Guilt has been around since God made Woman to tell Man that he was a worthless slob and should go rake the leaves around the Garden of Eden to improve the property value. Okay, maybe not, but it's at least been around since man harnessed enough brain-power to generate it. The self-help industry did not have the motivation to arrive very early in man's history simply because there was not a self-help industry to motivate it to arrive. The self-help industry finally arrived shortly after the arrival of Homo Erectus in the form of cumbersome stone tablets that were carved and sold by the precursors of H. Erectus, the Homo Habilis, who were angry at having their neighborhoods gentrified by the slightly less hairy and larger-brained H. Erectus. The fossil evidence garnered from these tablets reveals such classic auto-validation as:
1) Ugh
2) Urghhh
3) Grrrrphthgggle
4) Live every day to the fullest
Since language had not been invented yet (the last one seems to be a random assemblage of scratches that just happen to form a coherent sentence in perfect Jargonese English), the H. Erectus who purchased these stone tablets (using violence upon the H. Habilis as the most obvious and plentiful currency) glanced at the flint scribblings upon the stones and decided that they meant something along the lines of, "You need a change of scenery, so you should really migrate from Africa after the Pliestocene glacial period and get a good start on civilization; your future, less hirsute children will deny your existence in favor of a nebulous and unproveable God in gratitude for your meanderings."
The H. Erectus did just that, and the H. Habilis neighborhoods were safe. An unforeseen side-effect of all of this "help" that the H. Habilis supplied their unwanted H. Erectus neighbors is that H. Habilis died out for some reason that is theorized to be related to an au courant invention, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, that was caused by too much slab-shaping of gibberish. The unfortunate end result was that H. Habilis became unable to hold a spear for the required time to retrieve the archaic version of fast-food and died out en masse of starvation shortly after the departure of the H. Erectus. The lessons that this teaches us about the self-help industry are many-folded and smelly, like a fat-girl's vagina:
1) Ware the man who tells you he can help make you better, as he probably has his own motivations, none of which have anything to do with your actual well-being.
2) The moment that your well-being and his motivations no longer coincide, he will rid himself of your wearisome burden, thus helping himself.
3) Unless there's a lot of cash on the line, then he's still interested.
4) Really, he's got all the time in the world for you, as long as the moolah holds out. When do you get paid again?
5) No matter what sort of gibberish anyone spouts at you, you will take only what you want from it, and do what you probably already know you need to do.
I've been watching this crap wax and wane like filthy tide-water on the Jersey shore for far too long, and it's just the same shiny turds coming from a different anus. Religious cults, self-help seminars, political pods and other groups all use many of the same principals to get you to join (some taken from Lofland and Stark (1965) American Sociological Review 30:865-875, with further elaboration by yours falsely):
1) Tension: A discrepancy between how one finds oneself and how one wants to be. This could be the result of an actual problem or a perceived problem; the perceived problem could be the result of internal conflict brought about by external forces, such as upbringing, societal pressures, and peer-group pressures ("C'mon, Bob, you're not down with us unless you try the Fugu fish. Oops, fuck, you're dead. What a retard. Oops, fuck, I'm dead too.")
2) Seekership: Conventional changes of lifestyle from internal sources seem inadequate to the changes that one wants wrought, so the person may feel that the adjustment should come from an external source (bars, whore-houses and gambling establishments just aren't cutting it anymore).
3) Turning Point: The person feels themselves to be at a critical or pivotal stage in his/her life, thus enhancing the feeling that an important change is in order. (I've GOT to quit going to bars, whore-houses and gambling establishments.)
4) Cult Affective Bonds: A friendship or some type of bond with a current cult member must be established for con- version to take place. Cult members are usually first introduced to their cult by a friend or acquaintance in a group.
5) Extra-Cult Affective Bonds: affiliation with people who have negative opinions of the cult must be weak or at least weaker than the cult bond. This can also be accomplished when people don't know enough about the cult initially to form any kind of opinion on it. (Evil can flourish in secrecy; nobody knew how wack-job Scientology was until it had already sucked in about half of Hollywood and a few other people who'd never read an L. Ron Hubbard book and seen first-hand what a lousy author he was).
6) Intensive Interaction: this separates "verbal" converts from "total" converts. The interaction with "verbal" converts is generally to get them to become "total" converts through greater interaction with the "total" converts. (Thus begins the Dungeons & Dragons school of self-help: the higher your level, the more costly the next level is to obtain.)
I've got some self-help advice for all of you: buy a fucking Skee-Ball machine. It's just like an auto-validation seminar, only cheaper and more satisfying:
1) You have a set goal that you have to work daily at to meet (getting all 12 balls in that goddamn 100-point hole at the tippy-top on either side).
2) You get consistent and accurate feedback on how you're doing in achieving your goal (the amount of tickets the machine vomits onto your shoes).
3) You have to keep pumping money into it (ball-shine, red tickets, prizes, electricity, sheetrock for the holes in your walls), though not as much as a regular seminar.
4) It's good exercise (for =BD of your body, at least, so maybe add "become ambidextrous" to your goal).
5) You always get SOMETHING out of it (even if it's just a few tickets to buy a plastic whistle or bird-call).
6) You have something tangible (the Skee-Ball machine and a bunch of crappy prizes) that you can sell to someone, rather than just stuffy old self-knowledge that isn't worth anything to anyone except other seekers of external validation (hell, Tim Robbins and Deepak Chopra make a HELLUVA living doling out nonsense for cash-figures that would make Donald Trump blush like a virgin in a porn-theater (wasn't sure if everyone would know who the Sultan of Brunei or Alan Greenspan was, so I went with Donald Trump for that analogy)).
7) There's no misunderstanding your goal, unless you are an utter moron, which in itself is a good piece of information to have.
8) You get to throw things.
People, we don't need any seminars or books or audio CD's or the sounds of our own snoring during a self-help seminar played back to us in order to find out what's wrong with us. We have LSD for serious introspection, methamphetamine to give us focus, marijuana to make us (overly) sensitive, cocaine to make us chatty and gregarious, booze to make us take a swing at our friends when they won't share any of the above, and Ecstasy to make us feel better about taking drugs and trying to punch a friend in the face when we should be attending a self-help seminar.
