The Eternal Question

There is not much time to talk when you are swinging a pick or loading an ore cart, but we do get a half-hour lunch every other day, and like most workers we like to chat while we eat.  We don’t really follow current events, so there is not much talk about the “news of the day”, although we all thought Sarah Palin was hilarious, and we think she should do more of those skits with Katie Couric, and less of those lady movies like Baby Mama, and we are all hoping that President Obama gets us some health insurance that covers Devil’s Rot.

No, we mostly talk about our work in the mines.  Our favorite talk is to argue about which is the worst job hazard.  We have three main job hazards at the sulfur mines (four if you count deep crows, but I think those are myths), not counting Devil’s Rot, which is more of a job nuisance once you learn how to make the poultice.

One main job hazard is the whip of the overseer.  I don’t understand how it is okay for them to whip us – Pavel says it has something to do with our union being crooked in the 1930′s.  Our overseer, Grigalt, isn’t really so bad with the whip, because he spends most of his time with his other detachments – Yevgeny says it is because he doesn’t want to see my ugly face, but I say it is Yevgeny’s face that is ugly.

The other main job hazard is fire.  I understand that this isn’t a hazard in most sulfur mines, but I work in a white sulfur mine.  White sulfur is mainly used for making brimstone, I guess, and sometimes it likes to catch on fire.  These are not good times to be in the tunnels.

Our third hazard is cave-ins.  I don’t worry about these so much, because I know that the other miners would come to get us out sooner or later, and if we were down here for a while we might have to eat Yevgeny to survive.

Most of workers say that fire is worst hazard – we have the saying “the whip finds the lazy ass, but the fire she burn everybody some time”.  It’s a pretty wise saying, if you ask me.  Yevgeny says whip is worse, but that’s because he has never fallen into a flame-spout…yet.  You just wait, Yevgeny.

You just wait.

Load Sixteen Tons…

…and what do you get?

In this blog’s short history, I have spent quite a few posts describing a typical morning in the snug little zoo/asylum I call home.  Five days a week, these zany mornings give way to their polar opposite, as I drive my battered car to the local sulfur mines for another drab day of tiresome menial labor that will soon be indistinguishable from the day before.

I park as far away as possible, both to delay the actual start of my work day and to keep the other miners from seeing my car.  I am one of the few  miners to own a car, and some of the other miners chaffed me for it when I first started.  Pepe would only call me “rico” for about a month, and Yevgeny didn’t stop making jokes about it until I “accidentally” hit him with a spanner.

I trudge up to the gates and make sure to find my detachment.  I am part of Drudge Detail 168.  My detachment also has in it Pavel, Pepe and Yevgeny.  Our overseer is Grigalt, but we mostly call him “boss” if we don’t want to get whipped.  When we are on boring duty, Ilsa the mechanic usually runs the giant steam-borer for us.  Boring duty is actually the most exciting duty – this is one of our favorite jokes.

I find my place with my detachment and we crowd into the cages with the other drudges assigned to our tunnel.  It is a good tunnel, we rarely have trouble meeting the quota.  After a minute or two, the big whistle blows like the sky is screaming at us, and the foreman slams all the cage doors.  Then the cages start to go down into the ground.  It is not so bad for me, because the cages go so slow you barely notice, but Pepe gets nervous.  I try to tell him jokes to distract him.  Pavel doesn’t like Pepe, he says that he is stealing jobs from us, but I like him because he doesn’t speak much English, so he is real quiet.  Not like that bigmouth Yevgeny.  I don’t like Yevgeny at all.

After a while, cages reach the bottom, and Grigalt is there to open the door for us (how does he get down here?) so we can start our shift.

Dogfight

I believe we left our account of a typical attempt to get Clementine’s coat on with our tiny protagonist atop her would-be oppressor’s back gripping his arm in a hammerlock…

Although I don’t have the leverage to pull my arm free (that being the whole point of a hammerlock), I quickly realize that Clem weighs about sixteen pounds.  I take a moment to plan ahead, that being my biggest advantage over my diminutive adversary.  Then I roll over.  Clementine is more than fast enough to leap clear, but she is also a terrier, and loathes giving up a good hold.  I am counting on her to hang on too long, and she obliges me.

