Archive for February, 2009
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
So I’m back in radio.
But not like a triumphant return. It’s just Trey…working in radio again. The on-air studio actually looks like the performance studio at KUVO in Denver. It’s large and carpeted, beige on the walls and floor, and a long counter on one wall. At said counter is the sound desk.
I walk in for a shift and the board is absolutely buried in crap. Old commercials, commercials that haven’t been run yet, none of the air spots have been put away and they’re piled on the sound desk like carcasses after a rattlesnake hunt. There are so many CDs left out that they’ve fallen to the floor. Notes and scripts are everywhere, the text marked out in black and rewritten in red and red-penned in green. Two of three cups of cold coffee, a bottle or two of flat, warm soda. Old bits of pizza.
And worst of all, I can’t tell, from the marked up playlist and hour-script, where the hell we are. I can’t tell if we’ve done the last break of the hour or the first break of the next hour, I can’t tell what ads and network make-goods have been run – if any – and the phone lines are lit up like a fucking low-rent Christmas tree.
I stand there, at the sound desk, some kind of Muzak music blasting over the on-air speakers, and I have no idea what to do. The mess is so humongous, so all out of proportion to anything I’ve ever dealt with, that it has me in absolute, paralytic vapor lock. Not only do I not know how to begin to clean this shit up, I don’t even know how to think about figuring out how to begin.
And that’s it. The whole dream.
Next up on the hit parade, the trip through Trey’s subconscious in a vaguely interesting but mostly navel-gazing sort of way: my schooling.
I’m finished with the current class and it’s time for the exam. But unlike reality, I am in a room with my rat bastard instructor and he’s handing out those little ScanTron sheet where you fill in the bubbles. I’m sitting at a table with two #2 pencils and a tabletop jukebox.
He hands me the sheet and tells the class – and I seem to be the only one in class – not to do anything until he tells us.
So I promptly write my name on the ScanTron sheet.
And he promptly comes over, this hypocritical bastard more interested in format than content, and tears my sheet up. He glares at me and says, “Do it when I tell you.”
Uh…yes, sir, Mr. Control Freak, sir, no problem.
He hands me another sheet and I do NOTHING. I sit and wait. And wait. And then, when I’ve done that, I wait some more.
He, on the other hand, is doing I have no freaking idea what. So, bored, I turn to the jukebox because we all know how much I love me musics. I punch up something and lovely notes fill the air.
And my instructor, the rat bastard mope, he loses his fucking mind.
He races over to me, tears up my ScanTron sheet again, and then hands me two tickets.
Yeah, tickets. Like what you’d get from a cop. And not traffic citations, but actual criminal citations. They’re both for cheating and, using that odd dream knowledge people seem to have, I know they’re felony tickets and there’s not thing one I can do about them.
Then I’m done. Poof, just like that. Dreams are over, move along, nothing to see here.
What makes me sad is that my dreams are generally so banal, so easy to interpret as to be boring. Once, during the Chemo (and that’s how I’ve come to think of it, with a capital), my dreams were freaky and odd, with disco lights flashing and acidhouse jazz in the background…sort of like a coke binge…ahem, so I’ve heard.
Now they’re just boring. My instructor is a complete control freak who has been hammering me on format rather than content – yeah, because I started a Master’s Program to learn format – and who told me he was going to make me a better person by teaching me how to write well.
Yeah, no shit on that score. My friend Brad in Atlanta mumbled something about a piano wire garrotte and missing limbs but I don’t know anything about that if it happens.
So that dream was just my fear of really screwing that class up badly enough to get arrested.
The first, then, is nothing more than me feeling out of control – again. I’m sure it has to do with the bankruptcy and all kinds of little officious people telling me what to do and when to do it and what to pay and how to pay it and exactly how much money I can earn and not earn so as to fall into the bracket where I can actually declare bankruptcy and when to do my counseling (oh, yeah, two separate sessions of financial counseling are part of the package, wherein a guy asks all kinds of questions designed to make you feel like a complete fucking idiot for having had some financial problems when Bush’s economy fell completely apart).
Whew…the bankruptcy has been fun. You should all try it. It’s almost as much fun as…as…a heart attack. Or maybe cancer and a year’s worth of Chemo!
Oh, wait, been there, done that.
Posted in Random Thoughts | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
“You’re sitting there…shove it down your pants.”
No, it wasn’t said by a leather-clad, whip-wielding dominatrix, I’m sorry to say, but by my chiropractor. She was talking about an ice pack down my pants. It would be for my back, although the concept might well intrigue the leather-clad, whip-wielding dominatrix.
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Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
It’s a tiled room. The tile was probably once white but now it’s grimy and dirty and vaguely nicotine yellow. The room is big, big enough so that it fades into the darkness about twenty feet from me in all directions. There are some half-high walls that seem to surround individual showers and rusty drains in the floor and bits and pieces of dark, broken grout everywhere.