If all else fails, HIRE ME. I will follow you around drunk for a week to see how you interact with people and your environment. You will get IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK every time I think you're doing something wrong or stupid and at all other times, in a brazenly loud, public and slurry spectacle so you will remember my verbal harangue whenever you go to do that thing that irritated me (and therefore made you a worse person in my eyes). The cost is minimal. I require a decent Scotch (Laphroaig 10-year or Glenlivit 15-year will do nicely), several changes of clean clothing during the evening, someone to scrub the intestinal malfunctions from my shoes before I awake each morning, bail for any unforeseen altercations with bystanders or local constabulary, and hospital insurance for when I attempt to subdue a pole-lamp that appears to be staring at me too much OR if I attempt to make out with a parking meter or any electrified appliance. All that should cost somewhat less than 1 or perhaps 2 seminars, and I'll even cut you a "friend" price, because, really, I'm here to help YOU as long as the moolah holds out. When do you get paid again?
Monday, November 24, 2008
Monday, January 28, 2008
Missouri: It's Just Like You Thought It Was
I understand that some of you have been notably disturbed by my seeming lack of attention to your needs. I have recently received annoying texts, peevish phone-calls, obscure and divorced-from-reality e-mails from many of you with regards to my electronic absence. Several death-threats have also been articulated to my person, though these are mostly relating to the women of questionable morals alluded to in the forthcoming paragraphs. I have also recently taken up the art of hepatomancy, which allows me to augur the future using the various lobes and foldings of the human liver (since I am currently in charge of part of a hepatitis B drug trial), and it has revealed some disturbing details of each of your private lives, which I shall not reveal here in consideration of some of my readers’ more delicate constitutions. You know who you are and you know what you’re doing, so just stop it; you won’t go blind from it, but others might if they catch you at it.
Right now I am sitting in the Denver airport, after having been bumped from yet another flight (I’m totally used to it by now), so I do have a number of hours to kill (five, to be exact) before the next available flight to Austin gets me home (barring any storm cancellations, of course). I flew up here yesterday to see Genesis (yes, THAT Genesis, and it was a fucking great show, especially from 15th row, center) and was hoping to make it home in time for the evening football game. Those hopes have since been dashed, and the only football game I got to see was on a 10-inch screen in the first class lounge of Continental; I caught the end of an EPIC beating of the Denver Broncos by the Chargers. The Chargers looked like the angry, drunken father, and the Broncos got whipped like mixed-race step-children with cleft palates.
It has been quite some time since I’ve built up enough semi-interesting material (and angst) to feel it worth my while to annoy the rest of you with it, but some recent events have finally withered my determination to discontinue writing as an alternate mode of therapy as compared with booze and the companionship of women whose morals have been described as “lax”, “severely truncated”, or “so miniscule as to be immeasurable through anything with a resolution above that of x-ray crystallography.” I have needed immense amounts of the aforementioned tonsil-polish and ethically-flexible female comfort, as I have recently lost several of my dearest friends in the Austin area.
The first to pass was the conglomerate known as Merrickoya (Merrick and Toyacoya), who were enveloped by a large lava flow in the caldera of a formerly inactive volcano located somewhere in the Pacific ring of fire as they were attempting to sample the sounds of the Earth for their upcoming musical magnum opus, which we will now never hear or even know the title of. There are also rumors that they moved to Chicago, but this hearsay must be discounted as obvious falsehood because of their specious origins; these blatant innuendos have been bruited about by members of their former inner circle, and must be discounted without rancor as the tangible verbal manifestations of denial that only grief-stricken friends can fabricate from the rum-soaked recesses of their vaguely insectile minds. They were said to have moved to Chicago with Cecily-Jean and Alec, which proves the Chicago story false in an instant, as that couple was crushed in their home as they slept by a piece of blue ice from the lavatory of a passing American Airlines jet on its way to Oklahoma City; the case is still in court pending a monetary settlement with which their parents can purchase several annoying Chihuahuas to replace their lost progeny.
The next to pass onward was Casey Charvet, formerly of Blastro, and as close a friend as a reptile can be to anyone. He has moved to Galveston to make a stab at grad-school as some kind of Toxicologist, which essentially equates to committing social suicide in anyone’s book. I presume that UTMB has no requirements for ethics; his are in such shoddy disrepair from dealing with the usual gamut of hustlers, pimps, and money-whores whom associate themselves with the Internet that it might warrant a jail-sentence before any actual crimes or even scientific-seeming work has been committed. In any case, he has shuffled off his social coil and the withered husk that used to house his firewater and dirty thoughts now lies in repose in a nicely-painted Mausoleum in Galveston (this I know because I helped paint the fucker, and the tile-work and hot-tub scrubbing are next). Checks can be made out to me, as they are a much more tangible token of remorse than actual sorrow, and I assure everyone receiving this (in the most trustworthy of internet voices) that Casey’s ambulatory remains will receive the finest care (in the form of Scotch) that your hopefully generous outpourings of wallet-stuffer can buy.
The final and possibly most heart-rending to leave this world was Jill Marie Kleibur. She boarded the frigate Syphilitic Show Pony as a bilge-stirrer and cesspool replacement technician in an effort to save towards her lifelong dream of doing jack-shit (but only on a part-time basis). The ship was caught between the thrashings of two leviathans and was last seen in the terrible grip of an immense sea-gigolo, heading towards the depths of the Cayman Trench. There have been recent, shocking reports of a ghost-ship resembling the Syphilitic Show Pony seen plying the choppy and frozen seas around Newfoundland, and a willowy shape that can only be the soulless apparition of Jill (redundant phrasing, that) seen at the top of the stacks screeching like a foghorn-voiced harpy for Bombay gin, the souls of men, someone or something named Ella, and a dry pair of panties, all in no particular order. In this I feel some vague stirrings of what I once might have called guilt (but now commonly refer to as indigestion), as I urged her to board the ship to expand her horizons. I myself have recently experienced aural manifestations of sorrow at her passing, in the form of long and mournful messages on my cell-phone, plaintively bemoaning her less-than-glamorous fate as well as her own personal shortcomings and the inadequate social indulgences available in her afterlife.
There was also a guy named Shaun who used to live down here who died of a brain tumor after having moved to New York several years ago. He did too much meth and pissed off almost everyone he knew in this town, but he was always civil to me, so I will raise a glass to him in memoriam and say no more of the matter.
You think this would be enough to break any man, but there was far more in store. The stories I am about to reveal to you caused me to spend several days in Galveston at the Charvet Sanitorium for the Brainy and Slightly Twitchy, convalescing and rallying my depleted mental and physical resources for the writings that I knew would surely possess my hands to scrawl them, much as the Ancient Mariner must have once been forced by a geas of fate to tell his tale of woe to strangers (as an historical note, he was known as a bit of a long-winded and depressing gab at parties, and the dead albatross hanging ‘round his neck made him less-than-popular with those having two X-chromosomes; this also explained the failure of his cologne Eau de Albatross Extincte, which failed to sell even one bottle in the London market).
