Once Upon a Time in Montana

I have never presented myself as anything other than city folk. I exist best when surrounded by concrete, steel, box stores, hobos, clouds of car exhaust and a choking sense of alienation. The outside frightens and confuses me, filled with its clean air, vegetation, and occasionally lovable forest creatures. I am a meek, easily spooked creature who becomes scared when placed in environments where my moderately large vocabulary and knowledge of early twentieth-century poetry aren’t enough to get me through.

So, as you can imagine, Montana is pretty much a Lovecraftian nightmare for me.  There are very few things on this blue marble that could cause me to leave my sheltered world of comfy chairs, blocks with two Starbucks, Slankets and TV on DVD. However, one of them is one of my most treasured friends, Annemarie. Her decision to get married in Big Sky Country lured me out into the wilderness. So, along with my traveling companions, I ventured into the wild. Annemarie, being the saint that she is, arranged lodging for us with some of her friends, at two different houses. Which is good, because every motel we passed looked like room amenities included body lice, silverfish, and a complementary face-stabbing.

Our first order of business in Montana was to stop at the Missoula airport to pick up another friend, Sarah. The Missoula airport feels like that “Where is everybody?!” episode of the Twilight Zone, but with many, many more dead animals. This actually turned out to be a reoccurring theme wherever we went in Montana; omnipresent dead animals. The whole state is like a super-morbid Noah’s ark. If God made it, they’ve shot it, filled it with sand, and nailed at least part of it to a board. After waiting at the exact wrong end of the airport for much longer than we should have, we eventually wandered down to the correct end and successfully collected Sarah, fortunately before she was killed and filled with sand.

Once we rolled into Hamilton, Montana, it was time to drop Sarah off at the guest house at which she’d be staying. The process of getting to said guest house is an experience which continues to haunt me in my darkest nightmares. The road to the house was, in typical Montana fashion, completely unlit and without guard rails, causing us to have to weave and dodge around a dirt road roughly as wide as the laptop I’m currently typing this on. Complicating matters was the road’s almost sentient nature and apparent desire to see us dead, unexpectedly trying to divert us into pitch black areas with signs that appeared to be made by the family from The Hills have Eyes that read things such as “Shooting range” and “National Park,” the latter of which would not have been frightening at all if not for the ominous warning on our directions to “AVOID THE NATIONAL PARK.” I have no idea what dark horrors our tax dollars are funding down that shady stretch of dirt road, and I feel safer because of that. After successfully evading the national park, we crossed into even deeper darkness, jagged fingers of trees that might have actually been Ents scraping at the car as we passed a marsh that may or may not have had piles of decomposing corpses in it. Finally reaching the guest house, which was above a garage (…or perhaps kill-floor), we were greeted by BLINDING MOTION SENSOR LIGHTS which I’m pretty sure took at least six months off of our lives. After regaining control of our bladders, we ventured up to the guest house, which proved to be the most oddly unsettling place I’ve ever been in. I can’t exactly put my finger on what it was, but I would have found it significantly less creepy if I had walked in and seen piles of human torsos. As it was, everything seems just a little…off. It was like how I imagine advanced-stage schizophrenics see every room. I’m not sure all of the corners met. The art sure didn’t help. For some reason, there were TWO copies of the same photograph of an older woman shelving canned goods in two separate rooms. There was also a very large painting of a man’s head glowering outward from what appears to be the vast and empty void of hell. When I’m alone and things are quiet, I can still feel it staring at me. And in short, I am afraid.

After callously abandoning Sarah at what we were pretty damn sure was a murder house, the rest of us high tailed it back to Hamilton Proper (carefully avoiding the National Park once again) and traveled to the house that we would occupy for the weekend. It was, quite possibly, the exact polar opposite of the place we left Sarah (despite containing the requisite dead animals, which I’m pretty sure are part of the “Welcome to Montana” gift basket), a large, warm, inviting mansion. Yeah, we kinda won that one. The people who hosted us were, without a doubt, the nicest human beings on the face of the Earth. On my best, most charitable, benevolent day, I am Josef Mengele compared to these people. Forget the fact that they were letting us city-dwelling ne’er-do-wells stay with them in their home for three days, we, apparently, showed up a day earlier than they expected. They were absolutely fine with that, and, to accommodate us, had their disabled family member move from his room to the basement (which he was more than happy to do for the sake of three strangers). They then fed us homemade chili, started a fire for us, and made sure every one of our needs was met. In the morning they made us pancakes and bacon and wouldn’t accept any help in doing so. It actually forced some blood into my cold, dead heart.

The wedding itself was not until late in the day on Saturday, so we decided to fully experience all that downtown Hamilton had to offer. This took roughly half an hour, most of which was spent in a surprisingly awesome bookstore which had an advertisement for a cowboys vs. demons local film titled “Cowboy Reckoning,” which I can’t imagine is anything other than awesome. We also saw a street corner Santa Claus trying to talk-up the street corner Mrs. Claus he was working with, which was fairly hilarious. “So, you doing anything after this, or do you want to–oh…HO HO HO! MERRY CHRISTMAS!” Our daytime activities also included a return trip to the murder house, which really highlighted exactly how big of pussies we are (very. We are very big pussies). The nightmarish hellscape that we crossed the night before became a pleasant country road surrounded by sylvan glens, the corpse-filled marsh was now a frosted over pond, and the eternal darkness that had surrounded us was now bright and filled with chirping song birds. There may have also been a bunny. The house itself was also marginally less creepy, though the floating head in the void remained as ghoulish as ever.

As is my typical fashion, I actually won’t spend much time talking about the actual wedding, since it would just disintegrate into me going on and on about how beautiful it was until, eventually, I start menstruating. It was a beautiful service however, and Annemarie clearly won the husband lottery with her new spouse, Joe. I’m fairly certain that you could air-drop Joe into the Alaskan wilderness and, within a day, he’d have a constructed a house, a general store, and perhaps an international airport. For reference, I, on the other hand, couldn’t last three days in a relatively small town without becoming convinced that, at any moment, hill-people were going to emerge from the shadows and make furniture out of me. I’m considering forbidding Annemarie from speaking to my wife from now on. Speaking of my wife, she was, sadly, not able to attend, due to being sick (severely and abusively drunk). See, that’s the kind of thing Joe wouldn’t say about his wife. It was also great to attend a wedding where love and not, say, self-aggrandizing spectacle was the main focus.  It was a new experience.

