Finally, a weekend home

I finally decided that I should take a trip home. Here is a short journal type thing about my weekend.

1.28.06  12:00 AM
I am on my way home for the first time in months. I just arrived in the Valley airport and suddenly remember why I hate to fly. This whole place smells vaguely of body odor and Pez, but at least the wi-fi works. The TSA line is always an experiment in humiliation, especially when the guy at the x-ray machine decides there is something interesting in your computer bag. He probably thought he saw some kiddie porn in the CDRs.

1.28.06   1:59 PM
The gal sitting next to me in the plane looks evil. I mean she really looks evil, like she has a spellbook in her handbag and a bottle of ‘eye of bat’ hidden in her……..nevermind.  The man sitting next to me over-flowed his seat and pressed his flesh against me, pressing me into the evil woman, who gave me an evil look and pulled away as if I might accidentally infect her with a little nice. (As if THAT could ever happen.)

1.28.06     5:00 PM
I got an isle seat this time and the lady that took the seat next to mine is about the size of a hatbox, leaving me relative comfort. The lady in the seat next to the window seems to think I am stalking her because I let her get on the plane in front of me. Avoiding any possibility of eye contact, she stares out the window intently. I am often surprised that I can scare the hell outta people by doing something nice.

1.29.06    7:00 PM
Just to make coming back home fun, my stepTroll decided to wreck MY car on my first morning back and then drove it another 15 miles just to make sure that things were good and broken. This is going to be a mind-altering event for him because he is going to have to pay for towing, repairs, and new tires before I will let him have his license back.

• 7:00 AM

The stepTroll is still alive. He dodged a bullet by admitting he fucked up shortly after he got the car towed home. He cried and all that other emotional bullshit that he does so well, but he is still going to have to get the car fixed. Sometimes I love being a Troll. Now I have an excuse to be a hard ass and get away with it.

• 5:00 PM

Uneventful day. Been hanging around doing nothing until the MrsTroll pointed out that I have not posted.

I’ll let you all know how the trip back to the valley goes.

DRAMA!

I know people that seem to thrive on drama. They always have a crisis going on in their lives and usually have a crisis waiting in the wings just in case the present crisis fails to amuse. They seem to believe that without a crisis going on they have nothing to live for, no reason for being.

Some people I have known are almost compulsive about crisis. One of the best I have heard lately is an acquaintance that set it up so that when the present crisis fell through, it automatically generated a bigger and far more exciting crisis. Now that’s a slick bit of thinking ahead, ain’t it? (You know that you are a thinker when you even organize your crisis.)

Orienting your present crisis around family or sexual relations guarantees interest from others, making all that drama worthwhile. We all love to gossip about family and friends that we don’t like. (Or ones that we DO like but don’t like just for entertainment purposes.)

Drama is all about attention. The bigger the drama, the more attention you get. It is a direct relationship.

I can do without the drama. I am getting old, and the idea of getting all excited about other people acting stupid does not have the appeal it once did. Let them screw up their lives in peace. They will do it with or without my help. It’s their life to screw up, after all, not mine. I have done a fine job of screwing up my life; I don’t feel a need for more.

I have very limited involvement with families outside my immediate one, and we do not do the drama thing. There is one stepTroll that wants to be a drama queen, but we just kinda ignore it and it passes like a single zit on a teenagers nose.

I am sure that certain people think I am nuts, but I really don’t think I like the drama thing anymore. I live a rather boring life nowdaze, working, going home, sleeping, repeating, and riding my bike alone in the weekends.

But I do keep thinking. I can’t seem to stop that. I think that I think while I am thinking about thinking. When I think, I want to write it. When I write, you usually get to see it in a shortened form, brought forth from my fingers after mulling about in the vacuous spaces between my ears and spewed onto the screen in the wee hours in the morning.

It don’t have to be earth shattering, enlightening, or even funny. It does, however, have to get out somehow or it will stay inside and grow and grow until it grows beyond reason and could possible explode. We don’t want that.

You don’t want troll brains all over your computer, do you? (I hear they can really gum up your hard drive. Kinda like pizza. Advice; don’t ever suggest that someone e-mail you a slice of pizza. Take it from someone who knows.)

Where was I going with this? Oh Yeah….

I realize that there is a human need for drama, but do people have to build their entire lives around it? I don’t think so. Let us all attempt to keep things in perspective and get over the emotional part of living with other people and get on with the actual living.

The actual part is really kinda fun.

Being alive gives me something to bitch about, and bitching about it lets me know that I am alive.