Our first destination: Pineville, Missouri. Just the thought of it causes my hands to become palsied and itch for the trigger of something that throws large amounts of lead down-range in a rapid and barely-controlled manner.
I won’t go into the details, as they are far too disgraceful for the delicate constitutions of you, my gentle readers, but the reasons I ended up in Missouri were many-folded, like the steel of a Japanese katana, and just as likely to kill, maim, or generally result in an unfortunate mentally and physically injurious experience. The causes of myself having to migrate to a town with a population of 870 and a resident-to-sex-offender ratio of 96-to-1 had to do with reports that a house my parents rented out in the town had come to be infested by a group of methamphetamine addicts, or “White Rabbits” as they had come to be called, and the local constabulary was powerless to do anything either through disinterest or sheer sloth (or they declined participation because the “Hot Light” was on at the local Krispy Crème).
My parents, having never dealt with such scurrilous personages, were going to go up there and tell them to vacate immediately. Myself, having dealt with many such denizens of depravity, decided it would be best if someone having knowledge of violence and access to firearms accompanied them (that person being yours truly). There’s a line from Hunter S. Thompson’s book Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas that I like to quote, and it goes thus: “You can turn your back on a man, but never turn your back on a drug.” Now, I have not always been a scientist; I have dealt with a lot of unsavory characters, both professionally and in everyday life, and I have to say that the entire situation struck me as a recipe for paternal and maternal injury. I therefore decided that I could spare the time to deal with this particular state of affairs.
I am licensed to carry a handgun in the state of Texas, and since Missouri has a reciprocity agreement with Texas, I am also licensed to carry there as well. You are allowed to check firearms at the airport, as long as they are declared and “cleared” in front of some nervous-looking TSA agents and police, whom I noticed were sporting roaring erections at the mere thought of being able to draw their police-issue Perp-JerkyTM electricity-throwers and watch me twitch like a Parkinsonian Michael Flatley in a tumble-dryer, so I was sure not to make any sudden moves. Dealing with the po-lice is like dealing with heavily-armed newborn deer; they startle easily, only if newborn deer are startled they usually won’t shoot you about a hundred times, plant a knife on you, and say they thought you looked like you might be black (though I can’t say just how the deer in New Jersey might react).
Well, I made it onto the plane and reached my destination of North Arkansas Regional Airport; it says something about the size of Pineville, MO. that I had to fly into Arkansas and then drive the rest of the way. Incidentally, the North Arkansas airport is the one that services Fayetteville, AR. where the headquarters of that most American of corporations, Wal-Mart, is based; reason enough to build a large rocket and shoot Arkansas and the surrounding states into the sun, if you ask me.
In any case, my parents picked me up at the airport (as they had driven from Dallas) and we made it to the hotel, a place called the Boonslick Lodge. It had plastic laminated fake log-cabin plastic laminate (it was doubly faked and laminated and guaranteed not to biodegrade even at ground-zero of a direct nuclear strike with the most powerful nukes devised so far by man). There was, Shiva preserve us, both a large black injection-molded plastic Grizzly out front AND, as a special bonus, a thoroughly ridiculous truck and trailer containing (you guessed it) a NASCAR car. (Is that right, a NASCAR car, or would it just be a NASCAR? I don’t know these things, though I fear that as the literacy rate goes down the popularity of NASCAR will go up). There was also a combination tanning salon and video rental place called 2 Chick’s Flicks. This insipid combination brought to mind oily DVDs being manipulated by hail-damaged, flabby, and fishbelly-pallid country-folk trying to get a tan and beautiful appearance like Brittney Spears (even the current Brittney Spears, which would definitely be an improvement over the women I saw; I’m surprised the birthrate is so high with so much obvious ambulatory human sex-repellant lurking about. Luckily there’s a lot of night in the country as well, so you don’t notice the ugly quite as much).
Right now I am sitting in the Denver airport, after having been bumped from yet another flight (I’m totally used to it by now), so I do have a number of hours to kill (five, to be exact) before the next available flight to Austin gets me home (barring any storm cancellations, of course). I flew up here yesterday to see Genesis (yes, THAT Genesis, and it was a fucking great show, especially from 15th row, center) and was hoping to make it home in time for the evening football game. Those hopes have since been dashed, and the only football game I got to see was on a 10-inch screen in the first class lounge of Continental; I caught the end of an EPIC beating of the Denver Broncos by the Chargers. The Chargers looked like the angry, drunken father, and the Broncos got whipped like mixed-race step-children with cleft palates.
It has been quite some time since I’ve built up enough semi-interesting material (and angst) to feel it worth my while to annoy the rest of you with it, but some recent events have finally withered my determination to discontinue writing as an alternate mode of therapy as compared with booze and the companionship of women whose morals have been described as “lax”, “severely truncated”, or “so miniscule as to be immeasurable through anything with a resolution above that of x-ray crystallography.” I have needed immense amounts of the aforementioned tonsil-polish and ethically-flexible female comfort, as I have recently lost several of my dearest friends in the Austin area.
The first to pass was the conglomerate known as Merrickoya (Merrick and Toyacoya), who were enveloped by a large lava flow in the caldera of a formerly inactive volcano located somewhere in the Pacific ring of fire as they were attempting to sample the sounds of the Earth for their upcoming musical magnum opus, which we will now never hear or even know the title of. There are also rumors that they moved to Chicago, but this hearsay must be discounted as obvious falsehood because of their specious origins; these blatant innuendos have been bruited about by members of their former inner circle, and must be discounted without rancor as the tangible verbal manifestations of denial that only grief-stricken friends can fabricate from the rum-soaked recesses of their vaguely insectile minds. They were said to have moved to Chicago with Cecily-Jean and Alec, which proves the Chicago story false in an instant, as that couple was crushed in their home as they slept by a piece of blue ice from the lavatory of a passing American Airlines jet on its way to Oklahoma City; the case is still in court pending a monetary settlement with which their parents can purchase several annoying Chihuahuas to replace their lost progeny.
