Well’s Run Dry
Can't harvest a barren land now, can we?
There's something about summer that arrests my thinking. The heat? The years of slacking during the summer, that probably conditioned my brain to conserve it's energy from June to September? The short-shorts that liquefy my brains from mush to some kinda puree?
Whatever it is, I'm retreating back to my notebook for a bit, so, forgive the slower rate of posts.
Meanwhile, just to let you know, I'm going to England for a couple of weeks in August for my cousin's wedding and will be returning near the end of August. Hopefully I'll have tons of photos/pics for everyone.
On the Front Lines
I looked on the schedule last week and found out that I was working a lot that was being picketed. I wasn't looking forward to this since:
1) I just wanna do my job without someone bugging me.
2) I hate loud noises.
So when I showed up Monday morning, I was greeted by loud fucking music and a picket leader asking me for free parking. It's 8:30am on a Monday morning, which is bad enough as it is, but I went drinking the night before and barely woke up in time to go to work, so I was pretty friggin' tired. The last thing I wanted to hear was No Doubt's "Hella Good", or someone trying to explain to me why they shouldn't have to pay for parking.
I told her that she'd have to pay, just like everyone else in the lot pays, or like how the people in the building next door, who are actually working, have to pay too.
Bitch.
Anyway, the atmosphere is weird since they're picketing and playing pop music and rap music. Someone should really fix up their playlist to reflect the mood of what's going on, because Akon's "Beautiful" just doesn't cut it. What they need is some Bob Dylan or Neil Young, or anyone else with protest songs from the 70s. There's also no actual pickets, they just wear the signs over their chest and walk around in circles all day to music. It's not exciting at all, it looks like a bunch of retarded kids decided to play musical chairs, but didn't bring any chairs.
There I was, sitting and watching the people move hypnotically in circles in front of me when out of the corner of my eye I noticed Global TV coming down to film what was going on. They stayed for about 20 minutes and filmed a resident spazzing on the strikers for not letting him through the picket line, and making him wait 10 minutes. To get through the picket lines, every car had to wait 10 minutes before being allowed in, but(!!!), the exception being: if you were a resident or someone who worked for the parking lot, you could get in without a problem as long as you had some proper ID. This resident decided to argue with the picketers rather than show his ID to be let through, then complained the picketers were holding him up. Everyone else that day was being let through without a problem, but Global decided to film just the one guy, which I can understand, since, it's probably more interesting (and funny) to hear someone cuss someone else down.
For the most part the people were alright. I started a couple of conversations with them and they seemed to be pretty cool, aside from the one lady who asked for free parking, most people didn't get on my nerves. That was until I got the phone call.
The picketers use our washroom, which most people don't give a shit about because they don't mess it up or anything. I don't complain, the taggers in the area don't complain and our techs don't complain either, but nonetheless, I got a call from head office telling me they don't like the people using our washrooms and that I should lock it up. Since the guy wasn't here to tell them himself, I had to relay this dick move to the picketers and they immediately went hostile on me. Pretty much everyone's initial reaction was that they were going to pee all over my lot. One guy said he was going to pee in my booth, which really pissed me off since he was probably the guy on the picket line least likely to pull that move (read: he looks like a pussy). One guy tried to stick up for me, telling them it wasn't my fault, but then someone else came up and yelled at me and (like everyone else) threatened to pee on the lot.
"Where are we gonna go? How 'bout I just piss all over your walls?"
"Sure, if you want to."
"You don't think I'll do it?!"
"No, I just don't care if you do."
Bluff called. He didn't end up peeing on my walls. He just went to the next closest place to pee. I guess his vagina makes it hard for him to actually go through with his threats considering how peeing on the walls must be a strong departure from sitting down and peeing.
An hour later I get another phone call from head office telling me to unlock the door for the picketers, but seeing as how all the picketers already left for the day, this did nothing. He said that he didn't know what was going on and that he didn't realize the picketers were being nice to us by letting our cars in, so if they were being courteous to us, we should be to them. You hear that?! "He didn't know," and "he didn't realize," and yet he gets to tell me what to do.
*head explodes*
Garbage Strike
The garbage strike has turned Toronto into a shithole. I'm not under any delusion that it was a pristine city before this, but I could at least walk down Yonge St. without tripping over bags of garbage that people have left at the bins. I don't expect people to do otherwise, I mean, what's the city done to stop this? Saran wrap the holes? Ha! Cops can't stop people either, because there's too many garbage bins to keep track of. Not that cops would probably spare the manpower to police this anyway, it's stupid, there's more important things to look after.
I know what I'm saying is superficial, but, the city looks like shit. It bothers me when the streets I'm walking on suddenly turn into a mini-dump site wherever a garbage bin is placed. It's such an eyesore. See, if garbage was strewn around the city, I'd be fine with it, because while it's disgustingly dirty, it's not necessarily drawing attention to any specific part. It's uniform. You want things to seem as if they belong there. A pile of garbage on a relatively clean street is too much of a contrast; it ruins whatever street it's on. It's like the hair on a hot girl's arms, she's perfect until you look down and you wonder just where the hell it came from and why haven't they got rid of it yet.
Fuck this garbage strike.
