Darkness falls upon the Land of Magnesium Chloride
These days I have been making a little mad money working for some friends that run a snow removal company. This usually means waking up in the middle of the night and going out to shovel snow and ride around in the plow truck at 3:00 in the morning during a blizzard so the walks can be nice and clean and some pump wearing secretary doesn’t bust her ass on the way into work. It pays well and by god, I’m probably one of the only one’s out there crazy enough to go out and brave the elements in a blizzard. Than again I have also climbed five of the states fourteeners in the dead of winter-I like to play in the snow and Ice!!
The guys I work for are balls to the wall ex-pro Motocross racers with a litany of different injuries that makes the NFL look like flag football. The boss has a broken vertebrae right now and my other co-worker, a South African whom I used to work with in the Engineering world, has a crippled foot, has broken his back, busted his kneecap, torn his shoulder out, and done both his ACL’s. I guess that sport is fun-I know for a fact it is, but I hate being injured. All it took was a broken collarbone to cure me of the Motocross habit when I was a teenager. Anyway, the long short is that I am the strongman on the crew. Therefore I do the heavy work-bust up ice, shovel snow and sling around 50 pound bags of Magnesium Chloride which cuts through the ice, the skin, ruins your clothing, and eventually would probably eat through a stainless steel coffee mug.
Today, I got a call from one of my broken back bosses to go out and do some ice control on one of their accounts. I was happy to leave the computer and get out and earn some extra money. I drove down to meet my boss and suddenly realized that the place I was busting up ice and spreading Mag salt was a housing project. This fact was a bit unnerving. Here I am outside, luckily at noon, making a huge racket scrapping at the northside shadyside ice with a variety of different ice breaking tools. I pictured in my mind some Crack dealer inside one of the units waking up and angrily loading his 9mm. Well luckily this didn’t happen but I was invited into one of the units by a lady to “warm up.” I decided to pass on the offer. She might have been hot in 1979 before the Crystal Meth and the Crack took her out.
Well anyway I didn’t get smoked and I managed to spread 150 lbs of rock salt on the icy snow covered, Antarctic north facing sidewalks to prevent any slip and falls from Crack Dealers or Coke whores. This gave me a wonderful feeling of accomplishment and an incredible sense of pride that, yes, my work here on this planet is indeed important. After that it was back home to the apartment to work on my book business, read my book, and take my afternoon nap to which I’ve become accustomed to since I left the Slave Ship known as the Corporate working world.
Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen I am indeed liberated from the corporate world although I can’t seem to fully replace my 50K salary for which I slaved behind a computer terminal for over 10 years to earn. But than again my hair isn’t falling out in handfuls and I am not having any heart palpitations. In fact, I barely even smoke any weed anymore but I am totally relaxed. My sleep schedule has been thrown off by my side job but who cares, I sell books and stuff on the internet. I can work at 3:00 in the morning. My only real responsibility is getting my orders packaged and handed off to the postman who arrives in the afternoon. Occasionally I make a trip to the local PO and than throw down a few pints at my favorite bar, go home and do the mindless busy work that one can do well being half crocked.
My New Year’s Resolution-never ever again make a resolution. 1st of all I am not a quitter(some of you will laugh or perhaps scoff at this because I have been flaky in the past.) Secondly, never tell yourself that you need to do anything. It’s much easier to try and rewire your subconscious. That’s how I quit smoking weed-I sat down every morning and wrote out 100 times like Bart Simpson that I don’t need to smoke weed, I don’t want to smoke weed, and I certainly don’t want to be looking for a dealer 10 years from now. I hope to be growing it legally by than. I am not going to quit smoking the green, I just need to quit being a pot head because it makes me look, feel, and act like I have down syndrome. Still, I prefer it to alchohol because it doesn’t have the hangover or eat away the lining of my stomach. Third point is-resolutions are for fairies. To me the key to life is being a dynamic person. Never become complacent or flat because than you are just joining the boring brain dead masses.
This evening I am going to wash my hands for the tenth time today to try and get rid of the Mag Chloride and than I am going to get into reading my Stephen King book-Duma Key. I just finished Enemy at the Gates and I will probably never ever read another book about war. The Battle of Stalingrad was the most horrible battle that ever happened on the planet. Some highlights from the book include German prisoners turning to cannibalism to survive Russian POW camps where they don’t even have enough food to feed there own Army, mass suicides by German soldiers in the wake of the collapse of the pocket, Russian soldiers and German soldiers have fierce firefights over a drinking fountain, mass killings, starvation, dead dogs, dead horses, dead sharpshooters; just about everybody died in that battle and if you didn’t than you probably aged about 30 years in the span of 8 months. One thing for sure, I am glad I wasn’t alive at that time and a soldier in either Army or civilian. This was indeed a turning point in history but at the same time I think anyone who is thinking about joining the Armed Forces should read this book. They’ll probably want to join the Salvation Army or the Peace Corp instead.
(Stalingrad)
The story of my life-I need to get motivated-Relaxation is the key……
