I went to the gym last night after cutting the grass and bagging around 25 bags of my grain mixture. Both of these activities are almost the same as working out. Because I pretty much know what is coming as far as the work goes. I have finally figured out exactly the way to get the weed wacker started by choking a lean gas mixture. It is just like starting a motorcycle. I always would kick the engine over a few times with the choke open to put a lean fuel mixture in the carburetor, before turning the “on” switch to the spark plug. This lean fuel mixture starts the weed wacker or motorcycle right away. Anyhow, it always seems the more I do before I get to the gym the better the time in the gym goes. In other words the more that I do the better I feel. I was feeling great at the gym –I was in my groove. I noticed a guy was checking himself out in the mirror to excess. Everybody who as ever been to the gym knows this kind of guy. He was standing in front of the mirror flexing his biceps and admiring the hell out of himself. He was a newbie that I had never seen before. He did have some muscles but not any world class competitor. I barely noticed him until he came charging across the gym screaming at me when I got on the curl machine. saying that he was still using the machine. I just looked at him and said I’m lifting in a circle and proceeded to do my set. I think that he was surprised that I was not intimidated by him and he smiled at me. When I was finishing up my third set of what I do on the machines he came up to me again when I was on the tricep machine and asked me how many sets I still had to do. I told him twenty. I saw a puzzled look on his face. When I got off of the machine he was right behind me waiting to use the machine. I put my arm on his shoulder and said ‘relax, man, nobody is going to take your cookies’. He did not know what to say or do. He sat down on the machine and hogged it like people used to do in the 70s in gyms when the whole goal was to increase body mass just to get big. Today there is more elevation of the heart rate along with toning the muscles. That is what going to the gym is all about. Maybe the guy just got out of prison. Because you just do not see people sit on a machine for half an hour any more. I remember when I was living next to the female drug addict, her boyfriends all had clothes that were out of fashion because they were in prison. When they got out, they were given back their clothes that they were wearing when they went into prison. Anyhow I went over to the field house and ran a few laps before taking a shower. On my way out of the gym I saw the guy from the 70’s and to his credit he said see you later to me. So I told him later, man. If he did just get out of prison I figured he was doing the right thing going to the gym….

I had not taught in two weeks on my days off, because I had some house maintenance duties at my dad’s house and at the rental duplex that I have. After running the designated circuit up to the third floor in my father’s house, we decided to just tear out the bad wires and three way switches for the hallway light. My dad took two three way switches and with short pieces of wire and wired them together to simulate how they would work in the wall. Then he put a tester on all the different combinations of switches as they would be in actuality and he tested them out. He showed me all this. He is the ultimate teacher because he teaches by example. Now we are going to have to replace them in the walls on the third floor and run another designated circuit to one of these switches from back at the fuse box. My dad has rented the top of his house to a lady for over forty years and I’m not sure he has ever raised the rent. Her son Bobby I have known since I was a kid. And I had not seen him in a while. He was home because he just got laid off. Instinctively I called him Bobbalutch. He used to help me deliver papers on my paper routes when I went out for football. He has a little bit of a speech impediment and talks in a real shrill voice at times. It sounds kind of like Mike Tyson’s voice. And the instant I heard his voice it brought me back to when we were kids. He never married and he lives with his mother on the second floor of my dad’s house. When we arrived he was standing in the living room without a shirt on. And we looked at each other a little pleased to see each other. He was telling me that he was the union steward where he worked for a while. He had that job for 26 years and they fired him for being late a couple of times. He assembled sports protective equipment on an assembly line. After talking about the sad state of the work world we talked about different members of our families. Memories were coming back to me in waves. I remember he had a pretty good sized box turtle when we were kids. They let that turtle roam all over that apartment. Bobby was a good worker on the paper routes and he was honest. And he took a lot of shit from other kids because of the way he talked. As I recall I was somewhat of a protector of Bobbalutch. Somehow we had a hundred different ways to say his name - Bobbylou, The Bubster, The Bean Meister. None of these names came out of malice. Some protector I was, more like a midget little mascot. But kids are brutal bastards and I tried to look after him. Now all these years later he feels like a brother to me. His mother said that he likes to drive so I told him about a job out where I live, driving school vans for handicapped kids. It was nice to see that we were brought up good because I was calling his mother Mrs. and he was calling my dad Mr.. All these memories were almost too much to bare. But life is funny like that. We are all carrying around so much information. Again I found myself trying to be a protector. Hey, I know I had my protectors growing up. That is what life is all about. The strong taking care of the weak. And we are all strong and weak at different times of our lives. And my biggest motivation is knowing that I would have been better off being bigger sooner. I have to believe that my glory years are still up ahead. I know it is not very businesslike looking back but sometimes I just cannot help myself. Suddenly I just remembered something that somebody told me at work. And that is, I was told that Sinead O’Connor sang Danny Boy so well on one of her Cd’s that no one else had any business singing it. This is the way my mind works. I think like I write, scattered all over the place. That’s how I lived, pursuing pleasure and reason separately and sometimes together. Anyhow, so much for reminiscing. The other maintenance job I had was to snake the main drain down at my rental house. It backed up in he middle of the basement and all the toilet paper dried out around the floor drain. So I figured that there were tree roots invading the drain pipe again and they needed snaked out. My dad came out to my place to help me on this job. Actually I had to go out to his place to get him and the snake. And he was telling me how to drive. Then at one point he got radical on me. And he started yelling at some yuppies when they cut in front of me. Then he went ballistic when we drove past a tattoo parlor. He told me that tattoos are all bullshit. I agreed, I told him I did not understand how all these young girls are marking up their bodies. When we got to the house he always has a new way of doing something like snaking a drain. We didn’t have a fork to get the snake around the trap so we used a big coal shovel. I always learn something working with him. After we got the drain unclogged I took him out to Construction Junction where they sell used construction materials and he started talking about his hair getting long and how he was going to have to cut it. I asked for the hundredth time why he does not use the haircut coupon that I got him and he said that was for a special occasion. That was the only thing that I ever taught him was how to cut his own hair. And always seems to come up jokingly in conversation. After we looked at all the stuff at Construction Junction I took him to the East End Food Co-op to get a fresh squeezed carrot juice. Since he has diabetes he passed on the carrot juice and bought a bottled ginger water. I could not talk him into going to a talk at the botanical gardens about a guy who took photos of a lot of the steep staircases at and around Pittsburgh. So I drove him home. And, I was going to write a little bit about what we ate today but I ate too much the night before and am sick of eating, and thinking about food. Any book about nutrition should include a little disgust about the whole notion of eating in general. So this is my silent protest….

