Sunday, 10.12.8

So where do I start?  It's been weeks since I've had thirty seconds to myself.  Sleep has come in small doses and the stress of the work-week has put me on a ledge.  But here it is the weekend and I have a few seconds to relax and the week ahead looks promising.

The Miami project is coming to a close.  I have been all but living in Miami since early May.  The next project is O'Hare.  So in a few weeks I'll be living in Chicago for a few months.  Why did they decide to work Miami in the summer and Chicago in the winter?  Because they're the government; nothing is allowed to make sense.  Boil me and then freeze me.  Miami wasn't so bad because I drove home just about every weekend.  That won't be possible from Chicago.  With the market like it is, I'd be foolish to take a new job here in Jacksonville.  I'd be first on the lay-off list at a new company and so far my company has really gone out of the way to keep from laying people off.  So the job is safe, but it will be the full travel I've been dreading for the last few years.  Eh, never been to Chicago, lots of history there.  I'll get a chance to check it all out.

I was scheduled to fly up to O'Hare on Monday to start the application process for my badge.  Monday being a bank holiday, the security office is closed and the trip is cancelled.  Rather than have me drive back to Miami for one day, I'll be working from home on the O'Hare drawings.  I haven't had a "work from home" day in almost a year! 

Wednesday I'm leaving for AutumnMeet '08.  Just about everything is wrong but I'm not worried.  My partner in kitchen crime is not going to be able to get there until Friday night, Teresa and Becca won't be able to make it at all, my camp gear is in a trailer that I still don't have a hitch for and worst of all, I don't have my drum.  OHHHH the horror!!!  My drum head busted a few weeks ago and I haven't been able to get it re-headed.  Wade gave me a skin for it but I haven't had a chance to figure out how to put it on yet.  It is quite an involved process and I've never done it before.  Reading it on-line is very different from actually doing it.

So, with all these problems, why aren't I losing my mind?  Because for once all of this isn't nearly as stressful as my day job.  If I serve breakfast late at festival, some hippies will yell at me and say horrible things about me.  (Yes they do.  You wouldn't believe how fucking vile these "fluffy bunny peace and love" types can get if you don't serve their eggs and bacon on time or if you don't have the right kind of wheat grass).  So if I serve a late meal it means people living in the woods listening to trees say ugly words to me.  But at work, if I fail to coordinate one of the thirty or so steps correctly and it turns out we put in an international checkpoint late, some people living in DC answering to a bunch of initialates (FAA, TSA, DHS, FBI) have ugly things to say to my boss about me.  Somehow, I'm not so scared of burning the chicken this time.

And to be honest, as much as I love working the festival kitchen, I'm there to see some good people and to drum by the fire all night.  I'll give it my best shot and I'm not making any excuses or anything but hey, if I drum all night and I end up oversleeping, breakfast will just be a little late.  Deal with it or drive the 17 miles to McDonald's.

Work has been a full-on deal recently.  Working all day to sort out last night's work and to make sure the pieces fall into place for tonight's work.  And then I have to be on site all night as the work is going on so I can report it in the morning.  Repeat cycle, sleep when you can.  Some idiot was talking about the energy problem and suggested we move to a 4/10 work week rather than a 5/8.  That would keep us off the roads an extra day each week.  I haven't had a work week under 60 hours in the last six months!!!  Who the fuck is still working 9-5 anymore?

Even at "normal" office jobs, you're in that office more than 8 hrs a day.  If not you're not looking for a raise are you?  Not really looking to advance into the next position, make more money, better yourself...  The days of the 40 hour office worker went away a long time ago.  The chump that punches his time card on the whistle isn't around very long.  The real workers are stuck in there putting in unpaid OT because the company doesn't want to pay for another worker.  Stuck bringing their work home with them because if that TPS report isn't done by Friday, the boss will be upset.  4/10...  Most of the workforce is already pulling 5/10 and getting paid shit.

