Author: jkonrath

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general

Heat

When I lived in Seattle, my studio was on the top floor of the building. Okay, there were only five floors, but with the couple of levels of parking lots underneath there, it gave me a bit of altitude over Pill Hill. Seattle winters aren’t too brutal, and I probably could have survived the whole season without a winter coat, especially given that I drove everywhere. My apartment had a single baseboard heater next to my bed, about four feet of inductive coil inside a metal case, maybe something you could buy for $30 at your local hardware store. I seldom ran the heater, though, because everyone below me ran theirs. I’d often get home from work and find my apartment about the temperature of a bread oven, because the jerkoff below me left his heat on full and then went to work all day or all week. That meant, I opened the window or the patio door, and let the cold and usually rainy Seattle winter battle the apartment until it got comfortable.

I don’t have control of my heat system here either – most apartments in New York have steam radiators that are centrally controlled by who knows what kind of mechanical or manual algorithm. This usually means in mild weather like today – mid-40s or so – my apartment also approaches the temperature resembling a kiln. Unfortunately, the opening the window approach isn’t as pleasant. For one, my crap windows are very difficult to open, and are more binary than linear; you apply way too much pressure to a non-ergonomic handle like you’re trying to open a can of pickles, and after too much time – CREEAK – the window opens about as far as you’ll be able to correct it. Compare this to my Seattle digs, which were only a few years old and had all-new, tight-sealing, perfectly-balanced Andersen windows. And in Seattle, the distant rain and hum of traffic (with no horns or car alarms – I think most people in Western Washington aren’t even aware their cars HAVE horns) sounded so much better than the too-present sound of jocko-homo-italiano guys beating their wives or whatever else I hear outside my window on a regular basis.

I had another round with the dentist today, the last for the year. He finished up a root canal, put in another titanium post, and sealed it all up in temporary crud to await a real crown next year. I’ve burned up all of my insurance for 2004, so I will come back right before my Vegas trip for the porcelain replacement. And I’m doing the flex-spend thing so I will save a little bit of cash and not pay as much in taxes. I am all for any way to pay less tax, although I wouldn’t want to go through all the hoops of considering my writing a “business” so I could write off my computer and stamps and pencils and whatnot. It’s too much work, and I haven’t even bought a new computer in a while. Maybe I should, and deduct the whole deal. Those Tablet PCs look nice…

I finished reading the stock market book I was talking about, and I guess it is good, in the sense that the guy lost like a million dollars and was a total dumbass and admitted it at the end. The whole thing makes me NOT want to invest, to just shovel cash into some kind of blind trust and not look at it, and not buy anything and just read and write and let the money quietly accumulate. I guess that’s what the 401K is for. I have like a dozen choices in the thing, in contrast to old jobs that used Fidelity and offered a bazillion options. All I know is that I max out the thing every year, and I actually made a decent amount of money from my picks last quarter. So that will be there, and if Social Security survives, maybe I can use that money for books each month.

I came to the realization that my biggest fear about retirement now is not getting the money to stop working, but actually living long enough to spend the money. I know that sounds nuts, but 67 is a long way off. I mean, all of my grandparents died at just a few years older than that. Okay, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, and I don’t sit around eating giant blocks of organ meat doused in lard like my grandfather. But when I get out of bed in the morning, my 33-year-old ass doesn’t exactly feel young. What will it be like when it’s twice as old. Maybe I need to get my ass off the couch and run around the block a few times. I mean, having five million in the bank doesn’t do much if my arteries are 99% clogged and my bad cholesterol is a four-digit number. Of course, maybe in 30 years, I will take a roto-rooter nanotech pill and have my circa 1985 heart back again.

After spending the whole day veering in and out of sleep and hoping the dull pain of the new metal in my mouth would go away, I’m now far too awake, and I don’t feel like writing on this new book. I need to dig through my pile of unread books and find something new…

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Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving’s always weird. I’m not one of those people that ironically scoff about how the pilgrims raped the indians, and I’m not the kind that gets all weepy and talks about being thankful for the baby jesus or whatever the hell else. I have problems eating large amounts of food, so eating 8000 calories of turkey and then passing out isn’t my style. Both parades with floats and football bore me.

To the introvert like me, Thanksgiving is a nice day to not have to be around people. I woke up at the usual 7:30 or so today, but then went back to bed and enjoyed drifting in and out of sleep, feeling the cold outside and hearing the rain and wind, and being nice and comfy inside my fortress of blankets and pillows. I did get up to drink juice, take medicine, use the restroom, then go back to bed. I kept repeating the cycle until about two in the afternoon.

