6.26.2004 Early tomorrow morning we begin shooting a very important sketch. I slept only three hours last night so that I could wake up early and figure out how to build a Catholic confessional. I hope to sleep only four hours tonight, so that I can wake up early and bring a middle-aged man I hardly know to a cemetery.
6.24.2004
Instead of detailing the fact that my car was broken into and my Ipod was stolen, I'd like to post an article from a recent issue of The Onion:
Mugger Can't Believe Crap Victim Has On MP3 Player BOSTON—Following the successful mugging of a jogger in Franklin Park, petty criminal Derek Mesker announced Monday that he cannot believe the shit he's found on his victim's Philips 20GB MP3 player. "3 Doors Down? Maroon 5!" Mesker said, scrolling through the songs. "The new Counting Crows?! Man, I'm glad I pistol-whipped that motherfuck." Mesker added that the first thing he did was toss the device's "gay-ass" teal neoprene case.
I had a neoprene case. And a shitload of music that--if you were the sort of fellow who breaks into cars--would definitely disappoint you.
6.20.2004 The junk text below a picture of two disgusting-looking people having sex in a spam letter I received:
Jessica and I took from fundraiser (with bicep living with cream puff, burglar beyond.But they need to remember how hardly beyond pit viper hibernates.When tomato around somnambulist sweeps the floor, related to bride dies.looking glass toward laugh and drink all night with living with short order cook, or cough syrup behind movie theater boogie garbage can toward.Any umbrella can host ski lodge related to, but it takes a real fire hydrant to related to gypsy.When parking lot related to takes a coffee break, bartender over meditates.repulsive finnegan cheery deride anastomosis parallel
6.19.2004
I think this song is going to be very popular. I'm trying to listen to it as many times as I can before it becomes widely appreciate and I become embarrassed about having liked it--you know, like with the Postal Service or Michael Moore.
If you ever want proof that you're alive, get some hot sauce in your eye. That is a genuine feeling.
Part of my job--I'm a waiter in an Asian restaurant--is to fill these small, plastic containers with hot sauce. First I have to make the sauce, composed of chilis and vinegar, and then I have to pour the concoction from a large, cumbersome container into a series of smaller, unwieldy containers. The sauce spatters all over the place, it's a terrible mess. Tonight though--and four days ago, as well--some of the sauce lept up from the pouring process onto the surface of my open eye. I threw my hands to my face, I didn't know how to respond. I thought of chemistry labs in college, and how I'd never needed to use the eyewash.
I staggered around for a moment, blind, until I heard someone making their way down the stairs. I tried to pull myself together. At work, I like to seem like a reasonable person. I pulled my hands from my eyes, and tried to go about my business casually. It was one of the Mexican busboys, coming downstairs to get something or other--I wasn't concerned with what he was getting--and he said hello in a way that indicated he hadn't heard my pained shrieking. I returned the greeting and smiled at him. He paused for a moment before continuing on his way. I wondered if there was still hot sauce on my face. What would he have made of that? I went to the mirror, above a nearby sink I wish I had thought to use while I was panicking, and was surprised to find my face soaked with tears. I imagine the busboy was more surprised. I like to think he went upstairs and said something (en espanol) to the dishwasher like, "Man, white people really don't like working."
I'm probably going to spend the day pretending to get work done amongst other people pretending to get work done. In fact, I'm sure of it. Call me to distract me. 860.965.4224.
1. Earlier this week I argued with a homeless man until he showed me the size of his swollen fists.
2. Oh man, do I hate individually wrapped candy.
3. I feel like now that I sleep on a mattress that I found on the street, I can officially take dirty dishes out of the sink and use them without washing them.
4. Yesterday my aimless four mile walk ended at the beach, where I played volleyball in dress pants and felt terribly out of place.
5. Why don't more places carry stamps?
6. I painted obscenities on the largest wall of our apartment in an attempt to encourage us to continue painting, and now they've been there for weeks.