This asshole that recommends working 4/10 in an effort to save energy is the same dumbfuck that thinks his electric hybrid car is saving energy.  Hey asshat, that electricity came from somewhere and unless you have a windmill farm in your back yard, I'm guessing it came from the same coal-burning plant mine came from.  All you're doing is moving the exhaust from your tailpipe to the power plant.  Go crash into a tree.

Ohhh, I'm suddenly angry aren't I?

Alright, as long as I'm already on the angry roll, let's go with this one...

It's election time.  That means it's time for all the Hollywood types and their cult of brainless followers to start saying they'll move to another country if candidate X or Y wins this year.  So in response I say, "GO!!!!!  Please!  Go now!  Don't wait!  I encourage dumb motherfuckers like you to leave all the time.  Don't wait for an election year, just get your shit and go!!!"  Or is it all just empty talk?  Right.  I thought so.

Only the dumbest fucking people on the planet could think that moving to another country is the answer to fixing all our problems.  May I suggest moving to some place where all your compassion will be appreciated, like east Europe or just about anywhere in Africa?  You could really do some good there.  No, these people always say Canada or Costa Rica, or England or some place nice.  Somewhere they'd go on vacation.  You know what?  Fuck you, catch malaria, don't come back!!!

Actually, I have to amend part of that last rant.  I haven't heard anyone say they were stupid enough to think they'd be better off in a foreign country if Obama wins.  I only hear this from people about McCain winning.  I'm not coming out as a supporter of either side and I'm not saying that Republicans are smarter that Democrats, but I only hear Democrats say they'll move away if McCain wins.  And in years past the same was said about the Republican candidate.  Maybe the Republicans have figured out that hey, the system may be broken, but it's still pretty fucking good compared to most of the rest of the world.

Ouch, it actually hurt a little bit to say something nice about either political party.  I hate Republicans, I hate Democrats.  I hate politics.  The system IS broken, we do need to fix it.  Bluffing that you'll move away if your particular pet isn't elected is not the answer.  So what is the answer?  Well I don't have one.  No one does.  Thomas Jefferson had a solution.  He said there needed to be a revolution every 200 years or so.  We're overdue.

So I'll bitch and moan but can I come up with a solution?  Sure.  The only answer I can think of is for you, me and the person sitting next to you to get up off our asses and run for office.  When the average American has a say in the political process, maybe we'll have a better system.  Politicians are born and bred.  Very few working-class politicians.  There is a few of them out there but we need more.  Lots more.  And don't get hung up on your desires, find out what the people want.  Not what the people's churches want.  Not what the people's bosses want.  Hit the streets and go door to door.  Elect someone who comes from among us.  If Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have proven anything, they've shown that my mother was right, "ANYONE can become President."

I'm actually out of breath after that one.  I feel like standing on a podium and making a public speech!  I missed all of the debates, I had to work during most of them and I was at a Henry Rollins show for the first one.  But in the true spirit of modern technology, I followed the debates on my BlackBerry.  A few of my e-friends were talking about the debates on Twitter and I got a lot of comments about what was going on.  Twitter, Tivo...  Nothing ever happens live anymore.

I've got a lot more crap to spew out here but I'm tired and there is a beautiful woman who hasn't seen me very much in the last few weeks lying in the other room who would rather I'd come to bed rather than stay up all night telling the internet it is wrong.

For some reason, some Lennon lyrics have been running through my head while writing this all up.  I don't know if they really fit what I've been saying but dammit, it's how I feel right now...

"I don't believe in Elvis, I don't believe in Zimmerman, I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me."

Thursday, 10.2.8

Back to work, back to the state of not knowing when you're awake or asleep.  Did Brad Pitt do a movie where he was an Australian vigilante that rescued a fat kid from some sadistic "Silence of the Lambs" type of guy that had a holographic light saber that zapped the kid every time he spoke?  Or was that just in my head?

Some of you already heard this little nugget but I'll repeat it because I think it shows just how much of a gap there is.  Becca is branching out into different music.  She's got her own genres that I don't care for but she is searching through my iTunes library looking for stuff and every once in a while surprises me by picking out something I never thought she'd like.  So in my effort to give her some music history lesson, I expose her to some of the classics that came even before my time.  The Beatles, Hendrix, Elvis, etc.  The bands that any music lover should know, even if they don't like them.

