Idle Ranting, Revisited

Now, I know not everyone in the world is a math genius, and the people who suffer from morbid obesity are probably less than genius (just saying if you get that fat, you’re probably not too swift…). But it seems to me like the answer to the title would be rather straight forward (and thus easy for some of the slower folk out there to get): clogged arteries, high blood pressure, heart attack, untimely death. So when I saw my morbidly obese neighbor family coming home with dinner, it shouldn’t have surprised me that it was a garbage bag full of fried chicken.

They’re all large: mom, dad, college-attending-daughter, and their son who I only see leave to go get food from the local fast food joints. Probably not all of them are morbidly obese, but at least mom and son are, the other two are just really big. Sure they have friends over a good amount, and a decent number of them are also tankers, but it really didn’t seem necessary for their lazy fat son to bring home a garbage bag full of fried chicken. I’m not even joking. It must have been a 50 piece or something. And to top it off, he carried in three 12 packs of Pepsi. I can forgive beer, but soda!! It’s only a matter of time before they die. And of course before they go they’ll be sucking up tax money at the hospital with ventilators, doctors time, two hospital beds a piece.

These will get better…

Over the past year, I’ve become something of a fast food connoisseur. I work in Downtown Brooklyn, and I have ready access to all types of fast food. You name it, we have it (unless it’s one of those weird dirty southern places like Sonic). Being a fast food connoisseur has opened my eyes to many things, one of which is that each fast food chain attracts a different type of customer.

Wendy’s seems like a somewhat white fast food stop. After all, it’s named after a ginger and last I checked, gingers only come in white. Of course Downtown Brooklyn changes this a bit, but it still doesn’t seem like it should attract a ghetto thugging clientèle - that’s for the likes of White Castle and Popeye’s.

Today while I was enjoying my number six, straight thuggin’ walked in and gave me quite a start. His hair was picked out into a gigantic afro, and he managed to forget his pic in the back of his head. It was not this that caused me to stir, nor was it the fact that he was accompanied by two women who he kindly referred to as ‘bitch’, but it was his shirt. His shirt didn’t say anything vulgar, but it was vulgar in and of itself. It was a simple white button up with light periwinkle pinstripes.

The weather today was nice. Not overly warm, something in the low 60’s/high 50’s. Warm enough to wear a spring jacket, or a shirt with something underneath, but ghetto thuggin’ decided that it was warm enough to wear a button up shirt - unbuttoned. It would have been one thing if he was wearing a beater underneath, but he wasn’t. He was wearing nothing underneath, and he was stomping through Wendy’s telling his ‘bitch’ to give him a fry with nasty little chest hairs exposed for everyone to see.

There are laws that you must wear shirts in public restaurants, but apparently as long as something covers your shoulders, that’s enough. Dude, put on a shirt.

So far this has proved to be a rather eventful year, and I’ve no idea where to start. I do nothing at my job. I got engaged, but not before I got her pregnant. I’m about to be a father - due May Day. I’m eating venison right now. And to top it off, I’m about to get out of this ugly, noisy, smelly city and move to nice, sunny, warm Peach State right before my birthday.

Woo ha. Who would have thought I could/should be a parent? I’ll throw some pictures up when he gets here, but don’t worry, for as sparse as this blog has become, I will not litter it with baby pictures. Maybe baby shit, but not fun cuddly baby stuff.

I took a bit of a vacation this past week. To be honest I was a bit apprehensive coming back as I figured my computer would be missing (my neighbor got broken into two weeks ago). Thankfully everything was intact upon my return.

However, there was one thing awry. As I drove by the door to the building and parked, I noticed a flyer on the door. Usually flyers are stuffed around the knob and the jamb, but this was taped onto the window of the door. My initial thought was condemnation. Homelessness. It wouldn’t surprise me. These apartments just look nice.

I walked up to the door with a dog on one arm while the other was hugging a dirty bag of laundry. It was a note from ConEd - actually it was more like a bill for $1,189.00 for the gas for the apartment. The landlord neglected to pay this bill - not the first time according to the other tennants - and ConEd was going to have to turn off the gas which heats the hot water. No hot water.

It’s a lovely little hole this apartment 

I live above a pizza place - decent pizza. When I was working on the apartment I’d often go downstairs and grab a slice, but my first real introduction to the place was dropping off an extra set of keys. (The super lost the set he made me when I signed the lease, so I made an extra copy and was told to leave it at the pizza place.)

The super told me to ask for Johnny, and tell him these were extra keys for the apartment upstairs.

Me: "Hey, I’m looking for Johnny. I got some keys for him."
Johnny: "There’s no Johnny here. There’s a Jonathan."
Me: "Oh, sorry man. The Super told me to ask for Johnny. Here’s the keys for upstairs. He had me make an extra set…"

He seemed okay to me. Obviously confrontational, but perhaps that’s just his Albanianess. (I’ve known two Albanians and they’re both the same way - yes I’m drawing a stereotype, sorry if your Albanian.) I had no idea how confrontational Johnathan really was. One afternoon as I was stripping ancient paint off the floor, I heard some banging and shouting coming from the pizza place below. I paused, listened and heard the noise move out onto the street. Sure enough it was some half-Asian guy fighting with Johnathan, and a handful of people trying to break it up. The Asian guy was yelling, cursing, and spitting blood while Johnathan - who some how managed to get his shirt off - was telling him to never come back.

