My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

photo posted from my iPhone
“It must take some balls jumpin’ in that thing every mornin’.”

“It’s car art!”

“Yeah? I don’t like it.”

Overheard on the street at Fillmore and Geary.

How do edible undies work? What are you eating? An edible fabric? Is it made of fruit leather? Perhaps just the crotch is made of gum. Other than gum, very few foods are flexible enough to withstand so much movement. Bananas wouldn’t work. Sushi probably would. Or licorice. But what about the elastic waist?

If life begins at conception, could a man who has coitus with his pregnant wife be accused of child molestation?

Good night internet.

photo posted from my iPhone

Went out to Poll’s motorcycle shop with my pal Erik to ask a few questions. There’s always folks hanging around, including this archer who started shooting at a box across the street.

photo posted from my iPhone

Collin used to drink box wine, now he drinks booze bags. They come in the ice cream cooler at a liquor store around the corner. Frozen daiquiris with liquor already in it. Brilliant.

photo posted from my iPhone
Haven’t seen Rusty Sunshine in months. First thing he does is show me the John Deere he got for a song. “Even has power steering,” he crooned.

photo posted from my iPhone
He said, “it won’t matter for this band.”

Doug fell into the campfire.

photo posted from my iPhone

photo posted from my iPhone

photo posted from my iPhone
I was loading at ten pm the other night. Got over a ton of weight in there!

photo posted from my iPhone
Tall weeds, overgrown jade tree, sickly bulb plants. Dead leaves from the avocado tree everwhere and cement covered in dirt. Me and the fellahs put a good sprucing to it.

photo posted from my iPhone
No.

photo posted from my iPhone
Hard to believe but I was moving a former kindergarten teacher who quit because he started using meth even at school. He showed me the golf course where the Zodiac Killer got someone. Then the tread on my tire came flying off. Inside dually, too.
He gave me a valuim and everything was fine.

When they say a place is unpretentious, is this what they mean?

At my last yard sale an elderly woman stopped to talk to me. I said, “You’re Phillipina”. I could tell. She was. “When you go to a funeral in the Philippines, they don’t ask, ‘Did she have a lot of money?’ they ask, ‘Did she have a lot of children?’ That’s how we measure wealth there. In America it’s all about money.” That was her wisdom.

Here’s how I made money this week.

I hired a bunch of friends and a bunch of Mexicans to help me get a job done. ( I asked the day laborers, “Are you Mexican? You aren’t Guatemalan?” I wanted to know. They said Mexican. You will never see a Black person or an Asian person or a white person or a Pacific Islander or an Arab standing on Cesar Chavez hailing passing trucks. They are known collectively as Mexicans, although they may be from a more southerly region.)

I met with a guy who wanted his back yard leveled so he could put in a deck that was even with his back sliding glass doors. Not a big dream. I could help. I called some friends.

I told him $1800 to remove the dirt. And I’d take apart the deck. But we had to take down the fence and go through the neighbors back yard then down a flight of steps to get the dirt out.

How do I know how much that will cost? I don’t. Luckily I had Ian the Englishman giving me advice. He told me to say 1800. I could do the work, I knew that. I’d been the duke of digging ditches for four years in Woodside, 25 miles south of the city. But down there you could put a Bobcat (skid steer)in anyone’s backyard. Here it was all hand digging. I took the neighbors garbage bins with me and we used those to tote out over 8 cubic yards of clean fill. That’s about 10 pick up truck loads. 300 trips down the steps. I forgot to mention first we removed a brick patio. And a small deck. My friends, some Mexicans, and me.

How do you know what to pay someone who works for you?

Day laborers go for 10 bucks minimum. 12 is more humane. Unskilled labor, like digging. That’s what the word on the street is. You don’t know how well they work, you pay them 10 bucks an hour. Minimum wage is 9.79 in San Francisco.

The first day I hired a lot of my friends. One works at a movie theater. He also attends Berkeley. Another is a bartender. One more I met on photo shoots, he moves furniture. The first day was fine. The guy from the theater needed direction on how to back a nail out of a board. I remembered I had to learn that to. Straighten the nail. Short sharp blows in the direction the nail entered. Otherwise the nail bends. Then what? You need to know a few tricks. Which he knew none.

“I started hiring immigrants. It was the only way to make any money.”

The phrase rang in my ears as I looked up. Jeff had spent almost 20 minutes trying to get the nails out of one 2X4. I couldn’t be mad at him because only ten years earlier I had no idea about efficiency. I was on a rich landed estate installing a paddock gate for a billionaire. There was time to learn. Rus didn’t act that way.

“Go water the garden,” he’d yell at me. “Jeezus Christ, what the fuck you think you’re doing?” he’d ask me. He’s grabbed ahammer or a drill or a shovel out of my hands more times than I can count.

Jeff said, “Mario grabbed the shovel and pushed me aside and tore into it like a machine.”