All in all, despite the best efforts of the floating head in the frame and the evil national park, it was a really enjoyable trip. I am, however, pretty thrilled to be back in my safety-cocoon.

So, where were we?

It’s been awhile, so there’s some catching up to do. How am I doing? Well, I’m currently in wrapped in a Slanket, learning way too much about the human colon while studying for my community college medical terminology test tomorrow, and a great deal of my loved ones seem to no longer be speaking to me. How’s your Fall been?

I should probably talk about my continuing stint in community college first, as it has pretty much been the dominating force in my life since September. I’m studying to become a pharmacy technician (…should they someday let me into their program….) so I can once again become a functioning and contributing member of society. Unless of course my writing career really takes off first (pause for cruel, mocking laughter). At any rate, it involves me going to perhaps the most depressing school in the world, that seems to be built entirely out of recycled industrial concrete. I’m taking the basic classes right now while I wait for the Pharmaceutical Council of Doom to decide whether or not I’m worthy for admission next year. Unfortunately, this means I’m in two giant classes chocked full of the rest of the teeming masses awaiting their fates at the hands of various medical programs. Frankly, I have never been more afraid for the future of American medicine.

These people are stupid at a competitive level. Remember the people at my last job? Remember how stupid they were? They seem like astrophysicists compared to the people in my classes. And all THOSE people had to do was answer phones! This new batch of God’s lost bets will, ostensibly, one day be in charge of thankfully minor aspects of medical care. Most of them have managed to score below 50% on every test we’ve had, even though they’ve all been multiple choice scantrons, but one day they might be responsible for distributing medications to an entire hospital.

The highlights of the lowlights? Well…

-Juno: I don’t know her actual name, and I don’t care to. I call her Juno because she’s an 18 year old new mother and talks like she has part of a railroad spike lodged in her frontal lobe. Things come out of her mouth that, if heard by a licensed mental health professional, could probably get her declared legally retarded. She once spent an entire ten minutes describing to the guy next to her the, and I quote, “sounds her doggy makes.” She then acted them out. Later, while our instructor was discussing the exceedingly disturbing condition known as anal fissures (it’s not a pleasant subject, sure, but we should probably learn about it), she went into absolute hysterics, laughing uproariously and repeating “That means a crack…a crack in your butthole! A crack!” over and over again, to the point that the rest of the class had to wait for her to regain composure. Also, her recent unintentional reproduction has not discouraged her from completely, and how to I put this nicely…whoring it up. She’s already hooked up with one of our classmates, whom I call…

-Jag: I call him this because he’s a complete and total jag. Spiked up greased hair, leather cuffs, Ed Hardy shirts…the whole uniform. Now, one would think that, even in the face of overwhelming horniness, Juno’s overwhelming stupidity and acrid personality would have sent him scurrying to one of the myriad of other slut-tastic girls in our class. Of course, that assumption does not account for the fact that Jag makes Juno seem like Stephen Hawking. For example, at the beginning of our gastrointestinal unit, Jag raised his hand, stopping our instructor so she could answer for him the pressing question, “Huh-huh-huh….does that mean your butt?” Given Juno’s apparently super-fertility, I fear that we will soon have to invent a new word to describe the level of idiocy that their inevitable children will reach.

-The Sisterhood of the Traveling Uterine Disorders: Being a community college, my classes contain large numbers of middle-aged women who are here to “Show you….show ALL of you!” despite the fact that no one has ever questioned their ‘showing’ ability. This is all well and good until they start playing their daily game of, “My uterus has more horrifying problems than yours.” The game is played by one woman (a different one every day) stopping class to inform everyone about some grotesque issue going on within her reproductive system under the guise of it being connected to what we are discussing (despite the fact that we have yet to actually reach the unit dealing with the reproductive system). After the serve, another member of the Sisterhood will then drop all pretenses and volley back, sharing some even more repulsive story about her uterine misfortune. The other members will then join in, ceasing all control of the class from our instructor and spinning increasingly unbelievable yarns about the caustic wastelands that are the lower halves of their bodies, which, if allowed to continue long enough, would no doubt eventually involve their fallopian tubes being haunted by the ghost of a dead confederate general.

-The All Girl Russian Mafia: The All Girl Russian Mafia is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It’s a group of women from ages eighteen to sixty who cluster in the upper corner of my human anatomy class and jabber at each other in Russian until the instructor tells them to shut up, then are quiet for five minutes before beginning again. Naturally, they miss everything that is said, so they are constantly making us stop so the instructor can repeat what she just said while they were busy texting and chittering away at each other. Their matriarch, a large, prison-matronly woman in her sixties who has about the same grasp of English as I do of Klingon, is easily the most disruptive, as she understands almost nothing anyone is saying and will compensate for her confusion by yelling out whatever stray thought wanders through her mind. For instance, today, while we were discussing difficulty swallowing, she yells out, “HA HA HA! MASHED POTATOES!” In any other class, this would have brought things to a screeching confusion-halt, but we’ve all become so used to her nonsensical eruptions that we all just took it in stride. At least it was better than last week when, during our test review (and, apparently, a rare lucid moment) she stood up and yelled, “HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO REMEMBER ALL OF THIS?” at our instructor. I’m pretty sure she expected our instructor to just say, “Why, you’re right! It is ridiculous that I would expect people going into medical fields to learn basic human anatomy! The test will now be one question that involves correctly distinguishing the human skull from a box of marshmallow peeps.”

There are others, and I will write about them eventually, but right now I have to get to sleep so I can wake up early and throw the curve and make everyone pissed off at me again.

The Teutonic Plague

So, I just got back from Leavenworth, Washington, and I’d just like to take this time to renew my promise to never, ever go back to Leavenworth, Washington. The first time I made this vow was several years back, after returning from a German class trip that seemed to last a full lunar cycle and consisted mainly of me being punched repeatedly in the face by boredom. I had not intended to break my solemn oath to never set foot in Leavenworth again, but, unfortunately, the wedding of my wife’s oldest sister allowed the petulant little town to grab me by the throat with its meaty, sausage-stained hands and drag me back in.

