After maintaining my unemployed status for 19 strong years, I was met with my first real monetary crisis when the recession hit home: momma cut off the funds. That's right; the woman who financially supported me with her lucrative career as a single-mother-of-2/attorney for my entire life decided she would rather watch me starve than cough over a few of her measly dollars.
Of course, this might not really have been as dangerous a declaration as it seems at first. I mean, I still have her credit card, and she seems to have difficulties fulfilling her end of the bargain, what with giving me $55 over the past two weeks or so, not to mention the fact that my Grandma in Pittsburgh sent me $100 dollars because I took the time, out of the kindness of my heart, to call her on Mothers' Day (what a beautiful grandson am I...). So yeah, I have actually gained $145 in this summer of lean and squalor. Also, the wonderful option of selling my plasma remains, which I find quite lucrative considering my body has the foresight to make plasma itself and I could get 80 bucks a week from it. Further pushing me towards that end was the fact that South Carolina, the homeland, the Urheimat (pardon my Deutsch), this beauteous land which brought me forth into the world and raised me as her own amidst the indigo, palmetto trees, and peaches freshly grown, has the nation's second-highest unemployment rate behind the arctic wasteland that is Michigan, hovering somewheres around 11%. And who am I to take viable minimum-wage jobs from those struggling, huddled masses who don't have their mother's credit cards at hand to fall back upon?
Nevertheless, I, David Wile, who promised his childhood self that he would never work a job like those lowly working classes, pressured by my mother and my conscious, have abandoned my Seinfeldian (Hurculean?) task, succumbed to the beckoning calls of employment, and applied for a job. Yes, I said it, I have applied for a job. Now, I know what you're thinking. Maybe, for the sake of the working order of the planet, for the sake of mankind itself, unable to survive such an earth-shattering event, they won't hire me. I know you're thinking - nay, silently praying - these thoughts, because I am thinking (read: praying) them too.
But, if they at the PetSmart (that's a letdown, eh?) are so brave as to hire me, so daring as to turn the earth around on its axis and give me a job, I guess I can rest comfortably in the fact that I succeeded in my childhood dreams at least for 19 years of my life (and 2.5 months!). It's no Jerry Seinfeld, who never once held a job that wasn't listed on a marquee, but I'll have to take it. Oh, what a failure am I...
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
David and the Roach
Since going off to school, I haven't been able to keep up on my regular pool practice regimen, which consists mainly of my playing games against myself at ungodly hours in the morning while the soothing sounds of David Bowie and Elton John play in the background to help me concentrate (occasionally LL Cool J serves in this capacity). So let's just say the skillz I left with are a little shaky.
So 4 AM rolls around, and, desperately in need to sharpen said skillz, I was about to start one of these marathon extravaganzas of tense billiard play. As I lined up the balls against the back edge of the table to rack them, I hear a light tapping steadily approaching down the left rail - the pitter patter of tiny roach feet. I look down, and BAM, a roach is climbing into the corner pocket, where my hand had been only a matter of seconds earlier. As my initial reaction to question why the Lord our God has forsaken me subsided, I raced downstairs to get the Raid. I come back upstairs and the roach has disappeared. The most terrible, suspenseful, dreadful time of roach hunting has approached: the quiet lull between having found the roach and, once having assembled the necessary arsenal to annihilate him and the unfortunate cat which will invariably begin licking the insect spray remnants as soon as the critter is dead, re-finding the roach. The calm before the storm.
After waiting for that roach to appear for a good five minutes of pure terror, I find out why I haven't seen him in the fairly porous pocket; the roach is on the fucking floor. I shit you not. I unload everything I got. The red carpet has turned white with the rain of death I'm pouring out upon this roach. He runs. He cannot hide. I capture him on his way to the wall where all the roaches I've ever chased run toward; I think it's how they get in, but I won't judge. Caught between hell and highwater, the roach turns and faces me and my Raid. I'll give him credit for not BAPing. I unload the fury of a thousand armies upon his back. Now the carpet and the roach are white with the poisonous spray. Yet the roach is still alive, because roaches are indestructible.