The next to pass onward was Casey Charvet, formerly of Blastro, and as close a friend as a reptile can be to anyone. He has moved to Galveston to make a stab at grad-school as some kind of Toxicologist, which essentially equates to committing social suicide in anyone’s book. I presume that UTMB has no requirements for ethics; his are in such shoddy disrepair from dealing with the usual gamut of hustlers, pimps, and money-whores whom associate themselves with the Internet that it might warrant a jail-sentence before any actual crimes or even scientific-seeming work has been committed. In any case, he has shuffled off his social coil and the withered husk that used to house his firewater and dirty thoughts now lies in repose in a nicely-painted Mausoleum in Galveston (this I know because I helped paint the fucker, and the tile-work and hot-tub scrubbing are next). Checks can be made out to me, as they are a much more tangible token of remorse than actual sorrow, and I assure everyone receiving this (in the most trustworthy of internet voices) that Casey’s ambulatory remains will receive the finest care (in the form of Scotch) that your hopefully generous outpourings of wallet-stuffer can buy.
The final and possibly most heart-rending to leave this world was Jill Marie Kleibur. She boarded the frigate Syphilitic Show Pony as a bilge-stirrer and cesspool replacement technician in an effort to save towards her lifelong dream of doing jack-shit (but only on a part-time basis). The ship was caught between the thrashings of two leviathans and was last seen in the terrible grip of an immense sea-gigolo, heading towards the depths of the Cayman Trench. There have been recent, shocking reports of a ghost-ship resembling the Syphilitic Show Pony seen plying the choppy and frozen seas around Newfoundland, and a willowy shape that can only be the soulless apparition of Jill (redundant phrasing, that) seen at the top of the stacks screeching like a foghorn-voiced harpy for Bombay gin, the souls of men, someone or something named Ella, and a dry pair of panties, all in no particular order. In this I feel some vague stirrings of what I once might have called guilt (but now commonly refer to as indigestion), as I urged her to board the ship to expand her horizons. I myself have recently experienced aural manifestations of sorrow at her passing, in the form of long and mournful messages on my cell-phone, plaintively bemoaning her less-than-glamorous fate as well as her own personal shortcomings and the inadequate social indulgences available in her afterlife.
There was also a guy named Shaun who used to live down here who died of a brain tumor after having moved to New York several years ago. He did too much meth and pissed off almost everyone he knew in this town, but he was always civil to me, so I will raise a glass to him in memoriam and say no more of the matter.
You think this would be enough to break any man, but there was far more in store. The stories I am about to reveal to you caused me to spend several days in Galveston at the Charvet Sanitorium for the Brainy and Slightly Twitchy, convalescing and rallying my depleted mental and physical resources for the writings that I knew would surely possess my hands to scrawl them, much as the Ancient Mariner must have once been forced by a geas of fate to tell his tale of woe to strangers (as an historical note, he was known as a bit of a long-winded and depressing gab at parties, and the dead albatross hanging ‘round his neck made him less-than-popular with those having two X-chromosomes; this also explained the failure of his cologne Eau de Albatross Extincte, which failed to sell even one bottle in the London market).
Our first destination: Pineville, Missouri. Just the thought of it causes my hands to become palsied and itch for the trigger of something that throws large amounts of lead down-range in a rapid and barely-controlled manner.
I won’t go into the details, as they are far too disgraceful for the delicate constitutions of you, my gentle readers, but the reasons I ended up in Missouri were many-folded, like the steel of a Japanese katana, and just as likely to kill, maim, or generally result in an unfortunate mentally and physically injurious experience. The causes of myself having to migrate to a town with a population of 870 and a resident-to-sex-offender ratio of 96-to-1 had to do with reports that a house my parents rented out in the town had come to be infested by a group of methamphetamine addicts, or “White Rabbits” as they had come to be called, and the local constabulary was powerless to do anything either through disinterest or sheer sloth (or they declined participation because the “Hot Light” was on at the local Krispy Crème).
My parents, having never dealt with such scurrilous personages, were going to go up there and tell them to vacate immediately. Myself, having dealt with many such denizens of depravity, decided it would be best if someone having knowledge of violence and access to firearms accompanied them (that person being yours truly). There’s a line from Hunter S. Thompson’s book Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas that I like to quote, and it goes thus: “You can turn your back on a man, but never turn your back on a drug.” Now, I have not always been a scientist; I have dealt with a lot of unsavory characters, both professionally and in everyday life, and I have to say that the entire situation struck me as a recipe for paternal and maternal injury. I therefore decided that I could spare the time to deal with this particular state of affairs.
I am licensed to carry a handgun in the state of Texas, and since Missouri has a reciprocity agreement with Texas, I am also licensed to carry there as well. You are allowed to check firearms at the airport, as long as they are declared and “cleared” in front of some nervous-looking TSA agents and police, whom I noticed were sporting roaring erections at the mere thought of being able to draw their police-issue Perp-JerkyTM electricity-throwers and watch me twitch like a Parkinsonian Michael Flatley in a tumble-dryer, so I was sure not to make any sudden moves. Dealing with the po-lice is like dealing with heavily-armed newborn deer; they startle easily, only if newborn deer are startled they usually won’t shoot you about a hundred times, plant a knife on you, and say they thought you looked like you might be black (though I can’t say just how the deer in New Jersey might react).
Well, I made it onto the plane and reached my destination of North Arkansas Regional Airport; it says something about the size of Pineville, MO. that I had to fly into Arkansas and then drive the rest of the way. Incidentally, the North Arkansas airport is the one that services Fayetteville, AR. where the headquarters of that most American of corporations, Wal-Mart, is based; reason enough to build a large rocket and shoot Arkansas and the surrounding states into the sun, if you ask me.
In any case, my parents picked me up at the airport (as they had driven from Dallas) and we made it to the hotel, a place called the Boonslick Lodge. It had plastic laminated fake log-cabin plastic laminate (it was doubly faked and laminated and guaranteed not to biodegrade even at ground-zero of a direct nuclear strike with the most powerful nukes devised so far by man). There was, Shiva preserve us, both a large black injection-molded plastic Grizzly out front AND, as a special bonus, a thoroughly ridiculous truck and trailer containing (you guessed it) a NASCAR car. (Is that right, a NASCAR car, or would it just be a NASCAR? I don’t know these things, though I fear that as the literacy rate goes down the popularity of NASCAR will go up). There was also a combination tanning salon and video rental place called 2 Chick’s Flicks. This insipid combination brought to mind oily DVDs being manipulated by hail-damaged, flabby, and fishbelly-pallid country-folk trying to get a tan and beautiful appearance like Brittney Spears (even the current Brittney Spears, which would definitely be an improvement over the women I saw; I’m surprised the birthrate is so high with so much obvious ambulatory human sex-repellant lurking about. Luckily there’s a lot of night in the country as well, so you don’t notice the ugly quite as much).