For those of you unfamiliar with Leavenworth, it’s a tiny little dot in central Washington that, for some ungodly reason, has decided it needs to be a Bavarian themed enclave. Not actual Bavaria, mind you, or even Bavaria as seen in movies. No, this is more like if a Martian sent to Earth to report on our culture watched a movie featuring real Bavaria and then tried to describe it to his Martian friends. Everything is white with brown trim (even the McDonald’s and the Starbucks), and most places are described as being “Ye Olde” and/or “Shoppes.” Really, it’s Grandma’s House: The Town. So you can probably understand why I was not thrilled to be rolling back into Fake Germany.

Not wanting to kill our ailing car, we opted to take a Greyhound bus instead. Now, last time I took a Greyhound, there were some interesting people on the bus, but at least they were quiet. This was not a quality shared by our traveling companions this time. On the way to Leavenworth we sat in front of the Jungian archetypal nerd-couple. The guy was roughly the size of the moon and was wearing shorts that looked like they hadn’t been washed since last November and a black button-up shirt covered in little tiny AC/DC logos that he clearly thought was badass. His girlfriend, who made him look like Jack Skellington, was a straight from the box nerdy loser girlfriend, down to the pasty, doughy skin, the wiry orange-red clown hair, and the low-rise hip-hugger jeans with flab hanging over them, making her look like a just-split can of ready-made biscuits. These two talked the entire trip in excessively loud voices about…

-Their friend who is having an incestuous relationship with her uncle
-How Male Half of Nerd Couple is a big strong man that everyone is afraid of
-Every single three year or older internet meme (little advice…even if the joke was funny online, that seldom translates to funny in the three dimensional world)
-The rules of comedy (according to Male Half, when giving advice to Female Half on how to be more hilarious, “You need to work on making thing completely random. The more random things are, the funnier they are.” Thanks, jackass. It’s people like you who are keeping Family Guy on the air).
-How much they love to cut themselves for fun. Yes, they’re cutters, too!

But the mainstay of their conversation was Male Half’s deep and abiding love for World of Warcraft. Our entire bus was subjected to two hour screed about how sick he is of people who “won’t take the game seriously” and “don’t even bother to do research on the history of the World of Warcraft universe!” Pepper in lots of discussions of dark elves and druids, and we were all ready for him to return to talking about how he likes to drag a box cutter across his knuckles.

Eventually, though, we did arrive in Leavenworth. Somehow, over the last eight years, Leavenworth has managed to become even more annoying than I remembered it. For starters, when I went in high school, the who place was practically deserted. Well, eight years has, apparently, made the world go cuckoo for Bavarian themed towns that are the greatest offense to the German people since the firebombing of Dresden. The place was absolutely packed. It was like a German-themed Mardi Gras, but with out the floats or drunkenly exposed breasts. So, even though Leavenworth is roughly the size of the room I’m currently sitting in, it took forever to push through the throngs of unwashed tourists, all who had to stop ever six feet to point and say, “Look! There’s *another* nutcracker!”

Wife and I had booked ourselves a room at the Hotel Edelweiss, right in the center of the madness. Here’s a little tip: don’t book a room at the Hotel Edelweiss. It is easily the worst space I’ve ever occupied, and that’s a list that includes two dorm rooms and a jail cell. First off, the hotel entrance is just a barely-marked glass door in the side of a building, wedged between two tourist-crap stores. But don’t worry, you don’t actually get to check in there. No, instead, you have to go three blocks over and down an alley until you find a door marked “Sunspots Hotels” (which shares its building with a soap-making factory). That’s where you check in. No, really. But, of course, we got to Leavenworth around one in the afternoon, and, as our confirmation email told us, check-in wasn’t until four. So we wandered around, lugging our bags everywhere, trying not to die of whimsy-overdoses. Once we’d managed to kill three hours (they didn’t go down without a fight, let me tell you), we dragged ourselves back to the soap-factory office to check in. Unfortunately for us, in keeping with Leavenworth’s “Fuck you” theme, no one was there, and the closed sign was still up (the one that very, very clearly says right on it that on Friday and Saturday, they would be open from four PM to six PM for check-ins). So we waited. And waited. And waited. And, finally, at about four thirty, called the emergency number and asked, “Um…what the hell?” The woman on the phone went off about how they had “been trying to contact me all day” but they couldn’t reach me (…because, oh, I don’t know, I WASN’T AT MY FUCKING HOUSE, I HAD ARRANGED A STAY AT A HOTEL, YOU UNSTOPPABLE IDIOT). After saying that she accepted my apology for not leaving a cell phone number instead (…which it never asked for…and, also, I did not and would not apologize), she informed me that their check-in office is closed on Fridays. Yes, the check-in office that I was standing right in front of, that had a sign on it that clearly states in big, bold letters that they are most certainly open on Fridays after four. Again, she reiterated that forgave me for my mistake, and said she’d send someone in “in about half an hour” to get us a key. Now, normally in situations where a business does something seemingly incredibly fucked up, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt and say, “Well, I don’t know the (whatever) industry, so maybe that’s just how it works everywhere.” But here’s the thing; I DO know the hotel industry! I know it really damn well. This is not how the hotel industry works! First off, I could go down to, say, the (sic) Rodeway Inn, the seediest of seedy motels in downtown Spokane, and buy a room (probably for half the price of the Hotel Edelweiss) from an office that, strangely, ISN’T three blocks away in the back room of a soap factory, and have someone give me a key during their stated business hours. German efficiency, my ass. Fortunately for the woman on the phone and the person who, forty-five minutes later, showed up to give me our keys, I was so exhausted and just wanting to put my luggage down that I just took the keys and dragged myself back to the actual hotel.