In this job market people are droppin’ from their jobs like flies. My neighbor where I grew up lost his job after 26 years on a production line where he made sports equipment. Electricians and carpenters at work are going out the door. People have mortgages and bills piling up. Someone who got laid off asked me what I thought they should do and I said that I did not know. But I wanted to tell him that you can almost eliminate food as an expense. If you buy a 50 pound bag of oatmeal and stick it in the corner of the kitchen, it can liberate yourself from the fear of starving. Just knowing that you can eat that bag for months and even years. The kids are not going to go for it but anybody can switch their thinking to eat the same food everyday at almost no cost. The Asian culture eats rice everyday and we eat bread everyday as a staple. So adding a simple food like oatmeal everyday is taking a staple food to another level. And when you buy it in 50 pound bags you make the cost of it almost negligible. Any cook book will supply the recipes for making yogurt at home. So with that, the infinite combinations of raw oatmeal and yogurt you can come up with to eat, will take you off the whole food grid that we go through everyday in the three square meals a day habit. If you are not working, your first instinct is to simplify. First you start turning off the lights and turning down the thermostat. So reducing the expense of living is natural. You will be surprised to see how healthy and cheaply one can eat with a staple like oatmeal. Simply taking some milk and fruit and mixing it with some raw oatmeal will make a really tasty and quick meal. Remember to add a little sugar or honey and don’t overdo it with the oatmeal, around a quarter cup per serving. There will be no cooking and very little clean up when you wash out the blender. I know that I mentioned these eating options earlier in the book. But since we are accumulating an army of unemployed in this time and place, people are going to have to get creative to survive and live without traditional work. We still are going to have to take care of business. Only it is not going to be in a 40 hour work week. At least when we are all unemployed time will be on our side. The only possessions we will have to worry about are food, clothes and shelter. When we are all unemployed at least will have that in common. We will have time to get the house and car in super shape. And we will have to dust off the library card and check-out all those how-to–do books. And we will have to teach ourselves how to do everything. I wonder if I will be able to give myself a root canal. Do-it-yourself surgery might be on the horizon….

Recently there has been a lot of news coverage about the essay questions added to the SAT administered to every high school student across the country. Somehow this will determine if high school kids will be able to hack it in college. I cannot understand how this is even newsworthy. My first impression to all this hoopla about test taking and the people who make a living making and administering these tests was, that they should all be banished to the real working world. Where they would get dirty, have to breathe offensive substances, and live in the work world where things do not always follow what it says in school books. I say that a test is only something that puts limitations on the potential of any human being. And to the test makers of the world I have something to say to you. And that is get off your comfortable self-satisfied ass and do some real work. Give up your seat in the library and give it to somebody who deserves it. Like a plumber or a mechanic. They deserve a rest in the stacks among the books. People who want to put limitations on others are they not cripples in a sense? And who cares what school anybody goes to? School is just a start in knowing anything of any value. Its only a beginning so why do we have to put the status symbol of a test score with the so called good schools? What school is not good? How many students have given up all ambition of ever pursuing higher education because they did poorly on a test when they were 16 years old? The parasites and leeches who make a living making tests that say, “no, sorry your not good enough”. I guess you could say the same derogatory things about guidance counselors who are supposed to guide young people in career paths. I can’t even remember meeting one of these people. I just hope that young people today do not choose to pursue something as irrelevant as being a guide to young people. I honor all the kids who did not let these guidance counselors interfere with their dreams. And I really respect the children who did not let test scores or test themselves interfere with their plans on the future. In a way the computer has really leveled the playing field in the world because it has invaded all the traditional vo-tech occupations. And anybody who has access to one can pretty much educate themselves. Many people fell through the cracks in high school like insects, they were not even on the radar screen of the test makers and test givers and the guidance counselors and their disciples. Then some of them rose from the cracks and rose to heights these test makers will never know. Maybe they rose through the school of hard knocks or maybe they were refugees from community college. Any money they earned was more valuable than that of these pseudo ivory tower lackeys. And any work done or accomplishments achieved were greater.