On a work day, I rush through the whole teeth-shave-shower cycle as quickly as possible. But on days off, I almost savor it, and spend a lot of time on small details. I spend forever going over my teeth with floss, inspecting each gap and gumline. I usuaully clean the bathroom as I clean myself, spraying the scrubbing bubble stuff and rearranging the things in the cabinet to find some optimum order maximizing storage space and access to frequently-used medical products. I spend too much time with q-tips and peroxide, dousing out my ears. And then, once in the shower, I spend forever under the hot water, never wanting to get out again.

I got dressed and considered going out for lunch, but it looked like hell out: thunderstorms dumped rain from the dark sky, and cold winds tore across the streets, blowing the rain almost sideways. I didn’t need to be anywhere, so I watched a show on PBS about old railroads and played Ace Combat 5 for a while. Finally, at about 4:00, I got the wise idea that maybe I wanted to cook dinner. I figured the stores would probably close at 5:00 (city that never sleeps, my ass – crap closes here like a small church town with blue laws, and meanwhile in Goshen, Indiana, you can go to Meijer and shop for groceries at three in the morning if you want) so I bundled up and headed out.

The rain stopped, and the sky looked dark, but it was that kind of perfect bad weather, the eye of the tornado kind of stuff. Once again, another reason introverts like me love Thanksgiving is because I get the city all to myself. Everyone else is passed out in front of the tube or has a day off, which means nobody is on the streets and I can roam around without running into the usual assortment of derelicts, idiots, yentas, bad drivers, and everyone else that make this neighborhood a pain in the ass. It was absolutely quiet and still. I loved it.

Even the normally idiotic Key Food store wasn’t that bad at all. A few stragglers were in there, buying last minute stuff or stopping in on their way home, probably. But I got to wander the store with no screaming kids, no people leaving their carts blocking the whole damn aisle, none of the usual madness. I didn’t even have to wait in line.

I spent the evening alternating between watching the tube and doing various household crap like washing dishes and working on organizing my CD collection. It feels nice to spend the evening getting stuff done, relaxing, and eating a bunch of food I just cooked. It’s also nice to know there will be three more days of this ahead.

I guess when I spend Thanksgiving doing nothing, I feel slightly guilty in some weird way, that some relative or person will get all weepy about “oh my god he’s all by himself and he’s building a gallows in his bedroom” or whatever. But the truth of it is that I’ve always been alone on holidays like this. At any family gathering, there’s always the group of men, who want to eat their weight in turkey and drink a bunch of beer and watch football and pass out, and then there’s the group of women, who want to talk shit about all of the members of the extended family that aren’t there and exchange their voodoo/gossip, and there’s the group of kids running around like tasmanian devils. That always left me in the middle with nothing to do, and I learned from an early age that the best way to deal with family dinners was to bring a book. (This was long before the days of the GameBoy or portable DVD player.) So even though I had a dozen people around, I was essentially alone. Actually, I was alone but wanted to really be alone, but instead I was in a basement sitting at a card table or whatever, reading my Fiend Folio or something, wishing I could be away from the people passed out or catting out upstairs, except my parents usually drove. And okay, my maternal grandmother was an excellent cook, and I had enough cousins on my mom’s side that I could find someone to hang out with. But we didn’t go to Chicago that much, so Thanksgiving and many Christmases were spent at my stepdad’s folks’ house. And his mom could not cook. Imagine the mom from Better Off Dead and her grotesque cooking, and that was it. So sitting at home, cooking my own food that I chose, changing the channels on my own TV, and enjoying myself, that’s cool. What I did today made for a good day.

Okay, this Seinfeld thing is on TV, so I am going to watch that.

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The liberation of nothing

I did nothing this weekend. NOTHING. It was both depressing and liberating. I really do enjoy being in my apartment when it starts to get cold out, when it’s chilly outside and the thoughts about holidays and winter first fill my head, and long before I realize how shitty the insulation and heating in this place really is, when the January wind pounds through the windows at eighty miles an hour. But for a short period, there’s that warm feeling of being inside with a crisp and cozy amount of heat in the place, and the feeling of cold outside, and a good video to watch and maybe a nice drink and something to eat and an afternoon on the couch thinking good thoughts. I don’t know, I think growing up with a woodburning stove changed my internal wiring somehow. My parents got this giant cast-iron Fischer stove and had an installer build a little “stage” for it in the family room, along with a wall of bricks and a big chimney. And since I was a kid, there’s some kind of social aspect to being warm. You come home to a cold house, and someone starts the fire, and it heats up the whole room, the whole house, and that feeling, that dry heat in the air while you sit on the couch with everyone else, watching TV and waiting for supper, it somehow sticks with you. It seems so much more human, or communal, than just pressing a button or setting a thermostat. And I guess now, even when the impersonal steam heat kicks through the radiators, it reminds me of that comfort.

