An unedited word from Chicken John
May. 31st, 2002 03:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labrujahTrapped.
Well not trapped as ensnared, trapped by circumstance. Wedged. Put on display for viewing. Unable to move away from the thing that is causing me suffering. Having to endour moment upon moment of the dreaded small talk. I’m talking about the fucking bar of course. I’ve committed no crime, but sentenced to “the pen”. The area behind the bar is my pen. I’d say it was a cell but it’s not; a cell has sexy impenetrable bars and locks. This pen I am put in isn’t locked. It’s not even closed. I have to stay in it. I just do. No need to spend any time or energy on locking me in; I’ll stay. Where do I have to go, anyway? I’m stuck behind the bar in a pen. For as many moments as it takes. Dangerous criminals go to jail. You fence in horses. Children go in cribs. Birds get cages. But harmless, worthless or stupid creatures go in a pen. Like chickens. Chickens go in pens. And Pigs. And me. I go in a pen. Trapped. Anyone can find me.
This is different. Not the same. I haven’t really had a steady job in 15 years forget one that made me go to the same place every day. I’m learning that one of the best luxuries I gave up to buy this bar was my ability to be shy. Shy, you say? It’s true. I’m shy. I’m uncomfortable. I’m 12. But only when I can afford it, and boy is it expensive right about now.
Value. Expensive. Cheap. Words. Whatever. Owning a bar is more than just an excuse to be a cokehead drunk who counts endless wads of one dollar bills; it’s a COMMITMENT to being a cokehead drunk who counts one dollar bills. I can see how this would kill anyone. I mean kill the person but their body would just keep drinking for years. This isn’t doing anything for my monkly duties. I mean you can’t expect to embrace ultimate truth while trying to hustle your broke friends for drinks. You couldn’t possibly try to understand the basis of human interaction with God
or nature or a cheese sandwich trying to get the writer for the SF Weekly to get excited about Puppet Month and give you the pick of the week. You can’t even begin to think about the natural beauty of infidelity while explaining how to clean a soda gun to the new barback. And your just not gonna get in touch with your sensual being pouring Old Crow into the Jack Daniels bottles. It’s just not going to happen.
There is no romance here, there is only toil. Suspicious of everyone who touches the money. Making excuses and giving pep talks to the staff on slow nights. Working as fast as you possibly can to no avail on nights that are slammed (slammed for no reason, you never know and the bar is always either grossly over or under staffed). Talking to drunk people. What can you do? Nothing. Let it all go. Standing under a proverbial waterfall of bullshit, you just have to let it all roll off you and embrace the few positive things that there are. Moments.
Life, it seems of late, is all about precious few moments. But this isn’t me complaining about my job to all you people; this is the set up part of a story. Later, I’ll come back to this in an obvious fashion and tie it all together and make an end to the story and then I’ll gesture to the next story I will write; but of course won’t. But you won’t notice.
This is a story about moments. And mostly wasting precious moments talking about wasting precious moments in an attempt to learn how not to waste precious moments. That just cost 5 precious moments. No, 7 moments... 8. ect…
I’m sitting in traffic on the fucking Pulaski Skyway at 8:30 in the morning on a weekday waiting for my chance to pay the guy 3 bucks so I can go through the Holland tunnel and paint a metal staircase in a UPS building on 42nd street in NYC. There are an endless number of black metal staircases in a giant UPS building and I’m gonna paint as many of them as I can in 8 hours and make 80 bucks. I’m gonna eat lunch out of a fucking machine and try to talk about politics or philosophy with alcoholics from Jersey who work for my brother. All painters are alcoholics. You see, I’m broke and have to work for my brother painting because I just got back from one of my punk rock journeys where the band exploded in the middle of the country somewhere and he wired me money for a bus ticket home and now I have to work to pay it off. Again. Or something. It’s just one of the 4 billion times I had to borrow $500 from my brother to bail me out of some stupid situation.
It’s 1987. I’m 19 years old and driving a powder blue 1979 Chrysler K car. I couldn’t be more miserable. And I’m rotting in traffic. I knew it would be an hour of my time, wasted. The radio didn’t work and the guy I was driving was fast asleep. I’m sitting there wondering what everyone else is doing while they are rotting in traffic. I’m looking around at all of them and they all look as miserable as I do. It’s the East Coast way of looking, after all. All of them. Rotting….