I’ve never seen a self-service hotel before, but I’m pretty sure that’s what the Hotel Edelweiss is. I wasn’t expecting any kind of real luxury (Leavenworth is a ridiculously expensive little town, and the Edelweiss was the cheapest option…which still put it significantly costlier than a lot of Spokane hotels), and I knew about the shared bathroom (which they refer to as “European Style”….also known as “Dorm room” or “prison” style). But I expected that maybe, just maybe, SOMEONE would be working at the hotel. But no, there was literally no one working in the actual hotel. Ever. There was a big desk that said “reservations” over it, but no one was ever at it (and I don’t know how you’d use it anyway, since you need your key to actually enter the hotel itself). Our room was smaller than my dorm room at UW, and didn’t have any high-end luxury items like a phone or a clock. The bed seemed to be made out of the same material they make those pizza cooking stones out of, and it was at least fifteen degrees warmer in the room than it was outside. My favorite touch was that it was the only hotel or motel I’ve ever been in that did not have a Bible in the bedside table. Given the quality of everything else in the hotel, I was more expecting to open the drawer and find the Book of Mormon, but no, absolutely nothing. Apparently, the Gideons feel that, if you’re staying at the Hotel Edelweiss, you’ll no longer fear hell. The good news on the first night was that there was only one other occupied room in the whole place (and, since there’s no staff, that brought the entire population of the hotel to four people). This was good, since the walls were pretty much made of spackle, and we could very easily hear everything that the other couple was saying (or, in some cases, grunting and moaning…apparently they got bored around six AM) as if they were in the room with us. Again, in case I’m being too subtle about my overall message, let me reiterate; do not stay at the Hotel Edelweiss.

Now, as part of the wedding festivities, Beth and her youngest sister, Diane, had to go to the rehearsal at the hotel where the wedding was going to be held, which was seventeen miles away from Leavenworth Prime down a road called, and I swear this isn’t me making up a name to make fun of it, the Chumstick Highway. That left me milling around for a few hours until the rehearsal dinner (which, unlike the rehearsal, I *was* invited to). This, like most of my plans this weekend, involved me pairing up with Diane’s boyfriend, Nick. Now, I’ll admit, I was pretty apprehensive about this going in. I’d never met Nick before, and I tend to find some way to become critically annoyed with ninety percent of the people I encounter (see: every post in this blog, ever), yet the stated itinerary had me spending large amounts of time with him. Fortunately, this is one of the few things that worked out for the better, as Nick is actually a really cool guy who did not at any point find a way to annoy me. I was surprised, too. So Nick met me at the Edelweiss and we walked over to the restaurant, a place called Gustav’s, and told them that we were there with the wedding rehearsal dinner. They led us up stairs, where we found…no one. You see, even though were were like five minutes late for the stated time, everyone else was a good fifteen minutes later than that. And, since they had a very clear set of tables set up for the party, and Nick and I were barely a part of this whole thing, we didn’t want to take seats yet. So we just stood there like goons and drew suspicious looks from the wait-staff (including one guy who I’m pretty certain thought we were crashers). Fortunately, everyone else did, eventually, arrive, and the food was pretty good.

The next day started bright and early (thank God for our cell phone’s alarm clock feature), with Beth going off to get her hair done with the rest of the bridal party and me wandering around Leavenworth yet again. Here’s another annoying thing about Leavenworth: nothing opens until about eleven. Thank God for Starbucks, or I would have just passed out from boredom at the base of the maypole. As the hours passed, I headed back to our room and decided to save some time later by pre-tying my tie (I hate tying ties). So I open up the bag with my suit in it and discover….Well, this’ll take some explaining. Beth has this fancy belted shirt with a black fabric belt that looks very, very similar to my black tie, and which she decided to keep next to my black tie. So guess what I grabbed instead of my black tie. So thus started my frantic tie-quest, going to literally any store that was a) open and b) might possibly sell ties. But guess what you absolutely cannot buy in Leavenworth. The closest I came was a Harry Potter tie at a costume store that, sadly, I did honestly ponder purchasing for a handful of seconds.

My mission a failure, I went back to the room again and got changed into my suit (sans tie, of course) and then walked over to Nick’s hotel, from which we would then drive out into The Hills Have Eyes country to the wedding. I’m very, very glad I was not the one behind the wheel, as the road up to the hotel where the wedding was being held was long, winding, and highly confusing, especially with the GPS and Diane conspiring to kill us. At one point, the GPS led us to a bridge that was very much out (as indicated by the giant “BRIDGE OUT, DUMBASS” signs). Thoroughly lost and the GPS not backing down, Nick decided to call Diane, who tried to convince us to go across the bridge anyway. I can only imagine this was preceded by a conversation between Diane and Beth that started, “Hey…you wanna kill our significant others?”

Fortunately, once she gave up on trying to murder us in a ravine, Diane was able to provide working directions to the hotel. Once we got there, we were instantly put to work. Nick more than me, for some reason. I don’t know if that means that my inlaws don’t trust me, or that they look at Nick as basically a pack-mule in a suit, but, at one point, while Nick was off refilling a cooler with bottled water and I was standing around doing nothing, my mother-in-law came up to me and said, “could you ask Nick to take the presents to the car when he gets back? Thanks.” I ended up helping anyway, as I felt like quite the load just standing there while the new guy did all the work.

After the ceremony and the reception (which, for some ungodly reason, was dry) we all went out to dinner (again, at Gustav’s) and made up for lost time by consuming as much alcohol as possible as quickly as possible. Bad news; Leavenworth isn’t any more interesting when drunk. Unfortunately, when we got back to the hotel, we discovered that all of the other rooms had filled up (…still no staff), mainly with people whose favorite hobby seems to be slamming doors repeatedly. So by the time we woke up this morning, we were good and ready to get the hell out of Leavenworth. Of course, one more Greyhound ride stood in our way.

While we didn’t have to put up with the World of Warcraft fanatics this time, we did get to hear the exhaustive ballad of Shanika and Rondell. Shanika was the highly animated girl who sat directly behind us and who spent her ENTIRE bus trip yelling into her cell phone to at least five different people. The mainstay of her conversations, which she felt it was very important we all hear (at one point I had my ipod a full blast and could still hear her clearly), was her relationship with a mystery man named Rondell, whom she’s planning to marry in the near future but is too shy to hold her hand. She also discussed at great length how one of her male friends is too shy to have sex with anyone because he hasn’t had sex in a long time and has, essentially, forgotten how sex works. Then there was my favorite conversation, an detailed account of the previous week’s party that everyone was “talkin’ all nasty about her” over because she apparently got mind blowingly drunk and did stupid things. Or, as she put it, “It aint’ no big deal…I just got all happy and affectionate!” My favorite line from the drinking discussion had to be one she used repeatedly; “I don’t know why people are makin’ such a big deal; I don’t ever drink. Ever. I only drink when I want to.”  Thankfully, Shanika de-bussed in Moses Lake, and the bus became noticeably quiet the rest of the way to Spokane.