So yeah, no going out this weekend. I’m also taking it easy on the wallet and preparing for another round with the dentist tomorrow. This will be for another post insertion, another piece of titanium that will be with me forever, or until I do a Bruce Willis-12 Monkeys and tear it out so the men from the future can’t track me anymore.

Not much else. I think I’m going to read some Lester Bangs before bed.

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The Wards nightmare

It seems that my most common recurring dream/nightmare has to do with me working at Wards, or rather not working there. There’s usually some part of the dream in which I am not working there and I’m probably on the schedule, but I haven’t quit or anything, and I’m too embarrassed to go back in and tell them I’m not working there anymore. There’s also usually some component in where they still owe me a paycheck or two, and I’m not sure whether or not I should go ask for it or if they will eventually mail it to me. There are a lot of other side plots and situations to the dream, but that’s the basic deal.

This is the part where some wise ass says “have you ever had that dream where you’re in college, and you find out you have a class you didn’t know about?” Let me tell you something: that really happened to me, on a pretty regular basis. Okay, maybe it didn’t happen every semester, but I skipped a lot of class in college (because I was an idiot) and there were many times I had like a Calculus 5 class that I had only gone to the first class and I was somehow planning to go in and take the midterm cold and somehow get enough points for a half a semester of missed quizzes and homework. I have that dream regularly, to the point where I wake up and I have to verbally tell myself over and over “I’m not in school anymore. I graduated. I’m not in school. Go back to bed.”

Anyway, I always wondered if there were other people out there that worked at Wards on the web, like an alumni association. I mean, this place was around for a hundred years, with a lot of people that worked there for their entire lives, starting out in the shoe department and working up to be store managers, in charge of hundreds of employees. Some stores were the only thing in their communities, the equivalent of Wal-Mart these days, except even bigger because there was no Target or Meijer or Best Buy to go against them. I wish I could remember or write down a tenth of the stories I heard with people as I watched the clock and dealt with customers on the watch at that store. Everyone that worked there had a story, from the giant pro wrestler-looking receiving manager who still lived with his mom to the ex-schoolteacher who lived in the UK for ten years in the Air Force and now sold NAPA parts at the auto counter, to the janitor who seriously won like $2.6 million in the state lottery, yet loved working so much that he still kept his $5.15/hr job mopping up puke in the restrooms. (He did, however, buy a house on a golf course, a Lotus, and entire dispensers of those scratch-off lottery tickets from 7-Eleven, because he had a severe gambling habit and was convinced lightning would strike twice.)

So there’s never been much out there. But now, it seems someone has re-bought the Wards brand. I knew they were trying to sell everything but the fillings out of the employees’ teeth when they got down to the last days in 2001. GE credit bought them during their earlier chapter 11, and I’m sure they counted on salvaging out every sign and shelf when they tore out the stores. Now it appears the domain name and trademarks went too, because wards.com is now an online store with the same logo and look, selling housewares and other junk to web surfers. I couldn’t find any more information about how it happened, who is running it, what kind of PR went out, etc etc. You’d think there would be a picture of the president or a letter from the CEO or some sort of news item that said “we’re back!”, but I can’t find anything. It appears to be some kind of shithole, cookiecutter business-in-a-box that was incorporated by a paralegal in a strip mall and run out of someone’s basement. Too bad, because part of me would almost be interested in seeing Wards come back. I didn’t drink all of the Kool-Aid they fed us back then, but I took a few sips, and I really did believe in the place, as much as a kid in high school could.

What’s funny is that this is the second time this has happened to me. My first job out of college, spry.com, is now running as a pseudo-bizarro phantom business, this time an ISP. I don’t know if it has any relation to the original company – maybe someone bought their network infrastructure and name and tried to run with it – but it also has a fake-ass web site that doesn’t list who works there or what their deal is. I care less about Spry, but it was still an interesting place to be for a year.

Not much else is going on here. I am barely scraping at the next book, maybe writing 40 words a day, just trying to write down ideas and not much else. I have lots of scraps and pieces, and the eventual goal will be to melt all of that down into a real book, but the theme isn’t there at all. The pieces, though, are great. I haven’t named it yet, but it goes through title changes weekly like a bad heavy metal band. It was Zombie Fever!, then Toast Fucker, then Anal Sushi, and there were a few others.

