing your best to bend over every rube who walks through the door.
So I'm glad I'm not doing that any more.
What's been your worst job? Have you even done something you hated? Worked with actively poisonous people? Done something just plain disgusting?
I think immediately of a high-school pal who announced unabashedly that she wanted to be a mortician. Damned if she didn't go to school, study her ass off, work for a few years as an assistant county coroner, and then settle down with her husband and son in a cozy little house only a few blocks away from the funeral home she manages.
Sounds like she carved herself out a little chunk of paradise.
I'm sure many folks would consider a career working with stiffs to be a field trip to Hell.
I wonder how many idiots have decided to study forensics thinking that they'll get to run gas chromatographs to punchy pop music or have a chance of getting into Marg Helgenberger's pants.
The most disgusting thing I've done in the line of duty was, on orders from the owner, soak 40 pounds of green, smelly chicken breasts in sake, slice and grill them up, and serve them to the public with an extra-heavy dose of teriyaki.
But all that's in the past. And somehow I'm still able to eat out.
Aside from work, my wife's been working for Stanford, which means closer coordination of packed schedules. My son is starting preschool next week. I received my bandsaw, drill press, jointer, and dust collector, so I've been doing a lot of unpacking and assembly of heavy machinery. I'm gearing up for some major plumbing on the house, replacing the water main from the hose bib, back through our garage, to under our furnace. The baboon fellators who plumbed our house ran a galvanized-steel water main into our house and hooked it up directly to copper pipe in the rest of the house without using a dielectric union. They also left branch lines for a water softener and one of three defunct sprinkler systems. Yes, I know. It's all so completely and utterly shocking.
And Sunday is my wife's birthday. We're celebrating it with a family day at the Highland Games in Pleasanton. An entire day filled with pipe bands, meat pies, folk music, kilts, and huge men and women tossing telephone poles... all irrefutable evidence that my wife still loves me.
These are some of the reasons you're not reading my thoughts on Katrina. (I imagine some folks are saying "See? We need to get rid of those guns!" and others are saying "Damn. I better lay in enough ammo to hold off the mobs.") I've also wanted to write about how war has been perverted in recent years. And you're not reading the werewolf story that's been tearing at my brain for months now because... well, because I need to go to bed now.
Pakeha