gateway to dignity

Throughout my life, I seem to have accumulated a number of books. It's not a staggering collection by any means, but they do set off a room nicely. I get books as gifts, I inherit them from relatives, and of course I buy them. And I am someone who finds it important to always be reading something, even if I'm not the most diligent reader. For instance, I'm reading Irvine Welsh's Glue at work right now, and even as I type this I realize that I've left it at work again for my set of days off, which is the problem. I only get to read it at work, on my breaks. I'm about a hundred and fifty pages into it. It has taken me a month to get that far.

I come into possession of books far more frequently than I finish reading them. My book collection is fast becoming a leering league of strangers, rather than an army of cherished friends. William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom in particular is one book that's been proffering an unpleasant countenance at me since we first met when I was just a wee kid. Now there's hordes of others, waiting to do battle, like one of those gangs in that Walter Hill movie The Warriors. What a good movie that was: so absolutely without any sense of its own ridiculousness.

Well, the time has come to do battle. My New Year's resolution: to read fifty books this year. Tomorrow I am going to go round and pick out fifty of my unread volumes and make a pile of them someplace obnoxiously obtrusive, and one by one I am going to read them all in 2005. A book a week, with a little nudge room. Can I make it? Cue up "Eye of the Tiger" and watch me!

Come back to the five and dime, Desiderius Erasmus, Desiderius Erasmus

My girlfriend was telling me yesterday about how she thought the lyrics to John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" were more angry than they were hopeful. It's not like someone telling me that John Lennon was an angry guy is such a big shock - but his vitriol often goes forgotten because his catalogue has been subsumed into the land of the hippy-dippy. "All you need is love", maybe, but have you ever checked out the lyrics to that song? They're a nihilist's prayer. It's not like he's saying love is the key to happiness. It's more like everything is fucked regardless, so you may as well go ahead and at least try to offer one single moment of unselfishness. It will never be enough, but sure, give it a go. It's easy!

Anyways, Happy Xmas. Try the lyrics out in an Alastair Sim voice and you'll understand what my girlfriend meant. "And what have you done?" At the very best, it's a lament for the passing of time. But there's an accusation in it too, as in, it's not just the things you've left undone that are bugging him, it's maybe whatever you did. Although: "War is over!" What more wonderful proclamation could there be in such a reaching, falsely grandiloquent melody. But it's followed by the rotter's shrug, "...if you want it." He's like Dylan tossing his lyrics into the street. It's as much the snarling sell-out of a slogan as Johnny Rotten's "God save the queen / We mean it, man." That there's a choir behind him is something only meant to further confuse the matter.

That's John Lennon, man. The image of his blank face, bled into a sky strewn with cirrus clouds, is the perfect cover for an album called "Imagine", because what he most of all wanted us to imagine was Nothing. No you, no me, no this, no now, no then. Heresy and prophecy bleed into one another all the way through him. "I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one." Indeed, someday, it will. If there's one thing you can say about Oblivion, it's that it has a bed made for us all.

So what hope does he offer? In "Happy Xmas", it's in the way he saves his most forceful, most inflectional reading for the line "A new one just begun." It's the only part of the song where he allows his voice to deviate from the grade-school level melody he's devised. He crams four notes into "begun", because he wants you to know that he welcomes the new year.

But he also knows that it's hard. Human failings, the merciless elements, the inexorable logic of age all add up to one thing: every passing year will, on average, be a little bit harder than the last. We can affect it in big ways, with new loves, new friends, new money, new governments, but that's the way things are sliding. Towards the quick snap, the whimper. The philosopher Seneca wanted us to prepare ourselves for the very worst by recognizing it as inevitable. We will lose or be forgotten to all of our friends and family. We will be rendered penniless by a gust of wind. We will lose our looks, our limbs, our last resorts. Misery is certain. The grace of God is fickle.

Lennon was rich, but he understood this perfectly. But in "Happy Xmas", he doesn't wind the song down to some singer-songwriter moment of personality infliction where he takes over from the choir and strums a bit and tells us how we should really be to our near and our dear ones because we share an oblivion with them. He just keeps opening the song up wider and wider, until it ends in a delirious, retarded "Aaa-aaa-aaa-aaahhh!" where words used to be. The anger and the accusatory tone, I would argue, have been wrestled to the ground by now. All he's after is the simplest kind of redemption - a moment where you're kind and innocent because you've forgotten how cruel and twisted you normally are. It's a really sad song, because it's nothing but an eyes-shut-tight denial. And it ends a capella! Talk about mortifying.