OK, I fell asleep this afternoon, so it should be a long night.

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Pouring sushi

It’s pouring rain outside, a light but steady shower that’s been going on since morning. The city has been working on a few intersections in my neighborhood, grinding down the pavement really low so the manhole covers and drains stick way up from the surface, and then covering it all with lower quality, shitty patching material so it will fall apart in three months and then spend most of the year in disarray until the end of next year when they blow the rest of their year-end budget on another crappy patch job. Anyway, this has left several lake-sized holes directly in front of crosswalks, which quickly filled with water, the construction dust in them mixing into a nice mud. As I walked home in the rain, people charging off the subway met with these moats like the boys coming off the landing craft in Saving Private Ryan; some charged right through and were immediately incapacitated, while some squirmed and tried to go to the side, where no safety awaited them, and the ones in the back pushed forward on everyone, trying to move the huge clusterfuck of traffic onward and out of the hail of rain falling from the sky.

I’m working on some sushi that I paid too much for, and it’s not a good rainy day food. I’m thinking I should have made some grilled cheese, got a good broccoli and cheddar soup going, something heavy and warm and filling. Tuna rolls don’t really do it. Anyway, it will be nice to have a rainy weekend to do nothing. I’ve got Ace Combat 5 in the PlayStation 2 and there’s always that next book thing.

Speaking of which, I think I will go work on finding some more food that sits better than rice-wrapped fish.

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Kentucky McRib

I’m back. All of my clocks are an hour off. I ate a McRib for dinner in the Cincinnati airport, which is actually in Kentucky. I’m mostly unpacked, but I feel like I need to do some mass cleaning in the apartment, except I don’t feel up to it right now.

Indiana was a good getaway. I got to see both of the nephews and all of the other immediate family, and even anti-kid-me has to say that eight-month-old Wesley is pretty damn cute. I borrowed my mom’s car for most of the trip, and drove around all of my old haunts, noticing both the changes and the fact that a lot of stuff is pretty close to the same fifteen years later. It’s weird for me to drive, because all of the routes and trips are so burned into my brain, I just think “I’m going to University Park Mall” and without realizing it, I drive the entire journey from memory.

It’s strange for me to be back. In some sense, it’s sad, to think back to the time I was there, and know that everyone is now gone, changed, moved on and into their own families and not what I remember from high school. It’s not that I want to re-live that time, it’s just it would be nice to run into some people from back then, talk about it, see it again, and the only person that I still know in town is Ray, and he never wants to leave his apartment, aside from going on his weekly comic book run. On the other hand, I find Elkhart to be infinitely more habitable now that I have lived in New York. Everyone I know has a gigantic house with room after room of storage and furniture, usually purchased for the cost of a new car here. I realize I would go batshit insane after living in Elkhart for more than a week, but I really wish I could have a place like that, a car in the garage, a Super Target down the road.

But NO, I do not want to move back to Elkhart.

Okay, I need to crack open the photos I took and get them uploaded.

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mixing paint

Okay, I had fun rambling on yesterday about my old job at Montgomery Ward, and it was a good warm-up exercise for writing, so I thought I’d do it again for a bit. Here goes.

I don’t know how I lucked into the job at Ward’s, but it came at the best time possible. Before that, I worked at an Italian restaurant hellhole as a dishwasher, busting my ass for $3.35 an hour and taking the abuse of the old-school Italian owners. After about six weeks of breaking my back on a sink hung about six inches too low for me, I walked out on a Saturday night during the dinner rush and planned to never come back. The owner called on Monday, cursing in Italian, and said if I didn’t finish out the next week, he wouldn’t pay me. I came back and worked at half-speed, putting greasy plates on the clean rack, never changing the water, and giving them every excuse to tell me to leave. On my last night, I had to clean the cheese grinder, this huge, cast-iron piece that weighed a good twenty pounds, with big screw-threads inside that filled with raw mozzarella cheese. You were supposed to spend a ton of time carefully scraping the extruded cheese out of each thread, scrubbing the insides until sterile. I said, “fuck this,” and gave it a quick once-over on the exterior before putting it away, leaving the cheese to dry into cement inside. The next week, I filled out applications, and basically fell into an interview and callback for Wards, and had the job.