I Once Punched a Midget
His name was Paul Drummond and I was in Grade 4. I tried searching for him on Facebook, but couldn't find him (or didn't want to sift through the many different Paul Drummonds), so I just gave up. The last I saw of him he was smoking at a bus stop [snarky remark about how smoking stunts your growth removed] and that was a few years ago.
He was a few years older than us, but, since he was much smaller than the people in his grade, he didn't really hang around them much. He tried playing basketball with them once, but bounced off someone who was setting a pick and hit his head on the ground pretty hard. He needed a couple of stitches. I remember him getting up and screaming as blood dripped from the cut on the back of his head, and after his recovery he only hung out with the caretakers or played with us.
Well, he didn't really play with us, not all the time anyway. We saw him during lunch and maybe said a few things to him but aside from just random stories he told we didn't see him during recess, just the lunch hour. I remember one lunch I saw a bunch of my friends surround him. I guess he was telling a story or something but before I could find out what it was the crowd disbursed and everyone who was in ran out laughing hysterically. I asked them what was up and they were like "oh man, he showed us his dick!" You know, now that I think about it, that's a pretty disturbing story.
He also used to just join in on our games of Red A(ss) during lunch. For those unfamiliar with the rules, I'm just gonna go off on a bit of a tangent and explain how we played the game, and how the name came to be, it's somewhat relevant:
My mom's cousin played this game and back when he was a kid it was called Red Ass. I'm assuming the name was shortened to Red A because kids didn't want to get in trouble saying "ass" all the time. Basically, what you had to do was throw the ball against the wall without the ball hitting the ground first. If you couldn't make it, you had to run to the wall and touch the wall before someone threw the ball against the wall and got you "out."
My uncle said you're supposed to whip it at the guy's ass, not the wall, hence "Red Ass" but we were a little more tame. Over time we decided to semi-adopt that rule, but instead of whipping it directly at someone, we had to bounce it off the wall and get them on the rebound. It was much less painful, unless you had the misfortune of having to avoid one of my throws which were wildly inaccurate and could potentially hit you directly in the face.
Anyway, Paul loved to join in on this bit because he liked running to the wall and avoiding the balls and we loved throwing at midgets. He became a bit of a staple in our game, but then we eventually got bored of him and didn't really want him to play with us anymore, because he'd hog the attention and take over the games. He joined in anyway, much to everyone's annoyance. Now, I'm not sure how it started but there was a dispute over the ball one day and Paul grabbed my friend's hand and started twisting his fingers. We all pleaded for him to stop but he kept going on and my friend couldn't pry his hand loose so as a last ditch effort I ran up and, with all the power my grade 4 body could muster, punched him in the back of the neck. I think I missed, because I was aiming to hit him in the head, but ended up punching down onto his spine instead. I got the job done anyway because he crumpled to the ground pretty quickly and started writhing in pain on the floor. I looked around for a bit, then grabbed the ball back and ran my ass off into the field. I'm not sure what refuge I could have sought in the field, since it's open space with nowhere to hide, but it was the furthest I could get from the scene without going off school property.
Luckily for me, the teachers didn't go out on patrol yet so it was only the lunch supervisors (parental volunteers) who were outside. Nobody saw what happened and I never got in trouble for it. Paul also never came back to play with us, understandably so, and spent the rest of his year hanging out with the caretaker.
*sigh* Oh, Canada…
I went to work today and when I was coming out of Eglinton station I saw a massive group of people outside. At first, when I saw all these Asian people, I said to myself "damn, where's the Casino Rama bus?" but when I saw that there was actually a huge lineup stretching down Yonge and across Eglinton, I realized that these people were lining up for Mandarin. Why? I don't know, Mandarin food isn't that great to me, but every Canada day they offer free (I believe "free" is contingent on you being a Canadian citizen) lunch or dinner. Nothing says Canada like Egg Rolls and Chow Mein! mmmmmMMMM!
I don't know what the big hoopla is about Mandarin, the food is crap, it's a buffet, and it's expensive. I saw an old man in the lineup and he had tubes up his nose and was carrying around this bag with him (filled with medical equipment) and he was waiting in line for what must have been hours to get in. Really now! You're in ill-health and you'd rather spend your time lining up for Mandarin? Chinese food is so cheap and readily available that you shouldn't have to line-up for it. Ever. Anywhere. Or if you do at least get the stuff that's been cooked, and not left in a heater all day for people to scoop up.
Do people know what they're lining up for? Buffets are places where people look at food, and smell it before scooping it up onto their plate (or back into the tray). They had to install sneeze guards, which I assume is to address the issue of people sneezing into their food. That's all fine and dandy but I saw a couple of midgets in the line who look as if they could circumvent this, since those guards are set at a certain height. Ewww! Hands are used to pick up bread, which is ok if it's the last piece, but terrible if your hairy arms get all over the piece I wanted. And don't get me started on the ice cream! People don't wash the scoops in between mixing flavours for themselves. Hey, you little shit, I bet you feel brilliant for putting vanilla and strawberry ice cream together, right? Now I got all this pink shit in my vanilla ice cream because you didn't bother to clean the scoop!
But alas, it's free. If you give something away in abundance people seem to line up for it, and no matter how ludicrous it sounds to line up for hours to get into Mandarin for free food that's left on a heater, people still do it. In droves.