So if we can't even rely on a goofy-faced moment of shared idiocy to hold us together, what use could we possibly make of that complicated beast we call goodwill to our fellow man?

A better world is not in our cards. We have only the one we've got, and our tools are clumsy. We can never reach out to just the right person at just the right time. We can only reach out indiscriminately. The odds of anyone getting it right are slim. The hope that anyone should reach out to us is a miscalculation so staggering we spend years socializing our children out of it before we consider them safely able to act on their own. Still, all our culural touchstones, the heft of religion wherever it is found, church or cineplex, are mad for the kindness of strangers. We want it so badly we're salivating.

We shouldn't let each other suffer the embarassment of being deluded.

When it comes to songs about goodwill to your fellow man, Lennon wrote one that was much better than "Happy Xmas". He called it "Mind Games", and if you recall, he wanted us to keep on playing them. Standoffish he may have been, in fact a lot, and he was so familiar with irony he may as well have invented it. I don't think, though, that he had it in him to be sarcastic. The brackets indicate a sotto voce: Happy Xmas! (War is over!)

Now that I think about it, I would like to go to bed.

Do me a favor.

Go download Prokofiev's "Montagues and Capulets". Right now. It's okay, Prokofiev's dead, he won't mind.

Got it? Don't read any further till you've got it.

Hit play.

It's minus sixteen celsius (three degrees fahrenheit). The wind, which yesterday picked up and blew on its side the shack where I usually work, is still so strong it makes the truck I'm now working in shudder. It's minus thirty with the wind chill. The truck's windows are frozen shut. I'm wearing so many layers my back aches. The sun won't rise for another hour, but I'm out here trying to hold everything together.

The dock, made of a series of gray 50cm squared plastic cubes all legoed together, is frozen drifting off at an angle where it is useless. It is my duty to stand on this incredibly slippery surface and bang away at the ice with a shovel until every bit of it I can reach is broken up. Then I pull on a rope I've tied off to the dredge's traverse cable and cinch up the dock as far as it will go. There are no rails on the dock against which to brace myself. All that's keeping me from pulling myself into the shit is my own sense of coordination, which given that every time I look up from the black waters beneath me I see something like this



is not too terribly much to speak of.

My job's kinda cool sometimes.

(Here's where I got the photo from. Hope he doesn't mind.)

My pet is slowly killing me

Shit.

Most of all I dig the exclamation point

A grieving mother. Quite the target, eh? Quite the old proverbial slam-dunk. Now why would I be so arrogant as to shit all over a poem from a grieving mother? I, who so deeply regard the need for poetry in everyday life, everyone's life. Everyone should write poetry, just like everyone should draw, whether they're good at it or not. Poetry isn't many things but one thing it is's a tool, like a ratchet set is a tool. You may not be a plumber but a leaking tap belongs to you to do with it what you will. That's what I believe.

And really I don't have anything to say to someone who has lost their son in battle. What would you say, except thank you? Thank you for giving your son to a greater purpose, even if it's one I don't agree with, and you know I wouldn't even say that last part. For someone in this position to turn to poetry is a natural thing, it is honourable, it must be respected. That is what it is for.

But thank you isn't what I say to this woman. Here's her unusually chipper little fridge-magnet-ready bromide, designed not to mourn but to ride a death, side-saddle. Here is her uncompromising knicker-twister of a singsong poem, ready to yank the gravity right out of the center of the earth and send it spinning into delirious empty innard-imploding space. Here's this fucking thing. She lost her son, and she is the artisan of her own grief. She has made it less than nothing. Here:

Freedom Isn't Free It's Priceless!

At Seventeen he stood ready, ready to answer the call.
The call to fight for freedom, freedom for us all....

I sent him off to boot camp, with a smile upon his face.
Innocent and eager, ready to make his place.
He suffered through the crucible, a long hard test I hear.
Was it really possible, A marine did now appear?

At Eighteen he stood ready, ready to answer the call.
The call to fight for freedom, freedom for us all....

To Iraq and back home again, I suffered through it all.
The endless nights of crying, waiting for that 3 a.m. call.
To hear his voice from faraway, through laughter he would say
"No more teardrop letters Mom, I'll make it through each day."