7. I hope I have some brilliant ideas tomorrow, because I feel like a few are due.
8. Computer designers take note: it would be very cool--and marketable--if consumers could choose the font of the characters on their keyboard.
9. I do my best to dream at night of surviving a plane crash that takes place in the complete wilderness.
10. Tonight I'm going to do my best to fall asleep at a reasonable hour.
6.15.2004 Have you seen Dave's debit card? He can't find it anywhere. I thought I'd do my part by asking the internet instead of helping him look around our apartment.
UPDATE: (6/16) Dave has cancelled the account, and ordered a new debit card. It should hopefully arrive in a few days. My guess is that he finds his old card before the arrival of the new card.
6.14.2004 1. I really hate hearing people in the bathroom. And I don't mean that hearing people in the bathroom ruins my bathroom experience, I mean that I even hate walking by bathrooms. Sometimes I hum loudly to myself to mask the sound. Even to me, this seems odd.
2. Well, it's final. Zombies are the new thing. I was really rooting for municipal workers. At least we're through with pirates. (If I hadn't written this sentence right here, someone would have commented: "We're never be through with pirates! Pirates rule! ARR!" But we are done with pirates. Take off the eyepatch.) I'm even more relieved that we're one step further away from ninjas. The ninja period was a really unhappy time in my life. Everyone wearing black t-shirts on their heads and singing praises of that moronic ninja website? What an awful time that was.
3. Oh, and I found a queen-size mattress on a curb today. It's sweet! I'm lying on it right now! It's a major improvement from my other mattress, which was much smaller and stolen. (I suppose this is an appropriate time to mention that 95% of the furniture in our house was either found on the street or stolen. I am personally most proud of the larger of our living room's two couches, which Brendan and I found in an alley next to a scrap yard.)
4. We're working on a very big project right now. It's big enough that I don't feel at liberty to talk about it. It was rude of me to bring it up.
Here is what I wish for: I wish that I were inhumanly strong, and that I had the ability to make anything support my weight. I want to make everything solid and strong. That way I could climb up the shudders. I could pull myself to the ceiling by grabbing hold of a lightbulb. I could climb to the very, very tops of trees without worrying about branches breaking. Also, one of the stipulations of being able to make everything solid and strong is that I would be able--by choice--treat liquids and gases as solids. Christ made this wish.
Today I was sitting on a street corner with my digital camera, waiting for a(n) (elevated) train to pass by. To better set up this situation, I should explain that I bought a new digital camera that's smaller than a pack of cigarettes, and films movie clips--with sound--incredibly easily and with surprising detail. Anyway, I was staring at the world through this tiny lcd screen, waiting for a train to pass through, when this old man walked by, holding his fist to his face like a phone, going "yack, yack, yack. yack yack? yack." I thought he was making fun of me--which he may have been--so I became quickly offended and considered having him committed. But maybe ten feet behind him, walking the same way down the sidewalk, was one girl talking away on a cell phone, and another doing the same ten feet behind her.
6.13.2004 I hardly ever wish I was invisible because most of the time I feel invisible. The only reasons I would have to actually be invisible would be crime, listening to other people's conversations more closely, and staring down blouses. There are more productive wishes.
6.10.2004 Before I forget--what the fuck is this? It was bad enough watching my old domain become one of those generic internet directory pages--now I have to share my current name with another weblog? I imagine a lot of people will visit his site thinking they are visiting mine. I can only hope he isn't a tremendous asshole.
Now that I've linked to him or her, they will undoubtedly read this post. So, what's the deal, picniclightning.com?
I thought about how to explain this picture--taken this morning at 5 AM precluding a walk around Chicago and a trip to the beach--but then I realized it would be easier not to try.
