The Dolorous Stroke

Y’know, I really meant to write more about the zoo – Rebek and I had such a tranquil, wonderful time there.  It seems as though this world’s stream of sorrows is hastening me ever onward, though, and I am forced to pass by a golden afternoon of peace and joy to chronicle the latest reversal of our past good fortune.

I finished preparing our tax return yesterday.  Now, in past years Rebekah and I were unusual for our relative lack of concern about this most dreaded season of the fiscal year.  In the years when I was a lowly college student and she an under-appreciated nurturer of our nation’s youth, we became accustomed to receiving a small refund check from the government.  It was like a benediction from the great befuddled powers-that-be, telling us “hey, we know you’re pitching in as best you can, go ahead and keep your money”.

This year our circumstances changed.  While ‘Bekah continued to be an unsung hero at her school, I briefly held a place in the lowest caste of the educator’s profession, the reviled and wretched “untouchables” of our public schools.  When substitute teaching didn’t pan out, I went to work for the McCulloch Sulfur Mines, and this is where our trouble started.

You may be familiar with the practice of being paid “under the table” which is to say, paid with no paper trail for the government to follow, which usually results in the recipient of such payments being able to under-report or omit that income from his taxification by the government.  Well, that is not how my company works.  Mr. McCulloch, you see, he does his withholding under the table.  Which is to say, he takes money out of our pay checks for taxes, then doesn’t tell the government anything about it, instead pocketing the money and laughing when the government comes after us.

As a result of these new arrangements, ‘Bekah and I have been politely requested to pay the government approximately twice the money we have in our savings account.  Now, we will earn enough money between now and April 15th to make up the difference, but it means that the current balance in our checking account has to meet all of our expenses for the next couple weeks, including all of those lovely first-of-the-month expenses for April.

But, hey, as the old song says, keep on the sunny side, so I feel compelled to mention one possible benefit of these developments.  For much of the last year, I have been drifting miserably through life, my ambition spent and my resolve fragile and fading.  Well, there were signs recently that I might be coming back to life, and this latest affront has spurred the process along.  I am taking up the yoke again, and am confident that before too long my herculean powers will have vastly improved our lot.  Stay tuned.

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.

Nothing is Good

In related news:

1. Everything is bad.

2. I hate everything.

Job hunting, not much fun at the best of times, has not gone well this week.  I hate job hunting.  Also, yesterday Yevgeny forgot to engage the hand-brake on one of the sulfur-carts, and when it got away from him it rolled over my left foot, crushing three of my toes.  I hate Yevgeny.