20 Reasons I don't want to live in the Texas Tropics

1- The Birds; These awful creatures like to make video game sounds and are annoying as hell. When I go outside I find myself expecting Super Mario to start chasing me with a mushroom. They delight in shitting on you, and then laugh. (I think they are agents of gnomes.) Seagulls scream at each other and laugh at people like a group of out of control teenagers. Pelicans look like demons, and hide the fact with ungainly movement and comic walks.

2- The humidity makes going outside feel like walking into soup, a thin unsatisfying soup that wets your clothes but not your palette. I love the water, but not when it is just vapor until it touches my skin, where it condenses into a film that makes me feel slimy and unclean. On a humid day I usually feel like a mobile mold ranch.

3- Low pay  (I would be lucky to make a third of what I make now.) The pay scale here SUCKS. And from what I have been seeing, talented worker persons pretty much have to be imported from other areas. The workers that do live here don’t seem have much in the way of ethics, skills, or a sense of the right thing to do. They don’t call in, they arrive late, sneak out early, sleep on the job, and just take days off because they feel like it. Then they wonder why they are not employed more and blame it on ‘The Man’. (‘The Man’ being anyone who actually holds a job for more than, let’s say, a year.)

4- There is some strange aspect to the culture here, like slavery just ended a decade or so ago. They don’t call you ‘Massa’, but sure they do call you ‘Sir’, and ‘Mister’. It seems like a polite society, but it seems like a scared society at the same time. This bicultural situation seems like an uneasy truce for some reason that I have been unable to put my finger on and don’t really want to know more about.

5- I don’t like to eat fish. I don’t eat seafood. That makes me seem like an alien to those who like it here and eat that shit and claim to love it. Eating shrimp reminds me of eating pencil erasers. (Don’t ask. I may have won that bet, but I shit funny for a week.)

6- I don’t speak Spanish. Bilingual is the norm here. Half my day is listening to people jabber at me in a language that I don’t understand. When they figure out that you don’t understand, they take advantage of that and pretend they don’t speak English. I caught one of these fakers that actually speaks FOUR LANGUAGES, yet pretended he did not speak English. English is his first language.

7- Drivers here consider the shoulder (AKA; the breakdown lane) a waste of taxpayers’ dollars and drive on it as much as on the road. They expect you to drive on the shoulder when they want to pass you, making things interesting for bicyclists and others pulled off to the side to take a phone call or change a tire.

8- Speeding. Everyone here travels at least ten miles per hour over the posted speed limit, and if you are not going at least that fast, you are in danger of being run over by a beat up 1986 Buick with primer gray patches and bald tires. If you don’t pull into the shoulder, they will get as close to you as physically possible without actually ramming your car in the ass.

9- It is so fucking hot! It was in the 70s before sunup in the first week of March! (New phrase; Not a snowballs chance in South Texas in Spring.) The summers here must be brutal. I long not to experience the summers here firsthand.

10- Local Female news anchors tend to look transgender. I spend the whole Newscast looking for an Adams apple and miss the content. The males all look either horribly gay or too strange looking to be in any other market. Some days watching local TV news is like watching a geek show. “ Honey! Come watch! That guy with the twisted mouth is doing the news! He is sooo funny! Watch when he says ‘Rio Grande Valley! He looks like his tongue is trying to strangle his nose!”

11- Third world meets technoland.  Most people here equate technology with magic. I would not be surprised to see phones with rotary dials in some homes. I have overheard conversations involving fear of things like the Internet and cell phones. It is a widely held belief here that the Government cares enough that they actually monitor where everyone is and what they say. It does not matter that you would have to have at least one dedicated government employee for each person in this country in order to do what they think the Government is doing. They believe that the Government can do anything.

12- Time is an illusion here; no one is on time. Tomorrow is actually three days from now. People show up for work fifteen minutes late and leave one half hour early and think they have worked eight hours. The half hour for lunch begins at 11:45 and ends at 12:25. It’s like being in a third world nation that lives right here in South Texas. I have caught people taking a ‘siesta’ in their pickup truck with the air-conditioning on. (In February)

13- I hate polka music, and whatever else you call it, it still sounds like polka. Accordion music is seldom appealing to me and sometimes sounds like a bag of pissed off cats. I like cats.

14- Rodeo very is popular here. I know nothing about rodeo except it is very loud, dusty, and involves people who are called ‘Bubba”.

15- The name “Bubba”. Bubba sounds like something you would call a carwash or a porcelain object in the bathroom, not your sisters husband.

16- I feel uncomfortable in a place that seems to think that aluminum foil is the latest thing in window treatment.

17- Being in the building trades, I have noticed that the people here seem to put more thought into the front door than into the whole rest of the house. I have seen $5000 doors on a one-bedroom shotgun shack in a shitty neighborhood. It’s like gold plating a turd.