At this point it was decided that time was money (or could at least be measured in construction costs due to meth-addict misbehaviour), and our interests would be better served if we were to ask the junkies in the house to fuck off as quickly as possible. I feel it necessary to inform you that my parents had no idea that I was packing heat; no sense in distressing them, eh? My mother, ever the firm businesswoman, wanted to march up to the door and demand that everyone (including the rodents, roaches, and other country vermin) except the renter leave the premises; I convinced her that a well-dressed woman with all of her teeth driving a Mercedes SUV up onto their property and beating on the door with demands that the house be turned over to her forthwith was more likely to get jacked than obeyed. I also think yelling and waving my arms at her like a palsied orangutan helped somewhat, as my obvious distress caused her to think, for once, that I might be correct.
A knock, a pause, a firmer knock, a pause, then a pounding and an extra long, tense pause produced nothing more than a set of slightly-reddened knuckles and the whistle of the Missouri wind as it playfully filled my ears with the sound of the absence of response. There were a few cars in the general vicinity of the house, so I knew that someone was there. I made a polite smile at my parents sitting in their car, along with the extended index finger on a closed fist that is internationally recognized as the sign for “hang on just a moment while I commit a felony”. Without waiting for an answer or acknowledgement, I quickly made a round of the house to check for a possible entrance.
The rear door was closed, but I found a window towards the back that was unlocked after I threw a brick through it. After a quick reconnoiter, ensuring there were no noises emanating from the area or people lurking in the shadows, I prised open the window and made my somewhat less-than-stealthy entrance; I say less-than-stealthy because there was a transient breaking of the silence as the act of crawling through the high window caused me to flatulate briefly. I tried, with some success, not to giggle. I say this in order not to appear loutish and vulgar, but merely to point out that laughter is rather more likely to occur in a situation requiring a stolid mein than seriousness is likely to occur during a situation requiring a fit of giggles. This is why I was stifling my guffaws in the crook of my elbow during the commission of a felony B&E with a weapon, and could not recall ever having glowered in anger during inebriated lovemaking or a viewing of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. If I’d known I would be committing a felony breaking & entering when I was slurping raisinated (my word) oatmeal that morning in the depressing lobby of the Boonslick Lodge, I might have been a bit more eager to get the day started; slightly criminal activity always makes you feel a little more alive than normal, a little less numb and fuzzy around the edges. It really brings things into focus, at least for me.
Let’s begin at the den area, where I’d made my unconventional but necessary entry. The extraordinary smell that had assailed my nostrils was not that of my own sphinctoric (my word) exudations, but rather the fetid miasma that, I found later, permeated every nook, cranny, and manufactured hidey-hole of this near-new domicile. I say the smell was extraordinary, though avant-garde might be a better word for it, since it set a trend for stench in my nostrils that had until then only been achieved by the concerted effort of many people acting together to produce such miracles of olfactory odium as cesspools, hippie jam-fests, and New Jersey.
As I cast my stink-stung eyes south of my sneakers (lovely bit of alliteration, that), I was somewhat dismayed to discover that I was standing ankle-deep in the redolent filth produced by several drug-addicts living together in a house that none of them paid for. There were the pizza boxes, dirty clothes, empty beer-bottles, and piled dishes that one would expect to see in the common dorm-room, but this floor-obscuring mess ran the depth and breadth of the entire den and kitchen area. The detritus of this was complicated by distinctly Southern meth-addict touches, such as soiled diapers, discarded food-stamps, empty baggies, and even a glass dick or two, which crunched underfoot nicely as I made my way towards the bedrooms where I suspected the soon-to-be-erstwhile tenants were sleeping and dreaming their simple dreams of lottery winnings smoked up in record-setting fashion. The entire place looked like Al-Quaeda had failed to acquire WMDs and just decided to make living in the house as unpleasant as possible by detonating a squalor-bomb.
I crept upstairs to find two men, boys really, sitting and facing each other on two beds near a window. These two reeking human scarecrows were dressed in tattered jeans and the usual upper-torso-nakedness that comes with being purebred poor white trash in the deep South, and nothing else. Their skin was the unhealthy pallor of a cave-ghost that had been living in a barrel of bleach, with the usual pock marks, skin lesions, and scars that decorate the outer coverings of many meth-monkeys like pet-stains on the upholstery of a castoff Goodwill couch. One of them had a zit on his face that was so large it had worshipers gathered at the base, ready to throw a virgin into the top of it. It was the Mt. Vesuvius of pimples, and I feared that its rupture would cover Earth’s atmosphere and cause nuclear winter. The both of them looked skinny and run-down, like a tenement in the worst part of Hell’s Kitchen, and the both of them combined probably weighed only slightly more than the chicken-fried steak that I’d had for lunch the day before. They looked used up and bloody, like a tampon, and they couldn’t have been more than 25. The room they were in contained the robust miasma of cigarettes that only the poverty-stricken would care to afford, and the unadulterated and mephitic haze that comes only from the smoking of vast amounts of acrid methamphetamine over a long period of time; for fuck’s sake, the windows had a sheen of yellow nicotine/meth-mist grime on them.
These “people” were having a conversation. I say “having a conversation” in the loosest possible terms, because their main means of communication had descended from “barely-passable-as-a-language-Missouri-public-school-English” to the “I’ve-been-up-for-four-days-and-the-furniture-is-starting-to-argue” janky stage. In the two minutes that I stood there staring at them, completely in the open, there were a few brief bursts of intelligible words strung together that would have required an Ultra-High Frequency decoder to interpret; the rest consisted of uncomfortable silences, awkward pauses, grunts, and “huh?”.
I resisted the urge to kick both of them out of the window, and let me tell you, it was a STRONG urge; there’s nothing like some fucking hillbilly WT taking advantage of your family to make you want to start knocking heads. It was almost enough to make me turn Republican, but not quite.
My abrupt yet polite cough caught them unawares, and they both started like meth-addicted squatters, which is what they were. For a moment there was a Zen-like silence as we stared at each other, they with startled eyes and crack-lipped open mouths, my own face unclouded as deep summer in Alaska and as expressionless as Easter Island statuary. The stoppage of time in the universe was so brief that most of you probably didn’t notice it, and for the rest who did I apologize whole-heartedly, but I really doubt it was a terrible inconvenience, as it happened to everyone at once.
Truthfully, they didn’t seem a bit surprised when I said, “I assume that XXXXX told you that you would have to leave soon, so now’s the time.” There was no trouble, just a brief gathering of their meager belonging, quickly stuffed into a laundry sack, and an even more accelerated exit. I saw them make their way to a house on the next block, which I later learned was actually the house that they rented; apparently, they’d so polluted their own nest with the scuzzy and repellent excretions that they’d decided to go squat with some friends.