I throw paper upon it (I don't want to touch crushed roach), and throw the nearest brick (don't ask where it came from, I'm not 100% sure on that detail) upon that. The roach is still alive. Once again, my friends, I shit you not. I perform this task at least three more times. Limping, the roach emerges from underneath the paper, and heads towards the stairs, running for it's life.
FLASHBACK:
I once resorted to smashing the phone book, the Second College Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary (ca. 1985), and the 9th Edition of the Merck Index Encyclopedia of Chemicals and Drugs (rough estimate of 1800 pages, for those of you unfamiliar with the work) and jumping upon all three to kill a particularly spirited roach. I knew fear that day, my friends, and it had an extraordinarily strong exoskeleton.
With this memory fresh in my mind, I refuse to let the roach trick me into thinking it's actually injured. I spray him again to keep him from running down the stairs; I'm a roach herder in my spare time. He turns, I relocate the paper, and I deal him a final death blow with the brick. I pick up the paper, find the flattened roach underneath, and honor the death of a fair adversary. Having given him a proper burial in the trashcan, I resume my activities and play the pool match I'd started 30 minutes before.
I won.
So 4 AM rolls around, and, desperately in need to sharpen said skillz, I was about to start one of these marathon extravaganzas of tense billiard play. As I lined up the balls against the back edge of the table to rack them, I hear a light tapping steadily approaching down the left rail - the pitter patter of tiny roach feet. I look down, and BAM, a roach is climbing into the corner pocket, where my hand had been only a matter of seconds earlier. As my initial reaction to question why the Lord our God has forsaken me subsided, I raced downstairs to get the Raid. I come back upstairs and the roach has disappeared. The most terrible, suspenseful, dreadful time of roach hunting has approached: the quiet lull between having found the roach and, once having assembled the necessary arsenal to annihilate him and the unfortunate cat which will invariably begin licking the insect spray remnants as soon as the critter is dead, re-finding the roach. The calm before the storm.
After waiting for that roach to appear for a good five minutes of pure terror, I find out why I haven't seen him in the fairly porous pocket; the roach is on the fucking floor. I shit you not. I unload everything I got. The red carpet has turned white with the rain of death I'm pouring out upon this roach. He runs. He cannot hide. I capture him on his way to the wall where all the roaches I've ever chased run toward; I think it's how they get in, but I won't judge. Caught between hell and highwater, the roach turns and faces me and my Raid. I'll give him credit for not BAPing. I unload the fury of a thousand armies upon his back. Now the carpet and the roach are white with the poisonous spray. Yet the roach is still alive, because roaches are indestructible.
I throw paper upon it (I don't want to touch crushed roach), and throw the nearest brick (don't ask where it came from, I'm not 100% sure on that detail) upon that. The roach is still alive. Once again, my friends, I shit you not. I perform this task at least three more times. Limping, the roach emerges from underneath the paper, and heads towards the stairs, running for it's life.
FLASHBACK:
I once resorted to smashing the phone book, the Second College Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary (ca. 1985), and the 9th Edition of the Merck Index Encyclopedia of Chemicals and Drugs (rough estimate of 1800 pages, for those of you unfamiliar with the work) and jumping upon all three to kill a particularly spirited roach. I knew fear that day, my friends, and it had an extraordinarily strong exoskeleton.
With this memory fresh in my mind, I refuse to let the roach trick me into thinking it's actually injured. I spray him again to keep him from running down the stairs; I'm a roach herder in my spare time. He turns, I relocate the paper, and I deal him a final death blow with the brick. I pick up the paper, find the flattened roach underneath, and honor the death of a fair adversary. Having given him a proper burial in the trashcan, I resume my activities and play the pool match I'd started 30 minutes before.
I won.
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