Chicken John dons the white doctor coat and approaches the gigantanormous chalkboard that keeps continuing on forever and starts scribbling trig equations like he was competing for valueless prizes…
How many people? Waiting for how many hours? How many days a week? Lets see… I heard this statistic once, 300,000 persons go through the Holland tunnel every day. And the Lincoln tunnel. So lets say 150,000 go through the Brooklyn Battery tunnel. 200,000 through the Midtown tunnel. Another 300,000 over the George Wahington bridge and a modest 100,000 over the 59th street bridge. Every day. That’s one million three hundred and fifty thousand people. All waiting about an hour a day. If they do that 5 days a week, it’s 6,750,000 hours. They all take 2 weeks vacation, and are probably sick or buzy 2 other weeks a year. So that’s a total of 48 weeks a year that 6,750,000 people wait in traffic an hour. Or 324,000,000 hours. Three hundred twenty four million hours a year are spent by commuters waiting in traffic to go to NYC. If there are 24 hours in a day that means there are 168 hours in a week. And if there are 4.3 weeks in a month, that’s 722.4 hours to be used by a human in any given month. Eight thousand six hundred sixty eight point eight hours a year. Wow.
I’m doing the math while inching my car forward a foot at a time. I’m trying to embrace the higher collective conscience of the average commuter, trying to rally support… I’m fucking on to something! Excited, I continue to do math scribbling in the margins of an old newspaper that was on the floor of the car… OK, eight thousand six hundred sixty eight point eight hours per year… average life span of a man is 72. So you get six hundred and twenty four thousand one hundred fifty three point six hours to spend in your life. 624,153.6 hours. In your life. Wow. But 324,000,000 hours are spent waiting in traffic per year to get into New York. That’s a total of 519.10299003322259136212624584717176 LIFETIMES!!!!
I remind you, it’s now 8:41 AM and I’m driving a powder blue Chrysler K car; the car Lee Iaccoca killed the Chrysler corporation with and my mind is racing like a runaway Detroit diesel with a full tank of fuel and a block full of Slick 50. Inspired, I continued. 519.10299003322259136212624584717176 lifetimes snuffed out per year waiting in
line to pay the guy $3. I know, you think that that whole .10299003322259136212624584717176 may seem unnecessary for the story, but that’s almost 7 minutes of your life we’re talking about, buddy. Traffic is murder. Murder I say!!!!! 519 and change lives who never even had a chance. One of those lives could have been the scientist that cures cancer. One of them could have been the President of the United States of America. You wanna talk about the abortion issue? Lets talk about the traffic issue! Jesus, bodies are lining the expressways of each and every metropolitan area! Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, LA… the list goes on and on. And the guy; you know, the one that collects the 3 bucks… I wonder how much of that $3 goes to pay him to collect it.
Like, if it costs $3 to have the booth and his salary and the electric and the receipt machine and the ink pads in the machine… that would be insane. But how much does it actually cost when you factor in the whole human life variable? And how would you collect the variable if you took away the toll booth? So if it costs $2 and 94 cents in costs to have the guy collect $3, and 519 lifetimes are wasted, that’s just wrong. If it costs $2 then I guess it’s reduced down to merely a holocaust. If it costs a buck, the 519 lives are just collateral damage. If they can do if for less than a buck it’s just business. But all those hours, all those people… all those moments. Precious moments. I mean, who cares about a few precious moments when we’re talking about millions… no, BILLIONS of years tossed into the Abyss! Waiting in fucking traffic. I wonder how many precious moments were had whilst in all that waiting?
I’ve had a few precious moments lately. But too few. Toil. Errands. Paperwork. Neighbors. But a moment when the Hawaiian lounge singer at the bar forgot the words to the Karaoke song and starting complaining about the ventilation. That was a good one. Dammit yawning and stretching and falling over off balance because she was sleepy and forgot she had a broken leg. Precious. The lady at the bank throwing the change into the envelope. Threw it right in. Asking someone if they would like to share an intimate moment and slow dancing to a Romanian folk song about embracing, each of us drenched in sweat, in 3⁄4 time. That was the best. Still smitten over that one. Leaving a party at 7:00 in the morning and having my friend turn to me after we walked through the front door into the obscene sunlight and him saying to me “Well, that happened”. Bill the Junkman telling me “Your ruining my life again.” Finding one more whip-it cartridge after I thought they were all gone. Precious moments. I wish they would add up as easily as the wasted hours. There are 2,300 people on the Damnlist. It took Ben Burke 17 minutes to read this piece of shit. 39,100 minutes. Or 651.666 hours. Or one one thousandth of a lifetime. If I write a thousand piece of shit stories and you all read them, I killed a guy somehow. Go figger. I’ll be in my pen if you need me.
