As usual, my vision is foggy, I have to pee, and I’ve got a hot crap brewing in my lower gut. The burning gut is from some over seasoned Rus Ettes hash browns and six large eggs that I made at one o’clock this morning before I passed out with South Park streaming on Netflix. The top of my pepper dispenser fell off and a one inch pile formed on my hash browns when I was trying to sprinkle a bit on for extra flavor. I was only angry for a couple of seconds but then forgot what I was angry about and continued cooking by lightly smacking the potato shreds around with a melted black plastic spatula. This is a regular nightly routine. The foggy vision comes from drinking several beers at night because it helps me steady my knife hand when I work on my soap carvings...
I have twelve carvings done now: A Native American warrior riding a boar, a five-person bicycle, an eagle with another eagle in its beak, a single story craftsman-style house on the back of a blue whale, a trampoline, a cloud that looks like a different type of cloud, a Yule log, a polka-dot sundress, a cobra with a name tag that says “Roger”, a pear, and two more pears.
I’m unemployed, and it’s impossible to foresee what type of job leads I’ll uncover from day to day, but on the contrary my basic morning routine has become predictable to a degree of scientific accuracy.
Stage 1: No alarm. Open my eyes, figure out where I am, peel off my comforter and sit on the edge of my mattress with my head down and hands on my knees, surprise myself with my natural morning odor, turn off the oscillating fan at the end of my bed, stumble to the toilet while scratching the back of my bald head and hairy right ass cheek, pee foggy stinky dirty yellow for two minutes straight, shiver and then shake, stand slightly unbalanced and stare into my mirror, find new wrinkles and poke at puffy areas on my face, grab and shake my gut around, do several flexing poses, pick a dirty v-cut undershirt and a pair of grey sweats off the ground and put them on, head to the kitchen.
Stage 2: Walk barefoot on my unwashed linoleum kitchen floor, crunch stray crumb stuff under my feet and get a few chunks stuck in between my toes, pull out the filter from the top of my coffee maker, fill the canister up with water, inaccurately spray everywhere, get annoyed with myself because of it, grab a sack of whole beans from my freezer, grind and knock them out in the freshly rinsed filter, shake cinnamon on top of the grounds, close the top, slap “Start”.
Stage 3: Sit down at my computer workspace in my living room, put my left elbow onto the table and loosely support my head at my left cheek with my left fist, shake around my mouse to wake up the computer, slouch really bad while I wait, tuba fart directly into the thin Ikea seat cushion, surprise myself with the heat it produces, open up separate Google Chrome browser windows on both of my two monitors, from left to right I enter three websites on each monitor: Facebook, Yahoo mail, and my Last.fm Richard Marx station (on the left monitor), ESPN.com, wellsfargo.com, and theweatheredsailor.com (on the right monitor), these stay up all day, except for the wellsfargo.com one, I toggle that tab between it and Craigslist throughout the day. (I prefer to have the Richard Marx station playing most of the time because I’m angry a lot, and when “Hold On To the Nights” plays in the middle of one of my tangents, it’s a funny combination of conflicting emotions to have going on in the same place.)
Stage 4: Pour scalding hot black coffee into one of my twelve white mugs, blow and sip on it to avoid burning myself again, burn myself again, my farting gets longer in duration and in tighter intervals from the natural laxative, pull up new financial and administrative job postings on Craigslist (because Monster and Careerbuilder are less effective for anyone finding a job than my dad is at wearing underpants when he sleeps, he never wears underpants when he sleeps), ask myself why I’m looking at financial and administrative jobs, get angry with myself for not having an answer, apply for seven thousand jobs, quicker-than-immediately receive seven thousand auto-reply denials, and continue this process for the remainder of the day.
I’m often asked in interviews, “If you could do anything, anything at all, what would that ideal job be?”. Interesting question. First of all, leave me alone. Second of all, I don’t have many opportunities to list something out like this with a pretentious undertone, and I’m finding as I type this that I enjoy it. And thirdly, I would do what Teddy Pendergrass does. Every day Teddy Pendergrass audibly seduces women across the globe with milky vocals, sensual lyrics, intoxicating melodies, and channels it all through a dangerously sexy performance package. Women don’t stand a chance.
Do you have a job like that open?
Until next time: If soap carvings and frothy urine are what you produce, women will be the last thing that you ever seduce.