Expensive Evening

I was sort of relying on there being free food at work today. People come here and leave their food that is bad or about to go bad and I usually eat it if I can. Today there is only a thing of cottage cheese, a bottle of Ragu and a half of a bottle of some kind of tea. I believe the Native Americans made a paste by mixing these three ingredients and then fried it into a sort of ceremonial cake on a hot rock using deer fat as a cooking agent. I would be interested in trying this but we all know that Ragu is the very worst of all pasta-style sauces. It,s the Domino,s Pizza of tomato sauce.

Interestingly enough, Domino,s does not use Ragu as their sauce of choice. They actually crush fresh, vine ripened tomatoes using employees, small and large intestines. They then proudly dump their holdings onto a freshly baked, seasoned crust. I just looked up Domino,s tomato sauce to try and quote something but it was really hard to find a company write up about their sauce or their pizza in general. I did find that the tomato sauce has chicken bones in it though. That,s pretty cool. A whole chicken skeleton is ground into every pizza.

Scrateboard - Holiday Spirituals
I am going to have to eat ramen or penne pasta with olive oil like I do almost everyday that I work. I guess it,s my fault for being a moron and never bringing anything different to eat, but I like to blame others for not knowing that I,m an idiot and leaving me food scraps. Luckily, there has been free breakfast food at work everyday for the past month due to the fact that my work started serving breakfast. We set out a plate of bruised, wooden apples and and some stale English muffins with warm tubes of cream cheese and strawberry jam that I scoop back into the jar if people don,t finish it. I cook up two English muffins each morning and rub some butter on there. It,s whatever.

The best part about breakfast is scooping the crumb-filled jam back into the jar. I hate jam and I really don,t like getting my hands sticky but I always make sure to ,,accidentally,, stick my thumb into the spoonful that I,m putting back in the jar if people are watching me. It lets them know that they are valued customers and that their satisfaction is my biggest priority.

The First Day Of Summear

I work six days in a row and then I have one off and then I work four days in a row. Mike Rowe. When I worked at a liquor store I think I worked eleven days in a row once but I didn,t even notice because that job just meant free candy and spearmint energy beef jerky. I notice it here because I don,t like having to see the same people over and over for hours at a time. I don,t mean the deaf people I work with that clean the rooms with me, I mean the overweight balding man that took me into a stairwell this morning to tell me that he got a bloody nose in the bathroom and tried to clean up the blood with his piss. He suggested that I put a cone up in the bathroom because it was so wet that he was scared that somebody might slip and die.

I got a free shirt from work the other day. Somebody had left their backpack here a week or so ago and it was thrown in the lost and found which means it was crammed under a shelf with a bunch of phone chargers and glasses cases. I didn,t care about the backpack because it was dumb but I looked through it to see if there was any money or iPods in there. There wasn,t but there was a weird shirt in there that was stained but fit me and felt like it was made out of plastic. I washed it and wore it that day to see my dad and bring him a cake for Father,s Day. He made me dinner and we watched an old movie and I enjoyed the Mexican character saying, ,,I think,, at the end of his sentences. I think the true meaning of Father,s Day is appreciating blatant racism that was once so acceptable in this great country.

Samamidon - But This Chicken Proved Falsehearted
I once found twenty five hundred dollars at work. Maybe I already wrote about it. There is no way I am going to check and see if I have already written about it. I found a purse under a bed filled with money that belonged to some Italian jerks and I was elated that I would be able to buy myself some nice juice at the grocery store. My friend calls the grocery store ,,the grocery,,. The Italian jerks realized that they were a missing a tiny bit of their piles of money so they were back in fifteen minutes to rip a fat dump on my dreams of delicious, cool juice.

I,ve been finding a lot of those tiny cubes that you plug into the wall and then plug a cord into that are used for charging iPods. I have two now and there is another one here as well. I wish they had the packaging with them because they are thirty or forty dollars a piece and I would gladly scoop up whatever store credit I could by returning them. Of course I would use said credit to buy juice.

I brought home a bunch (two half six packs and three fourths of a four pack) of imported beer yesterday. Is it still imported if it is just made in the style of an English beer but it,s really made in Connecticut? It was imported to California so that probably counts. I don,t know what I,m going to do with that beer. I put it in the fridge and it,ll probably just sit there. I left it in a hot car first because that,s supposed to make it taste better.