At Nineteen he stood ready, ready to answer the call.
The call to fight for freedom, freedom for us all....

Back to Iraq a second time, he went without hesitation.
This time though only God knew my son’s final destination.
The laughter and the teardrops all blur together now.
I wish I could make sense of this, but I really don't know how.
No happy reunions, no hugs or snuggles from him,
For he is in a better place, and I’ll carry on....for him.

So let us all remember and never forget,
Freedom isn't free and for those of us who've suffered its cost it's....Priceless!

Stand Strong America. Our colors don't run. Never have, Never will. Proud Marine Mom of ....

Lcpl Torrey L. Gray U.S.M.C. KIA April 11th, 2004 Fallujah, Iraq "Once A Marine, Always A Marine"

Semper Fi

She's Mary Beth Gray - mother of fallen Marine Torrey Gray. She deserves respect. And she deserves rejection.

Semper fi is a bunch of crap. People say it like it means something. It doesn't. It's short for semper fidelis, which means "always faithful". This is, of course, the motto of the U.S. Marine Corps. As a slogan, it is wonderfully adaptive, just like a great soldier. You can, indeed, be always faithful. Anyone can. I faithfully masturbate to internet porn at least twice a week. Semper fi. What matters is what you are faithful to. Principles? Admirable. A cause? Also admirable, to the extent that the cause is a just one. The vigilant protection of a nation? Exceedingly admirable. The enabling of a corrupt and miscreant band of thieves in their quest to defraud a nation of its birthright? Hmm.

Mary Beth Gray, your son died in a war that has meant many things to many people, but very few of those things are even tangentially related to any respect for freedoms enjoyed by the occupied or the occupiers. There have been many positive effects of the war, but most of them are simply the interruption of a series of devastating crimes committed by a totalitarian regime installed by those who were the war's very architects. This interruption was executed with utmost violence, and it is being repaid with more. The resulting instability means that Iraqi cities are overrun with a level of chaos you or I would never understand.

Did you know that the black-market selling of the U.S. Army's discarded drugs is now one of Iraq's most profitable new growth industries? In many cases neither the buyers nor the sellers know exactly what they're transacting in. There are no plans to investigate or curb this industry.

Much effort has been expended to open Iraq's schools, while safe transport there and back (and a reasonably effective number of qualified teachers) remains out of reach. Schools and colleges will be restricted to operating just three days a week in the three weeks before the election due to strict security precautions. During that time, mobile phone comunications will also be disabled. This, for an election that the largest ethnic population in Iraq pretty much feel is designed to exclude them from political discourse. And there'll likely be no way to tell if it does, since the Iraqi Supreme Legation of Elections has threatened to sue any media outlet who violates its rules about how the election is to be covered, without establishing exactly what a violation would be, or look like.

The police, whose supposed mandate is to protect attempts at legitimate industry, are illegally selling gas.

Do you know how long it took them just to return electricity to Baghdad? But it took Bremer no time at all to institute full expropriation rights for foreign corporations. I take back what I said about freedom. But it isn't the Iraqis' freedom which is faithfully defended, and given the way the highly concentrated ownership of American news reporting has been slavishly devoted to building a consensus for the war to the extent of making things up, it would seem it isn't yours either.

To best remember your son, we are obliged to ask why he died. It is the most basic of explorations into who he was. Your pride in your son is a larger thing than I can write about. But when you use it as a bully pulpit for a cheap sloganeering hog call, you're selling out your son's memory to the unscrupulous men and women who sent him to go and die. That makes me angry. Angry enough to write back.

Anyways, I do hope you keep up the poetry, Mary Beth Gray. It truly can be a bridge to solace if you can be open to suggestion.

So here's a suggestion.

The Answer

A Rose, in tatters on the garden path,
Cried out to God and murmured 'gainst His Wrath,
Because a sudden wind at twilight's hush
Had snapped her stem alone of all the bush.
And God, Who hears both sun-dried dust and sun,
Had pity, whispering to that luckless one,
"Sister, in that thou sayest We did not well --
What voices heardst thou when thy petals fell?"
And the Rose answered, "In that evil hour
A voice said, `Father, wherefore falls the flower?
For lo, the very gossamers are still.'
And a voice answered, `Son, by Allah's will!'"

