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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Man, I am wiped.
As many of you already know, I’m not exactly what you’d call a ‘morning person’. Or an ‘afternoon person’, really. I’m more of an ‘after-dinner person’. Or perhaps a ‘quarter after ten at night person’. Sometimes even an ‘up till three in the morning for no damned good reason person’.
But ‘morning person’? Decidedly not.
And that’s why I’m so poopered right now. You see, the wifely one and I are having some work done on the house. It seems to involve a troupe of large, burly men hanging around our living room comparing ass-crack plumage. I think it may have something to do with pliers, too, and possibly caulk. It’s all over my head, frankly.
(Except for the ass-cracks, unfortunately. At least if those were over my head, I wouldn’t have to stare at the damned things. Man, I could have gone my whole life without seeing that.)
Anyway, the pomp and pageantry of the plumbers cracks is not, sadly, the main issue I have with our current situation. Rather, the problem is that these cracks, and the cranky asses they’re attached to, show up on our porch at the very ass-crack of dawn. Or thereabouts. Before eight am, anyway, and that’s damned early enough.
Now, I can handle this sort of early morning chicanery once in a while. I have nine am meetings twice a week, and — as much as I hate them, and anything that’s said in them, and anyone who speaks during them, and the very fact that I’m awake to witness them — I am able to cope with them. Twice a week. But that’s my limit.
So, now that I have to not only be awake, but showered, dressed, and marginally functional while herds of carpenters and plumbers roam the sweeping hallways of my house like so many flannel-clad wildebeest, I’m struggling a bit. This is the second full week of this nonsense, and I’m not sure how much more I can take. I finally let go this afternoon, and took an impromptu and unplanned nap on my keyboard at work. Lemme tell you, folks, you simply don’t know ‘tired’ until you’ve woken up at your desk, with drool on your space bar and an ‘Escape’ key up your nose. Yeeks.
Anyway, those guys oughta be done pretty soon. I’m hoping to actually get some rest this weekend, assuming I make it that far. On the other hand, my mother-in-law is coming into town on Friday, so there’s just one more reason to get all sleepless and agitated. At least she’s not likely to hang around the living room with her ass creeping out of her pants. Not before her second glass of wine after dinner, anyway. Double yeeks. Double yeeks, indeed.
Permalink | 8 CommentsYou know what burns my biscuits?
(Wait. Hold on. Who the hell am I, Flo from Alice? Granny Frigging Clampett? Start this shit over. Take two… and… action!)
You know what gets my boxers in a knot?
(Much better. Let’s continue.)
Anyway, among the myriad of nerve-tweaking things that the assorted cluebags around me do on a regular basis is this: many of them say things that they don’t really mean.
Now, I realize that sometimes it can’t be avoided. Occasionally, you have to pretzel up the truth a little to save someone’s feelings, or preserve your job, or avoid giving away where the bodies are hidden. And that’s fine — I’m down with that.
But there are also times when people just lie, bald-faced and remorseless, for no damned good reason. And that pisses me off. Bald-faced skinbags, anyway.
I’ll give you an example. Just today, at the office, I told someone that I was going to try tackling a particularly thorny and complicated problem. Something that I and others have put off for a while now, because you’d have to be insane, drunk, and possessed by the ghost of chubby Anna Nicole Smith to even think about getting yourself ass-deep into this train wreck of a project.
(Yeah, yeah, I know — Anna Nicole’s not dead. But ‘Big Anna‘ is, right? Surely now that she’s back to sex kitten sveltitude, she’d never let herself go like that again, right? She’s a smart girl, after all. Right?
Heh. I almost got through typing that with a straight face. Hee! Oh, I just slay myself sometimes.)
Anyway, I mentioned that I was gonna take one for the team, and put my rep, my job, and my sanity on the line, so that the freeloading assmagnets in the office can get back to playing Minesweeper and picking lint out of their tummy buttons.
(Okay, okay, I kid. Actually, most of the people at the old workplace are just peachy — sweet, competent, helpful bunch of folks, really. And I don’t even know what ‘assmagnet’ means, exactly. So I take all that back.