Well not trapped as ensnared, trapped by circumstance. Wedged. Put on display for viewing. Unable to move away from the thing that is causing me suffering. Having to endour moment upon moment of the dreaded small talk. I’m talking about the fucking bar of course. I’ve committed no crime, but sentenced to “the pen”. The area behind the bar is my pen. I’d say it was a cell but it’s not; a cell has sexy impenetrable bars and locks. This pen I am put in isn’t locked. It’s not even closed. I have to stay in it. I just do. No need to spend any time or energy on locking me in; I’ll stay. Where do I have to go, anyway? I’m stuck behind the bar in a pen. For as many moments as it takes. Dangerous criminals go to jail. You fence in horses. Children go in cribs. Birds get cages. But harmless, worthless or stupid creatures go in a pen. Like chickens. Chickens go in pens. And Pigs. And me. I go in a pen. Trapped. Anyone can find me.
This is different. Not the same. I haven’t really had a steady job in 15 years forget one that made me go to the same place every day. I’m learning that one of the best luxuries I gave up to buy this bar was my ability to be shy. Shy, you say? It’s true. I’m shy. I’m uncomfortable. I’m 12. But only when I can afford it, and boy is it expensive right about now.
Value. Expensive. Cheap. Words. Whatever. Owning a bar is more than just an excuse to be a cokehead drunk who counts endless wads of one dollar bills; it’s a COMMITMENT to being a cokehead drunk who counts one dollar bills. I can see how this would kill anyone. I mean kill the person but their body would just keep drinking for years. This isn’t doing anything for my monkly duties. I mean you can’t expect to embrace ultimate truth while trying to hustle your broke friends for drinks. You couldn’t possibly try to understand the basis of human interaction with God
or nature or a cheese sandwich trying to get the writer for the SF Weekly to get excited about Puppet Month and give you the pick of the week. You can’t even begin to think about the natural beauty of infidelity while explaining how to clean a soda gun to the new barback. And your just not gonna get in touch with your sensual being pouring Old Crow into the Jack Daniels bottles. It’s just not going to happen.
There is no romance here, there is only toil. Suspicious of everyone who touches the money. Making excuses and giving pep talks to the staff on slow nights. Working as fast as you possibly can to no avail on nights that are slammed (slammed for no reason, you never know and the bar is always either grossly over or under staffed). Talking to drunk people. What can you do? Nothing. Let it all go. Standing under a proverbial waterfall of bullshit, you just have to let it all roll off you and embrace the few positive things that there are. Moments.
Life, it seems of late, is all about precious few moments. But this isn’t me complaining about my job to all you people; this is the set up part of a story. Later, I’ll come back to this in an obvious fashion and tie it all together and make an end to the story and then I’ll gesture to the next story I will write; but of course won’t. But you won’t notice.
This is a story about moments. And mostly wasting precious moments talking about wasting precious moments in an attempt to learn how not to waste precious moments. That just cost 5 precious moments. No, 7 moments... 8. ect…
I’m sitting in traffic on the fucking Pulaski Skyway at 8:30 in the morning on a weekday waiting for my chance to pay the guy 3 bucks so I can go through the Holland tunnel and paint a metal staircase in a UPS building on 42nd street in NYC. There are an endless number of black metal staircases in a giant UPS building and I’m gonna paint as many of them as I can in 8 hours and make 80 bucks. I’m gonna eat lunch out of a fucking machine and try to talk about politics or philosophy with alcoholics from Jersey who work for my brother. All painters are alcoholics. You see, I’m broke and have to work for my brother painting because I just got back from one of my punk rock journeys where the band exploded in the middle of the country somewhere and he wired me money for a bus ticket home and now I have to work to pay it off. Again. Or something. It’s just one of the 4 billion times I had to borrow $500 from my brother to bail me out of some stupid situation.
It’s 1987. I’m 19 years old and driving a powder blue 1979 Chrysler K car. I couldn’t be more miserable. And I’m rotting in traffic. I knew it would be an hour of my time, wasted. The radio didn’t work and the guy I was driving was fast asleep. I’m sitting there wondering what everyone else is doing while they are rotting in traffic. I’m looking around at all of them and they all look as miserable as I do. It’s the East Coast way of looking, after all. All of them. Rotting….