18- They don’t seem to use road signs here, instead they use piles of discarded tires. ”If you are goin’ East on 501, right after the light ya see that pile o’ 275-15s, turn left. Don’t turn at the ol’ truck tires, they ain’t worth a shit.”

19- Spring break, 40 to 100 THOUSAND drunk and horny young adults in the same place at the same time seems like a recipe for disaster. I heard that there was a betting pool about how many kids would die this year. I did not win.

20- Waste disposal is anywhere beside the road where no one is looking. Huge piles of trash mark the roads here, sometimes right in a person’s yard. They can afford to take the refuse to the country, but they can’t afford to take it to the dump where they might get charged as much as two dollars. Am I missing something? Do they think that there is some secret Old Mattress Elf that only lives out of the city limits?

21- Mold. There is black shit growing EVERYWHERE. I usually live where it is dry and mold does not have a foothold. Down here mold gets to vote in municipal elections and larger colonies are even allowed to drive a car. I can’t believe some of the places where that shit grows.

I know, I know, you are going to point out that that was more than 20 reasons. Let’s say that my cup was overflowing.

Nice?

Recently, as an experiment, I have been trying to show a different face to the world.

I have been trying to be…………’nice’.

I have been trying the ‘nice’ thing for a while now, and it just isn’t working out for me. When someone says something weird I have been shaking my head and just walking away, keeping my frustration inside and not letting people know that what they just said seems totally out of place or just plain stupid.

The other day I was talking with an African-American man about where he lives. It was an innocent enough conversation until he sarcastically asked, “Why do you want to know? Do you want to come over?”

A small thing inside me made a distinct snapping noise and I responded, “No, I have an extra cross lying around and I am looking for a good place to burn it.”

Now THAT felt good!

He did not take offense, and I did not mean it as a racial comment. I was expressing in my Troll-like way that I thought is he were going to be sarcastic, he should do it better.

He seemed to understand, and everyone else listening thought it was funny. (Or he is just too wrapped up in his own issues to take offense.)

Lately, I have noticed some things; People seem to like it when I am mean, and, I feel better when I feel free to express what I am really thinking, instead of keeping myself in check. Mrs. Troll tells me that this blog is boring when I am trying to be nice, and I have to agree.

Maybe it is my lot in life to try to balance all that ‘sweetness and light’ bullshit that Americans have accepted as the new socially acceptable way to behave. I know that ‘kinder and gentler’ fits me like snakes wearing bunny slippers.

I am not making an excuse to be meaner; I am just going to do what comes naturally to me and stop trying to stifle my inner Troll.

I think I am feeling better already.

April in the tropics

As I sit here quietly in my RV, listening to the snap, crackle, and pop of the high power lines that run nearby, it slowly sinks into my delicate brain that I am going to be here for another month, maybe longer.

I cannot contain my joy. (Delicately wiping sarcasm from my lower lip with my sweat stained t-shirt.)

The RV Park is cleared out. When I arrived it was pretty much full, with spaces open only between other spaces. Now, there are not enough RVs to make a good circle for a wagon train.

Some people pay large amounts of money to vacation here. In the winter I can see how this place might seem attractive for a week or two with its warm weather and south of the border atmosphere.

I would rather watch snow fall on the porch. I am not the warm weather kinda guy that it takes to be comfortable here.

Living in the tropics makes for a certain lifestyle. That lifestyle usually involves staying up late and having fun when it’s cooler. That lifestyle is not for me. I am more of the ‘up at the crack of dawn and made sure the rooster is doing a good job’ kinda guy, not the ‘drag my ass outta bed at the crack of noon’ kinda guy.

During the day I am huddled in the air-conditioned comfort of my Doghouse, avoiding the heat and humidity like it is an infectious disease. I am usually in bed before eight and up before four. That does not leave much room for nightlife.

I hope that the people who actually live here like it, because I would rather pass a kidney stone than live here in the summer.

With a kidney stone, you can get morphine.

I might have something nice to say.

I know that I have not had many nice things to say about the Texas Tropics. I am just here for a short while, (Yeah Right) and don’t have to like it.

But just to set the record straight, I have found a few select communities and neighborhoods that I think are really nice. All the nice places are kinda hidden and off the main roads, but that is why I didn’t notice them before. This last weekend I uncovered a little mobile home community that seemed quaint and interesting, built around a ‘lake’, and boasting its own police force.

So there you have it; I may not like the weather here, or the people, (Face it, I don’t like people anywhere) but I have found some towns that I would actually consider living in if I were to be forced to live here. It is not all bad.