This allows me to employ my other big advantage over Clementine: weight.  I can feel her mighty back legs pressing against my ribs as I turn so that she is pinned under my right side, but she is as likely to budge me as I am to leg press a minivan, so I concentrate on poking her in the chest repeatedly with my left hand so that she’ll be distracted while I slowly lever myself up on my right elbow, taking care to leave enough weight on Clem that she can’t scoot out from under me.

Once I have regained the use of my right hand, I gradually work it around behind her neck as she attempts to wrap her forepaws around my left wrist and begin gnawing on my left hand.  This nearly proves my undoing, but somehow I manage to pass my right hand behind her neck while frantically jerking my left hand away from her mouth.  Once my right hand has passed behind Clem’s neck, I am ready for the trickiest part of the operation.  Suddenly I snake my left arm down between Clem’s left forepaw and neck, trapping her paw and enabling my hand to press against the side of her neck.  I exert similar pressure with my right to complete the katahajime sleeper hold.

Clem struggles a little bit, but gradually her bulbous eyes begin to close and she relaxes.  I’ve learned the hard way to wait until I am sure she’s not faking before releasing the hold and scrambling over to retrieve her coat.  It is imperative that I have at least the three  primary straps buckled before she wakes up.

Clem is usually awake enough to squirm and snap at me as I finish securing the numerous secondary cinches and ties, but it is the last trouble I’ll have with her for a while.  Once her coat is on she’s generally far more preoccupied with worrying at the straps than interfering with me as I scoop her up and bundle her into the car.

We’re usually running late by now, so I tuck Clementine into her car bed, insert her mix CD into the CD player, and give her a quick scritch behind the ears, pulling my hand away quickly to avoid the surly little snap she gives me by way of reply, and throw the car in gear.  It’s off to the Doggie Arena.

Round One

Some mornings, right after I put Coke in ‘Bekah’s bag, I have to take Clem to Doggie Arena.  The first step in this process is to get Clem’s coat and tuck it carefully into one of my pockets.  Then I head to the kitchen, reach carefully down past the razor wire that tops Clementine’s enclosure, and pick up my little dog.  I cradle her in my arms like a baby as we head to the laundry room, where I set her down in front of the door to the garage.  I open the door and head through, Clem frisking merrily about my feet.  ‘Bekah and I park on the street now so that the garage is empty for this particular morning ritual.  I take a few deep breaths and try to empty my mind of extraneous thoughts.  Clem scampers about, snuffling at the floor and chasing scraps of paper or stray autumn leaves.

All the romping stops the instant I pull Clem’s coat out of my pocket.  Clem’s coat is a cross between a flak vest and a straight jacket.  As soon as Clem catches a glimpse of it’s black expanse, festooned with heavy-duty straps and buckles, she comes to a complete stop.  For a single pristine moment she is utterly still, her head up, ears cocked forward, bizarre bulging eyes regarding me intently.

In the next instant Clem is hurtling through the air toward me, propelled by one of her lighting-quick leaps.  It is her usual opening gambit, so I am able to anticipate it and pivot out of the way, preventing her little black cannonball of a head from colliding with my groin or abdomen, her targets of choice.  A loud crack followed by a series of crashes tells me that Clem has at least partially demolished a shelving unit, so I turn and lunge at her as she attempts to scrabble out from under the wreckage.

I capitalize on my temporary advantage by rolling Clem onto her back.  This impairs her mobility, if not her capacity to fight back, which she swiftly demonstrates by snaking her hind legs around my left wrist and clamping her teeth onto three fingers of my right hand, causing me to drop her coat in the process.