Chicken John dons the white doctor coat and approaches the gigantanormous chalkboard that keeps continuing on forever and starts scribbling trig equations like he was competing for valueless prizes…
How many people? Waiting for how many hours? How many days a week? Lets see… I heard this statistic once, 300,000 persons go through the Holland tunnel every day. And the Lincoln tunnel. So lets say 150,000 go through the Brooklyn Battery tunnel. 200,000 through the Midtown tunnel. Another 300,000 over the George Wahington bridge and a modest 100,000 over the 59th street bridge. Every day. That’s one million three hundred and fifty thousand people. All waiting about an hour a day. If they do that 5 days a week, it’s 6,750,000 hours. They all take 2 weeks vacation, and are probably sick or buzy 2 other weeks a year. So that’s a total of 48 weeks a year that 6,750,000 people wait in traffic an hour. Or 324,000,000 hours. Three hundred twenty four million hours a year are spent by commuters waiting in traffic to go to NYC. If there are 24 hours in a day that means there are 168 hours in a week. And if there are 4.3 weeks in a month, that’s 722.4 hours to be used by a human in any given month. Eight thousand six hundred sixty eight point eight hours a year. Wow.
I’m doing the math while inching my car forward a foot at a time. I’m trying to embrace the higher collective conscience of the average commuter, trying to rally support… I’m fucking on to something! Excited, I continue to do math scribbling in the margins of an old newspaper that was on the floor of the car… OK, eight thousand six hundred sixty eight point eight hours per year… average life span of a man is 72. So you get six hundred and twenty four thousand one hundred fifty three point six hours to spend in your life. 624,153.6 hours. In your life. Wow. But 324,000,000 hours are spent waiting in traffic per year to get into New York. That’s a total of 519.10299003322259136212624584717176 LIFETIMES!!!!
I remind you, it’s now 8:41 AM and I’m driving a powder blue Chrysler K car; the car Lee Iaccoca killed the Chrysler corporation with and my mind is racing like a runaway Detroit diesel with a full tank of fuel and a block full of Slick 50. Inspired, I continued. 519.10299003322259136212624584717176 lifetimes snuffed out per year waiting in
line to pay the guy $3. I know, you think that that whole .10299003322259136212624584717176 may seem unnecessary for the story, but that’s almost 7 minutes of your life we’re talking about, buddy. Traffic is murder. Murder I say!!!!! 519 and change lives who never even had a chance. One of those lives could have been the scientist that cures cancer. One of them could have been the President of the United States of America. You wanna talk about the abortion issue? Lets talk about the traffic issue! Jesus, bodies are lining the expressways of each and every metropolitan area! Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, LA… the list goes on and on. And the guy; you know, the one that collects the 3 bucks… I wonder how much of that $3 goes to pay him to collect it.
Like, if it costs $3 to have the booth and his salary and the electric and the receipt machine and the ink pads in the machine… that would be insane. But how much does it actually cost when you factor in the whole human life variable? And how would you collect the variable if you took away the toll booth? So if it costs $2 and 94 cents in costs to have the guy collect $3, and 519 lifetimes are wasted, that’s just wrong. If it costs $2 then I guess it’s reduced down to merely a holocaust. If it costs a buck, the 519 lives are just collateral damage. If they can do if for less than a buck it’s just business. But all those hours, all those people… all those moments. Precious moments. I mean, who cares about a few precious moments when we’re talking about millions… no, BILLIONS of years tossed into the Abyss! Waiting in fucking traffic. I wonder how many precious moments were had whilst in all that waiting?
I’ve had a few precious moments lately. But too few. Toil. Errands. Paperwork. Neighbors. But a moment when the Hawaiian lounge singer at the bar forgot the words to the Karaoke song and starting complaining about the ventilation. That was a good one. Dammit yawning and stretching and falling over off balance because she was sleepy and forgot she had a broken leg. Precious. The lady at the bank throwing the change into the envelope. Threw it right in. Asking someone if they would like to share an intimate moment and slow dancing to a Romanian folk song about embracing, each of us drenched in sweat, in 3⁄4 time. That was the best. Still smitten over that one. Leaving a party at 7:00 in the morning and having my friend turn to me after we walked through the front door into the obscene sunlight and him saying to me “Well, that happened”. Bill the Junkman telling me “Your ruining my life again.” Finding one more whip-it cartridge after I thought they were all gone. Precious moments. I wish they would add up as easily as the wasted hours. There are 2,300 people on the Damnlist. It took Ben Burke 17 minutes to read this piece of shit. 39,100 minutes. Or 651.666 hours. Or one one thousandth of a lifetime. If I write a thousand piece of shit stories and you all read them, I killed a guy somehow. Go figger. I’ll be in my pen if you need me.
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Date: 2002-05-30 08:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-05-30 11:10 am (UTC)