The paint department had two older women and two teen-aged guys. There was me, and another guy named Joe, a year older. He looked like the actor Eddie Kay Thomas from American Pie, except much more sickly and emaciated, and he was even more of a slacker than I was. He perfected the ability to sleep while slumped against the paint counter, so at a distance it looked like he was actually waiting for the next customer. He wanted to go to film school, and his stepdad was one of the top microphone designers in the country. He worked for Crown, designing mics, and wrote articles for many top-end audio magazines. What that meant for us is that he had tons of audio and video equipment lying around the house. Joe got me hooked on punk bands like Black Flag and also on old Troma films like Surf Nazis Must Die and Bad Taste, so we were continually trying to get a band together and/or shoot a movie with no talent, no money, and whatever equipment we found in his basement. Luckily, only a few copies of our attempts actually survived over the years, and I keep tight control over them to avoid shame and embarrassment.

As for the two women, there was Bev, who worked the regular day shift and was our somewhat-manager. She set the schedule and did other managerial tasks, but she wasn’t a salaried manager, and that was a big point of contention for her. Bev was this middle-aged woman that took the job a bit too seriously, and always wanted to claw up a level on the Wards corporate ladder, but would always be back in paints. She helped out the housewifes with their wallpaper samples and worked slowly yet diligently. When there was a shift change at five, she babied us “kids” a bit, and that got old after a while; after all, we were teenagers and knew everything in the fucking world. Joe and I talked behind her back all the time and went on and on with long, mocking dramatic parodies of her and Pearl, but she kept things going during the day, so that worked for us.

Then there was Pearl. Pearl was a crotchety old woman with white curly hair and a constant look of fear and confusion on her face. I felt sorry for her, because she actually worked some other job and needed Wards to make ends meet. I didn’t know her social situation, but I imagined her to be the hermitted old maid, the lady in the neighborhood that all the kids said was a witch, with no family to help her, and this big, scary Reagan-spun world of evil ready to collapse on her at any moment. Pearl was very highly strung, and tended to lose her shit at a moment’s notice. Put her in front of a cash register with a transaction that’s anywhere near abnormal, or have her mix more than four cans of paint, and she would freak the fuck out. She often put cans of paint in the orbital mixer without closing their lids all the way, causing an explosion of pigment everywhere. That and the fact that she was creepy made it difficult to work with her, although maybe it was slightly better than a shift’s worth of Bev’s momming you around.

Me and Joe never worked the same shift during the week; sometimes we’d team up on weekends, but most school nights, it was one or the other of us watching the fort. One of the games we played was repainting stuff in the department. We’d get a lot of damaged, mismixed, or extra paint, and since we’d only get like one or two customers a night sometimes, we’d use the extra supplies to refinish equipment. Joe started the trend by completely disassembling the pigment dispenser one night, and spraypainting the base and turntable with some nice beige spraypaint, the hard-metal finish crap you use on filing cabinets. Compared to the previous million-color splatter, it looked showroom-new. I took apart the paint can closer, that press-thing that seals can lids, and did it up in two different colors. Joe then resprayed our orbital mixer, although shortly after his new paintjob, we got a new one that didn’t shudder and shake like an out-of-balance washing machine during each can of paint.

We did another collaborative art project, which was a book of modern art we created from found objects in the paint department. We only had one or two colors of marker, plus ball-point pens, but we also worked in paint samples, weekly circulars, security tape, wallpaper pieces, and anything else we could find. Once Joe found a cockroach and taped it to the page. We kept the book (really just a legal pad) hidden in the back, and worked on the modern art masterpieces during slow time. I still have the book and often threaten Joe that I will scan the pages and make some kind of web-based interface for it. Just for posterity, here’s a page I scanned in for my glossary; the top piece (“Sunset From Hell”) is Joe’s, when he was in his blue security tape and wallpaper-as apocalypse period, and the bottom piece (“The Analog Kid”) is my deconstruction of the Sunday sales circular into mosaic, representing the complexities of a post-Freudian individual in the new world Reagan era of digital change. Or something.

Any idle time was spent making fun of Pearl and Bev, or devising complex games or diversions. First, both of us would imitate Pearl, and sometimes pretend she led a secret life as a deranged serial killer, mostly because she resembled Norman Bates’ mom’s corpse from Psycho. When that got old, we’d do stuff like put metal can openers in the orbital mixer and hit start to see the thing shoot around; it sounded like dropping a wrench in a large printing press. I manufactured a blood pack from plastic bags and pigment; Joe started a game of seeing who could steal the most can openers a night. We did all of the regular work: dusting off cans, putting away stock, tending to customers, facing shelves, and all of the other usual retail labor. But sometimes, in those non-holiday months, you had nothing to do but listen to Muzak for four hours, and you had to pass the time.