This is not the only instance. I was walking my dogs around eleven - right when the pizza place opens up - and I see a Hispanic guy come out of the pizza place rather quickly, obviously in a huff. Not far behind him comes Johnathan - cursing at him in Spanish. The guy tries to just walk away and Johnathan runs back into the shop and shouts in the door "Take that pie fuckin’ out of the oven." He follows the Spanish guy down the sidewalk, calls him a queer in Spanish and then spits on the other guys neck. A big gross one. The Hispanic guy swears at Johnathan, and starts walking away again. Jonathan runs back into the pizza shop, asks the guy working if "He’s got it," and then takes off running down the sidewalk most likely to fight the Hispanic guy.

Who knew a pie could be so confrontational?

So we finally moved into our new apartment. Sanded down the floors, put down new linoleum, washed and painted the walls. An all out cleansing attack.

The man who lived here before, lived here for ten years - until he was evicted. According to the other tenants in the building, he was a sketchy little Arab cab driver with a big old beard. More often than not he would sit in the kitchen with the lights off, watching his mini black-and-white television that he left on the table, with the door open eye-ball-fucking people as they would go up and down the stairs. He never spoke to anyone, just eye-ball-fucked.

It is doubtful he owned a vaccuum, or if he even owned one, that he knew how to use it. There was dirt everywhere, and we spent a day or two running a small file between the cracks in the floorboards bringing up years of black dirt and lint. The cupboards were full of not dishes, or food, but cans of coffee and unpaid bills to ConEdison, as well as a 1,800 dollar bill to Verizon. (Why Verizon would continue to give the man phone service after he hadn’t paid 500 dollars is beyond me, but apparently collections was trying to sort it out.)

To top off his highclass shittastic dirtiness, he left the bathroom in total disarray. The drawers were empty except for some rusty disposable razors that hadn’t seen use in five years, and there was a tube of black hair dye on top of the mirror - apparently he had given up on trying to keep back the grays. The thing that really got me about the bathroom is the yellow stains on the wall. At first I thought it was piss; maybe he missed the toilet a few times (which had no seat mind you - did he take it with him?), but then I realized that this yellow stain was all over the walls. No way in hell this guy shot the cieling. But I have no clue what it was.

Things are clean now, and the crack-den-that-was is finally habitable. Just hoping that Crazy Cabbi stays away.

So the Girlfriend and I are moving into a new apartment. It’s more a crack den than anything else, but it’s cheaper. The neighbors are interesting. The landlord is a bum, and the super is a drug addict from Vietnam. Yes, there will be stories coming from here.

Also, if anyone comes here, leave a comment. I’m trying to get them to work. Fucking Haloscan moved to this stupid JS Kit shit and now comments are all funky. Seriously, what’s wrong with just a comment. I don’t want a poll, or stars, just a fucking comment.

To be honest, I am not much of a gangster. I never tried to be in High School, and something tells me I never will try. Not only do I not act like a gangster, but I do not look like one either. In fact, most of my kids think I am the exact opposite: a dirty hippie.

"Mister, are you a hippie?"
"Mister, do you surf?"
"Mister, do you ride a skateboard?"

So when I was called a gangster I was a bit taken. It was the class directly after lunch, and with mice falling through the ceiling, and the general school rule of no food in the classroom, I was really on my students not to be eating this period. Of course, some fat-ass mommy’s-princess bitch think she’s special. She is exempt from my rules, the schools rules, and probably anyone’s rules. As I said, she is special.

On her desk she had a bag of cookies. I told her to put them away. She said no. I took them. She looked at me in disbelief. Suddenly she was awed that some one enforced a rule and took her cookies. She was left struggling for words momentarily, and then she comes out with this wonderful bit:

Fat-Ass: "Mistah, you think you a gee or sometin’?  Cause I know you didn’t just steal my cookies."
Me: "No, I didn’t steal your cookies. I asked you to put them away, you couldn’t do that, and so now I’m taking them."
Fat-Ass: "Can I get ‘em back at the end?"
Me: "No. You should have eaten them in the cafeteria. You can’t eat them anywhere else. That’s why we have mice and rats."
Fat-Ass Friend 1: "Oh mistah, you a fuckin’ Starvin Marvin. Stealin’ students food."

At this point I’d had enough and so, walked away. Cookies in hand and I have to admit, they were pretty tasty.

I grew up in rural Upstate New York. Rodents were a common occurrence, be they in the house somewhere, running through the leaves or pushing up mounds of dirt in the middle of your lawn. They were never much of a nuisance, and I got used to them so when I came down to this cluster-fuck of people, concrete and pollution, the rats did not surprise me. The fact that people gathered on train platforms and watched and giggled at the rats playing on the tracks did surprise me.

So when my students were in an uproar about a mouse today, I could not seem to grasp their anxiety. All their lives they’ve seen big nasty rats playing on train tracks and rummaging through their garbage. Why then was a small mouse in the classroom something that put them all in an uproar. I understand that a mouse falling from a crack in the ceiling and landing on your assignment would be a bit frightening - it’d scare the shit out of me real quick for sure - but the students just could not seem to get over it. The best part about it is that the mouse was probably poisoned and tracked poison and nastiness all over my students papers that are now sitting on my table. Fucking awesome little mice.

This past summer I made the mistake of slamming a girl with a two year old kid. It was fun, and well worth the experience - except for her monster hangers. I think she is the only girl I have ever met that becomes less attractive as more of her clothes come off.

I moved, far away, and told her I really wanted nothing to do with her. Blah, blah, I’m sorry, I need to find a job, and it’s not here. No you can’t move with me. Blah blah.

Occasionally she calls, and I don’t pick up, but yesterday she sent me a text message.

"U know I don’t know if u understand how much u have ruined my life! I’m going to be losing my son bc of u. U might think I’m some crazy girl but you have a son wh"

 Nothing else, just that. I don’t have a son with her, and to be quite honest, if she’s losing her son to it’s stoner father, it’s her own damn fault - I just don’t have the heart to tell her.