And I still had two bedrooms to check. Bonus.
I don’t really want to go into the details of the second bedroom I checked. Suffice to say that it contained smells, sights, and debris similar to that I’d found upstairs. Also contained therein was a “couple” of junkie-squatters, one male and one female, as well as their two squalling newborns, which explained both the perpetuation of this particular species of Homo homunculus and the grotesque diapers full of fuck-trophy feces I’d found scattered all over the house. Just the thought of those two rutting away for hours on king-hell crank while their children squalled in the same room was almost enough to make me repaint the domicile with the contents of my stomach; the couple was so skinny that I feared they would start a fire if they ever rubbed together. I was thankful that these two and their cracker spawn also decided it best not to give me any trouble. I’m not a particularly menacing person, but I have a feeling that they were getting a distinct “I’m REALLY not in the mood” vibe that poured off me in waves, like stink from their own bodies, and it seemed to work in my favor.
Before their skittering exeunt, I quizzed them as to the location of the “renter” who had formerly occupied the space. They mentioned that he was at a construction job, trying to get money to pay for a lawyer to get his DWI dismissed, pay for his divorce, and get his kids back from child protective services; it was quite a lot of stereotypic information in one or two brief sentences, and I tried with some success not to laugh in their faces. I figured that, if there was a God, then He’d already done enough to these poor buggers and there was no use adding to it; the omnipotent and omniscient are much better at ruining someone’s life than I am. The lesson I took away from this particular encounter can best be summed up thus: stereotypes are a useful shortcut.
The third room was by far the most stunning of the three. It was locked, but due to shoddy construction, my previous criminal history, and American Express, it didn’t take much for me to jimmy the door with my credit card. What I found inside was…
…exactly the kind of place that someone with too much time, unlimited quantities of pharmaceutical-grade ice, world-class obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a toothbrush, would choose to spend their time. The house-mung stopped dead at the threshold, as if hesitant to despoil such an obviously large amount of work. It was as if the rule that “everything gravitates towards chaos” had utterly failed within a small area of the planet. The floor, the base-boards, the A/C vents, and storage cabinets were completely devoid of any trace of grime. If I’d been asked to lick the floor for free, I would have tried to wheedle $100 out of the person who asked, at least until they pulled a gun on me; then I would have done it for free, but I wouldn’t really have minded. Really, it was that tidy.
Now, this is where the OCD and the creepy break from reality become evident (not my own, just the tenant’s). This guy had been spending all of his available cash on what appeared to be baseball cards, toy Hot Wheels cars, cleaning products, and high-quality crank; the storage cabinets were chock-full to bursting with the cards and un-played-with cars. I couldn’t make this one up; it was really a strange moment that my head struggled to wrap around. I thought to myself here lies madness, though it seemed to me that the madness was not lying around being shifty and no-count, like a lazy Catahoula hound; madness was in fact capering around with cleaning implements and a pipe-full of the purest king-hell Work Ethic that could be put in a baggie, sold, and smoked by someone with nothing else to do. Truthfully, the only thing I knew to do was to shut the door before the mounds of squalor from the other rooms decided that they’d bum-rush the room like a bunch of Arab states trying to beat up on Israel.
Once the house was evacuated, it was a simple matter to call in my parents for an inspection of the damage. Watching my dad damn near blow a gasket and my mom pacing around with a legal pad, jotting notes and working her way up to the same venous pressure as my father, was a real treat, let me tell you.
Around this time, a couple of construction fellows that my parents had hired to clean up the house and finish the construction that was supposed to have been completed by the “renter” showed up, and I went out to talk with them and get some air that wouldn’t make me feel like my lungs had taken a dip in syrup made from syphilitic maple trees. One of them, I learned, was an ex-Special-Forces from Vietnam; a genuinely laid-back individual who’d probably killed any number of other humans and had them try to kill him, and was never going to sweat anything else ever again. The other was his brother, who’d been in the Navy on a hospital ship and had actually carted his Special Forces brother in on a stretcher after he was wounded during some offensive or other. We chatted and jawed like old hands, and they seemed interested in what I did for a living, as they were getting near the age where the big C could possibly rear its ugly head, especially since both of them were heavy smokers. They were also very interested in the rarified conditions tuned to junkie biology that were to be found inside, and could only shake their heads in amazement. I was fascinated by their ability to do something called “construction” with their own hands, and plied them with many questions (and learned more about concrete in 10 minutes than I’d known in a lifetime), as the most interesting thing I’d ever been able to build by myself was a layer of shower mold, and that was strictly unintentional.
About that time, dumb-ass showed up. I can prove he’s a dumb-ass because he still drove up after seeing my mom and dad in the yard, as well as their Mercedes SUV, myself, and two construction workers standing in “his” yard. If he’d had any brains at all, he would have turned his truck around and never come back.
The word “golem” appears in the bible and refers to an embryonic or incomplete substance, and has its place in Jewish folklore as “an animated being created entirely from inanimate matter”, and for some reason when I saw this worthless fucker, that’s the word I though of; I also though of “homunculus”, “mud-puppy”, and “future fertilizer” (because I had SERIOUSLY murderous thoughts regarding the disposition of his corporeal self). He was a squatty, thin, slope-headed, uni-browed, scummy, disreputable-looking piece of human filth, and I vowed that if he so much as made a hostile move they would be picking up chunks of him from the trees for the next week, and never mind the handgun; I would rip his own arm off and beat him to death with it, then tell the police it was a masturbation accident.
I decided to stay some distance away from the discussion that ensued between my parents and this miserable, chemical-smoking junkie, lest I become further unhinged and do something, if not regrettable, at least not wise. There was one instance of raised voices that caused me to start forward, but I was grabbed in a surprisingly strong grip around my arm by the ex-Special Forces guy, who didn’t say anything, but held on for a moment until the volume of the “discussion” had subsided and I returned to my position of Sentinel rather than Avenging Shiva.
To make this long story short(er), the ambulatory pile of poo that was the renter decided to move his shit out, though he seemed to believe that my parents were taking advantage of him; I’m really glad they told me that last part AFTER we’d returned to the hotel room. What the FUCK is it with some people and their sense of endless entitlement, their rancid logic that says that the people who work owe them a living?
Ahhh, these scum. We’ve all been there…the feeling that there are some people who are better off as Soylent Green or tinder for camp-fires. You talk to them or have to deal with them, and in your head there’s the thought of “what the fuck is this person thinking/on/doing?” and you want to simply turn and run away so that you don’t have to interact with them any further. Kind of what many of you think whenever you find one of my e-mails straining the digital load-capacity of your “in” boxes.