Shortly before I came aboard, our store switched to Nixdorf Point-of-Sale terminals, replacing the old cash registers. These things looked like a slick (at the time) grey PC, with a full keyboard, a tape and form dot-matrix printer, a small greyscale CRT screen on a swing-arm, a magnetic card swipe reader, and a disembodied CPU unit hidden in the counter below, and connected to a main computer, the offices in Chicago, the credit companies, and who knows what else. They gave me a couple of days of training on the machine, but it really took about seven minutes to master them. If you could order food at McDonald’s, you could understand the intricacies of this machine. That meant, of course, that Bev and Pearl were constantly at war with the little grey box. Something as simple as a return and exchange for a different amount would send them into a fit, and I would be asked to step in because I “knew computers”. One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone finds out I’m “into computers” and then asks me to debug something like a garage door opener or a VCR timer. I didn’t learn how to fix a damn toaster in my compilers class, people.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time going through all of the menus on the register, trying to find secret screens or undocumented easter eggs. After hitting all 101 keys in every combination on every screen, I found a way to change the idle screen on the monitor. Normally when you leave the register, you flip around the monitor and it says “Montgomery Ward – Register Closed” with a bunch of asterisks around the text, in an ASCII-art box. Well I found out you can add your own line of text below this, maybe to say “Go to Housewares” or something. Instead, Joe and I found great pleasure from changing it to “Go fuck yourself,” or “Pearl, this is Jesus, you’re going to die.” We had several close calls where we forgot to change a register back and had a manager wondering how the hell the idle screen said “Holiday in Cambodia” or whatever punk anthem we were into that week.

Another time, we were playing with the igniter from a gas grille. It was a push-button assembly with a wire coming off of it, and when you put the wire’s tip near a piece of metal and pressed the button, it would click and shoot a spark across the gap. We had a lot of fun one afternoon shocking each other with the thing, playing games of paper-rock-scissors-electric shock or whatever. Then Joe was ringing up someone’s paint at a register and I found that when you shocked the glass CRT screen, the system FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. The screen would completely blank, even more than when the register was turned off, and all of the peripherals acted like the thing was in the middle of a cardiac arrest, the print heads moving back and forth, spitting out and pulling back in paper. Right when we were ready to fess up and call someone from the front office, we found out that cycling the register to another screen woke it up again and everything was well.

After a few months there, I could take apart the entire Nixdorf terminal with no tools and no keys, in my sleep with the lights turned off, in probably ten seconds. I knew how the printer worked, and was shocked to find out they were paying some doofus 50 bucks an hour to change ribbons and clean printers, when I could do it for nothing. I even had fun taking off the keys and rearranging them, so nobody could type in addresses unless they were a touch typist. Word got out that I could “fix computers”, and I got called to do stuff like unjam printers, pull out shards of documents that were fed wrong, and re-thread ribbons that were totally fucked by people trying to print on cardboard or something.

Wards wasn’t a “real” job, I mean, compared to stuff after college, but it didn’t involve food or wearing a headset and saying “would you like a drink with that?” so it was a big step up for me. There was a dress code, and I had to look reasonably like an adult: dress shoes, no jeans, collared shirt, a tie, and unfortunately, a maroon smock-jacket for the paint department, where I worked. We did have nametags, and “Master Paint Specialist” badges, which Joe and I would use white-out and marker to change to “Master Pain Specialist” or “Master of Puppets” or whatever. Most jobs a sixteen-year-old can get are places that employ “kids”, like fast food or other places in the mall, and everyone worked with other kids their age. But I mostly worked with other adults, and to a certain extent, was given the same respect as one. I mean, Bev still babied us and kept us in our place, but all of our customers were adults who asked us for advice, and I went from being a 16-year-old punk building model airplanes in his basement with Iron Maiden on the stereo to someone who could have a conversation with other adults in a pretty short time.

I have been rambling – this is about like a book chapter, and I haven’t even started. Okay, I’ll get back to this later. Let me know if you enjoyed it.

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Nintendo tapes

I wish I would have kept a journal when I went to high school. Okay, it would have taken more time to carve out the daily entries from the stone tablets way back then, but there are times I wish I had greater memory of day-to-day activities, even if it’s just so I can write another crappy book that’s based on part of my life.

I’ve been thinking back to the past in order to recycle some crap in my head into a new book, and I’ve also been reading threads on SomethingAwful that are absolutely drop-dead hilarious, and I wish I could do something similar. One of the recent threads was about experiences in working at grocery stores, and it contained some of the most hilarious stories about irate customers and general mischief, the sort of thing that is so damn funny because you know there’s no way you could make that stuff up.

