My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

The NBA is in the news lately, the first player ever has come out as gay. How will it change the game? I don’t care to speculate. The jokes about new uniforms are too obvious, and the question becomes, “If gays come out, should straights go in?”

What I think would be more interesting is changing the nets to dream catchers. How would that change the game? A willow hoop with string and feathers dangling down might add a bit more spiritualism to the game. More gravitas.

In other speculative affairs, a 3000 foot roll of Kirkland plastic wrap was on the counter at Rough Brew, so we tried to figure out how many it would take to stretch across San Francisco. Seems to be about 12. A quick trip to Costco and it’s on.

Gold is down hella much, I heard the guy in front of me tell Lily, the weighmaster at the scrapyard. “That means copper will be too,” he said.

Gold and copper, they are commodities. Tangible chunks of useful things. Commodities are down. Because consumer’s aren’t buying as much, again. When we don’t buy stuff, things don’t get made, so we don’t need gold and copper.

Keep shopping seems to be the cure. And if we won’t shop, the feds lower interest rates, so it’s cheap to borrow money to buy a house. Buying houses makes people go shop, because no one wants to live in the same color house as the people before them.

Would you watch a home NO improvement show? Where people find a house and learn to love it just the way it is? No. You wouldn’t.

People who run numbers tell me that it adds up to a second recession. A global one. A recession where Germany can’t afford to bail out Greece, and the eurozone falls apart, maybe.

Mac doesn’t worry about this stuff. He had a dip in and drank a packet of bbq sauce. He’s worried about people around him not laughing. Or reacting. His lips will have a brown ring of dip juice and he’s spitting into a coffee cup as we drive around. He will smoke with a dip in. He’ll drink milk with a dip in. I’m not saying he’s dumb, I’m saying he is not concerned with the bigger picture. Really, what good does it do to read the numbers every night? If the S&P shaves 5%, should he care? If his wages won’t increase if the S&P increases 40%, why should he?

He owned a house, a truck and Harley 10 years ago. Then construction starts fell, then he lost his job, then he lost his house and his truck. He kept the Harley for a while. He had a lot of free time so he decided he’d be a Big Brother to some kid.

“I rolled up on my Harley and the lady interviewing me asked me if I had a car. I didn’t even think about it being a problem rolling a kid around on my bike.”

“I needed someone to show me how to use app’s and stuff, and I thought it’d be cool to teach a kid about pussy. A win win situation, but the Harley was a deal breaker.”

So Mac wasn’t to be a Big Brother, and he had to sell his bike soon enough. I sold him a ten speed about three months ago, and now he works for me.

Long story short, buying when everyone else is buying isn’t a good time to buy. There’s no way to glean that from this story, but it’s something I believe.

Cleaning out a hoarder’s house this week. You may have seen something like it on A&E but when you’re watching in your home the experience is different than when you are literally shoveling someone’s belongings into garbage cans.

The gentleman passed away so no one’s saying, “Save that, it’s still good!”
He had ropes tied along the wall to use as a handrail because the floor is under a three foot shifting layer of boxes and clothes.

As we took our first load to the dump we got behind this truck.
Crime Scene Cleaners
Homicide Suicide Accidental Death
24 hour Services

Because some things cant wait til morning.

We all know guns don’t kill people. They’ve only been designed to kill people. In many different numbers, climates, and distances. I mention it because the new guy in the truck has a lot of conservative one liners he likes to throw out.

“As a union carpenter I have to get drug tested to go to work. Why shouldn’t these leeches get drug tested to collect unemployment?”

“Well,” I say. “Perhaps because you could kill your coworkers and yourself if you show up on drugs but no one’s at risk if someone is doing drugs on their couch at home.”

“That’s an interesting liberal point,” he says.

He goes on to say it’s all about those in control trying to divide the little people. We don’t like people who sit around collecting welfare, we don’t like immigrants who want our jobs, so we don’t like people who work and we don’t like people who don’t. Then you go to jail for smoking pot.

How can we fight Congress’s bailout of banks and the refusal to bring charges against the key players? We can’t because we are too busy working to pay off overdraft charges and the 3 dollar ATM fee’s we’ve accrued.

“I’m glad we’ve got guns all over country, hillbillies and gangsters everywhere, it’s a standing army. They proved Russia wanted to attack us but we had too many guns.”

That’s the new guy talking. It’s easy to recognize his voice. We meet at 10 am this morning and head north to clean out a hoarders 2 bedroom home. My ears will be set on “Record” and I will let his stories wash over, the miles of the highway will turn into a mist as he poses a question and takes the floor to answer it, then with a small question from the audience he will take the other side and argue himself down, then dismiss the whole conversation with a phrase like, “But what do I know about good ideas? I got a four leaf clover tattooed on my neck.”

Let’s just say the new guy is my latest muse, and the reason I had to sit down and write again.

People come and go through the Hauler! We sit in the cab and tell stories, double park in front of a Victorian, move some furniture, then head home. They may last a few months, maybe a year. Then they move on.

Mac is the newest one to ride shotgun. Doesn’t like there to be silence, so he asks a lot of questions.

“Do you have a favorite dinosaur?”

“I haven’t thought about dinosaurs in a long time,” I say.

“Well, how about when you were a kid?”

“I wasn’t really a dinosaur kid,” I answer.

“I always thought I’d be buddies with a brontosaurus. Ride around on his back while he eats leaves. Then when a t rex comes up, I’d call out to a pterodactyl and be like,’fly me out of here man!’”