Well, looky-there, I’m tired of writing. Goody for you. I have to go unpack and pack for more trips. I’ll write more when the burden of the mundane becomes less.
A knock, a pause, a firmer knock, a pause, then a pounding and an extra long, tense pause produced nothing more than a set of slightly-reddened knuckles and the whistle of the Missouri wind as it playfully filled my ears with the sound of the absence of response. There were a few cars in the general vicinity of the house, so I knew that someone was there. I made a polite smile at my parents sitting in their car, along with the extended index finger on a closed fist that is internationally recognized as the sign for “hang on just a moment while I commit a felony”. Without waiting for an answer or acknowledgement, I quickly made a round of the house to check for a possible entrance.
The rear door was closed, but I found a window towards the back that was unlocked after I threw a brick through it. After a quick reconnoiter, ensuring there were no noises emanating from the area or people lurking in the shadows, I prised open the window and made my somewhat less-than-stealthy entrance; I say less-than-stealthy because there was a transient breaking of the silence as the act of crawling through the high window caused me to flatulate briefly. I tried, with some success, not to giggle. I say this in order not to appear loutish and vulgar, but merely to point out that laughter is rather more likely to occur in a situation requiring a stolid mein than seriousness is likely to occur during a situation requiring a fit of giggles. This is why I was stifling my guffaws in the crook of my elbow during the commission of a felony B&E with a weapon, and could not recall ever having glowered in anger during inebriated lovemaking or a viewing of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. If I’d known I would be committing a felony breaking & entering when I was slurping raisinated (my word) oatmeal that morning in the depressing lobby of the Boonslick Lodge, I might have been a bit more eager to get the day started; slightly criminal activity always makes you feel a little more alive than normal, a little less numb and fuzzy around the edges. It really brings things into focus, at least for me.
Let’s begin at the den area, where I’d made my unconventional but necessary entry. The extraordinary smell that had assailed my nostrils was not that of my own sphinctoric (my word) exudations, but rather the fetid miasma that, I found later, permeated every nook, cranny, and manufactured hidey-hole of this near-new domicile. I say the smell was extraordinary, though avant-garde might be a better word for it, since it set a trend for stench in my nostrils that had until then only been achieved by the concerted effort of many people acting together to produce such miracles of olfactory odium as cesspools, hippie jam-fests, and New Jersey.
As I cast my stink-stung eyes south of my sneakers (lovely bit of alliteration, that), I was somewhat dismayed to discover that I was standing ankle-deep in the redolent filth produced by several drug-addicts living together in a house that none of them paid for. There were the pizza boxes, dirty clothes, empty beer-bottles, and piled dishes that one would expect to see in the common dorm-room, but this floor-obscuring mess ran the depth and breadth of the entire den and kitchen area. The detritus of this was complicated by distinctly Southern meth-addict touches, such as soiled diapers, discarded food-stamps, empty baggies, and even a glass dick or two, which crunched underfoot nicely as I made my way towards the bedrooms where I suspected the soon-to-be-erstwhile tenants were sleeping and dreaming their simple dreams of lottery winnings smoked up in record-setting fashion. The entire place looked like Al-Quaeda had failed to acquire WMDs and just decided to make living in the house as unpleasant as possible by detonating a squalor-bomb.
I crept upstairs to find two men, boys really, sitting and facing each other on two beds near a window. These two reeking human scarecrows were dressed in tattered jeans and the usual upper-torso-nakedness that comes with being purebred poor white trash in the deep South, and nothing else. Their skin was the unhealthy pallor of a cave-ghost that had been living in a barrel of bleach, with the usual pock marks, skin lesions, and scars that decorate the outer coverings of many meth-monkeys like pet-stains on the upholstery of a castoff Goodwill couch. One of them had a zit on his face that was so large it had worshipers gathered at the base, ready to throw a virgin into the top of it. It was the Mt. Vesuvius of pimples, and I feared that its rupture would cover Earth’s atmosphere and cause nuclear winter. The both of them looked skinny and run-down, like a tenement in the worst part of Hell’s Kitchen, and the both of them combined probably weighed only slightly more than the chicken-fried steak that I’d had for lunch the day before. They looked used up and bloody, like a tampon, and they couldn’t have been more than 25. The room they were in contained the robust miasma of cigarettes that only the poverty-stricken would care to afford, and the unadulterated and mephitic haze that comes only from the smoking of vast amounts of acrid methamphetamine over a long period of time; for fuck’s sake, the windows had a sheen of yellow nicotine/meth-mist grime on them.
These “people” were having a conversation. I say “having a conversation” in the loosest possible terms, because their main means of communication had descended from “barely-passable-as-a-language-Missouri-public-school-English” to the “I’ve-been-up-for-four-days-and-the-furniture-is-starting-to-argue” janky stage. In the two minutes that I stood there staring at them, completely in the open, there were a few brief bursts of intelligible words strung together that would have required an Ultra-High Frequency decoder to interpret; the rest consisted of uncomfortable silences, awkward pauses, grunts, and “huh?”.
I resisted the urge to kick both of them out of the window, and let me tell you, it was a STRONG urge; there’s nothing like some fucking hillbilly WT taking advantage of your family to make you want to start knocking heads. It was almost enough to make me turn Republican, but not quite.
My abrupt yet polite cough caught them unawares, and they both started like meth-addicted squatters, which is what they were. For a moment there was a Zen-like silence as we stared at each other, they with startled eyes and crack-lipped open mouths, my own face unclouded as deep summer in Alaska and as expressionless as Easter Island statuary. The stoppage of time in the universe was so brief that most of you probably didn’t notice it, and for the rest who did I apologize whole-heartedly, but I really doubt it was a terrible inconvenience, as it happened to everyone at once.
Truthfully, they didn’t seem a bit surprised when I said, “I assume that XXXXX told you that you would have to leave soon, so now’s the time.” There was no trouble, just a brief gathering of their meager belonging, quickly stuffed into a laundry sack, and an even more accelerated exit. I saw them make their way to a house on the next block, which I later learned was actually the house that they rented; apparently, they’d so polluted their own nest with the scuzzy and repellent excretions that they’d decided to go squat with some friends.
And I still had two bedrooms to check. Bonus.