And thinking back, I have a lot of funny stories from my days of working at Montgomery Ward back in high school. I worked in the paint department, mixing paint and unloading pallets of boxes of cans, each weighing about ten pounds each. Over the years, I managed to work in almost every department of the store, filling in to get extra hours and unloading trucks at 6AM during the summer for the extra money. I didn’t socialize much during high school because most of my classmates were dicks, so I spent most of my time back in the paint department, huffing mineral spirits and carving wooden paint stirrers into punji sticks and potential ninja weapons.

The general idea of working in a retail store puts you at risk for many encounters with the criminally insane. I don’t know who is responsible for it, but long ago, someone came up with a saying called “the customer is always right,” and that bit of mistruth will make any job behind a cash register sheer hell. There are people who cannot remember how to add two and two who can somehow instantly recite that bit of propaganda. I mean, I would think the small amount of brain matter it would take to store that phrase would also be enough to comprehend why it is impossible to put a lawn tractor on the roof of a Chevette and drive it home, but I’ve seen that one happen.

Monkey Ward was a step up from Target or K-Mart and akin to Sears in their paint offerings. They had their own brand of paint (which was actually superior to almost all other paints, because Wards owned a chemical company from back when it was part of Mobil Oil, and they made an incredible paint for a steal of a price) and we custom mixed it to one of 768 or 863 colors on a chart. We also sold all the fixins’ as far as brushes and drop cloths were concerned, and there were a few bins of wallpaper. But we were peons and jerk-offs, not trained interior decorators. I don’t know how you’re supposed to tell, as there is no accreditation program or professional degree for decorators. You can’t just go, “oh, he has a PhD from Rutgers in wall coverings, he knows his shit.” So I guess price is the only real gauge, and when you’re paying ten bucks a gallon, you aren’t getting shit in the way of design help. Most of the time, people came to me and said “four gallons of #221 in semigloss” or whatever, and I slung that shit out like I was making chocolate shakes in McDonald’s. I’d take their money, tape a can opener to the lid of the shit, and tell them to come back soon. If they got really crotchety about it, I carried the paint to their car, mostly because it gave me a chance to check out the ladies of Housewares on the way back in. But then I quickly forgot the home project in question and went back to seeing what I could break by putting it in the paint mixer.

About once a week though, I’d get one of Them. They would come in with a piece of tile, a scrap of carpet, some wood off of a door frame, a few slips of paper, a magazine cover, and who knows what else. They would then slap all of the shit down on the counter and say “what looks good with this?” I would refrain from saying, “my dick would look good on it, you wanna see?” and tell them that I was, despite my professional appearance as a 16-year-old jagoff who could barely tie his tie plus an ugly maroon paint smock that had more paint explosions than cloth visible, not a professional decorator. My car was six different shades of bondo; I couldn’t match my ties to my shirts, so I bought all white shirts and all grey ties; the biggest thing I’d ever painted in my life were the Led Zeppelin runes in four-foot high letters on public property. And when I told them that they were up shit creek and I would not hold their hand while they compared each of the 863 colors twenty two times to all of their samples, they looked as if I told them I’d just told them I was selling their house to the Viet Cong.

The paint department lived in Four Seasons, which held a mix of different merchandise, depending on the time of the year. In the summer, the lawnmowers, tractors, and weedeater paraphernalia rounded out the area, with kiddie pools and lawn furniture and the barbeque grills. When fall came around, they moved to snowblowers, plows, and tire chains. And as the season started (usually after July or August), the Christmas trees and lights and toys made our department the default playground, as shoppers dumped their cold virus-saturated bumdles of doom in our aisles the terrorize the shelves and convince us all that breeding was a bad, bad, idea. As the defacto toy department of the store, we also had to field the calls and inquiries about the Big Thing of the year. Cabbage Patch dolls made a comeback one year, and we got exactly four of them from the Franklin Park warehouse. In a strange bit of irony, we got all black Cabbage Patch dolls. Even though these insane screaming mother robots were willing to crack someone in the fucking head for one of these dolls, they would dodge into our store, look at the four remaining items in stock, mentally think “I’m not givin’ mah kid a black doll” and then rush back out to look for a “REAL” cabbage patch.