There. I said it. Are you happy now? I DO sometimes find the good in things. I just have to be hit in the face before I will admit it.

And now back to the MizfiTroll bitching and complaining, which is already in progress.

Temple to Trash

I don’t know what I did to piss off the managers of the RV Park, but when I arrived home last night something had changed.

White Trash Man had moved.

Guess where he moved.

That’s right! Right next to me! Thirty empty spaces in the park, at least, and he moves one space away from me, with his front door facing me.

I now get to listen to his yapping canine-like creation constantly affirming that it is alive in Stereo! It’s just like having the little shit machine in my lap! Oh the Joy!

I have not decided what I am going to do. Murder is out. Its not the dogs fault the man is crazy.

He brought all his ‘collectables’ with him. I am particularly taken with the table he made from stolen milk crates that sits next to his “lounge chair” beside the door. Five gallon buckets, cinder blocks, and a spare rooftop air conditioner adorn this temple to trash.

This monument to mobile living now blocks what once was a decent view of the sunset.  I guess I will talk to the managers and see if I can move this weekend.

White Trash Man

I have a neighbor here in the RV park that I have dubbed ‘White Trash Man’. (Pretty much my only remaining neighbor.)

His parking space looks like a white trash pile, with his home at the center. His home is his castle, with a protective moat of ‘stuff’ keeping the outside world at bay.

In just the last two months or so he has managed to trash a space as well as his RV.

His TV antenna looks like a giant used it as a toothpick, there are ‘collectables’ on all four sides as well as underneath, and he managed to somehow drive into one corner of his rig and mangle it.

When he arrived his RV looked pretty OK, but now it looks like a tornado used it as an object of desire. Used it HARD.

I have a hard time accepting that someone can let an RV go to hell that quickly. These things are not cheap, and one would think that you might take care of yours. In his case, it just ain’t happening.

His awning got loose one night in a windstorm. It flailed and slapped at his roof for hours, and he never did a thing to stop it. You can’t convince me that he did not know. It woke me up when I thought someone was hitting my Doghouse with a baseball bat. By morning, it was in a heap in front of his door, where it remained for five days before being rolled into a shapeless mass and shoved under his home.

A new one would cost about one thousand dollars, yet he took no effort to save the one he has. He does not look like he can afford to throw one thousand dollars away that easily.

All his connections are held together with tape, his truck looks to be a collection of other trucks of different colors, and even his lawn chairs are recycled and in disrepair. His TV antenna is something from the 70’s on a piece of pipe leaning against the corner of his bedroom. Even it is broken, making it resemble a bit if nonfunctioning tissue in an erectile dysfunction commercial.

His constant companion is a black Chihuahua looking creature that yaps its awareness of the world. It is in constant motion, and when he takes it for frequent walks, he keeps it on a chain that rattles along the ground. Why this dog needs the safety of a chain escapes me. That dog looks almost as threatening as toothpaste.

You might think I am being overly critical, but I have a point in all this.

I do not understand People. I do not understand how you can live in something barely larger than your car and not take care of it or even keep it clean. (Inside and outside.)
I do not understand how a person can spend 10s of thousands of dollars on something then let it become a pile of rubbish in a couple of years.

I am not buying the infirmity defense. He can walk that obnoxious shit machine several times a day, but can’t move the piles of trash that he has to walk around when he goes in or out of his door.

Please help me. What motivates people like this? Why can they not show enough pride to attempt to keep the things they have looking reasonably clean and vermin free?

So what is the deal? Are they lazy, stupid, or just not care? You tell me. Please.

The Keys to Knowledge

Most people seem to think that their opinion is just as good as anyone’s. That is not necessarily true. “you have to walk a mile in someone’s shoes”….and all that.

You have a point of view. You are allowed to express your opinion. That does not make your opinion truth. It certainly doesn’t make your opinion the ‘handed down from on high’ truth.

I credit the news media in part for this phenomenon. Talking heads often express a point of view as truth, and we, as the public, eat it up and treat it as proven and will defend it if challenged.

I have known a LOT of people that love dispensing medical advice, though they know absolutely nothing about medicine. This is exactly the kind of shit I am talking about.

Everyone wants to spout off about politics and what we should do about this problem and that problem. I doubt that 99.9% have enough background or information to make a rational decision, but they are happy to share their opinion with you anyway. Then they pass it off as the only acceptable solution.

You have a point of view, not the keys to all knowledge. Get over it. It is time we all realized that we are as subject to subjective reasoning as anyone else.

The sooner that we realize that we are fallible and accept it emotionally the sooner we will be able to make better and more informed decisions in all things. The first step is in knowing that you don’t know everything.