I don’t really want to go into the details of the second bedroom I checked. Suffice to say that it contained smells, sights, and debris similar to that I’d found upstairs. Also contained therein was a “couple” of junkie-squatters, one male and one female, as well as their two squalling newborns, which explained both the perpetuation of this particular species of Homo homunculus and the grotesque diapers full of fuck-trophy feces I’d found scattered all over the house. Just the thought of those two rutting away for hours on king-hell crank while their children squalled in the same room was almost enough to make me repaint the domicile with the contents of my stomach; the couple was so skinny that I feared they would start a fire if they ever rubbed together. I was thankful that these two and their cracker spawn also decided it best not to give me any trouble. I’m not a particularly menacing person, but I have a feeling that they were getting a distinct “I’m REALLY not in the mood” vibe that poured off me in waves, like stink from their own bodies, and it seemed to work in my favor.
Before their skittering exeunt, I quizzed them as to the location of the “renter” who had formerly occupied the space. They mentioned that he was at a construction job, trying to get money to pay for a lawyer to get his DWI dismissed, pay for his divorce, and get his kids back from child protective services; it was quite a lot of stereotypic information in one or two brief sentences, and I tried with some success not to laugh in their faces. I figured that, if there was a God, then He’d already done enough to these poor buggers and there was no use adding to it; the omnipotent and omniscient are much better at ruining someone’s life than I am. The lesson I took away from this particular encounter can best be summed up thus: stereotypes are a useful shortcut.
The third room was by far the most stunning of the three. It was locked, but due to shoddy construction, my previous criminal history, and American Express, it didn’t take much for me to jimmy the door with my credit card. What I found inside was…
…exactly the kind of place that someone with too much time, unlimited quantities of pharmaceutical-grade ice, world-class obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a toothbrush, would choose to spend their time. The house-mung stopped dead at the threshold, as if hesitant to despoil such an obviously large amount of work. It was as if the rule that “everything gravitates towards chaos” had utterly failed within a small area of the planet. The floor, the base-boards, the A/C vents, and storage cabinets were completely devoid of any trace of grime. If I’d been asked to lick the floor for free, I would have tried to wheedle $100 out of the person who asked, at least until they pulled a gun on me; then I would have done it for free, but I wouldn’t really have minded. Really, it was that tidy.
Now, this is where the OCD and the creepy break from reality become evident (not my own, just the tenant’s). This guy had been spending all of his available cash on what appeared to be baseball cards, toy Hot Wheels cars, cleaning products, and high-quality crank; the storage cabinets were chock-full to bursting with the cards and un-played-with cars. I couldn’t make this one up; it was really a strange moment that my head struggled to wrap around. I thought to myself here lies madness, though it seemed to me that the madness was not lying around being shifty and no-count, like a lazy Catahoula hound; madness was in fact capering around with cleaning implements and a pipe-full of the purest king-hell Work Ethic that could be put in a baggie, sold, and smoked by someone with nothing else to do. Truthfully, the only thing I knew to do was to shut the door before the mounds of squalor from the other rooms decided that they’d bum-rush the room like a bunch of Arab states trying to beat up on Israel.
Once the house was evacuated, it was a simple matter to call in my parents for an inspection of the damage. Watching my dad damn near blow a gasket and my mom pacing around with a legal pad, jotting notes and working her way up to the same venous pressure as my father, was a real treat, let me tell you.
Around this time, a couple of construction fellows that my parents had hired to clean up the house and finish the construction that was supposed to have been completed by the “renter” showed up, and I went out to talk with them and get some air that wouldn’t make me feel like my lungs had taken a dip in syrup made from syphilitic maple trees. One of them, I learned, was an ex-Special-Forces from Vietnam; a genuinely laid-back individual who’d probably killed any number of other humans and had them try to kill him, and was never going to sweat anything else ever again. The other was his brother, who’d been in the Navy on a hospital ship and had actually carted his Special Forces brother in on a stretcher after he was wounded during some offensive or other. We chatted and jawed like old hands, and they seemed interested in what I did for a living, as they were getting near the age where the big C could possibly rear its ugly head, especially since both of them were heavy smokers. They were also very interested in the rarified conditions tuned to junkie biology that were to be found inside, and could only shake their heads in amazement. I was fascinated by their ability to do something called “construction” with their own hands, and plied them with many questions (and learned more about concrete in 10 minutes than I’d known in a lifetime), as the most interesting thing I’d ever been able to build by myself was a layer of shower mold, and that was strictly unintentional.
About that time, dumb-ass showed up. I can prove he’s a dumb-ass because he still drove up after seeing my mom and dad in the yard, as well as their Mercedes SUV, myself, and two construction workers standing in “his” yard. If he’d had any brains at all, he would have turned his truck around and never come back.
The word “golem” appears in the bible and refers to an embryonic or incomplete substance, and has its place in Jewish folklore as “an animated being created entirely from inanimate matter”, and for some reason when I saw this worthless fucker, that’s the word I though of; I also though of “homunculus”, “mud-puppy”, and “future fertilizer” (because I had SERIOUSLY murderous thoughts regarding the disposition of his corporeal self). He was a squatty, thin, slope-headed, uni-browed, scummy, disreputable-looking piece of human filth, and I vowed that if he so much as made a hostile move they would be picking up chunks of him from the trees for the next week, and never mind the handgun; I would rip his own arm off and beat him to death with it, then tell the police it was a masturbation accident.
I decided to stay some distance away from the discussion that ensued between my parents and this miserable, chemical-smoking junkie, lest I become further unhinged and do something, if not regrettable, at least not wise. There was one instance of raised voices that caused me to start forward, but I was grabbed in a surprisingly strong grip around my arm by the ex-Special Forces guy, who didn’t say anything, but held on for a moment until the volume of the “discussion” had subsided and I returned to my position of Sentinel rather than Avenging Shiva.
To make this long story short(er), the ambulatory pile of poo that was the renter decided to move his shit out, though he seemed to believe that my parents were taking advantage of him; I’m really glad they told me that last part AFTER we’d returned to the hotel room. What the FUCK is it with some people and their sense of endless entitlement, their rancid logic that says that the people who work owe them a living?
Ahhh, these scum. We’ve all been there…the feeling that there are some people who are better off as Soylent Green or tinder for camp-fires. You talk to them or have to deal with them, and in your head there’s the thought of “what the fuck is this person thinking/on/doing?” and you want to simply turn and run away so that you don’t have to interact with them any further. Kind of what many of you think whenever you find one of my e-mails straining the digital load-capacity of your “in” boxes.
Well, looky-there, I’m tired of writing. Goody for you. I have to go unpack and pack for more trips. I’ll write more when the burden of the mundane becomes less.
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