Mario was hired help from the street. Mexicans like to show you they work harder than you. (assuming you are white) Jeff may have realized it, I don’t know, but when he swung a pick axe, everyone knew it was the first time. I wanted him to set it down and do some bookkeeping for me. But if that’s how Rus had treated me, I wouldn’t be out here today, confident and manly. God I’m a man when I’m on a job. My job. I told someone, “Sure, I can get all this dirt, brick, rock, cement and decking out of here through the neighbors back yard and down their steps for 1800 bucks”, without even knowing what the fuck I was talking about. Well, I did know. But I wasn’t sure. Which is the scary part. I knew their might be a live gas line out there. Or solid rock two inches below the surface. Or that tree may have crazy roots growing along the water line that leaks even though it leads into your kitchen. YOu look at the surface and say, “I’ve dug so many holes, I can guess.” Then you go hire people that have never dug and they don’t know how to operate a shovel. So you go down to Cesar Chavez street and hire someone who doesn’t even speak the same language as you.

I don’t want to work with people who don’t speak my language. It makes it hard. Do you remember the Biblical story of the Tower of Babylon? God got scared that people 6,000 years ago were going to build a tower that could reach heaven. (WTF God, are you stupid? Sun dried brick, no matter how you stack it, won’t get there.) Then God made everyone speak different languages, SO NO MORE CONSTRUCTION COULD TAKE PLACE. God hated construction workers.

Rolling a giant block of concrete downhill is hard if everyone pushes a different direction. I’m the lazy boss because I walk away and watch. They can’t listen to me and I have no clue what they’re swearing about. They want to show you they are smart and hard workers so they do their own thing. Talking to each other. I have to walk away. If only I could find a group of guys like me who were 19 and fresh to California. Who spoke English. Everyone is going to college to be a designer. learning how to operate a shovel sounds retarded to a white person. But here I am. The duke of digging ditches.

I’dhire Jeff any day of the week over these mexican guys. I can talk to him. He is funny. He tells jokes one right after the other in a language I speak as well. After work, we go to a bar and have a drink. I’m not much of a conversationalist because I’m thinking about what I need to load on the truck for tomorrow, but god damn right I like him more than Jose, Alberto and Louise combined.

I went to Turkey right after high school for a “5th year” of study. It made me realize how unique every culture was, and how much I loved being able to talk. It was the most important sense. The ability to bullshit. Maybe I’m blind, but I can bullshit. Maybe I’m deaf, so I’m out of this conversation. Fuck it, who ever you are, you want to bullshit with the guy next to you. If he’s too scared to crack a joke you hate him. If he doesn’t speak your language, you don’t hate him, you just see him as an instrument to get work done. That’s not how I want to live. I want to bullshit with everyone. Work is just a reason to get together and bullshit.

It may make better business sense to hire Spanish speakers. A bunch of guys doing a bunch of mindless digging for 8 hours are gonna try to entertain themselves and that means talking about boobs and farts. Which would be fine if the homeowner and the elderly neighbors who are sitting around heard it all happen in Spanish. The homeowner and the neighbors don’t speak Spanish. They’d assume we were talking about shovels and holes. They do speak English and a word like “pussy” is able to penetrate walls and get through a tv commercial turned up loud enough for a guy with a dead hearing aid battery to hear.

This backyard we are hauling dirt out of is not far from my friend Ian’s rental place, and he keeps tools in the basement. I have a key. I went to look for some drop cloths to lay on the steps so we didn’t damage anything when I was suddenly gripped by the urge poop. Mind you I’ve been sick this week and I’ve been drinking loads of orange juice. That with the pizza for lunch gave me diarrhea. But I was in the laundry room of Ian’s apartment building and no bathroom around. So I grabbed a shopping bag with someone’s clothes in it and dumped them on the sorting table and hunched over the open bag on the floor and let it rip. I HAD TO GO.

“What do I wipe with…nevermind…gotta go again.”

I grabbed the bag but my diarrhea, like most people’s, was wet. So wet it was already leaking through the bag. I’d left the door to the basement laundry room open, it stunk like shit, my pants were down, I needed the plastic bag on the shelf over there. I went in that. Then I put the leaky bag in the plastic bag. Then I cut strips out of someone’s pillow case and wiped my butt. It was a laundry room remember, so I soaked the strips and got myself very tidy and clean. It was all very hilarious to me once it was over, and I rushed back to the fellah’s to share my story. Only, I wish I had said it in Spanish. Not everyone needed to hear that.

On the ride home Jeff asked, “What’d you do with the bag?”

It was like a ghost story, because I pointed behind my head into the back of the truck and said, “It’s right there!”

It was, it was right there. I had tucked it level with my head on some random garbage because I didn’t want it to tear open. It was right behind the glass behind my head!

Jeff screamed. Covered his mouth with his hand like he was barfing then with a plaintive voice asked, “Why do you still have it?”

“I couldn’t leave it at Ian’s!”

“Yes you could have! You should have stuck it in his oven and left it on 300!”

“I think I can smell it in here!”

Jeff gagged a little bit. Poop stories rule.