So that’s the story of our trip to Leavenworth; a cautionary tale, to be sure. Unless you think I’ve left something out, in which case there’s probably some place you can go to see about that….

Look over there again

Hey, everyone who still has access to my old Myspace blog! You might want to go look at that again. Just this once, I promise.

From the Classics File

So, recently, it was requested of me that I repost a certain story of mine for mass consumption. For some of the handful of people who actually read this blog, this will be an old story. But I think it’s one of the few that I have in my arsenal that is worth a retelling or two. As with the last time I posted this, I’m going to just repost my original write up on it, done when I was eighteen (holy shit, I just realized that that makes this story eight years old), the day after it all happened. So, bear with the less than stellar writing. Again, I was eighteen and, literally, just out of high school. Anyway, here goes; the story of my time in the slammer.

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This goes back to yesterday (6/5/01), the last day of school for us seniors. The underclassmen still have to go for about a week. The seniors get out halfway through the day, giving us a perfect excuse to come up with senior pranks. Now, normally, these pranks have been either really stupid (people driving by with squirt guns spraying people), or malicious (people filling water balloons with paint, urine, and bleach). Naturally, my friends and I wanted to do a senior prank…but what? There was only one person who could answer this question…

Silas.

Now, let me set up Silas a bit here.

-He’s our valedictorian
-he got a perfect 1600 on the SATs
-he is actually some sort of magic robot

Silas is the man. So we naturally turned to him for advice on what to do for a prank. We met him in McDonalds, where we planned it all out (I have never felt like more of a badass while sitting in a McDonalds). The plan was simple. Our school sits right next to the elevated railroad tracks. We would go up there with Silas’ giant waterballoon launcher and rain death down on the underclassmen as they left school at the end of the day. But what would we shoot? Waterballoons were too conventional…and we didn’t want to do anything painful/mean-spirited that might get us in trouble (this will turn out to be ironic later) so we made the logical choice:

Hamburgers.

That’s right, Spokane’s own Dick’s Hamburgers. Worst burgers in the world [A little aside from present-me here...I got in a bit of trouble the first time I posted this, way back when. Apparently, one of the owners of Dick's found the post and wrote me a fairly scathing email. Which was sad, because, by then, I'd really picked up a taste for the greasy little burgers], but we got 10 for $5. On our way back from Dick’s, we ran into Erin, our senior class Vice President, who thought the idea was great. At this point, all five of us sneaked up the hill and through a hole in the fence that led to the area around the train tracks.

Now came the tough part. First, let me set up the environment. There are two sets of track with ample amounts of gravel and such on either side of the two tracks. The problem this time was that there was a train moving (albeit very very slowly) across one of the tracks. Now, of course, we weren’t going to let that stop us, so we set about crossing the moving train that was blocking our path. There is NOTHING that rivals the feeling of leaping on to a moving train and then jumping off to the other side. Nothing at all. At this point, we all thought that would be the high-point of the day. Oh how wrong we were…

Anyway, after that excitement, we reached our destination: the edge of the elevated tracks that faced the school parking lot. We had about 5 minutes before school let out. Two of my friends took to holding the sides of the balloon/hamburger launcher, Silas took the firing position, I provided the ammo, and Erin stood a bit down the tracks and directed us in where to aim. After what seemed like forever, the bell finally rang, and the underclassmen flooded out of the building. It was on.

I have never seen my friends and I work so well together. We were like a well oiled machine. Freshmen scattered and screamed (in fun, not agony) as horrible, horrible hamburgers rained down on them like hellfire and brimstone (which are coincidentally both found in Dick’s hamburgers). Just then, the school security guard, Officer Dan (who is about as much of an officer as I am a mystical wizard) yelled for us to stop. Not wanting to get into trouble (irony alert), we did. So we started down the tracks, but at this point another train was going through on the second set of tracks, this one much too fast to jump. Suddenly, one of my friends squinted at the spaces between the cars of the moving train and the parked train. I think he summed it up nicely…

“Ho–ly…SHIT!”

To quote Silas after this was all over, “It was like Rainbow 6 [Anyone remember Rainbow 6? Anyone?], but with pale ropey guys instead of terrorists.”

I looked where my friend was looking, and I saw perhaps the scariest thing I have ever, EVER, seen. It was the SWAT team. I’m not BSing. The fucking swat team. And not just a few, either. We haven’t been able to lock down a firm number, but we’ve heard everything from 10 to 30 swat units. The absolute most frightening thing I’ve ever seen has to be a group of swat officers in full riot gear with shotguns and tear gas launchers crossing between the two trains (the second of which was now stopping, but still moving a bit. It created a creepy slide-show affect where one car would go by, and you’d see the Swats one place, then another would go by, and they’d be slightly closer, and so on and so forth).

Needless to say, we were all pretty much soiling our various pants at this point.

“Okay” one of my friends said, “now, let’s just be real friendly, they’re probably just going to realize what we’re doing, and give us a warning and tell us to get the hell out of here.”

Holy shit we were wrong….about 5 seconds later, we were all on our knees with that damn plastic cord around our wrists (cut mine to shreds…looks like I tried to kill myself) while the Swat team yelled at us. I thought about this later. They dispatched up to 30 units of SWAT to take care of 5 kids with what amounted to a giant rubber band. After forcefully loading us into the Paddy Wagon, we were off…

It should be obvious by now that my friends and I don’t take much seriously. We pretty much thought that we would get down to the jail, they’d hear our story, and realize how ridiculous it was and therefore let us go. WRONG. Still, we decided to pass the time in the paddy wagon by singing ‘Amazing Grace’. Over, and over, and over again. The two swat officers driving were very very obviously trying to keep from laughing. At this point it was discovered that one of my friends is not yet 18, and therefore he had to be separated from us. We really felt sorry for him.

When we got to the station, they let us out and had us stand against the wall for the pat down. Again and again. They also decided to remove the razor-wire straps around our wrists, but for some reason, the guy feeling me up decided that I looked dangerous, so he threw me in normal cuffs. No one else, just me *up-yours gesture*. First off, I AM NOT THREATENING LOOKING. Second, I AM IN A FUCKING POLICE STATION! HOW FUCKING STUPID WOULD I HAVE TO BE TO TRY TO GET AWAY?! So, they led us into the front room of the station and frisked us AGAIN…..you know, just in case we had somehow been able to produce a shotgun with our minds in the last five feet. As we entered in, one of the officers looked at us with disbelief and asked “What the hell did these guys do?” Now, let me explain the make up of this group. There’s lovable me, hospice volunteer. There’s Silas, our valedictorian. There’s my best friend, National Honor Society member, and there’s Erin, our Senior-class VP. We’re like the Apple Dumpling Gang gone horrible wrong. So they lead us into the waiting area where we met Coco.