While I carefully work my right forearm away from Clem to prevent her from wrapping her forepaws around it, I make my next move.  Although there’s little I can do with my left hand, which is held tight to Clementine’s belly by her amazingly strong hind legs, I start sliding it slowly to my left.  Clementine, still intent on consolidating her hold on my right arm, doesn’t notice until my hand reaches the pressure point behind her ribs.  She gives a low growl when she realizes what is about to happen, but it is too late.  I scritch gently with the tips of my fingers.  After a moment, the steely bands of muscle which are Clementine’s hind legs relax, and her jaws loose their hold on my right hand.  She lays there panting,  paralyzed by the canine euphoria I have unleashed with my underhanded belly-rubbing tactics.

Unfortunately, putting Clementine’s coat on requires both hands.  I grab the coat with my right hand and drag it over Clem’s head, scritching madly with my left.  Then I have to use both hands to pull it down over her torso, and that’s when she shakes off the lingering effects of the belly-scritch.  She writhes like a thing possessed and kicks me in the wrist with her hind leg, knocking one of my hands away.  Before I can recover she has wriggled out of her coat and corkscrewed back onto her feet.  I go for a waistlock, but just as I get an arm around her middle she pushes off my chest with her back feet and shoots out of my grasp like a bar of soap in a convict’s nightmare.

I stumble to my feet and race after, not wanting her to have time to regroup.  She easily stays just out of my grasp, then, with no warning, she turns on a dime, darts between my legs, and delivers a two-footed mule kick to the back of my left knee.  My leg folds up faster than a topless bar in Tehran, and I crash to the hard, hard cement floor.  Clementine grabs my right hand in her mouth and leaps onto my back, dragging my arm around into a hammerlock.  I tug experimentally to see if I can just pull my hand free, but I can feel her feet dig into my back for purchase and she pulls back hard enough that I can feel it in both my elbow and shoulder.  “Dammit Clem,” I mutter, “I’m just trying to put your coat on.”  Clem gives a little terrier growl as she squeezes down on my hand…

The Hours of the Wurro

I am sitting down to write this at a very special time of the day.  It is a few minutes before eight o’clock, and I have just sent Rebekah out the door on her way to teach her little children.  The animals are all fed, and for the first time all morning I have nobody to take care of.  I don’t have to be at work for two hours.

I used to use this time for going to the gym, until they asked me to stop coming.  In their very official letter they listed some so-called “infractions” of their code (listen, that drain in the steam room floor is there for a reason, and I think we all know that it’s for peeing into), but I know they’re trying to hide the real reason.  Yep, membership has declined since I began hitting the weight room.  Once other guys check out my magnificent flacktoids, or see me maxing out my cloits on the inverted torsion press, they know that they’ll never be able to look like me.  They lose hope and stop coming.  Maybe they just head over to the pool – I don’t know, as I was banned from the pool months ago.  Seems that I was swimming so fast that the water started boiling and scalded some of the seniors in a waterobics class.  Yeah, its pretty tough to find a gym when you’re the kind of physical specimen that I am.

Anyhow, after I stopped gymming it up, I used this time as general purpose “me time” – I cleaned the house, or read, or played computer games, or wrote things for my gaming group, or practiced air guitar, or watched obscure foreign films so that I’d have material for the annoying chatter I use to change the subject whenever ‘Bekah tries to bring up our money problems.

Lately, however, I have a new use for this time.  I often use it for writing this blog, though I sometimes don’t post until later because I am hung over unsatisfied with my work and want to tweak it some more.

All of this assumes, of course, that it isn’t one of the days that I have to take Clementine to her Doggie Arena.  We’ll talk about those days tomorrow.

The Red Bullet

Each weekday, before I send ‘Bekah off to work, I run through a quick checklist of things she will need packed into her day bag.  This includes pretty typical stuff: snacks, emergency flares, any library books she’s ready to return,  her taser, her insulin, contraceptives, some mealworms, etc.  None of these things is all that crucial (I suppose the insulin might be, if she had diabetes), but I think they brighten her day.  The Coke is a different story, however.  Every morning I check to make sure that ‘Bekah has one or two Cokes in her bag.  If we don’t have any, I go out and get some while she is showering.  The bottom line is, she doesn’t leave the house without all the cocaine-based soft drinks that she needs.  Not after the McAllister incident.