6.04.2004 The following is a (long) excerpt from a letter I received today from my good friend Adam Janos, detailing the experiences that he and Joel are having by committing themselves to what is supposedly one of the worst jobs you can legally get in a country with work regulations: gutting and preparing salmon. When I first received the letter, I sat on my bed and read it aloud to Dave--and we even considered writing them a parallel letter detailing our collective days (waking up at one in the afternoon, eating junk food and fighting over which fun things we should do that day), but in the end we decided that that would be inhumane.
Anyway, here is his account of their experience. Keep in mind as you read it that the motivating factor behind these torturous tasks is the promise of a trip to India--a venture that they could not afford otherwise.
Joel Clark and I are in Alaska in a little fishing village on the Prince William Sound. We process fish full-time. Well honestly, I do a whole lot more processing than Joel does... Joel spends a good chunk of his work hours driving a 24 foot truck too and from the airport, loading and unloading 50 and 90 pound boxes of frozen salmon. The reason they have given Joel this job is because he can go on the insurance; seeing as he is over 21, has a license, is not a foreigner and not a convicted felon he is one of the few workers qualified.
We live in a bunkhouse and share a room with two others. Mike is a 29 year old Oklahoman who is trying to make $4701.01 to finish paying off a costly divorce. He married at 17 to the town stripper then joined the army. She became a meth addict and wrote $13,000 in bad checks. When the divorced, she went back to her maiden name, clearing her credit and leaving him with the burden. If he doesn't make the money, he goes to jail. ("If I go to jail, Lisa goes in the ground," says Mike. "And I am SERIOUS about that.") Alejandro is a middle aged portly Mexican who speaks little English. He drinks constantly, "Mexican Kool-aid", which is a glass of vodka with a splash of Gatorade. He keeps a plastic cup full on the bedside drawer so he can start as soon as he wakes up.
The wage is $7.15 an hour. Yes, this is shit, but the catch is that every hour over 8 in one day is time and a half ($10.70) and every hour over 40 in a week is as well. The catch on the catch is that the owners do whatever it takes to keep that overtime away from us. Then there are the hidden costs: $170 to get from Ancorage to Cordova, $43 for rainboots, $40 for rain gear, $12/day for the bunkhouse plus three meals. The ferry back will be $65.. we may not take the ferry, but I'll get to that later on.
To take you through my first few days of work:
Monday was easy. Joel and I cleaned out the water coolers with bio-sol, then dumped it into the ocean. We filled those fuckers up at the spring, lugged them back. It hurt, but it was a good hurt. We felt badass, like we were doing something people of our educational/social backround aren't supposed to be hard enough to do. 7 hours of work for me, 8 1/2-9 for Joel because he took the truck while I ate dinner.
Tuesday was an opener... an opener is a window of time in which the boats are allowed to catch fish (permitted by Alaska Fishing and Game). They last 12, 24, or 36 hours and they work the full time because if you try to catch fish during any other time its a $25,000 fine. This was a 36 hourer.
9:00 A.M. ***
Work starts and I'm at the wash tank. I'm wearing 3 pairs of socks, underwear, long underwear, thermal shirt, t-shirt, hoodie, rain boots, glove liners, heavy duty rubber gloves, yellow plastic overalls, a beard net, my favorite red winter hat, and a yellow rain jacket.
To better explain the wash tank: first the dock crew (big guys) take the fish out of the nets and dump them into carts. The carts get brought into the factory, one big room. Then the Fillipinos cut, gut and behead the suckers. Those go onto a conveyor belt where the sucking line use high-powered vacuums to remove the blood line, which runs down the spine on the inside. The fish move down the line in one-second incraments, then fall off into the wash tank. Its my job to reach into this freezing cold water and grab the gutted beheaded fish. Then I check to see if the hearts still there (its on the inside of the headless throat) and if it is, tear it out. Sometimes it squirts blood, so I've learned to cover with the other hand so it doesn't shoot up into my face anymore. Then I check for remaining entrails, pull them out and throw them onto the next conveyor belt. This must be done VERY FAST, the fish come every second and there are 3-5 of us at this 6' x 2' x 2' tank. From this conveyor belt the fish are graded by an inspector and go to their respective carts, from which the Mexicans box them up and send them to the freezer, one of the bosses, or Joel, who drives them to the airport when a truck is full. (Joel also does alot of the "slime line" work as well, don't get me wrong). Work is envigorating though disgusting. I don't notice the smell.