Coco was our Yoda. He was a pretty clean looking guy, compared to some in the room, and he offered us much advice. He said that it would be best for us to spend the night in jail instead of bonding out, because it would look better to the judge and we would have a better chance of getting charges (trespassing and disorderly conduct, by the way) dropped. This was a tough decision. One thing we all freely admit is that we are all giant pussies. We do not belong in a jail. Shit, we don’t belong in a sporting goods store. But Coco made sense. But if we were going to do this, it had to be all or none. Honestly, I’ve never been more proud of my friends as a group. We all decided to take one for the team and spend the night. Coco was proud of us too. He gave us more good advice, like what food they give us is good and what isn’t, the best way to keep from being notice, and how to handle ourselves during the trial in the morning…..

….oh, and he was in for dumping a pop-bottle full of urine over his girlfriend’s head. But otherwise, he was a great guy.

After making our calls home (all of our parents were surprisingly understanding…and my mother really couldn’t say much, due to the fire-engine incident from her childhood), they moved us into the holding zone for the longest 15 minutes in recorded history.

We were in there with some very very very very very scary people. And they weren’t amused by our antics. One continuously threatened, in graphic detail, to rape Silas. Another, a drunken old man, talked to himself the entire time. Topics of his conversation were:

-Harry Houdini
-Air support
-’wooooosh!’

Coco was there too, and he told us that this was obviously a ‘scared straight’ tactic by the cops, since he’d never had to do this before, and there was no reason for us to have not been taken right to our cells. After what seemed like an eternity, we were removed from the holding area and taken to our cells. Our female member was taken to her own cell, of course, leaving three of us guys. Two of them got to share a cell. Neither of those two were me. This was because of Officer Jackass.

This guy hated me. I don’t know why, but he took every opportunity to make my life hell. Maybe he had issues from his childhood. Maybe it was because, when one of my friends asked if at least two of us could be in the same cell and he replied that he would put us all with sleazy lowlifes, I asked if I was sleazy and lowlife enough for him. We’ll never know. So he sent me into my cell where I sat alone until I was introduced to the most frightening man I’ve ever met. This guy was about 6’6″ and had long hair and a Manson-ish beard. His arms were coated in tattoos and he smelled of fish and pot. I mumbled something like ‘hey’ at him, and he…

Growled.

No, really, the growled. It wasn’t a mumble, it was a definite growl. And that was ALL he did the entire time. This guy scared the living hell out of me. I had the top bunk, and I didn’t sleep at all as I was afraid to move and wake him up, therefore causing him to get up and powderize my skull. I was growled at several more times during our time together. After the longest and most hellish night of my life, it was time for our trial.

We were all led into a room with some TV equipment in it. It was sort of a teleconference trial, with a split screen for us. The top half displayed the judge and the bottom half displayed the audience (their bottom half of the screen displayed us). At this point I was really really nervous. Then I glanced at the audience section of the screen. There there were several of our friends sitting there with eyes fixed on the screen.

Now, I was ready. Before I went, my cell mate went. This was the first time I heard him talk. Apparently, he was charged with weapons charges, but in his defense, as he put it, “I WAS JUST CARRYING THE MACHETE FROM THE CAR TO MY GIRLFRIEND’S HOUSE!”….I wish I were making this up. Then it was my turn. I got up there, and, fortunately for us, Coco was right. The charges were dropped. We were free…….

In 3 hours.

After three agonizingly long hours, we were all reunited. We strode proudly to the front gates, where we discovered the majority of the senior class. Apparently, there had been talk of some sort of protest, but they decided it would be better to just have a celebration. Everyone was there. We were literally cult heroes. Girls we had never met before were hugging us. One of the girls brought us all hamburgers.

So anyway, thus ended our adventure. The Spokesman Review is doing a very pro-us article about it, for which we were interviewed. Meanwhile, for the time being at least, we are heroes. For the first time in our lives, we have achieved the pinnacle of social status.

We should get arrested more often.
——————————————————————-

And that’s that story. Great thing is, eight years later, they’re still talking about us. Back at my last job (the one with Crazy Snake Man), I was actually working in the same building that housed our high school during my senior year (they were doing construction on the actual high school). One of my coworkers was a guy who had graduated from the same school just this summer, and I mentioned that I was an alum. He asked me what year, and when I told him, he, unprompted, asked, “Dude, were you there when those guys threw hamburgers and got arrested?” Yes, yes I was. I was there.

Post Mortem

Remember that horrible job I had? No, not the one where crazy people threatened to slit my throat on a daily basis. And not the one where I worked for a lunatic millionaire, either. The most recent one. Well, despite my best efforts to drink the memories into the hoary netherworld, I do. Often I’ve wondered how the rest of the motley band of weirdos and idiots I trained with were faring in the brutal hellscape that was that horrible job.
Well, about two nights ago, I got a call from my lovably angry former sidekick, Bitterfly. Seems she had just been fired. Why? Well, it sounds like they sniped her, but, in all fairness, as much as I was always a fan Bitterfly and her angsty ways, I think they contributed just a bit to her falling into the iron-sights. I’m pretty sure what happened was that, once I left, she didn’t have anyone to vent her vitriol and bile to. So, instead, she just expressed it directly to the people who were irritating her. By her own accounts, she told our supervisor to change her attitude, told our manager that our training program was an utter joke (which it most definitely was) and told the rep from AT&T that she couldn’t believe they still used our company for customer service. Yeah. Bitterfly is someone who benefits greatly from having a venting-post. So she’s not there anymore, and thus severs my last connection to the place. She did, thankfully, pass on some information about what my former adversaries have been up to…

-Hipster Douche: As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Hipster Douche actually quit the day before I did, in a big, Jerry Maguire like display, declaring that he didn’t need this job anymore, he had a NEW and BETTER job…at Perkins. Well, turns out, that job fell through (I can’t imagine it has anything to do with his utter lack of social skills, his nostril-raping body odor, the fact that he wears women’s clothing all the time, or the fact that he’s very, very proud that he never showers), which is good, because I occasionally like to eat at Perkins and world rather have my food served to me by Aragog from Harry Potter. However, it’s bad for the really really dumb girl in our class who, perhaps under the influence of a brain-slug, had decided to lend him hundreds of dollars, with the understanding that he’d pay her back once he started his Perkins job. Well, surprise surprise, Hipster Douche can no longer be found and won’t respond to her phone calls. This story will no doubt be continued on a future episode of Judge Joe Brown.