So with Bob Dylan releasing a new album, I loaded up a lot of his old stuff on my iPod and have been listening to him a lot more recently.  One day we were sitting around and I told her about how Bob Dylan wrote some amazing lyrics and I attempted to explain the era to her the best that I can.  The times, they were a-changin'.  She seems interested and when we got back to the house I pulled up my iTunes.  I have something like 350 tracks by him.  I hit play and by random choice which one comes up?  "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35".  All she hears is "Everybody must get stoned".  She is not impressed with Bob Dylan.

Today I was working with the electrician's project manager and we were discussing the rest of the work we have here in Miami.  You have to x-ray the floor to see what's in them before you drill 4" holes in them.  Hit one pipe, one conduit, one pre-stressed cable, and it's all over...  So we hired a different contractor on the most recent job.  He used GPR (ground penetrating radar) instead of x-rays.  It went well and we are going to use them on the remaining work.  Claude and I were laughing about the previous contractor who actually used radiation and x-ray film to scan the floor.  They had a pellet of Iridium-192 in a canister, attached to a long hose.  When they were ready, the technician wound out the hose and the pellet was held up against the ceiling for however long the exposure required (depending on the thickness of the slab).  It required two nights to x-ray ten holes.  And the scary part was that the hose was not insulated or anything, when it was out of that canister it was radiating everything around it so we had to keep a clear path for 80 feet around the hole.  When some of the slabs turned out to be 24 inches thick, they pulled out a bigger canister.  Cobalt-60.  Yeah, it's alright, I'm done having kids I guess.  I just cut off most of my hair, why not just have the rest fall out?

Now that we found the guy that uses GPR, it only took three hours to scan 18 holes.  So Claude and I were talking about the x-ray guys and he says, "You're intelligent right?  No one in my office understood me when I said that the x-ray guys looked like they stole that thing from Oppenheimer's garage."  I laughed and we talked about some other stuff but then it hit me, he prefaced that thing with "You're intelligent right?"  What if I hadn't known who Oppenheimer was?  What if I was quick witted enough to pretend to not know and just look at him with those blinking eyes?  Now THAT would have been funny. 

I'd be interested in seeing the numbers on recognition of historical names based on age groups.  I hope it would be a surprising number, I'm thinking that it will only confirm my suspicions that most people weren't taught history in any depth and that they never found it interesting enough to read on their own.

Speaking of statistics, I just read about ants.  The number of species is around 13,000.  Their total biomass is roughly 18% of all organic life and would weigh more than all the man-made buildings on Earth combined.  Now, considering that ants are mentioned in the Christian bible, I'm left wondering how Noah had the time to capture a queen and drone from each of the 13k species of ants.  That's a lot of work for a 600 year old man...  I hear people lived a lot longer back then.  I guess if Noah had a few days to pick up these ants he could get it done.  And if he had six days, he could have created a whole new universe.  But then, some people insist that a day was a modern 24 hour day.  But he could work at night as well because the Christian version of the moon emanates its own light.  There's no arguing with them.  Insanity always beats logic in a rational argument.

See, now I'm just pissed off.  No one knows who Oppenheimer was but everyone knows who Noah was.  One is involved with one of the greatest scientific discoveries mankind has yet discovered, the other is at the heart of a very endearing fairy tale.  FUCK!!!  I just can't stand it!  When will people wake up?  When will we let go of the security blanket?  Why is it that most people can quote most of the ten commandments but don't know even what the first ten amendments are collectively called.  I'm sick of people.  Ignorance is understandable and nothing to be upset about.  I'm ignorant of a great many things.  But to cling to a belief even in the face of contradictory evidence, it's just damn stubbornness.  Why don't people want to learn anything new anymore?  Why are we so comfortable in our old ways that having to adapt them to new discoveries scares us so much?  I'm really sick of how my life is constantly under the influence of these people and their god damned silly superstitions.