Y’see, little Derek McAllister was something of a problem student of Rebekah’s, and the last time I let her go off to work without Coke, he decided it would be a good morning to abuse his paste privileges.  As near as we can figure out, ‘Bekah surreptitiously dabbed peanut butter onto the back of his neck and sent him out to play with the giant squirrels that inhabit the trees around her school.  The ones her father used to hunt with an elephant gun and a pack of mastiffs when they needed thinning out (nowadays we just send Clemen into the trees after them).  All they found of poor Derek was a shoe.  Of course we told his parents he was abducted by a child molester, and they were glad enough, I think, to get rid of him that they didn’t ask too many questions, but privately I’ll always know that his fate was sealed when I sent ‘Bekah out of the house with an orange soda that morning.

Waking ‘Bekah

In the early days of our relationship, Rebekah was recovering from some very tumultuous times in her life.  She was truly a fragile flower in those days, and this was seldom more apparent than when I had to awaken her from her nightly Ambien coma.  Each morning was a miniature Lazarus spectacular, complete with weeping, praying, paramedics yelling “clear”, the chanting of clergy and the crackle of the defibrillator  (I provided most of the weeping – ‘Bekah could be really cranky when she woke up).

The intervening years have been good to ‘Bekah.  Whatever my shortcomings as a spouse (dwindling career prospects, bizarre sexual hangups, snoring, possible incipient madness, fiscal irresponsibility, chronic infidelity, the cockfighting ring I run out of her school after hours, my snarky blog, etc.), I am a fairly good nursemaid.  Several years of regular meals, plenty of sleep, scrupulous adherence to medical appointments and medication schedules, and a low, low incidence of drama have done good things for Rebekah’s health.

Nowadays waking her is a much easier proposition.  After feeding her I simply head for the bathroom and turn on the shower.  Usually, the pressure of the cultural taboo against wasting water is sufficient to pull Rebekah out of bed and into her day.  Some days, however, I have to use my Duck Spatula (“Duck” is my pet name for Rebekah).  I designed the Duck Spatula, and built it myself out of a baking sheet (any thin sheet of metal will do) riveted to the metal pole from an old pool-cleaning net.  Its use is likewise simple: merely insinuate the edge of the spatula-head under Rebekah and, using the pole as a lever, flip her out of bed and run like hell.

Bed & Breakfast

(Part IV of an intermittent and ongoing series)

As previous installments have shown, I have about 30 minutes of hard dealing to get through each morning just to care for the livestock around here.  Once that is done, I get to take a little break from the insanity and and fix Rebekah breakfast in bed.  I do this almost every morning, and I feel like it lets Rebekah know that I care about her – especially on those mornings when I have a day off during the week and could otherwise sleep in!  Anyhow, breakfast isn’t typically too involved; oatmeal is Rebekah’s fare of choice at the moment, though this is subject to change at any time, as are any of milady’s other preferences.

Feeding the Beasties

(part III in an intermittent and ongoing series)

I shall resume my tale of a typical morning at the point where Clementine, who is being a right bastard today by the way, has gone outside.  While she offloads her metabolic byproducts, it is time for me to feed the cats.  Now, on mornings when Gypsy begins his food-yowling before sunrise, or augments it by flinging himself bodily into the bedroom door, I usually give him discount cat food we get from Sam’s Club.  This may not seem like much of a punishment unless you’ve read the ingredient label, so I reproduce it for your edification:

Ingredients: Brewer’s Rice, Shredded Newspaper, Toenail Clippings, Powdered Cellulose, Gravel, Scabs, Calcium Sulfate, Strychnine, Potassium Sulfate, Despair.