Then softly as a rain-mist on the sward,
Came to the Rose the Answer of the Lord:
"Sister, before We smote the Dark in twain,
Ere yet the stars saw one another plain,
Time, Tide, and Space, We bound unto the task
That thou shouldst fall, and such an one should ask."
Whereat the withered flower, all content,
Died as they die whose days are innocent;
While he who questioned why the flower fell
Caught hold of God and saved his soul from Hell.

- Rudyard Kipling

Blog Explosion, you changed my life!

Dunt dunt daah, doot doot de dooby dooby dunt dunt dannant DAAAHHH!

Huunnnhhhhh.

I wish you could have a practise blog, where you figure it all out before you fucking publish it. Kinda seems like I might be a ripe candidate for such a fate as this little diatribe describes since I feature occasionally profane language and plus there's that weird and wacky title I use, so maybe I'll just beat them to the punch. There's other ways to go.

Least BlogSnob turned me down flat from the start. These guys apparently have a history of, oh let's call it less transparent behaviour.

Hee hee. I'm so textbook. My only defense is that I don't really want to be famous, I just want to start connecting. With even just a few. So a "brother in cluelessness" I may be, but I never pretended differently. And it did cross my mind as I saw about the sixth pure-advertisement blog sit on my screen for those interminably long thirty seconds you have to give of your surfing time in order to gain credits that hey, I wonder if this really means anything. Turns out it doesn't.

You can apparently get this handy little button:



But I'm just going to put it here and be done with it. Especially since it's not like the origin of this little boycott doesn't house a truckload of complete batshit. Call it shame, call it a fart-and-run. The whole thing never happened. Hello, blogwise?

"*+*+wHeN sTaRs cOlLiDe oR sOmE sUcH bUlLsHiT=>>"

So I've decided that I'm going to be a complete slut about promoting my blog. Like the Ghostbusters' proton guns, traffic sharing engines become more useful when their streams are crossed, so I'm just going to add button after button. BlogSnob didn't work because they don't like my ads, but Blog Explosion seems to be okay with my blog name - at least for now. Plus they have features that make sense, like toggle switches for adult content and the like, so presumably anyone who didn't want the word "orgasms" showing up on their computer (and bitching aside, I guess I can understand how you might be one of those people, i.e. you're Pat Robertson's laundry-and-bagels monkey, or somebody's mom) could avoid doing so without denying me the god-given right to shill for a readership.

Maybe somewhere down the road I'll see what I can do about making the site look a little less generic, too. My banner's kind of ugly the way it is right now. Colours just ain't right.

The other good thing about traffic sharing engines is that surfing them as opposed to just hitting that "next blog" button top right is that you don't waste time tripping over all the friends'n'family blogs, and I have yet to see one of those ungodly java box series come up. It's so uncomfortable to see, say, "*+*+tEl mE we wIll alwYz b fRIEndz+*+*" jump out at you from the familiar gray box, and your only way out is to click "OK". You should never say anything in your blog you wouldn't say to a stranger in a shoe store, is my feeling. The sudden and unsolicited demand of your eternal love is no way to begin a conversation.

Or maybe it is. Maybe that's why this guy became famous: because human beings don't demand enough from each other.

Of course, there's still some charm to the "next blog" feature on Blogger. It's how I found this ugly little beauty, for instance. It's only three entries deep, but if she keeps going it'll be a gooder. It has a seedy kind of charm, like a one-legged stripper who doesn't care if you stare at her nubbin just so long as she can be the only person in the room who's dancing.

Sigh. There probably won't ever be a Blog Explosion button on her site. Nothing that isn't completely obscure is ever really perfect.

I wanted to be a forelock dangling from under your cowl

What's up? Lucky beer. The way life with my girlfriend parses a thin layer of clothes, evenly spread, over every inch of the house. I don't blame her, since I do fuck-all to stop it. My new, new, newy new television (Television! Oh how you did delight in me, it's true I hate you now but I never stopped loving you. You little shit, you never moved. The dumb fucking music videos I used to be addicted to like dumb fucking anything, keeping me still, empty, till my brother came home from the sulfur plant and tossed me around for not touching the pile of dishes, his face caked with dried venom, in the kitchen in our trailer, in our drama, in the sink. Television! Moving! Vision! Telling and seeing! Never ever ever stop telling and seeing, ) it's a flat-screen so I'm set till one of us dies and the race is on! I've watched eleven thousand hours on this one already. I work shift work so I have to drink. I don't drink enough to compensate for what my job does to me. Employment is a vice. It feels like a vice. They should have a support group. Nauseated, constipated? Forgetful, dysphasic? Overly emotional or dead as the radio? Not sleeping much, or right, or with anyone? Do you tell people what you really think of them? If any or all of these symptoms blah blah blah, you may have a job noone wants to do! Share with us your boring story. Maybe the weight of them all will shift us back into death where we belong.

