|
Channel111
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Roy
Gender: Male
Interests: EV ER EE THINGGGG!
Expertise: Channeling, cleaning parking lots, herbal medicine, conversation, making peace
Occupation: Cleaning parking lots at night
Industry: Ohh, I am quite industrious or
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
4/12/2007
|
|
|         Ah, the joys of living in New Jersey! Perhaps it is my lack of having spent extensive time in other parts of America, but based upon where I have been and what I've seen, New Jersey has THE most psychotic drivers in the nation. I see this in the hours between six and eight ayem as people scramble to get to work or to get the little bastards to school. Virtually everyone behind a steering wheel has left sanity and caution at home; virtually every one of these beknighted fools will drive fifty to sixty miles an hour in twenty-five-mile-an hour zones in an effort to beat a traffic light or to merely get ahead of whoever is in front of them. Very few people use turn signals; quite a number of these so-called drivers will run stop signs, red lights and have no qualms about going the wrong way on one way streets. Should you be foolhardy enough to get onto an Interstate highway, people will be driving between eighty and one hundred miles an hour. Where are the state troopers? Hiding, if they have any common sense! To be fair to the brothers in blue, though, they do spend considerable time pulling over the very worst of the speeders and careless drivers who cross their path. And this is when they aren't disentangling cars and bodies from multi-vehicle disasters. One night about five months ago I saw seven separate accidents along Interstate 80 westbound; each involved quite a few cars and in two instances, buses and trucks. As I had to return more or less the way that I'd come, I took a different road, thinking that I would avoid the congestion the afore-mentioned seven pile-ups had caused. Ah, silly old hippie! On this highway there had been three MORE accidents and traffic was being diverted to side streets. We were moving slowly enough that I was able to talk with one police officer for a few moments; he described the situation as "another god damned bloodbath." He was visibly upset and I had to move on.
A lot of people piss and moan about "the cops," but it's convenient to forget that if old Missus Johnson hasn't been seen for ten days and there's a stench coming out from under her door, it's always a policeman who has to go in to see just how badly she's decomposed. It's also the police who have to scrape up the remnants of people who drank and wound up smeared all over a bridge abutment; the police who have to break into the midst of a "domestic violence" occurence, meaning, when a husband has gotten drunk and beaten his wife or raped his children. To me, the police are like the barrel of apples analogy: one or two SOBs will make the whole profession look bad, which is a shame. During the late 1960s the police generally made my life miserable because I had long hair and dressed funny, so for a long time I held a blanket grudge against them. But this sweeping job that I have threw me out there for the whole night, on into the morning hours, and it was often that the only people I'd see and talk to were those officers who'd stopped to pick up a roll and coffee and maybe the morning paper. I learned that most of them are really decent people, bordering on selfless (as opposed to selfish); good humored, patient. Why do people join the police force? There are a few who have the misguided notion that they are gonna outdo Dick Tracy in catching crooks, but the majority of the women and men I've spoken to over the last twenty years became cops to give back to community in which they live.
| | |
| It's good to be posting about nothing in particular again, although I did have a couple of dreams a couple of days ago. Both involved women I've loved in the past, one I can't name and the other is my last mortal girlfriend. The one I'm not going to name, well, I've said any number of times that when I was younger I was a total bastard to people at times and I was terribly awfully so to this lady. It was something I'd done, something that hurt her and ultimately hurt me for my unwillingness to admit it. What is worse is that we still see each other once in a blue and the emotional bond is still there. Soooo, in this dream she and I were in a room with "some guy" whose face is lost to the general vagueness of dreaming. I can't even recall the context, what was going on, but she was standing by me and was crying; the guy had become pushy (apparently) about something about our long relationship, and she was holding back. Quietly I said, "Tell him. Tell him everything." She looked at me and repeated, "Everything?" I nodded. And again, there is the vagueness of dreaming here, but she told him "everything," everything about the wrong I'd done her, and in those weird moments of dream-life it was as if the telling had freed us up from a terrible thing in the past. She hugged me. The second dream involved a kind of running process in my dreams as a whole, where I am trying to get "home." This has been an ongoing theme for many years now, I recall having had them when I was in my late teens. Again, there is vagueness; all that I really recall is the end of the dream, where I was on a grassy hill; there was a red door that led into an underground chamber within the hill and I went inside. The interior was a mad amalgam of a number of places where I'd lived, but the overall atmosphere was very much like Das Kobaldhaven, the underground warehouse that I lived in for a number of years - only it had windows! And waiting for me with a smile was the Other, my late last girlfriend, and we embraced in a sweet hug - thus ending a brief if marvelous dream. 
| | |
| It looks like the folks at Xanga have gotten the hint. Some of us (like me) don't want the extra whistles and bells of the "new look." I just want a blog, fer chrissakes!
So I was working two nights ago at a BJs Wholesale Club in North Bergen NJ, it's part of huge new mall that has eaten up more of our precious Meadowlands. The store manager is supposed to have his people pull the carts in before closing, only they (the carts) were all over the lot. This is nothing new, as it happens at other BJs as well as at Costco and Sam's Club "bargain" outfits. Although I made sqwauks of protest to the night supervisor, I nonetheless got to work and cleared the parking lot of shopping carts and garbage. It took me something like two hours but the place was clean. This made me run late, despite my pushing myself to the limit for the rest of the night. At 6:00 AM I reported where I was and what I was doing to the aforesaid supervisor, who relayed this info from all of us to the company owner shortly thereafter. Company Owner wigged and ordered me to bring the truck in. I still had four places to go - mind you, I would have been a bit hard-pressed to get them done in a timely manner, but I could have done it. But, there is no arguing with the guy, and I brought my sweeper in. This was fine with me because it meant that I was going home about 2 1/2 hours earlier than usual. When I got to the garage, he was there, and of course just HAD to say something to me. I let him say what he wanted, and gave him "uh-huh," non-commital answers. No matter what I might have said, he would find a way to make me look like an idiot, so I left him as little room as possible. Never mind we encounter this problem at Costco properties and deal with it in the same way; he wigged, made an irrational decision (as usual) and had to have several other people make up for my not being there.
But having had the time to think about it,and his incompetence in general, I'm laughing, sort of. He's like five years younger than me. He doesn't feel the clock ticking, or if he does, he's ignoring it. Yessir, the clock is ticking and saying with each tick, "you're getting closer to death." I don't at all fear this - so far no-one has found a cure for it (Aubrey de Gray notwithstanding) and I'm ready. But it makes each day, each moment, precious, so that, if someone wants to deride me and ignore his personal responsibility as a company owner, to give in to his unending rage and fear and to take it out on we who work faithfully for him, so be it. One hundred years from now, who is going to give a flying fuck?
| | |
| I suppose it says something about my not quite keeping up with things, but I only saw the "Boxxy" video the other day. Whatever she's about, I thought it was simply delightful nonsense and thought so much of her and everyone here that I'm adding a link to her by-now infamous video. Call it a "YES!" vpte for Boxxy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yavx9yxTrsw
| | |
| I've had a wonderful vacation this year, I did so much that I'd set out to do! But I'm realizing just how precious this time off has been for me, how much we here have enjoyed so many wonderful times together these last 12 days. I know in my heart how good and rich my life is, but just this once I am gonna say something uncharacteristic of me, at least not on line: I should NOT be doing my job of cleaning parking lots any longer. I'm too old for it for one thing, and there is so much more good that I could be doing in the world if I were somehow liberated from it. And I don't mean being liberated by getting shot, in an accident or finding out I have cancer or something else. Just a graceful, goodbye to all of that!
Elsewhere: wussup, Travis?
| | |
|