The light is as though it’s coming from me, like I’m carrying a naked 25 watt incandescent bulb and it’s not tossing out much light at all. What light there is is dark and dank and somehow mirrors the room.
And I’m the only one. Standing alone, wondering what in hell I’m doing there.
At some point, I realize I’m standing ankle deep in blood. The entire floor is covered four inches deep in blood. It trails off into the darkness but I know it’s there, I can just tell.
And I keep repeating, in a voice that is sometimes scream and sometimes anxious and all times terrified, “It all counts. It all counts.”
My life was pretty full just about that time, and it was all stress and obviously I felt as though the world was bleeding me. There’s a great Metallica song, “Yeeeeaaahhhh, it’s blee – ding meeeee.”
Ah, the delusions of the self-centered.
See, I love dreams. I love how cockeyed they are and how odd and disconnected. ‘What the hell did THAT part mean?’ They’re sort of like foreign films. No, they’re like foreign, art-house films. They obviously mean something, but who the hell knows what…just like a foreign art house film done in black and white with subtitles and lots of anthropomorphizing about animals and cars and a stick or whatever.
So, a few weeks later, I have another dream. This time, I’m on duty and I go to a house to take a report. I start asking the wife questions and she, being the snippy bitch that I somehow know – with that semi-complete dream knowledge you get – tells me she’s not making the report, her husband is.
“Fine, where is he?”
“I’m right here, asshole.”
The voice is extremely high pitched, like fucking Alvin and the Chipmunks of something. And it seems to be coming from below me so I look down, expecting a short guy I just hadn’t seen…like a bad Vaudeville routine, right?
Yeah, he’s waaaaaaaaaay shorter than that.
And he’s not quite all there. Not mentally, but physically. He’s missing some parts.
Like…everything
Okay, not technically true. He’s still got his nose. And the top of his skull. Other than that? Nada.
He’s talking to me, with no mouth, and I can hear him breathing, with no lungs, and he’s moving around, with no legs or feet, and I’m thinking, “Why would she marry him? She’s pretty cute, she could do better.”
And this guy, who seems to be moving around on a roller skate of some sort, is pissing and moaning and trying to give me some information and all I can think about is ‘What the hell kinda roller skate is he on?”
Blink, I’m awake and that one’s over and we move on to the next.
I’m driving with LuAnn’s father. He’s 84 or something and his driving’s starting to suck. We’re driving up a huge hill on a dirt road and Othmar keeps pulling to the right. The car’s about halfway off the road and I’m afraid we’re going to tumble off the side of this hill.
So I grab the wheel and put us back on the road and he just laughs and laughs and then we’re at the top.
And we just keep going. Right over the crown of that fucker and down the other side.
The other side is like a roller coaster. The front of the car keeps dipping and dipping now we’re free falling straight down. The view is just like the Christ Redeemer statue in Rio. You know it. You see pictures from behind the statue all the time, looking 2,300 feet straight down at Rio de Janeiro. Yeah, THAT angle.
That’s what we’re falling. Straight down. Scared me so badly I woke up and thought I’d peed the bed.
So LuAnn says, “Well, it means that even when you’re in control, you’re not.”
See, I took the wheel to make sure we didn’t crash off the side of the mountain. Instead, with me in control, we crashed off the front of the mountain. So even if I have control, I’m going to fuck things up.
How’s that for an upbeat assessment? Take the wheel, crash anyway.
So the lesson is what? Let an 84 year old man drive? Or maybe I can drive, just do it with no hands on the wheel?
Or maybe just take the fucking bus.
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Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
“I think he’s a latent bisexual. And that’s scared him into being asexual.”
“Uh-huh…well, [if he's not careful] pretty soon he’s gonna be hand-sexual like the rest of us.”
Overheard during lunch recently.
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Saturday, February 14th, 2009
“Oh…Trey…man, I was just walking home.”
See, I poured out his weed.
I know, there are those who’d think that was a bigger crime than anything I could have arrested him for, but hear me out…I was actually trying to help society.
I’m heading back into town following a car that might be a drunk driver. The car had swerved just enough for me to notice it so I follow long enough to decide the driver isn’t drunk and then I’m planning on getting some gas and maybe a soda or two and a bags of chips and some beef jerky…and maybe a donut along with some cheese crackers and –
“Whoa! What the fuck?”
Yeah, I talk to myself in the car. Usually, it’s a soliloquy on the day’s events – politics, my moronic professor in my Master’s Program (more on that soon), what a waste local city politics is, etcetera. Lately my self-involved diatribes have been about the ravages being visited upon the publishing industry. Anyway, I’m fairly deep into a solo conversation – sort of a verbal onanism – when there is suddenly a man in front of me.