Ah, but it isn't all jackanjory's delightful dorries, either. Sometimes Christmas comes and you have to go piss on a nativity scene somewhere in your neighborhood. Hey, happy. It's happy, it's a happy! I am, truly. But it's too late to stop being golyadkin.

Like my new uranium? Depleted it m'self.

A fried egg sandwich with the face of Clay Shaw trapped in the batter in my hand, I step outside my front door to watch the war profiteers. I have never seen an occupation before. It looks a bit like a parade, except the floats all pretty much look exactly alike. Most of them a bit spattered with the little craters bullets leave on thick metal. Open for business. Come on ina my house, I can make sandwiches that you'll want to get on your camera phone to ee-bay. The hard fists of God clenched and severed, pickled in piss. The label on the jar reads "executive order 37". The ingredients read: "a marginal income tax rate of 15%" "a free tariff zone" "a new trade bank headed by jp morgan and co." A band is playing on a flatbed truck in the backyard of the frat house across the street; they are called "The Redundant Apostrophes". Their instruments explode in their grips, and the crowd is dumbfounded. I clear my throat in the silence and expectorate.

"Bechtel", I sound out, and sail my new hot vote onto the sand.

An open letter to Blogsnob

Dear Blog Snob:

There, as I understand it, is a sexual connotation to the word "orgasm". It is a physiological response to stimulation of the genitals and other erogenous zones. Now, I understand that you wouldn't want to associate yourself with a site that features pictures of some of these erogenous zones being manipulated or pruriently displayed.

Mine doesn't. Well, I do have one picture of a butt with the map of the world on it, but that's it.

There is also a stigma attached to words like "orgasm", similar to that which follows other sex-themed vocabulary like "vibrator", "come", "jack", "penetration", and so on. If any of these words are found in the text of a message, the assumption is often made that the content is for adults only. The stigma, however, is not one of shock that comes from exposure to actual expletives like "tits", "cock", "pussy", "fuck" or "cum-guzzler". The stigma of "orgasm" is not the word itself - it's the associative properties we often attach to it.

So LOOK AT MY SITE. If it is, as you say, an actual person reading the ads, then what is preventing you from taking the ten seconds it would cost to investigate my content and make sure that the title of my blog - really just a metaphor for the small, personal and excellent things amidst what from a more distant perspective may look like mind-numbing squalor, and an attempt at being funny in a free-associative way - does not at all reflect the content. That as a matter of fact the content reclaims the word "orgasm", as well as "shantytown" for that matter, to set them aside for a moment from all of their associative relationships and present them as simply words, words that I think happen to look nice beside each other.

And even when you take it literally, what the hell is wrong with a shantytown orgasm? What is so goddamn offensive about it? It's not a swear word!

I like the idea of Blogsnob. I think I'm more than an okay writer and I would love to start building a readership, however small. I'm actually a blogger who would benefit from advertisements, in that my blog isn't just a bunch of pictures of my cat. There's humour, personality, content - all the good stuff, except readers. I'd hoped you could help me with that part, but I guess I need to find a different way to promote my blog. Because I can't change the name of my ad. It's the name of my blog. If I changed the ad, it would be false advertising.

Best of luck to you in your quest to make the world more boring. Forgive me if I don't acquiesce.

golyadkin

Metaphors are a bitch

Guess that's it for blogsnob. My ads were rejected because they apparently contain sexual content. There's nothing I can do about it now, though: the blog's name is "The Shantytown Orgasms". Ridiculous, really, but I guess there's no way around it. I'll have to find some other way to promote this site. Rest assured, the lack of pictures, or descriptions of, or any references to orgasms at all, will continue unabated. I reserve the right to use strong language, but this site is not a porn site.

Off to work now, I guess. Happy 33 to me.

Ever take a birthday tally?