Anyhow, Gypsy’s been good this morning, so he gets his prescription weight-loss food from the vet, which is made mostly from black magic and guys who squealed on the mob.  I quickly dial the combination on the cat food safe and scoop Gypsy out some of the good stuff, then deposit it in his bowl in the laundry room.  After Gypsy minces in there, I close the door for his protection and head back to the kitchen.  Clementine is pawing at the door now, so I scoop food into Cleo’s bowl, pluck her out of the air as she drifts by, and set her down in front of it.  Past observation has shown that it will now take her anywhere from five to seven minutes to find the food directly in front of her, but I don’t have time to watch, because it’s time for Clemmy to come back in.

Clem shoots a stiff paw to my groin as I let her in, and I do my best to shrug it off as I head over to turn on the stove and get the ingredients for her breakfast out of the refrigerator.  For the next fifteen minutes or so I will be busy searing steak and sautéing mushrooms, as well as preparing a fresh green salad.  It may not sound that hard, but trust me: anything becomes a challenge when you have a sixteen-pound dog hanging off your sweat pants and snarling incessantly.

Finally  I’m done cooking and can lay Clem’s breakfast out in front of her.  She dives into the steak and mushrooms while I croon encouragements to her: “That’s it Clem, eat up so you’ll grow big and strong”.  I watch anxiously as she sniffs at the salad, because I’ve decided to try something new today: Arugula!  Clem snuffles around the salad bowl very carefully, then turns and squats over it, urinating deliberately as she looks back over her shoulder at me to make sure I get the message.  When she’s finished weeing, I scoop her up and carry her to her corral.

A Day in the Life

(Part II of an intermittent, ongoing series)

On any given day, my first order of business after waking up is to loose Clementine upon an unsuspecting world (actually, I’m pretty sure the world suspects by this time, but there’s not much it can do).  This is a fairly involved process, for safety reasons.  First I take the master remote which controls Clemmy’s cage defenses from its wall dock.  Next I deactivate the perimeter fragmentation charges, and kill the voltage running through the cage itself.  Finally, I draw back the three tempered-steel bolts and fling wide the door of her cage while crying “Havoc!”.  Originally this was intended as a warning, something akin to yelling “Fore!” on the golf course, but I find that it also helps keep Clem’s attention focused on me as we head for the bedroom door, so that she doesn’t pounce upon my sleeping wife.

Then we head down the hall to…oh wait, crap, actually, I have to go back to the bedroom now and put on some sweats, because the school bus stops right behind our house at this time of morning, which means that there’s a crowd of school children milling around across the street from our back yard waiting for the damn thing, and apparently their uptight parents don’t think they’re ready to see the kinds of things that are sometimes left uncovered by the secondhand maternity lingerie I usually sleep in.  So I go back and change while Clem cavorts in the hall.  Gypsy makes a plaintive cry of “Food!”  which must seem to Clem to be an accurate assessment of Gypsy’s ecological role, because she takes of after him, which thankfully rids me of both of them for the precious time required to get dressed.

Then I close the bedroom door behind me, so that ‘Bekah will be spared any further ruckus, and pad down the hall.  When I reach the kitchen Cleo, the remaining member of our little menagerie, attempts to dive-bomb me from the top of the fridge, but her miniscule bodyweight and the unique aerodynamic properties of her incredibly fluffy coat conspire against her, causing her to get caught in a sudden updraft and float off-course.  Figuring that it will be some minutes before she drifts down to the floor, I ignore her and focus on more immediate matters.

I can’t see Clementine, but Gypsy’s panicked bleating leads me to suspect that she has him trapped in the excruciating Fujiwara Pawlock variation she’s been practicing at Doggy Arena.  “Clementine!” I yell in the general direction of the living room as I sling open the sliding door to the backyard.  Clem shoots by me like a streak of heat, yapping out her diminutive Boston Terrier challenge to the disinterested mob of adolescent punks across the street.  I flip them a desultory bird myself as I shut the door.  It’s going to be a long day…