View current page
...more recent posts
On Company Time
Freddy from Honduras said of his work mates, two are from Guatemala, and two from Bolivia. Any Salvadorans? I asked. No, Freddy grimaced. No te gusta Salvador? I asked. No, Freddy said. Porque? I asked. Because they kill women and children, he said. Cuando, I asked. Setena y siete, setenta y ocho, he said. Oh, si, recuerdo, I said, remembering back to my college months in Austin and all the love everyone was feeling for Daniel Ortega. Freddy is from the state of Limpira, which borders El Salvador. He is only twenty-five so he is carrying on a hatred handed down by his older relatives. Freddy said a nice house can be got in Honduras for $7,000. I paid $22,000 for my house in New Orleans. It was a fixer-upper.
I was talking to one of the Guatemalans around lunchtime yesterday. It was his birthday. He asked me to take him a la tienda. So I did and he got him two packs of Marlboro lights and a drink. He bought me a large Heinekin. Earlier he had asked me what I smoked and I showed him and he said, oh, Camel. I smoke Marlboro light, girly cigarette, but Camel for man (I tried to show him that my Camels were lights too but he didn't get it). Yes, I said, lowering my voice and puffing out my chest, and hacking up a hairball.
I want to now shine a brief light on the Marshall office of VDOT which has some good men and women working for it and some with rather antiquated racial attitudes towards its African-American workers. I will spare you the details because I would hate to taint a burgeoning lawsuit. But it seems they have a lot of fun down there with their workers, and even Anglo on Anglo gags are rife with hilarity. Workers have been known to duct tape weaker workers into submission and then sit on their chests and wag penises in their faces. So if you live in Virginia and pay taxes you might make a note on your next tax bill that you would prefer your money not go to projects that would include penis-wagging on company time. Unless that is something you do support. I am not here to make judgments.
Deputy Dog Lives Another Day
Dear Mom,
I don't know if you remember this but back when you were still living I wrote to you about a barking dog in Virginia, down the hill from where I stay. He would bark all night at the moon and stars and the foxes and if there were sheep out here he would bark at the sheep. A yappy bark. A high pitched yappy bark. The sound would travel hundreds of feet and come into my bedroom and make me feel insane in a way disproportionate to the aggravation. If I were a superpower I might, to show how discontented I am, fire bomb a hundred small cities and follow up with a couple of atomic bombs dropped on the citizens of two larger cities, or, say I were the bitch step sister of a superpower and some mean people kidnapped two of my people, and these mean people were a group with no agenda that I considered relevant, I might fly around in jets and drop bombs over the entire country where the mean people holed up. What, mom? The innocents? Please, please mother, there are no innocents.
By the way, speaking of ill-logic, after a lifetime of eye-wandering under-achieving, with a list of suspect accomplishments including, college-quiting, cross-country hitchhiking, boxcar riding, ghetto dwelling, and a series of moderately satisfying dead-end blue collar jobs, I have ended up as sole occupant of a rather large house on top of a hill, surrounded 360 degrees by Blue Ridge foothills on a property that has a pond, a pool, a tennis court, and as we speak, a rather ambitious re-landscaping of all the land between the pool and the tennis court. Yes mother, I am in the bighouse. What? No mother, no. I know that's what Cagney and Robinson called the...no, I don't mean THAT bighouse. No, unh uh, I've never meant it that way, don't be silly.
Anyway, to the point--I am several hundred feet higher up the hill from the yappy dog and I can still hear it, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to hear it, and so I was just wondering if maybe Jesus would let you have a dog I could send you this one. I know that after our cat, Frank, died, you said you didn't want anymore pets, but that's been a good many years ago and I think you might enjoy this dog, its no bigger than a puppy really, and...no, I wouldn't say it was cute but do you remember that cartoon Deputy Dog?, well, it looks kind of like that.
Sure, yeah, no, I understand. No, you are absolutely right, I should count my blessings. What? No, this isn't long-distance. No, really, I don't think you have to worry about that anymore, I think you are operating with the currency of eternity now and so....click...dial tone. Ok then, it was nice chatting.