Psychotic American

We Looked Like Giants

God bless the daylight, the sugary smell of springtime
remembering when you were mine in a still suburban town

When every Thursday, I'd brave those mountain passes
and you'd skip your early classes and we'd learn how our bodies worked

God damn the black night, with all its foul temptations
I've become what I always hated when I was with you then

We looked like giants in the back of my grey subcompact
fumbling to make contact as the others slept inside
and together there in a shroud of frost, the mountain air
began to pass through every pane of weathered glass
and I held you closer than anyone would ever get

Do You Remember the J.A.M.C. and reading aloud from magazines
I don't know about you but I swear on my name they could smell it on me
But I've never been to good with secrets... ohh...

Oh together there in a shroud of frost, the mountain air
began to pass through every pane of weathered glass
and I held you closer...

I like this song. maybe it's because I'm lonely and I miss things. oh well.

tomorrow, I do my laundry, I clean up. today, I just sleep. yeah. right.

too tired really

I'm too tired really to write much of anything interesting--as if anything I write is interesting, har har--and not too much really exciting happened today. I finished my hole, which while immediately personally gratifying, seems kinda small potatoes now. I think I can stand this job though, since I really hated the last two days and for some reason don't dread going in the morning. I suppose that's good then. yeah. I want to see I heart Huckabees, but that's hardly an original statement. I'm about a week away from leering and shouting stuff at every woman that crosses in front of the job, that's how infective those fucking guys are.

What sounds really really good now, as opposed to watching nip/tuck, is a big glass of water, my trashy sci fi novel, and my warm bed, and god damn it, I'm going to have it. I hope everyone is moderately happy or improving, and I hope to see some of my friends soon.

ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

my new best friend, and worst enemy

meet my new arm/nemesis: The Hilti TE 55

I've been chained to this 15 pound bastard for the last two days, and while it awsomely beats the little bosch hammer gun that I had to use before, it also threatens to break my wrists and cover me in concrete and asbestos. but oh well, it's fun to play with these overpowered toys. It somewhat makes up for whatever is bad about a given task, although not terribly. I thought I should also mention that I own a 2004 Honda Element, for which I have not yet paid... but that's ok, I have a 0 percent loan for the next 5 years from the dealer. man, I used to hate this thing, but it's quite possibly my favorite thing in my life right now. I;'ve even forgotten--though not totally--about things like percoset, and sex, and girls. in that order. people either love or hate it, but it's full of so many nice touches and abilities, and drives like a dream while still geting a respectable amount of milage of a tank of gas, that I'd have to say I'm well pleased with the purchase. It's also 4x4 sorta, so I can kinda drive over stuff now, which if fun. Although I'm not sure I want to take it to a construction site, since those dudes all drive F-250, 350s.

oh well nothing really interesting happened to me today, it was much like yesterday, except with heavier tools and harder to crack materials. I made a dusty mess out of the main altar, where the pope and mother teresa have done shit. oh yes.

til another time, this is bloody work

fightin the battle of who could care less.

day five, second week. I didn't update last week, because I didn't want to. I don't really want to now, but I'm going to do it anyway because I want to try and use this thing a little bit.

first off-- I'm working in the Basilica, and the power tool that I have had most contact with is Bosch Hammer-Drill. Now we also have Hilti and DeWalt Hammer Drills, but they are much more badass and larger, and so up to now, I have only had access to the little guy. I am told that I will be able to use the Hilti tomorrow though, since my current task is becoming increasingly impossible and dangerous with the little bosch hammer thingy. I spent essentially all of today after morning break cuting a hole in the ceiling of the crypt/vault place under the alter. Basically I'm demo-ing a portion of ceiling that the pope has stood on while doing a service and delivering delicious eucharist… mmmm good. The plaster was simple and fell off, but the two layers of vaulted brick took me the entire day to chip through and as I reached what was supposed to be a ‘void’ under the marble, i.e. a big empty pocket space, it turned out that instead of a void, I instead had a foot of two hundred year old concrete and asbestos laden pipes to deal with. So my boss of bosses revived the plan, tomorrow I get to actually sit on the alter, while poor catholic worshipers are trying to pray up front, and drill a shitload of holes down through the marble and into the room below, where I was working. This is a. very cool to be doing this kind of stuff in that kind of place and b. great because none of the stuff will be dropping all over my head, face and body. It was great fun because I needed a mask to combat the hundreds of plaster, concrete and brick particles I was creating, and then also a hard hat to deal with the falling bricks, and then safety classes to protect against the aforesaid dust. That was all well and good, and I was thankful to have that shit. But I could in no way get the dust mask right so that my hot, moist breath would leave through the filter, instead of through the top and into my glasses. The result is that I was effectively blind the whole time, so I’d drop the glasses, decide which brick I was going to chip away at for a half hour, and then put the glasses back on and hammer somewhat blindly at the brick. It was really swell. Oh well enough of that.

