Where have I been? Not doing much, I'm shamelessly not ashamed to say.
Okay, I got that janitor job at The Georgia Hotel — which incidentally lasted only a couple months — but other than that I haven't done anything significantly serious or cool. That much-improved but still skeezy hotel is a dysfunctional family almost Maury Pauvich in caliber, is part of the reason I didn't last longer there (also if was outright gross); I don't do family anymore, not even for money. Any job or place lived in that drives an alcoholic to drink is bad news. Lately my building has been trying to drive me to drink, in the form of a short-fused prison-thug of new neighbor, but even so my new apartment is heaven compared to the last place I lived in, and of course the loading dock and the freeway I was homeless at out in the Land of Sweet Breezes (the Northwest industrial area).
It's been just over a year since I moved in, and all I've really done is play video games on my cheaply souped-up Craigslist computer (forget FreeGeek — I don't get along too well with nerds, for some reason). I was going to get all serious with Central City Concern, but in the end my simmering consternation and disdain for the outfit over-rode opportunism, and I gave them the finger in a colorful voicemail rant. I've been saying this forever, but social service non-profits by and large suck ... just like much of subsidized housing does; for all the valiant efforts put forth to combat poverty, it's been at best hardly any smarter or more successful than it is to patch boots with that Shoe Goo® crap. After I bailed out of the hotel job I went back to canning, supplementing that with labor gigs from Craigslist.
Taht is, until the bottom suddenly dropped out on the labor market, one mid-November weekend, when the year's rain began in earnest. Which was fine, sort of, because I was getting mostly moving gigs, and handling other people's belongings sucks — just give me a shovel and tell me where to dig or fill, is the kind of labor work I prefer. Especially if it all pays the same! However, I'm been trying out something new, which is what my title pertains to. I'm still canning, albeit with diminished zeal, but I've also taken up flying a sign by a freeway. I won't throw any numbers out, but its returns are consistently better than canning's. I don't feel all that lousy doing it, too, like I feared I would at first. Guess I'm just a parasite at heart after all, eh?
lol Whatever, it's probably going to get me a janitor job at the local stadium, where Portland's esteemed Timbers play. I really don't care much for soccer; my friends in Switzerland tried to get me into it but ultimately failed even after successfully roping my into a brief stint as the village's Keeper of the Seven Goals ... which I executed with grand aplomb, if I may be indulged. Regardless, if the job is one I can keep, and manages to provide me with an average of twenty to twenty-four hours a week, I'll finally be able to pay back my two super-awesome <3 friends, buy a camera for my on-hiatus culinary blog, build my cat a couple nice trees and me a middlin'-badass gaming system ... and eventually save up for that boat or RV, or WTFever I'll be leaving this town in years hence.
Did I mention a cat? That's going to be whole other post, but her name's Ellie (not my choice) and she's young and thinks I'm a lame-ass who occasionally is fun to play with. This postscript is to explain “I fly Bleifrei”. When I was that lucky teen living in der Schweiz I used to see this beautiful key-lime-pie Citröen 2CV puttering around the area. It had a duck cruising above its undercarriage on little fart clouds, beside it the words in the title; it means “I fly unleaded” in English. It's a sort of inside joke, because I'm flying a sign in a miasma of unleaded (and diesel!) exhaust. I wonder how difficult it would be to get one of those cars here in The States...