-Crazy Snake Man: The fantasy kingdom of Crazy Snake Man has fallen on dark days. Gone are the stories of fighting ninjas in the nude or having threeways while twenty Burmese pythons watch on, no doubt hissing words of encouragement. No, instead, he decided to continue with the whole “Crazy Snake Man’s ‘wife’ is pregnant!” plot arc that seemed to really fizzle out in the face of his desire to have sex with every girl in class. Now, it seems, his wife was pregnant with twins, but then, TRAGEDY STRUCK and she lost them! Okay, I know it makes me sound like some kind of hideous ghoul that I’m making fun of this, but I would have to have a piece of rebar stuck through my skull to actually believe this man’s story. This is a man who claimed to be a brute-squad mercenary on the weekends. And that he was hit by a car and it did more damage to the car than to him. And that he got into a knife fight while naked and bested an invading criminal, while spouting one-liners. And that he found a body outside of McDonalds (which was why he was late that day). And, for those keeping track, this will be the SECOND coworker I’ve had who has invented a pregnancy and later a miscarriage for the sake of garnering attention. At least the last one was female.

Bitterfly shared some other lovely stories of the place, such as the team-lead who pulled her aside and offered her $50 if she’d just reach into his pocket and get it. He still has a job, by the way. They should really just cut the crap and pepper the sexual harassment section of the employee handbook with laughing-face emoticons. But she’s done with them now, off to find a new job, because bitterflies are free to fly, fly away, high away, bye bye.

I’m sorry.

The season is upon us….

Today marks the beginning of wedding season, for me at least, as it was the first of many I’ll be attending over the next few months (some I’m looking forward to, some I’m ambivalent towards, some give me brain-scream). Today’s ceremony falls into the middle category, as I really don’t know either of the people involved. The bride is a friend of Wife, and the groom is some guy she met over the phone a few months ago who looks rather like I picture Ichabod Crane. Yeah. The ceremony was nice enough, aside from being praise-song dominated. Seriously, for centuries, Christianity inspired some of the greatest music mankind has ever produced. But over the last two decades or so, the works of Bach and Handel have given way to screechy, sappy, melodramatic, interchangeable whine-fests stuffed with contrived emotion and nearly as much respect for God as the all powerful creator of reality as the song “Sweet Home Alabama” has for Neil Young as a suitable commentator on southern culture.
But I digress. The wedding went fine, and there was good food at the reception, which is all I really ask. But what was much, much more fascinating to me was the incredible garbage-house across the street from the reception hall. This is not like any other garbage house, with maybe a destroyed front yard an an old car in the driveway. This is the garbage house of garbage houses. This is Oscar the Grouch’s summer cottage. The dwelling (which seems like an unfit label, as I don’t think anyone could possible live in this amazing house) itself is, of course, dilapidated, with most windows broken out and paint entirely peeled away. In front of the house are two dead cars, with a third in the driveway. But what pushes it over the top are the epic piles of garbage surrounding it. The porch hads trash stacked about four feet high, and it continues down the steps and covers the lawn. More garbage is coming out of every window on the house, and seems to continue inside, as well. All three dead cars are likewise filled with piles of garbage which are escaping from them, as well. The third car, the one in the driveway, is completely surrounded by refuse, which comes up past its bumper. It is nothing short of a wonder. The houses in Fallout 3 don’t look as bad as this one. I would pay $50 to go inside of that monstrosity with a camera, just so I could pull out the pictures the next time I feel that our apartment is a pig-sty. I tried to take a picture of it, but, sadly, it was far too dark.

Garbage House, you have set the bar pretty high for all of the other weddings I will attend.

But existing is pretty much all I do!

So, for the last few weeks, I haven’t exactly been my biggest fan. I’ve quit yet another job (sure, it did almost make my heart explode, but that in and of itself isn’t exactly something I’m happy about), I’m swiftly closing on another year without getting published, and my raging case of writer’s block has kept me from producing much more than a paragraph that any non-masochist would ever want to read. If I was a character on a sitcom, focus groups would insist that I be retooled or written out of the show entirely and replaced by Scott Baio. So I’m trying to get serious about writing, which, I realize, is something I’ve said many times before, only to get distracted by something shiny ten minutes later (and let me tell you, the upcoming, sure to be comedically bad GI Joe movie doesn’t bode well for this attempt). But maybe this time I’m not full of shit. I’ve got a story right now that I’m having trouble getting off the ground (I absolutely despise writing opening scenes. Why do things need to begin somewhere at all?), but I managed to actually plot out at least a significant chunk of it tonight. I was tempted to go the fantasy route that I did with Saint of Excelsior, but since agents seem to see that as unsellable as a Coke II edition Zune, I decided against it. This one will be more similar to my earlier work, Voltage, which several people seemed to enjoy (or at least felt they got what they paid for after downloading it for free). One in the win column would feel pretty damn good about now, and I’ll settle for just completing another novel at this point. Hopefully I can hammer this one out in a few months time, unlike the multi-year trek that was trying to write what is increasingly seeming to be an unsellable novel.
In other news…who wants to buy me a new air compressor for my car? Apparently our beloved Corsica, though fully functional otherwise, has decided that we do not need air conditioning this summer. Unfortunately, it did not seem to have consulted God before coming to this conclusion, and thus did not take into account the enormous spans of 90+ degree days. It also has this neat trick where, even if you have all of the windows down and are driving at speeds fast enough to bend time, no air will actually enter the vehicle. And, apparently, it’s going to cost $800 to fix, if we so desire (and considering that that’s probably about eight times the current value of the car, we do not). So, should we arrive to some function smelling like a big kettle of feet, that’s why.

One Flew East, One Flew West…

…one flew the hell away from the cuckoo’s nest.

