An Ordinary Crucifixion – No. 6

On Duquesne Boulevard, in heavy morning traffic, on my way to work, there were two pickup trucks side-by-side at a traffic light. I was one car behind the one in the center lane, and the other was in the left lane. A woman stepped out of the passenger’s door of the truck on the left. She looked to be in her early 40s, with a bleached blond mullet and tight acid-washed jeans. She walked over to the other truck’s driver’s side window and started talking. I couldn’t hear what was being said. She started to walk around to get in the passenger’s side door of the truck on the right, leaving the door open on the truck which she had left. At that point I could hear some yelling, but still couldn’t tell what was being said. As she was standing between the two trucks, the light turned green. The truck in the center lane drove off. We started moving. The woman was still exchanging words with the driver of the truck in the left lane through the open passenger’s side door. They were paralyzing the left lane of Fort Duquesne Boulevard, in morning rush hour traffic. The driver of the BMW 750i immediately behind the remaining truck looked extremely irritated, but didn’t say shit. Nobody laid on their horn. In my rearview mirror, I looked back at the event, and saw her get back into the truck through the door she had exited when the event started. They moved through the intersection, only to get stuck at the next light beside the same truck.

Bars in the Morning

The real test of a bar is how it looks in the morning, filled with daylight. Most places can’t hold up to that test. Most bars need the forgiveness of moonlight and neon to look good. Anonymity is their character. Broad daylight ruins them. You’re not meant to see a bar that way. Just like you’re not supposed to see a woman without her makeup, but a really beautiful one even looks good without it.

Buttons

This shirt’s got buttons and a collar, so fuck you. In my estimation, that’s dressed up. That’s license to go anywhere: job interviews, hearings, weddings, funerals, and public speaking engagements. I am held hostage by it. It’s so fucking goofy. I hate the extra fabric, stiffness, and complexity, all present for no tangible or quantifiable purpose. I feel like I’m owed something for this gross indignity.

Watches

Apparently watches are pretty fucking important. Perhaps they are even the measure of a man. The bigger they are, the better. There should be no plastic anywhere on it. Plastic isn’t hard like stainless steel or chrome or gold or silver. Whereas diamonds are normally reserved for shallow, bitchy women, on a man’s watch, they indicate a giant dick, insatiable heterosexual appetite, and good Protestant work ethic. A straightforward, honest, god-fearing man should wear a good watch. A respectable watch should cost as much as a decent used car. That way you can ensure that nobody will mistake you for the sort of dishonest, degenerate queer who would wear a cheap, scratched up, ten year old plastic Timex with a nylon band that doesn’t match the face, bought at K-Mart, on sale, for $14.

Bagging the Grass

It burns my ass that I have a yard. My dad has a yard. From the age of about 12 or 13, cutting it had always been my responsibility while I lived with my parents. Now I own my own house, and I have to cut my own goddamn yard. I wish my house didn’t have one. I want to pave the fucking yard and just paint the asphalt green. When we bought the house, the yard was nearly dead. That was one of the big selling points for me. The first summer that we lived here, it was fantastic. I could get away with cutting the yard once every two weeks, and I just let the grass cuttings lay. The next summer was still pretty good, but the grass grew a little faster and got a little thicker. My wife suggested that we get a lawn service to spray it periodically with lawn treatments to kill weeds and fertilize the grass. I agreed to it, without thinking or believing that it would realistically do anything. Another year has passed, and as we move into summer, we have much more grass to deal with. It’s terrible. We have thick, fast-growing grass everywhere. I’m still resolved not to bag it, though, as I fucking hate that. Bagging your lawn clippings takes forever, and just seems like a really ecologically shitty thing to do. The drawback is that we have ugly clods of grass everywhere. I couldn’t give a shit if you paid me to. The grass clods didn’t bother me one bit until my dog started eating them. Whenever we would take our Chihuahua outside to do her business, she’d grab a giant clod of grass, and eat it while she shat. She’d squat and grind out turds while chewing a mouthful of grass. It was kind of funny to watch. I guess there’s nothing wrong or unhealthy with that, but it pissed me off. It was time-consuming. Anytime we took the dog out, we had to wait for her to finish playing with the grass clods. So this past week I resolved to bag the grass just to spite our dog. We have a somewhat wooded lot behind our house, so I dumped the clippings there into a compost heap. I gave the yard a crew cut. It looked like golf course. No grass clods anywhere. The next time I took our Chihuahua out to do her business that evening, I taunted her that she would starve to death, because she’d have no grass to eat while she shit. She was immediately thrown by the absence of grass clods. She hunted and hunted for them, and I laughed out loud. I relished my victory. The only problem is that now she won’t shit at all until she comes back into the house. Now it’s incredibly difficult to get her to shit outside without the clods, and we’ve got to either housetrain her again or just mulch the grass again and let the clods lay.