Of course, the ‘lint thing’ stands. Seriously, I love those guys, but I am so not shaking their hands. Ew.)
All right, back to the friggin’ story already.
So, I mentioned my plan to tackle this convoluted ball of crap, and do you know what the guy I was talking to said? Can you imagine what his response was? Come on — take a wild guess, just for turds and titters.
No? All right, I’ll tell you. He said:
‘More power to you.‘
‘More power to you.’ ‘More power’. ‘To you’. Douchenougat.
Because, you see, the bastard didn’t mean it. It’d be fine to sincerely wish me more power, but that’s not what he meant. And that’s why he’s a big fat porkslapper in my book.
And what’s worse, nobody ever means ‘more power to you’. It’s never on the up-and-up; it’s just one of those horrible, nasty things you say when you want to sound nice, but you don’t want to be nice. Like ‘Hey, nice try, anyway‘, or ‘Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be‘. Or even ‘It’s okay — it happens to every guy sometimes‘. Bitches.
Well, I’ve had enough of this nonsense. If you’re gonna say something, then I think you oughta damned well mean it. Next time somebody tells me ‘more power to ya, buddy‘, then I want some goddamned follow-through. Give me a promotion, or hire me a henchman or something. Gimme a seat on the city council — at least I could get some potholes fixed, or rezone my living room as a pants-optional biergarten or something. That’s the sort of thing they do on councils, right?
Ah, well. All this bitching has settled me down a bit. Sure, that guy can still go bump his own ugly, but I think I’m pretty well over it. Suddenly, I’m more interested in strapping on some lederhosen and grabbing a beer. Or shoveling some tar into that hole in the street out front. Man, this power shit really goes to your head fast, huh?
Permalink | 2 CommentsWe have an appraiser coming to look at the house tomorrow. Some sort of refinancing shenanigans or other, I think. I’m not so good with details.
But it’s got me a little bit nervous — see, I know there are people out there called ‘appraisers’, and then there are people called ‘estimators’, or something like that. And from what I understand, what you really want is for one of those people to believe that your house is worth several tens of thousands more than it really is, and you want the other one to think that your place is a dilapidated crapshack, valued far less than its current worth. But I’ve forgotten which one is which.
Maybe I should pay attention to those ‘details’, after all. Meh.
Because now I’m all confused — my wife told me to ‘get the house ready’ for this appraiser person tomorrow, but I’m not quite sure what that means. Should I dust, and mop, and put away my boxers that are draped over the television? You know, make the place look nice, wash the assprints off the walls, that kind of thing? Or should I go the other way, and rough the place up a bit, maybe drop some matches on the couches and piss on the carpets? I’m just not sure what I want here.
(But I need to figure it out soon. I really need to pee, and I don’t want to waste it, if I’m supposed to be bringing the value down. Nothing says ‘cut-rate flophouse’ like a floorful of piddle. This stuff could be liquid gold.)
Anyway, I suppose I’ve got to figure this out pretty damned quick. Maybe I can half-and-half it — clean up the living room, set fire to the dining room, wipe down the kitchen, but stream water from the sink onto the porch. That way, I can get a feel for which way I was supposed to go, and just show the appraiser the right set of rooms. That kind of ridiculous shit works on sitcoms all the time, right?
Of course, there’d still be my wife to contend with, and I’d be guaranteed to have gotten half the house wrong. I suppose I’d better ask a few more questions before I get crazy and pee on anything tonight.
Hmmm. How much trouble would that sentence have kept me out of over the years? Damn.
Permalink | 4 CommentsYou know, I don’t often do the traditional, ‘linky comment’ blog thing, but I just couldn’t pass this up:
It seems that some of the unsavory elements out in Oklahoma have been watching their Simpsons. They’ve finally flipped and gone into the grease-stealing business. And apparently, they’re pretty good at it — they’ve got five thousand pounds of the goop already.
Just wait until they decide to hit the local elementary school, and run into Groundskeeper Willie while they’re siphoning off his ‘retirement grease’. Ah, good times, good times.
I’m certain this must be a sign of the apocalypse; I’m just not quite sure which one. I’ll be on the lookout for rivers of blood and that locust thing, though. Just in case.