I Quit Reading A While Ago

I have a very fun cold right now. It has slowly transformed from a standard issue cold with coughing and sniffs and headaches and thoughts of suicide to a strange single-symptom thing. Right now a very small part of my throat hurts. It feels like somebody has a straw going to the back of my throat and is spraying one of those frozen fire extinguishers through it. It,s very bizarre. I have a pea sized frostbitten part on the inside of my body. It,ll probably last forever and it,ll probably end up killing me.

I have been drinking a lot of water the last few days because that,s what ,,they,, say you should do when you feel like this. That means I have been having to pee more. That isn,t really a big deal except for when I,m at work. When I,m at home I can piss one hundred times a day and I don,t care to wash my hands. It,s not like I do anything cool with them anyway so why would it matter if they are covered in piss? If I,m at work I feel obligated to wash my hands because somebody could be waiting right outside of the bathroom and they would hear me not wash my hands and maybe they would tell on me. It,s not even like we have one of those signs that say that I have to and then that I have to in Spanish, but I bet my boss would be mad anyway.

JEFF - Castle Storm
I don,t mind the act of washing, I just don,t like how my hands feel afterwards. They feel dry and sterile and smell like the binders of horrible drawings at a tattoo place (place? I don,t know what tattoo places are called. Tattoo store). They are beginning to crack and look like lizards. Each one of my once beautiful, feminine fingers is now like its own separate Western Fence Lizard.

I just learned the other day that this normal kind of lizard that I have seen a lot throughout my life is called the Western Fence Lizard. I always called them blue bellied lizards even though I had never seen one of their undersides and I doubt that it is actually blue. It,s probably lizard colored just like the rest of their body. I do like things that are named after other things though. A lizard named after a specific fence is pretty good. ,,Rock fish,, is alright. ,,Corn snake,, is one of my favorites.

Television In Bed

The other day I signed up for food stamps online because they,re cool and I,m cool and I thought we would work well (alliteration) together. I wanted to do it a long time ago but I was in school and they don,t give people in school free food because they want you to learn how to steal hummus from Safeway. It would have been nice though. I was only making four hundred dollars a month for a long time. That was fun. I was spending a lot of time with the great folks at the Food Bank back then. Eventually I saw them as part of my family. I miss them.

Luckily, the people at the food stamp office were of the same stock. They are a diverse, filthy group of creatures. There is the ubiquitous white woman with smoke-stained blonde hair that moves her head rapidly and continuously because she is either permanently, or currently blasted out of her mind on meth or pills or a mix. Next to her is the mid-twenties black guy with headphones playing ghetto fight music and rapping along loudly and proudly with accompanying hand motions, dirty looks, and verbal threats if you accidentally make eye contact. There is also the ,,reformed,, Hispanic gang member with reading glasses and infected tattoos eating pistachios and throwing the shells all over the place while balancing a wet cigarette on his knee that he plans on smoking later. And my personal favorite, the young woman of ambiguous racial makeup that has replaced her once full eyebrows with with a neat bendy design wearing faded flare jeans with no back pockets and the bottom eight inches are soaked because they are too long and drag on the ground when it,s raining. She is probably wearing either two different colored Converse shoes or a pair of Guggs (off-brand Ugg boots). Her hair is always wet and wavy and her skin is either covered in sores and pockmarks or a ghastly, sick color like a glass of milk that somebody put two tablespoons of coffee in.
Ryuichi Sakamoto - 1996
I had to get up bright and early yesterday morning in order to meet with somebody there for them to tell me I make too much money to receive any benefits. That,s the end of the story so you don,t have to read anymore if you don,t want. I got there a little after seven and was met with a nice long line of smokers waiting to get in. After waiting a bit we were herded in like cattle to the bolt gun. I was greeted by three sheriffs who were there to ensure that weaklings like me don,t get raped to death by somebody trying to take their spot in line.

I was probably the one hundredth person there but luckily I was only the third or fourth person called back to talk to a tiny Russian man about why I can,t have any free food. I even lied and told them I don,t have a car but it didn,t matter. The system beat me. I guess I,m not as punk as I thought I was.

In a strange M. Night Shallyman twist, I ran into my scrawny friend while I was there. He will soon start collecting more unemployment money than I have ever made in my life. He was also approved for the maximum allowance of food stamps. It makes sense though because he is a pretty punk guy. He puts cereal in or on almost everything he eats and he was just hanging out with some Commies in Cuba the other day. He also skateboards and brings snacks to band practice.