Understand, I’m in the squad car…on the roadway? And he…well, wasn’t. Standing in the roadway, sans car, and even from inside my squad, I can smell the drunkenness. Damn, I think, a drunk wants to interrupt my jerky and cheese crackers and whatnot? That’s bullshit. So maybe I’ll just drive around him and ignore him, he’ll get home okay.
Don’t make it a half-block before I have visions of him getting hit and splattered and killed. So I turn around and get back to him just as dispatch calls the local city coppers about a drunk on the street.
“Yeah, I got him,” I say. “He’s not on Main, he’s here at Crockett and Bowie.”
“Maybe he lives right there,” one of the city officers says.
The city guys are talking about a different local drunk who once said he wanted to kill himself and was going to jump. Problem was, he was about six feet up in a tree. Not much of a death jump.
“Not him,” I say, as I realize I know the guy. “Ricky. What’s happening?”
He grins. “I been drinking.”
“I see that.”
“I’m walking home.”
“I see that.”
“What’choo arresting me for?”
“No cuffs, buddy, I’m just gonna take you home so you don’t get hit. Call it Trey’s Taxi Service.”
He kind of stares at me, bleary eyed, and then nods. “Cool. Ain’t never ridden in the front of a police car before.”
So he staggers and climbs in and immediately, his eu de cologne gets all over my car. It’s gonna take me a week to get his funk outta there.
Per procedure, I tell dispatch who I’ve got and where I’m going and what’s going on. Dispatch gets cranky when they don’t know those things…worried about me getting shot blah blah blah.
Then I get this from dispatch: “Deputy, are you clear for traffic?”
Crap on a shingle. Nothing good comes from radio traffic like that. It’s like realizing there’s a squad car in front of your house at 2 in the morning. Bad bad voodoo, baby. What it means, in coded dispatch language, is: ‘Did you know the drunk in your car has a warrant?’
Damnit. “Ricky, you gotta warrant?”
“Fuck, no!”
“Are you sure?”
“Fuck. No.”
“If you had a warrant, whose would it be?”
A loooooonnnnnggg pause. “Fuck, Trey, I was just walking home.”
“Well…walk’s gonna be a little longer now.”
So he puts his hands out and I go to cuff him up. Then he snatches his hands back and I tense up. I have no idea what’s coming, what he’s doing, or why he’s hesitating, but that kind of twitchy shit makes me nervous.
“You gonna charge me?”
“With?” I ask, though I have a decent idea.
He stares at me.
“Tell you what, let’s see how much we’re talking about and then we’ll decide. But I’ll give you some rhythm ‘cause you were honest with me.”
It’s my standard thing, giving people a break on marijuana when it’s not much. See, this is where I’m helping society. I think the jails are waaaaaaay overcrowded with personal use marijuana arrests. I think they clog the system like a backed up toilet and there ain’t no way in fucking hell a couple of joints does any more damage than the six packs and fifths of whiskey which we, as a society, happily drown ourselves.
Making marijuana illegal was a bogus argument created on a need to build empires within a bureaucracy. Now, 80 years later, it’s still bogus. Alcohol kills tons more people than dope, causes tons more roadway accidents, and exacts a higher cost to society.
Yeah, call me Peter Tosh…. “Leeegaliiiiiize iiiiit.” boom-chicka-boom-chicka. Imagine me singing with a Jamaican accent.
Meanwhile, back at our story line, Ricky pulls out a dented and cracked pipe which is just sad in a ‘I’m so poor I can’t even afford a decent hitter pipe’ kind of way, and a tiny little bit of weed. He’s been through the system and he knows it’s much better to cough up the ganja to the road officer than it is to be found with it inside the jail. That’s a whole other steaming pile of crap with which he’d have to deal.
I put the pipe in my pocket and dumped the weed in the road.
“Oh…Trey…man, I was just walking home.”
“Yeah…well…next time you better walk faster.”
And off we go, Peter Tosh’s reggae bouncing around in my head. “Leeegaliiiiiize iiiiit.”
boom-chicka-boom-chicka
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Friday, February 13th, 2009
“Drive fast enough and you never hit the bottom.”
One of my fellow deputies – the newest canine officer who I’ll call Dog-Cop II – when I told him not to come to my accident scene via the viaduct. I told him it was drowning beneath something like 45 feet of water (okay, okay, a slight exaggeration on my part) and he’d never make it across. This was his response and damned if it hasn’t become my life motto.
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Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
As Trey’s website guy, it’s my job to keep track of the stats for his website. One of the search terms that someone used to find Trey’s site was: “love the smell of piss.” Go figure…
(Actually, it’s from Trey’s book 2000 Miles to Open Road, the chapter titled “752 Miles.” I just thought it was funny.)
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Monday, February 9th, 2009
“Don’t polish a turd.”
A friend on what Princeton is doing in terms of economic development. The city recently spent tens of thousands on new sidewalks and new streetlamps…even as For Rent signs are piling up on Main Street as businesses close.
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