Permalink | 2 CommentsHey, all — a bit of a late post tonight (or technically, tomorrow morning… well, technically, I suppose it’s ‘today morning’, but that’s just splitting hairs, now isn’t it?), but I wanted to tell you one quick thing that happened to me today.
(Okay, so maybe it’s not a ‘quick thing’. I’ve never really been ‘quick’ about telling you folks anything, come to think of it. Still, what I said up there in the last paragraph has a better ring to it than ‘Let me blather on for a couple of thousand words about next to nothing before finally wrapping up this train wreck and letting you get back to your life‘, now, doesn’t it?)
Okay, so anyway, here’s the thing: I woke up this morning at a few minutes past ten, to the sound of a lawnmower. Now, normally. this wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Ten-plus in the am is plenty long to sleep, and I’ve got no special aversion or allergy to the sound of a good Briggs and Stratton mower.
Unfortunately, though, as I shook my drooling self awake and gathered my wits about me, I determined that this was my Briggs and Stratton engine providing the concert. And that’s both ‘B’ and ‘S’, in my book.
You see, it’s my job around the house to mow the grass. My wife, she’ll whack the weeds (not euphemistically speaking, of course), and tend the flowers, and generally see to it that the lawn in is good order. But mowing — that’s my burden, and I’m happy to shoulder it.
Except… last week, I missed my window. On Saturday, I put off the job, thinking (and saying, too, as I recall) that Sunday would be just as good a day — perhaps even better — for the mowing extravaganza to occur. Only, as happens so often, it rained on Sunday before I could get down to my grassy business. And I get home pretty damned late most weeknights, so the grass had to wait a whole ‘nother week before getting its trim.
My wife, to her credit, was largely silent throughout this period. I caught neither hell nor shit nor grief during the week. However, it was made perfectly, crystal clear to me that the grass was to be mowed this weekend, come hell, high water, or hungry, hungry hippos.
And then, of course, I hurt my leg.
(And a big bunch of humbled, amazed and grateful thanks to all of you who wished me well after my calf-snapping experience. I’m feeling much better today, though still limping — yesterday, though, was a hobbled, hellish hoohah of cripplehood. I was not so happy, let me tell you. Now, better. Then, cranky. Let’s just focus on ‘now’, if that’s all right, eh?)
Anyway, that’s why it was a bit of a shock — and dread-inducing fear — to be awakened to the sound of my own lawnmower, perhaps being used in anger against me. As it turns out, my wife — as always, really — was cool about the whole thing. Still, even after my injury, I said I’d mow the lawn, no matter what. Never mind whether I really meant that I’d mow the lawn this weekend, or believed that I’d be well enough to mow the lawn — I said I’d mow the lawn, and that’s what I intended to do, or break off my leg trying. So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when my wife came back into the house, the dirty deed already done.
But, as I said, she was all cool and shit. She knew it would have been a struggle for me, in my current condition, and she took one for the team. That’s just one reason why she’s the shiznit, you know? Never mind the fact that she still made me go shopping with her for hours this afternoon for bathroom vanities and accessories, or that I had to carry many of said ass-drooping heavy accessories up the thirty-plus stairs to our house. At least I got to do all of that (which I might expand on tomorrow, if I remember) on a fully-awake brain and a stretched-out, limbered-up (though still crippled) body. And that’s miles better than oozing out of bed, into a pair of shorts, and mowing the damned grass. So, really, I still owe her one. Cool.
Anyway, that’s my story for now — it’s bedtime, and I simply don’t have the mental bandwidth or the clock time to tell you abou the other things that went on this Saturday, from the shopping ordeal to the dinner out with friends to all the shit I caught for my recent gimpiness.
(Okay, so that’s all you’re likely to hear, now or later, about the hell I’m catching for having a bad leg. It’s like nobody ever limped before, in the history of mankind. Cut me some frigging slack, goddamit! Bitches!)
So, for now, I’m gonna limp off to bed. All in all, it turned out to be a pretty good day, which was not what I expected when that mower engine woke me up right outside my window. But in the end, all is well, and hey — now I don’t have to mow the grass for another seven days or more. Maybe I should snap something in my leg every week!
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