Let me start this off with a little story from way back in the day when I worked on the crisis hotline. It was one of our busiest days ever (one of the Monday holidays…we always got slammed on those due to everyone else being closed), and we only had two people working the lines (myself and someone who, apparently, was very forgettable, as I cannot remember them). The MHPs (mental health professionals) were gone, and we were getting flooded with calls. Simultaneously, we got three calls from seriously suicidal people. Once again, there were only two of us on the phones. So, we had to juggle these three people who were on the verge of killing themselves, trying to coordinate getting them all help while deciding which one was least likely to kill themselves at the moment so we could put that one on hold. And, oh yeah, the ten thousand other crazy people didn’t magically know that we had three suicidal callers on the line, so they kept pouring in, too. I tell you this story so that you will understand that I’ve had stressful days before, and, that, since none of the previously mentioned three callers shuffled the mortal coil that day, I can deal with stress pretty damn well. I also tell it so that you will understand the meter I’m using when I say that yesterday was easily the worst, most stressful day I’ve ever worked.
I knew from the get-go that the training I received at my new job was absolute crap. It was fragmented, incoherent, incomplete, and never really seemed to get around to telling us exactly HOW to do anything. Sure, on certain subjects, we knew WHAT we should do, but, for some reason, customers aren’t satisfied with that and want us to, you know, actually fix their problems. And when doing so involves accessing upwards of ten different programs, each of which can solve a fragment of their problem, it might have helped to be told exactly how we should mesh those fragments together. It’s like deciding to build a five-hundred piece Lego set without the instructions. And, for some reason, having given each individual Lego to a different person, all of whom live in different cities, speak different languages, and have a deep and abiding hatred for you. Your black-and-neon-green space station just ain’t happening.
Well, yesterday, I got a forceful illustration of just how ludicrously useless our training was when we were all thrown out onto the call floor for the very first time. With absolutely no assistance. I think one of my coworkers, during a rare moment of eloquence, put it best when he said, “it’s like we spent six weeks bird watching, and now we have to fly a plane.” This wasn’t a bad day like all first days are bad days. This was like mad scientists gathered around and engineered the worst first day ever, and then made us live it. We knew how to do NOTHING. None of our computer systems were any help (the handy dandy, much touted decision flow system did exactly what our trainer did…told us WHAT to do without bothering to tell us HOW to do it). The ‘floor helpers’ who we had been told all through training would pop into existence next to us the second we put our “OH MY GOD HELP ME I’M DYING!” cup on top of our computer turned out to be nearly mythical creatures (I had my ‘help’ cup up for, and I’m not exaggerating, over half an hour before someone assisted me…meanwhile, the girl wearing the ridiculously low cut shirt got helped twice in that time…I’m sure those things weren’t connected). Every customer screamed at us (and I don’t blame them), and so did our supervisors, who would pop in periodically not to offer us help with the questions we had about how to do our jobs better, but instead to tell us how shitty we were all doing and to threaten to fire us. That was what they did when they were piping helpful little notes directly to our computers reminding us of how we were failing. Several people in our group broke down in tears when not on the phone (and not just the idiots who didn’t pay any attention or who had never held jobs prior to this one…even our smattering of decent, hard working employees), and were told that they needed to control themselves or be fired. When, after about five utterly disastrous calls, I asked if it would be possible for me to monitor again with someone (so, you know, I might accidentally learn how to do this job and not screw over any more customers), the manager told me no, get back on the phone or get out. So I took more calls, and did just about as well as you would expect someone who had NO FUCKING CLUE HOW TO MAKE ANYTHING HAPPEN to do. Early on in the day, Hipster Douche went from being everyone’s least favorite person to everyone’s hero when he summed up all of our feelings by saying, “this is bullshit,” and walked out.
Then things got a little scary. I started having chest pains and my heart was pounding like it only has about twice before (both times resulting from heavy over-exercise and ending with me going to the doctor). I’ve never reached that level of stress before (at any job or anywhere else), but that was definitely what was doing it. The second I left that hell hole, things started getting back to normal. That’s about when I decided that, as much as I love making $10 an hour at a job where they really don’t seem to even want to try to give us a chance to not do shitty work, I love not having a massive coronary at age 26 even more. And that’s the story of why I’m now, once again, without a job. It just wasn’t worth the toll it was taking on my health (even now I’m still not completely back to 100%). I never thought such meaningless activity could be so fucking stressful, but they managed to find a way to make it so. So, that’s where I am now…one more in the fail column, but at least my heart won’t explode as soon.

I Know Why the Singing Bird is Caged

So, on Friday, I reached a real milestone in my life; a truly momentous event. Yes, I graduated from my company’s training program. I swelled with the same pride that I imagine must come with being added to the ‘Do Not Fly’ list, or the national sex offender registry. And yes, we did have a ceremony, held out in the hallway (which, again, is a hallway that I used to use to travel between high school classes) where the other training classes lined up and watched us march one by one past a line of our superiors (…a title which, now that we’ve graduated this program, I feel applies to just about everyone on earth) and receive our official certificate of completion and a balloon. Considering that I typically like to associate balloons with happy occasions, I returned mine to Tobias the Angry Trainer (who, for some reason, was deemed the most appropriate to hand out balloons). I did, however, keep my certificate, which declares, “Congratulations! You officially have a job THAT ROCKS!” No, that’s not interpretation, that’s exactly what is printed on my certificate right over my name (which is, of course, misspelled). When our department head handed me said certificate, I got this strange flashback to 2005, when I was walking across the stage at the Arena, graduating with honors and receiving my bachelor’s degree from my college’s president. Let me tell you, when you find yourself at age twenty-six, standing in the hall of a building you used to go to high school in, receiving a certificate with your name misspelled that uses the word “ROCKS” in earnest from a man who looks like he’s probably on the previously mentioned sex offender registry, along with fifteen other people, half of whom have already punctured their balloons and are using their helium voices to sexually harass each other, you start wondering where the hell your life went wrong.
But, at any rate, on Monday I start phase two of training, wherein I’ll be allowed on the phone for half the day (…except on the first day when they put us on the phone the whole day…because that makes sense) and then spend the second half having an in depth discussion of how bad I fucked up. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to find a frame for my “You have a job THAT ROCKS!” certificate so I can put it up next to my degree.