All of the things that make that day just one more in a series - the snow either cleared or needing to be cleared, the children being in school, everything that entails, the movies that are playing and what should we see, the everlengthening sameness of everything inside your house and the more you move it the samer it gets, something growing always whether it's colder than you can handle or not,

Toss a no comment out now. Take a step back and look, because the precipice is right behind you and everyone is waiting.

To experience all of the real things in your life in the heat of some kind of lens.

That all this time you thought everything was ok, it was just that noone was examining you. The bore of luck.

That, and will you return to it?

Or to be thankful. Stand up and reach out and smear this upon yourself. You may as well, it's filling the room. You'll smell of it regardless, so you may as well experience its texture.

Remember how you were? It was no different. There are a few new people with new perspectives you haven't heard in years, and that just closes other circles. Like the ones you're building now.

It all depends: did you practise the songs in your fakebook?

What's this? A keyboard? Wow! Let's hit it with our fingers! Pap pap pap pap isn't it satisfying?

So the interview for the running-of-the-circly-thing position happened today. The supe can't tell me cause it's not his call, but since I'm the only one who applied I think I stand a fair shot.

The circly thing is a trommel. It belongs in a "happle" sometimes, except try googling that word and see where it gets you. I wanna be a happle operator! It's where they make dust. You get to wear a mask and you still get to even shovel a lot and a lot and plenty more besides! Happles are stupid. But they pay better than dredges.

Here are some of the phrases used to describe parts of the happle which would otherwise have no name and so for all intents and purposes are called by these names:

- "squirrel cages"

- "bag house"

- "chimneys" (they are nothing like a chimney except they're the highest thing in the happle)

- "happle operator"

The war you fight is a war against dust. You must remove dust from all surfaces, and gather all dust into two piles near giant roll-up doors where loaders can come and scoop it up. Your arsenal is made up of brooms, shovels, a putty knife and an air wand. When they remember you exist they sometimes fix a wheelbarrow so you can use that too. Also you have an assistant who never enters the happle but is nevertheless called a Happle Assistant! You may command him, though he is nowhere to be found. True power!

The interview was hilarious. The shortest man you've ever seen with this little John Waters penciled-on moustache sits behind a desk in what is called the "penalty box", a tiny enclave of an office situated in the middle of the largest stainless steel building in North America. Seated beside him, and completely obscured from view by a 17" monitor, is the young, young, young little kid they've just made supervisor, there to observe how an interview is done. Seriously, I could almost be his father, if I hadn't been so shy when I was twelve. The position I am applying for is something that both of them consider to be a placeholder. If I get it, it'll be the most money I've ever made. It doesn't pay enough. And these two guys are struggling to get by just like me.

And don't get the idea I'm putting them down. These men (and me) are paid to deal with (not just bury, but deal with) what people throw out, at the moment and locus of history where more shit is getting thrown out than ever before. These guys make Brokaw's "greatest generation" look like a bunch of schoolyard chickenhawks.

Eloquence, however, escapes them. Never had I heard the word "fuck" uttered in a job interview before I worked here. But the kid, my son, the supervisor, he says "fuckin'" the way some people say "um". It makes me want to round up all those linguistics majors who made their term paper bones promoting the theory that "fuck" is the most powerful word in the English language and sit their dumb asses down in front of this guy for ten minutes. "Fuck" is not some kind of cornerstone. "Fuck" is a plastic bag stuck in the tree of language. It's bright and ugly and it flutters in the wind and it is of no use whatsoever, though it's what you see as you pass the tree. Do arborists study plastic bags? Or do they study the fucking trees?

The third question I was asked (after "why do you want this job" and a different version of "why do you want this job") was "Who do you see taking your place out at the dredge?" What I should have said was that it wasn't my fuckin' problem. I don't know from anybody who works on the tip floor, and I don't care to.

Before I was a dredge operator, I worked on the tip floor. (You'll love this.) The tip floor is where the garbage is brought in it's raw, fresh-from-the-curb format. It is spread in ten-feet-wide lines on a concrete floor by loader tractors. Then these guys basically walk through it, looking for hazardous materials or anything too large or too non-biodegradable to be composted. Then they take their sawed-off hockey stick and fling it to the side. Anything and everything can be found in this line: dead animals, wallets full of money, water heaters, Hep-C laden syringes waiting to find skin, perfectly good furniture, pornography (so much!), diamond rings, food you could eat and not get sick from. The life of what people throw away really begins on the tip floor. Before we get it, it's just commodity. Once it enters our plant, it is culture.