He appears to only ask questions he’s put hundreds of hours of thought into answering.

“Ever think about how you want to be buried or whatever, when you die?”

“I don’t know. Maybe cremated and sprinkled off the Golden Gate Bridge. But that might be too much like a suicide.”

“Not me man. I want my girlfriend or wife or whatever to die at the same time, and she’ll be on one of those Viking boats with the crazy tall front end, and she’ll sail out in the ocean, and I’ll be cremated and turned into a cannon ball. Then when she gets out there, they can shoot me out of a cannon and blow up her boat. But what if they miss? I better get made into 3 or 4 little cannon balls so they have a second chance.”

“Ok. We’re here. Get out of the truck.”

In a city that loves dogs dog parks will abound. In a dog park in a city where meth abounds, heads will shit in the bushes and dogs will eat the shit. Then the dog absorbs the crystal and tweaks out.

But that’s not how the story was told to me. He started with, “The dog was acting all coked out, just tweakin’. He took it to the vet and was told there was meth in the dog’s system. He’s like, ‘How’s that even possible?’”

Apparently meth stays in your poop, and meth heads poop in public. And dogs eat people’s poop. The perfect storm.

I guess he told it better.

I don’t want to keep switching dreams.

I was at the height of my physical powers only a year ago. My body was conditioned and I could use the whole of it in synchronicity to move and lift things other men couldn’t. To get under a dining room table and heave it up and over a banister rail while walking backwards downstairs made my body feel stronger. Just last summer even, my muscles felt like they still had room to grow in my skin. They were already hardened in the forge of furniture moving, but my t shirts had a little stretch left to them. Today a grimace fouls up my face when I bend at the knees.

Rusty Sunshine told me long ago, about 40 you start to go downhill. And that’s what downhill is for me. No longer a student, no longer begging to learn more, the fibers of my biceps have matriculated. The sponge they once were is now rubbed to frayed tatters, the weight of water pulls them apart.

Sadly, its only just begun. The lament I mean. The list of ailments. Men older than me have as a talisman against the wrath of time a sacred chant that they hope will prevent Death from actually taking them – a list of ailments. As though by saying aloud how close death is, it will not sense a challenge, but instead will pass over them in the search for youth, something with fight still left in it, fight that mocks Death and rattles his scythe.

The list of injuries and other complaints. Not skateboard accidents. Not proud badges from barroom fights. Nope. It’s the muscle you pulled in your lower ass getting out of bed. It’s the font on your cellphone pumped up so you don’t have to use a magnifying glass to read texts. Oh, look how close death is, my hands cramp up folding them in prayer!

I do this physical labor because it’s how I learned to pay the bills, and I don’t want to switch dreams now, cook up a plan to go back to school and study biology and head to the forest to track the decline of everything on the planet. The dream was to be a junk man. Drive around the city gathering up another man’s waste and knowing where to sell it. That dream is happening, and I haven’t forgotten the more important dream of finding time to write. I just needed a year to think about things.

Im flossing my teeth drunk
Not because someone told me to
Im taking care of myself

20 years ago when someone was having a good time they’d say, “I wish I had a camera!” No one had a camera except rich people and photojournalists. The rest of us had to talk about the event repeatedly so as not to forget it. Memory was verbal. Of course, people like me kept a diary. We wanted to be writers. I started blogging in March 2004. 8 years. I’m going back to keeping a diary.

I wish I didn’t have a camera. Or a cell phone. I’m tired of this side of life. Facebook makes me irrelevant.

As an example, the cobbler versus Payless Shoe Store. A cooper vs Tupperware. I’m a candlestick maker at a Pink Floyd laser light show.
It’s time for me to stop blogging.

If you’d like to receive a newsletter in the mail, I’m considering going back to that format. Let me know if you’d sign up for a mailing list. Or writing a book about The Flagpoles. Would you like to read that? I’d like to write it.

But my heart is no longer into this place. Tough guy poetry and manly stories of loneliness are behind me. Thanks for all the support along the way.

An old friend sent along this beauty.

Is this reading? My normally abnormally white skin is yellow as uncooked chickenfat with exploded blood vessels crackled throughout.

This is the result of a karaoke dance tragedy Thursday night. The worst part was the terrible sprain, but I was holding a Dark and Stormy with extra lime in my hand, a fresh pour, and as I fell, I threw the drink into my face. Citrus combined with alcohol blinded me completely for several seconds as I fell to the dance floor.

Witnesses presumed I’d been possessed by the mighty spirit of the lord or suffered a seizure. My screams and the clawing at my eyes were also misconstrued to be part of an awkward dance of flailing pantomimes of winged dinosaurs.

The crowd was divided but entertained.

“What song did you sing?” a friend asked in one of the numerous retellings.

It was, honest to goodness, Twist and Shout. How prophetic.

Waiting my turn to the podium, back at the police hearing commission to officially change the business name from Rolston Hauls to Hauler!

I’d expect an increase in business now that people will be able to find me on yelp

Looking for tax form 1040HD – heavy drinker. All the money you make goes to bars and restaurants in the neighborhood anyway.

I woke up and thought, “I need to cut holes in my front door.”

It semi-defeats the purpose of a door. A door is meant to provide security and if the holes are small enough, no one can get through. Still, people can look in your house. Of course, windows allow that as well. Then there’s the problem with small animals – I don’t want raccoons in my kitchen. Perhaps plexi-glass over them?

The thing I love is revealing how much we rely on a closed door for a sense of security. Windows in a door wouldn’t defeat that.