zaziel
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I'tr�m breit vula�oz�o ye spalla ei�tlin nel�ffnes pieqi aummit su berwegr'ra'ao.

Cherishing the Inner Bitch

Friday, Nov. 21, 2003 -
Ap�sl�min ida corbalanyrtne 'ls�o rohl'daathi�m v� nen�a iroyss�rd.

I disquieted the New Guy today.

The New Guy is my latest temp, my fourth since the end of August. The holiday season's here and I need someone to be Santa's Little Helper. I really don't want a temp, I'd like to a hire hard-working go-getting flunky on a permanent basis, but young men these days don't seem to be interested in a career as a minion. They might say they're interested, but they sure don't show any passion for the job. Fuck passion, I just want 'em to give me eight solid hours a day of simple labor. Apparently that's too much to ask* of the average American male. Or the average American female. Yep, I am an equal-oppor-tunity employer. If you can sling 40 lb. bags of manure, heft 25 gallon saplings, wield a chainsaw and staple barb wire all day long, I'll give you a chance, whether you're a man, woman, something in-between or neither. But the good people at Human Resource Specialists Inc. only send me guys. Go figure.

I met the New Guy on Monday (since he's my fourth New Guy in less than three months, I'm not gonna go to the trouble of thinking up a pseudonym for him until he's been around longer than six weeks). He was supposed to start work on Wednesday, but he had "things he needed to take care of", so today was his first day on the job. For the past two days, while the New Guy was taking care of "things", I've been dividing massively overcrowded clumps of daylilies. Wet and muddy massively overcrowded clumps of daylilies, because nobody thought to turn off the automatic sprinkler system. Since my help had other "things" to do, I was working all by my lonesome self. I have a partner in the landscaping biz, in fact, I have two. The Amazing, Fabulous, Inestimable Lofvendahl Brothers�Carlos, Jimmy and Salvadore. (Yeah, that's three, but Salvadore's not a partner. And technically, he's a cousin.) But Carlos had his own jobs to do, and Jimmy has been heading up our Central Coast Division since he moved to Lompoc at the beginning of summer. I met the Lofvendahls through Jimmy, who was my roommate for most of the eleven months I spent in prison.� Which was not a place I expected to meet one of the best human beings I know, but I did, and that human being is Jimmy.

But where was I? Dividing daylilies? Right. I had to work from the very earliest crack of dawn to darkest dusk to get the job done by the time I said I would. But I didn't, so I'll have to finish it on Sunday. Today we had to do some soil solarization in Saticoy. (Say that ten times, fast.) The New Guy arrived twenty minutes late. Actually, he was twenty minutes plus two days late�I hope he wasn't surprised to find me possessed by my inner curmudgeon. I let him know that he was off to a bad start, on the wrong foot, and this did not bode well for his future with 'Zaziel Enterprises. He apologized with ill grace.

I cut the apologies short with a "Fine. Let's get going, shall we?" Of which the subtext was "Whatever. Stop wasting my time." And the implication was "Loser."

I can be such a bitch sometimes.

I had already loaded the truck with the tiller, rolls of plastic, boards, pipes, and various pieces of junk that would be needed to weigh down the edges of the plastic, and half-a-dozen bags of a Premium Blend of Composted Cotton Burrs and Cattle Manure. We got on the road forthwith. The first thing I told the New Guy was the radio in the truck didn't work. It does, but I was soooo not interested in debating the merits of the local radio stations, or defending my taste in music (which is largely indefensible). Besides, most of the time, I prefer to drive without the sound of music or blathering media filling my ears. I like the unadorned rhythms of the road, the rattle and thrum of velocity, the shussing of the tires on the highway, the voice of the engine. The New Guy asked me if it would be okay for him to bring his iPod to work. My new slave wants to wear his $300 digital music system while we're shoveling decomposing cow shit.

"You one of those people who need a soundtrack for their life?" was my comment.

"Uh...no," said the New Guy.

He gets the standard lecture about how I cannot and will not be responsible for damage or loss of his $300 digital music system, but if he wants to take the risk, bringing his iPod was fine with me. "Don't let it interfere with you work. I don't pay you to groove."

His eagerness to assure me that he would not be groovin' on my time made me realize I needed to sweeten my sour mood. I went a wee bit out of our way so that we could travel along the beaches on Highway One. A stretch of road through a beatific piece of California landscape is always an antidote to whatever ails me. Traffic was light and moving fast, but not too fast. The weather was bright and cool, but not too cool. We sped along, not talking, and I became content. The New Guy might have been a little tense, but that only pleased me.