12 PM ***
Lunch break. I feel okay, a little sore but there's alot of work yet.
1 PM ***
Back to work. This is getting harder but I focus on defocusing, blocking the whole thing out because India, here I come.
2:30 PM ***
No more fish. Next ship comes in at 3:30, come back then. I rest my back and feel a bit better.
3:30 PM ***
Back to work! If you think that this work is disgusting, you understand it at the most superficial level. If you think its painfully repetitive, you're getting closer. More than anything else, this job is painful. It is hard on the hands, on the forearms, and most of all, on the back and neck. I am in pain.
6:30 PM ***
Dinner break. After dinner I'll get overtime, so I'm excited. At dinner I'm told there's no more work tonight. Tuesday work is over. Come back at 1 AM.
7:30 PM ***
I try to nap but to no avail. The sun is out, as it always is, and my roomates are chatting away.
Wednesday
1 AM ***
Work starts again. No overtime because technically its a new day. I'm not that tired, and there's an 18 year old Minnesotan girl named Sarah who works across from me. Unfortunately she's a fucking idiot, but no one has told her yet because she just so gosh darn purdy. Luckily we can't make conversation due to the loud machinery.
3:30 AM ***
15 minute paid break. Everyone heads to the break room. I am soaked in fish water, it has seeped through. People injest the substances of their choice (coffee/cigarettes/methamphetamines/hydrocodone/muscle relaxers/Mexican kool-aid) and get back to work. I think I am ready to do this shift... I am wrong.
5:00 AM ***
My supervisor moves me to the sucker line. It is here that I break... no one can hear what would be my audible whimpering over the loud machinery. Blood, guts and eggs spray into my face. My right hand is covered in fish fluid and has trouble moving.
5:30 AM ***
My supervisor recognizes my agony/lack of production/slow up at the wash tank and moves me back to my original position. Ah, the wash tank. I'm glad to be back.
5:31 AM ***
I'm no longer glad to be back.
6:30 AM ***
I'm starting to get nauseaous, which is interesting because up until this point it has not happened. I gag several times. I feel the onset of diherrea as well. The seconds creep by. In all my life - from tech weeks to gem scams, from illness to injury, sleep studies to heartbreak - I have never felt so close to hell. Breakfast is at 7 AM, thank god.
7:00 AM ***
No breakfast, we must do more fish. Sarah leaves the line, goes outside, and vomits. She will not be coming back. 15 more minutes, my Czech supervisor tells me. I decide to take her spot on the otherside of the wash tank. It is during this short stumble over that I realize how exhausted I am. My back is gone.
7:15 AM ***
15 more minutes, my Czech supervisor tells me. It is at this point that I have decided to give up. This work is not for me. My tickets to India are non-refundable, and there will be a huge debt, but it is okay. After college, I'll get my bartending license and work off the debt at Mardi Gras. I'm charming, I can do that. I'm a talker, not a factory-er. What the fuck am I doing here... I'm definetly quiting. I'll tell Joel when I get off work, he'll understand. My parents will understand too. I'll be really dissapointed in myself, but its what I have to do.
7:30 AM ***
Work ends. "Come back at 1," the Czech tells me. I stumble out the door, but I can no longer feel myself. Oklahoma Mike sits outside the breakfast hall and greets me... I hear myself say hello back. I go in... a big bearded man asks me if I'm alright... I hear myself say that I'm fine. I grab a plate of something rather and go to eat it... The food appears to be falling out of my mouth, I hear myself think. I bring the plate underneath my face to catch it. Food is finished and I stumbled to my room and strip off most of my clothes. "How was work?" Mike's girlfriend Holly asks me. "Fucking shitty," I say. "I wish I were a drug dealer."