The Nintendo was the sure kick in our collective balls, and that one happened twice in a row. The first time, we got two shipments of four; one in October, and the other on December 24th. We got approximately 427 million phone calls about it for three months straight. I started answering the phone “Montgomery Ward, we have no Nintendos, this is Jon, how may I help you?” 50% of the time, the people would still ask us if we had Nintendos. That remaining four that came in on the 24th was probably a mistake, but when they showed up, I had the front desk page over the intercom that we had them for sale, and they were gone in 20 minutes. Of course, the next year, you’d think they would order 200 dozen of them per store and make up half the company’s profits on game consoles, so they gave us exactly six of them. And twice as many phone calls. And every person that called would ask me, “Do you have any of the TAPES left?” “Do you have any Intendo TAPES?” “TAPES? TAPES?” THEY ARE NOT FUCKING TAPES! THEY ARE CARTRIDGES! THEY CONTAIN A ROM CHIP! NO MOVING PARTS! NO TAPE! NO MAGNETIC MEDIA! IT IS NOT A GOD DAMNED 8-TRACK! “Um, so you got them Mintendo Tapes or not?”

Christmas music was on a loop. It played about 5 hours or so, because there were many times I heard the tape three times. We opened early, we stayed open late, we had extra hours and mad dash sales events and special sales and I usually got a couple of 40-hour weeks, even with school. Our only escape during the day was to go to a boarded-up, cigarette-infested, paneled back room that was our break area, or go out in the mall and fight every fucking degenerate to get a spot in line at the pretzel stand for a lunch of corn dogs and soggy fries. It’s almost sad that I now miss the food at that place, especially considering the number of years it took off my life.

I should talk about this more, because I haven’t even started to discuss the people I worked with. As an aside, this isn’t the stuff I’m researching for a book – I have found a great new idea and I’m working on it, but this is just a way to get the cobwebs out of my head. Anyway, ER is on in 15, so I better get situated.

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general

writing about not writing

I uploaded a “preview” of Dealer Wins to lulu today. If you go here, you can download it for free. I say “preview” because on lulu, you are supposed to upload a PDF of a chapter or whatever as a preview, and then people can buy the full PDF as an ebook. Well, the full PDF of the book in press-ready format is 23 megs. I made a crunched-up PDF that’s only about a meg and a half, and made that the preview. So the preview is the whole book, although the photos are all lossy-compressed and dithered and a bit blotchy. They aren’t bad, though. Anyway, click that link and download the preview if you want to look at it without buying it. But you should buy it, of course.

I still haven’t been writing much of anything, other than writing about not writing. I’m at the start of a cold and I tried to avoid eating any sugar all day except for a Coke or two, and now I have a tremendous headache. Yesterday on the train coming home, I tried to think of things besides writing that I really wanted to do to keep busy, things I wanted to research. One was that I wish I could find a lot more information on making my apartment more liveable. Like, on one hand, it would be cool to do more things to make the place soundproof, or put down some nice rugs or different art or whatever, to make it a better environment. Or I always think I should throw out this desk and get something that is really ergo-oriented that would make it more productive to write. And I wish I could find things to make an apartment more efficient, as far as storage or whatever. But most of the sites I find are Pottery Barn sort of bullshit. I’m not interested in buying more things to have more things; I would, however, buy better solutions that would replace things and make the space more usable.

The other thing is I want to plan out my travel schedule for next year much better. I would really like to go back to Hawaii again, but I’d also like to do a lot of other things. Like, I’d love to go to Tucson and visit the Pima Air Museum. It’s across the street from Davis-Monthan AFB, better known as “the boneyard”, or the big place in the desert where old planes go to rest and eventually die. Some new planes go there for temporary storage; older stuff sits in formation, with crew chiefs occasionally scavenging parts to keep other jets current. And some planes are destroyed, which sucks, as I’d really like to buy an old B-52, either for my own personal use, or just to convert into a house out at my place in Colorado. Anyway, that might be an interesting long weekend, and I’d like to think of a few more of those and line it all up in advance.

Blah, this headache is killing me. I think I may nuke it from orbit with some Tylenol PM and go blotto.

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general

More dental horror

Now that I have the new book done, things have gone back to normal, and I can get back to my regular routine of dental horror stories. I went in Saturday for a session that ended up being fairly pain-free, except for the fact that the TV set was tuned to the VH1 top 20 video countdown. Maybe I’m getting old, but I guess I am totally out of touch with what kind of music is on the radio these days. It’s bad when you watch a half hour of videos, and the best one is by Velvet Revolver. Anyway, I got my crappy, always-falling-out temporary crown replaced by a nice, new, expensive, firmly adhered crown. When they had to take out the old one and the assistant went after me with a medieval-looking pair of pliers, I got a little freaked out, but then I remembered there are no nerve endings there anymore. A few minutes later, I was on my way, my tongue constantly running over the new, glossy porcelain. The bad news is that I have to go back next week for another root canal and some kind of involved dental cleaning that will probably resemble some kind of North Vietnamese torture technique.

That said, I don’t seem to be creating much of anything these days. Maybe I should end this entry and find something better to do.