Things I earned through last year's Pepsi-points promotion from points collected from the tip floor: a carabiner, a minidisc recorder, over twenty movie passes, a digital camera. That's pure theft, baby! But it's one of those oh-so-hip victimless crimes.

Anyhoo. The tip floor is where my replacement's going to come from. And I know what I said about the greatest generation just a bit ago, but you can forget it because some of these tip floor guys are absolute retards. If I saw them somewhere outside the plant I would run. And here, among these ranks, is where my replacement is biding his time, waiting to be promoted and plunged into the impossible task of keeping a dredge moving in open waters when the ambient temperature is minus fucking thirty.

Who'll replace me? I don't fucking know. Just so long as I never have to row a boat across a lake of freezing shit to reconnect a pipe that's split away.

But how was the question meant? Is this the price of my new position: that I have to vouch for one of these guys? To not screw it up? So badly we're all laid off till April? Come on. Just gimme the job. Gimme the job, gimme it, gimme gimme gimme.

blogito ergo sum

Curious leapbloggers may have clicked on my profile, where it says that I'm a "dredge operator". This isn't some attempt to be cute. I am not (yet) one of those bloggers whose sum purpose is to trawl the net for cool, exciting, weird or insufferably dumb things in order to collect them all here and prove to you that I know where they are too. This blog is about - jesus, I haven't gotten that figured out yet. I want to write more about music, really I do. I will when music excites me again. Right now I'm kind of tired of it. I listen to the same things over and over again, and mostly because they're such a soft cushion to lay on that I don't have to have a response to them: Richard Hawley for those times when you feel like you should be listening to music but you don't really want to, Pavement or Swell when you just want a friend in the empty room at night before you go to bed, Alice Coltrane when you're hooked up to the milking machine staring at a dry barn wall wondering why you followed all those other cows into the narrowing corral and you just want something to take you out of it without punching you.

Right now: Secret Chiefs 3. Because the duMaurier I'm smoking tastes like every other duMaurier I've ever smoked and I hate that.

I am a dredge operator.



That's not my dredge, but it's sort of close. Now, I don't actually work on the dredge, it is operated via remote control from a shack on the shore of the lagoon. There is a cutter head on this dredge which can be lowered, and a pump which pumps sludge through an endless series of pipes into a tank down the hill. This sludge is then added to a mixture of polymer which turns it into a substance of about the texture of a stiff, heavy chocolate mousse. This substance is added to the city's garbage, as it winds its way through expensive and labour-intensive processes on its way to becoming compost. The sludge speeds the composting process.

What I do is not really complicated, but it takes a knack. If the sludge I pump is too thin, then more polymer must be added - polymer's expensive. If it's too thick, it will trip out the transfer pump breakers, and eventually degrade the very expensive equipment.

Here's part of that equipment. It's called a "muffin monster" (I've heard all the jokes).



This thing chews up whatever errant materials get sucked up - wood, trash, rocks even.

This is what I do for maybe three or four hours every day. For the rest of my twelve-hour shift, I operate a much simpler and more expendable piece of equipment.



It's not exactly what I had in mind for myself after six years of post-secondary education, but such is the nature of a raw-materials based economy. If you can't capitalize on your fresh, piping hot education righta-rightaway, then to the factory with you, sir or ma'am. I know a lot of people here in Alberta who wound up like this.

Anyways, it's not really that bad. At least I work for someone who's doing something positive for my city, and for nature. I could just as easily be some tenderloin snaggletooth being menaced by equipment designed to extract oil from our obdurate tarsands to the north, where all the big monkey oil companies have parachuted in an entire city's worth of men for the tenaciously single-minded purpose of fucking shit up. Or I could be working retail or food service in our terrifying Mall.



Aaand, it turns out that I'll most likely be getting a promotion from the dredge soon. It's not official yet so keep schtum and cross your fingers, but very soon I could be running one of these:



Hooray for commerce degrees!

I'd like to offer you my testimonial

He da man!

6 rooms to wait in

- snows in two days,
last of the seeds have blown across the street.

what else can I shut off? the home's a bluffing canter,
belt is tracking on the pulley
coins are spilling off the sides and making piles
altered postcards mailed to my realtor
the free dust spins and locks to silence
the fascia's hoisted quick and buried
my body is out there in the world with no protection
empty space is a hard killer
the walls are braced with bones
the money in my wallet is black