7:40 AM ***
BLACK
12:30 PM ***
Time for lunch. I feel a lot better. I eat lunch. Joe has told me that once we finish the fish, he'll give me overtime making boxes.
1:00 PM ***
Fish fish fish? Fish fish. Fish?! Fish!! HAHAHA! Fish fish fishy fish.
2:30 PM ***
OVERTIME!
2:40 PM ***
No more fish. Clock out. Joe tells me I will not make boxes today, tomorrow when it won't be overtime.
Tonight I sneezed over and over for hours in the most ornate movie theatre I've ever been in. I can't imagine the rest of the audience appreciated this very much, though in my own defense, I think I must have been the most annoyed.
6.01.2004 Sometime in the last month I lost my good work shoes. This was incredibly saddening because those shoes were fucking great. They were shiny and fancy looking and comfortable enough that I could wear them without socks. Relatedly, my tendency not to wear socks has made all of the shoes that are still in my possession smell absolutely awful. It's sort of a brie smell. Anyway, I have no idea what happened to those shoes. What's more, they were the keystone in my pretending to be a serious person. It's embarrassing to go around to fine dining restaurants and talk about how much formal experience you have when you're wearing New Balance sneakers that reek of brie.
A few days ago--the day we found (in an alley beside a scrapyard) the couch that has since become the centerpiece of our living room--Brendan and I spent twenty minutes trying to free some similar work shoes from their dangling location on a power line outside of Home Depot. We threw sticks at them, we threw a tennis ball. Brendan climbed into the back of an eighteen-wheeler and found a lengthy plank of wood. We were on our way back to the power line when a security guard caught us taking the wood and motioned for us to freeze.
Brendan and I have had a lot of experience getting into trouble with one-another, so we were fairly comfortable at the time, and exchanged the usual chimes of "Oh, great," and "Here we go," before dawning our charming grins. The officer made his way to where we stood with the stolen board, and asked us what was going on.
In our last show, we had a live sketch called "Ice Skating Rodeo," written by Raizin Bob-Waksberg, about two kids who get caught sneaking out of their house. In the sketch, each of the two kids simultaneously lies about where they were headed, but the lies are extremely different, and the kids have to do their best to rectify the discrepancy between their lies. Brendan and I performed this same exact sketch for the officer.
OFFICER:
You're trying to get shoes down? Whose shoes are they?
BRENDAN: BEN:
(pointing at me) They're his. A friend of ours.
OFFICER:
(confused look)
BRENDAN:
Uhh...(pointing at me) a friend of his.
OFFICER:
Uh-huh. So how'd they get up there?
BRENDAN: BEN:
Gosh, who knows? Some other guys threw them up there.
OFFICER:
(confused look)
BEN:
Some other guys...know how they got up there.
OFFICER:
Well is this guy a Home Depot employee?
BRENDAN: BEN:
Yes. No.
BRENDAN:
Uhhh...
BEN:
Uhhh...
BRENDAN:
He used to work here, but he lost his job.
BEN:
Very sad.
Even though he eventually came to believe our ridiculous story, which went on to such absurd lengths as to include the work history of our shoeless, fictional friend, it was the worst display of lying I think I've ever been a part of--and we didn't even get the shoes.
For the remainder of the summer, you can also read about my life on Brendan's site, as he is right now sleeping twenty-five feet (as the crow flies--the kind of crow that can fly through walls and floors) from where I sit in bed. Our lives are very similar, with the exception that I have a job and he has a bunch of worthless stories about applying for jobs. You hear me, shitface? Your stories don't put pizza on the table. Now go get a fucking job and then go buy us a table and put a pizza on it.