Earlier in the early morning, my partner in the cookie biz, She-Ra, the Princess of Power, reminded me that we didn't have enough chocolate chips for tomorrow's baking. Sometimes I buy chocolate chips by the bucket, other times I just go to the grocery store when they're cheap and buy a dozen bags. Since it wasn't the ungodliest hour of the morning (a few minutes past six) I nipped over to the most local supermarket to see what they had on sale. Hershey's, which will do okay. I like Hershey's chocolate for eatin', probably because I grew up on it. Hershey's semi-sweet Special Dark bars have a good intensity, but the semi-sweet chocolate chips seem to be made out of a different formula. Occasionally I use Special Dark bars for our chocolate chunk cookies�we chop up the chocolate ourselves, that way you get little chunks and big chunks and slivers and crumbs and pulverized chocolate, which makes a more adventurous cookie.

While I was picking up the chocolate and a few other sundries, the song "Cherish" came wafting over the supermarket aisles. I found myself murmuring along with the Association, and that's all it took for the lines of the final refrain to lodge in my brain like a Tumor-For-A-Day. When I got back to my kitchen, much to the amusement of She-Ra, I had to take ten minutes to perfect the two lines that will garble hopelessly if you don't get the words exactly right. One good thing about the New Guy's late arrival was that it drove the song right out of my head.

Or did it?

We were humming down the road, I was both relaxed and alert, using a certain amount of concentration for my driving while the rest of my brain was bouncing around any thought that wanted to pop in. Suddenly, without warning, I was singing.

That I am not gonna be the one to share your dreams
That I am not gonna be the one to share your schemes
That I am not gonna be the one to share what seems to be
The life that you could cherish as much as I do yours

It wasn't until the second line that I realized what I was doing. I had three choices at that point. I could shut up and pretend that it wasn't me who had been singing. "I told you the radio doesn't work. It does that�it turns on for a few seconds and then it conks out." Or I could decrease my volume to a mumble, finish the song, and then apologize. But I chose the third option. I put some oomph into the third and fourth lines (which was the tricky part) and sung them with a soulful flourish. And then I sang the final bit in a dreamy Nina Simone/Lili Von Shtupp drawl:

And I do
Cherish you

On the word "cherish" I turned my liquid puppy-dog-eyed gaze onto the New Guy (who was staring at me with what might've been horror in his eyes) and when I finished the last note I gave him a big slow blink of the eyelashes.

Sigh. I do enjoy unsettling my serfs.

(He's lucky the supermarket wasn't playing the Association's "Along Comes Mary" this morning. On those days, I have a disconcerting tendency to bellow "And then a wanton fairy!" at odd intervals, without explanation.)

~

* To tell the truth, that's not all I ask. I always ask prospective hirelings if they've seen the move Tremors. If they say yes, I tell them we'll be working like Earl and Valentine, more or less. If they ask "Who?" I make a mental note of their level of comprehension and say "Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon." If they don't ask "Jesus, we won't be pumping shit out of septic tanks, will we?" I know they've lied about seeing the movie. Which can be taken as as preliminary evidence of a brown-nosing personality, or they're a liar. Either way, it's a useful thing to know.

� I spent a short time in a Level III (medium security) facility, rooming with a severely fucked-up individual named Andre (not his real name�no way am I gonna use his real name). The most dangerous person I ever hope to meet in my life. I'm not kidding. In my admittedly inexpert opinion, this individual should never be paroled. People will die when this man is paroled. Luckily, he loved me almost instantly. He was calling me "brother" from day one and telling people not to fuck with me. When I was transferred to a minimum security facility, he wept. To this day, I don't know what the hell I did right in those first few moments when we met, but it's almost evidence enough to prove there is a God and He likes me a lot.

<~>
Ap�sl�min ida corbalan� 'lse nesgla ugar�-cham sa cru ogrulho bat�oltha al�mv�sde.

last eleven:

Resurrection - Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Arts and Letters -
Friday, June 17, 2005
Domestic Obsessions -
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
The Kindness of Strangers -
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
Gone -
Saturday, April 2, 2005
Coming Back, Little By Little -
Saturday, April 2, 2005
Effing Around -
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Explicably Yours -
Wednesday, February 9, 2005
Things Too Innumerable To Mention -
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Mr. Armstrong -
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
The Pope in Our Kitchen -
Saturday, October 2, 2004



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Sa r'ji�o oss�vel meninonceiv �o poshik m�'�nch uscantebatahla o�r musiu o�r muiko.
Copyright � 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 by gcs

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