<>There was also a time last week where I helped build the decking over the main dome opening, which is suspended 300ft above the sanctuary’s beautiful and incredibly hard green marble floor. The opening that we had to deck in was about 30ft in diameter, and while the materials were already up there, since they had had a deck before and ripped it apart, we still had to screw it all together again. My favorite part was when my immediate boss and working companion, George, decides to sit on the unfastened TGI Joists and plants himself out over open space in order to screw in a base board that is out of reach. He did not have a harness on, and I think about all I might have been able to do if the wobbly pieces of wood had fallen on their side is grab his belt… His comment about that little episode was simply “Huh, that used to be so much more fun when I was younger.”<>Then there’s Randy, the Forman for our Concrete Sub-Contractors. He’s an older guy, looks like he might be a nice old man, but don’t be fooled. I paused for about 30 seconds in between debris hauling to watch his crew pour concrete. In that time he called numerous members of his crew ‘silly fucking cunts’ and ‘dumb fuck coons.’ Then he saw me watching and yelled something more or less indistinguishable but involved lots of ‘you stupid fucker’ and ‘don’t fucking watch me.’ Later, when I was taking a tour of the trenches with George to see the progress on the Concrete, Randy favored us with this lovely joke in front of his crew, who are entirely black: “What do you call a busload of niggers heading to hell with an empty seat? … A Goddamned Shame, that’s what! HAR HAR HAR!” His laborers just shook their heads and George and I looked really uncomfortable. He has been much more cordial to me since he found out that I can shovel, and probably likes me because I am white. I am staying away from that man. <>

As well, in the realm of racial fun, I listened to a Masonry foreman bitch about Mexicans and how useless they are for a full half hour while I was doing ‘housekeeping’ work in the basement. The construction culture, or I should say lack of culture, never ceases to amaze me. But I shouldn’t act so shocked, I mean I knew what these workers would be like, but still found it interesting at how racist they can be on a project that is being run by a black man, my ultimate onsite boss. There are a lot of bosses, or I guess I could just say that since I’m at the bottom of the totem pole, everyone is my boss. Except Randy and thank god for that. <>I’ve never worked this hard before in my life, at least not physically, and I have to admit, I kinda like it. Shout out to my sister in arms Adrianna, who toils to make some drunk Scot moderately happy. Here’s to you banana trashbag.

payday

hehe. I've worked for three days on the jobsite, but I got paid. Construction workers get paid weekly apparently (sp?). enough to buy a bottle of SCOTCH! it's cheap in the u s of a.

I'm not the only living boy in new york.

mild qualification

Just wanted to add one more thing. I published without reading the thing over, and when I did read it over I didn't like part of it. Lest you have the impression that I am a construction manager, or anything remotely approaching it, I am most certainly not. I am completely on the bottom, and while I am working for the company managing the overall constrcution, and therefore in charge of all of the many sub-contractors, I have no specific trade, and they could care less how well you can write when all they want you to do is move dirt around with a shovel. I'll blab about how I see construction as a paralell organization structure to the military some other time.

Hmm. Where do I begin?

Well, to start with, I realize that having one of these things automatically characterizes you as a bit of a wanker, but I never keep a personal journal, so I'm going to do this instead. It won't be as personal perhaps, as a private journal, but I might *actually* update this thing once in a while, and it can hopefully chronical a bunch of stories that I might otherwise forget.

To set the stage: I didn't get a job in Toronto, like I wanted to, so I had to hightail it home to Baltimore, MD. I hadn't expected to be there, and honestly didn't want to be there, so of course I had made no plans for what to do. My meager supply of summer money quickly dwindled, despite the fact that I don't do anything in Baltimore, and it became readily apparent that I should, and more accurately, had to find a job in order to keep my relationship with my parents cordial. There was also the slightly powerful reason of being completely bored out of my mind each day, and needing to be gainfully employed in some capacity.

I'm a college graduate in an english major, but for some reason, have no inclination to try and teach english, or write in a professional sense. I guess you could say that I liked being in a major where I got grades to read good books... IN any case, I wasn't going to look into English careers. I have also worked in the Information Technology world quite a bit for someone my age who doesn't specialize it, and have done a variety of commercial webpage projects to pay for my sometimes expensive habits. You wouldn't have guessed that because I'm using a really basic blogger template, but that's not because I like it, but more because I'm tired and can't be bothered to make my own customized page right now. I liked technology work a bit, but outside of website design, I only really liked it because provided a nice paycheck. Long story short, after having worked in a variety of technology office jobs, I wanted to avoid that like the plague. That left box stores, as far as jobs I could get. I dropped off an app at REI, but somehow missed the hiring deadline--at least that's what I tell myself--by accident and didn't get offered anything. I'm getting tired of exposition though so here's what happened: My mother got me an interview with a prominent local construction company with the view to becoming a construction manager. I met with them, thought about the whole unknown enterprise, and accepted the offer.

Fast forward to today. I’m three days old on the job. They started me on The Basilica. Or, rather, The Basilica of the Assumption of Mary the Blessed Virgin, but that’s a god-awful mouthful, so you see why I want to abbreviate. It is a two hundred year old Catholic Cathedral, and in fact, it is the first Catholic Cathedral in the States. It’s a twenty million dollar project, which is fairly big, and they are redoing everything. I consider myself lucky to have been put on this as my first job, since they could have shunted me off onto some bland jobsite in the suburbs, and this one is so much more historically interesting…

<>I don’t want to have mammoth long posts, and besides, tomorrow is the last work day of the week, so I’ll write about my first week in great detail then. It will feature, hopefully, Randy, the bigoted and once-electrocuted asshole of a concrete sub foreman, my time spent on thin wood joists suspended two hundred and fifty feet above the sanctuary’s green marble floor and much fun with expensive and noisy power tools. Oh yes, also lots of dust, mud, rain and Maryland accents.

<>To be continued…

inaugeral

I know I probably spelled that wrong. Just wanted to see if something would show up on my page.