go rub fudgie the whale
I had a lot I wanted to write about tonight, but I spent the day moving a guy from oakland to SF. so here are my notes, to remind myself what I wanted to say. Maybe I’ll fill em out tomorrow.
call your mother from the fruit juice aisle, couldn’t carry on a conversation moren six feet from the kitchen wall ten years ago. how amazing are cell phones? very. How soon do you forget? Very quickly. They bore me now. fire still fascinates me.
uhaul place in an active laundramat. the empty house next door on fire. a woman walking down the street saying, “help me, i locked myself out, i’ll help you.”
I got the bluegrass one, but someone stole the ramp from it
Guy at Uhaul “i can see you workin like a hebrew.” Older black man with a gold tooth.
I wanted to be a cowboy. it don’t pay. no work. so i move furniture now. Use rope. ride. no, not the same. but i’m a maverick. that’s a cowboy word. means a semi wild unbranded cow. Or a horse or a bull or whatever it is men wanted to brand and call their own out west. The word has come to mean more than that. I’m not calling myself a cow. I’m a individual, living by my own rules. Not part of a corporation or a congregation. It means having short hair when every body got it long. a maverick furniture mover. I do it my way. put the couch on last.
can you spare any change for a homeless american citizen? An old white guy wrapped up in an afghan on a chair someone dropped off outside goodwill.
Early in oakland, “how you doing?”
“Been pimpin since pimpin been pimpin”
some get the money motivation, but what can someone do who never had a chance? never been told to do their homework. how much homework would you have done if there wasn’t a fight every night about it? If your mom was high on crack and your dad was in jail, you’d'a been on the streets till past dark.
i made about two hundred bucks today but i don’t feel like sharing it cuz i worked really hard for it. some communities have been shattered. no one wants to say that. they ask, why do they let themselves stay so down and out?
you don’t realize how much you’ve been taught to act by your parents and community. Do you realize how long it took to learn to go to work everyday? How many of you have jobs you hate yet you go to them day after day? Does that make any sense? Not really. but you were taught and shamed and rewarded into doing it. You were taught to think five years ahead, to think about the bills to pay at the end of the month. You were taught that you have a future. These things were taught and you did learn them. You aren’t giving yourself enough credit for what you know.