TOUGH GIRLS ALWAYS RING TWICE

Here’s the thing, I’ve had wine.  Pinot to be specific.  I’m not typically a fan of pinot (noir), but I find Malbec to have a very scary finish.  I’m a wine snob which is code word for ‘”too old to admit you’ve turned into one of those broads that really likes wine.”  It’s my little thing I do to cajole myself to write.  It works.  I hate being this honest. It’s not in my nature.  Plus I hate people.  Those two things alone are reason enough to own a gun.  I also have a fascination with guns.  Not in a Yosemite Sam, yahoo-nutbar way.  It’s more of a fascination with all things retro.  For instance, I like revolvers.  In particular, how they look and I like gangsters.  Not bullshit fake celebrity ones like Snoop.  I like old school noir characters.  I love black and white gangster stories but Boardwalk Empire might be the best neo noir ever.  I’m getting off topic (I have to reel in tangents sometimes – it’s the wine).  Actually if we’re going to get into it – in addition to film, I like gangster characters that early to mid-century novelists like Raymond Chandler or Daschiell Hammett created.  My favorite is The Big Heat by William P. McGivern, who tends to write about cops… either side of the law, I like the tough guys.  They can be unscrupulous but still are coming from the right place.  They’re loners because they have integrity and they are not afraid of what comes at them.  They drink whiskey like water, and I imagine they don’t lose any sleep.

My fascination with these characters might be the appeal of a man’s man who’s tough but has valor and truthfulness.  There’s something about people who have braved a lot but haven’t been corrupted by it.  Real gangsters are people who have been through the ringer but still remain noble.  Real gangsters work temp jobs.

WORKERS COMP AND OTHER DEBAUCHERY or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Failure

This little ditty could also be a part of what I might sub-title The Divorce Chronicles. 

I’m drinking wine.  
THIRD GLASS.  <---That is inappropriately in all caps.

I have digressed mentally from the original blog idea --  which I think was to try and get to real meaningful writing before the end of the world (which could be any day now, but still).  I’m not sure this blog is going to do that.  It will, however, catalog some rough patches in my evolution as a human, that may eventually become a memoir or color my stand up, or be impetus for a one-man-show, or at least gain some followers.  

I recently had a face time interview.  This is sort of in the realm of the ridiculous, but I went along with it because I needed a job.  Do you know these awful people that are so deceptively upbeat and positive that they just come across as grossly counterfeit at best?  Temp recruiters that’s who!  This is who “face-time” interviewed me. 

She was selling me “temp-to-perm” positions that I did not want.  I actually went out of my way, more than once, to tell her that I was not interested in getting caught up with these listless, dead-end positions that only benefit the temp agency.  She was one of those people who said catch phrases at the end of every sentence.  I could have said “I’m going to come to your house in the middle of the night and murder every inhabitant in your dwelling,” and she would have still responded “perfect.”  How corporations are so good at creating robots is beyond my comprehension.

Did I mention I love drinking wine.

So let’s go back to general mockery of me trying to get back on my feet.

I had an ugly divorce where I had to flee Hawaii.  In retrospect, that’s pretty fucking Hunter S. Thompson bad ass, if you ask me.  I landed back in Dorchester.  I happen to love Dorchester.  Not many people have written, never mind uttered those words.  The name comes from a county town of Dorset, England. The Boston area Dorchester is wonderfully mixed and urban with beautiful Victorian houses and fabulous triple deckers .  It was where I lived after college and where my art studios and exhibitions were .  It also was the last place my mother lived before she died (Fields Corner).  It is home for me.  After disembarking off of a ship and flying back to the east coast, heartbroken and penniless, I landed not only in the same neighborhood, but the same house by Patty's Pantry (St. Margaret's Parish).  I had a lot of difficulty finding work.  I didn’t even have a laptop.

Because there was a recession, I ended up going back to restaurant work.  Somewhere in here I need to mention that I always go back to office work because it is usually there for me when I need it, except when there is a recession.  So working in an upscale restaurant, I tried to take on the attitude that I was being entrepreneurial about it, as in “My Albanian grandfather was a restaurateur - I might run a small wine bar some day in the South End, so this is valid.”  But in reality, I was just waiting tables.

This wicked white trash “bar manager” who didn’t even drink wine and, who incidentally, was dumb as a bag of hammers, was doing the wine buying/selecting, the outcome of which produced a sludgy-overly-fruity-alcohol-forward selection of cheap wine (complete with white zinfandel which we used to call hooker juice, and mind you, this is way before rosé had made its comeback).

I liked working at said restaurant, but it became evident they were not going to put me on the bar, and then I got injured.