Methinformation

I know how to make meth.

Not from watching television or movies, not even from wiki. 

Its a strange story.

Years ago, I needed a job. Badly. It wasn't the money. I had a little legal dispute with the evil orange empire and they lost. So I was getting a paycheck every two weeks. However, I was going crazier. I have worked since I was 12, part time during school and full time plus during the summer. That's what happens when the Family business is landscaping and construction. You want to eat and not be naked, you work.

So sitting around doing laundry and watching the infant was making me nuts. Really. For three days I rolled dice and wrote down every number that came up to see if there was a predictable pattern.

(Incidentally, 5 is the least common number rolled while 7 and 9 share the title of "most rolled")

At the end of this time of random number prediction the wife took matters into her own hands and started applying me for jobs. One day, when the mental anguish has faded I will write a blog about the painful process of  a 30 year old white guy with a background in construction and money collecting for various semi-shady money lenders interviewing for jobs in the real world. With real humans. As a last resort she applied me to a job working for the Military, the last line of the job description made me laugh "MUST BE ABLE TO DEFEND ONESELF AND OTHERS FROM PHYSICAL ATTACK"

Yeah, right.

So I applied, interviewed and they overlooked my various eclectic skills (I can stick a knife or a 16 penny nail into anything 20 feet away for example) and hired me.

The first day on the job, my hair cut, my steel toed boots and canvas pants fitting quite nicely I reported to the "Chief" to meet my crew.

Federal inmates. All of them facing life and multiple life sentences. Murderers, Rapists, Drug Dealers, Unsuccessful high dollar item thieves, and soft pasty white squishy accountants.

My crew.

I asked if I got a gun, they handed me a shovel. I had a guard, he was supposed to shoot the crew if they tried to escape and or tried to kill someone. (me) He didn't seem to be to enthused about his job, cant say I blamed him. He was half my size and I was half the size of 1/2 the crew. The accountants never lasted more than a week or two. Some of those guys actually scared the hell out of me, some I felt bad for, most though. Were just tattooed bodies getting out in the sun to work away from their box. We talked, a lot. I learned really quickly that there are certain words used in the real world that have entirely different meanings in the box.

As a hint, NEVER call a 6 and 1/2 foot inmate a "punk" they take it badly. Luckily I had my shovel with me.

I got some really cool scars at that job. Got pushed into a roll of concertina wire and got to have the interesting experience of pulling myself off while grown men howled and wept with laughter at my predicament. Saw a little tiny dude knock a really big dude out cold for throwing a spider at him. He really didn't like spiders I guess. It was a job.

Oh, and I learned how to make gin, tattoo ink, tattoo guns and meth.

I've never put any of this knowledge into practice. Although I did think seriously about making the garbage gin for a Halloween party......

The thing about Meth. The thing that astonished me, really truly hurt my brain. Is the fact that it is poison. Really. Poison.

In the real world, the non "breaking bad" real world. Meth is made from the strangest concoctions of chemicals anyone has ever heard of.

Blue aquarium rocks. Drano. A specific brand of stainless steel cookie sheet. Certain paints. Certain permanent markers. A lawn fertilizer. A gopher poison.

Anything you could think of that would kill you to ingest.

Here it is, the thought that I thunk during all of this. 

Who?

Really. Who was the sick minded human that one day, playing in his shed, his lab, his bedroom? Who was the guy that saw evaporated crystals as the result of a botched lawn treatment gopher poison application and said.......

"DUDE! We could TOTALLY smoke that shit!"

Possibly this guy?

GAS

STOP!

If you or any member of your entourage is or has been a vegetarian, a member of PETA, had a cow as a pet, Ever looked at a cow and thought "cute", throw up easily, and/or don't like me very much.

DO NOT READ THIS!

Fair warning.
I love Bill Cosby.

I have never met the guy, and I never watched his show, but I have all his albums. I even transferred them all to computer gibberish so I could have them on my I-pod. Funny stuff, I freely admit that my sense of humor is odd. I should clarify that by just saying that I am odd and leave it at that. I listen to Bill when I run, when I ride my bicycle, when on long road trips, once he accidentally started playing loudly in my pocket whilst I was in line at a book store. Awkward.
He has a couple of lines that I use all the time. Shakespeare wished he would have had Bills timing. Here is one. "I told you that story, so I could tell you this one"
wait for it.
My family is a family of hunters. We shoot things and eat them after they are dead. Only because its much easier than trying to eat them while they are still moving.
Deer, Elk, Buffalo, various fish and fowl and once, my brother killed and et a rattlesnake. Its just one of those things that I grew up doing, like working with my hands, working with my Dad and uncles and brothers. Just living. They told us stories about when they were younger. About the hunting trips and adventures they had had.
Gut piles.
That is all the parts of an animal you leave in the mountains, with fish and birds it is a very small amount, with deer its a fairly large pile. With Elk. Holy mountains of moly. The damn things have TWO stomachs and enough gut to make a very large pile.
They also swell up after a few hours in the sun. Give them a day or two before the various animal life that dine on such things have found them, and they look like large veiny balloons.
One of my favorite stories was about my Uncle John, he died when I was 9. So all of the stories of him seemed to resonate a little more.
 He loved to fish and hunt and play his guitars, He was an excellent house painter. He was a Father and a Husband and a Brother, and my Uncle.He seemed to be universally loved. Melancholy is not what I was aiming for here, so to continue.
He shot a gut pile.
That's not the funny part.
The funny part was the bird sitting on top of the gut pile.

When you introduce a high velocity bullet to a swollen pile of two stomachs, it explodes. The camp robber sitting on top of the mountain of moly was engulfed in a rain of shredded gut.
When it flew over my Dad and John it was making this sound "bleeeeechhhh, bleeeeeeech,aaaaaaaacchhhh"
When my Dad told this story I would laugh. So should you.
Here it is. "I told you that story, so I could tell you this one"
(Thanks BIll)
I told the above story to my Brother in Law.
I laughed at the punch line.
He was skeptical. Very skeptical.
I told him in the midst of a very very long drive to a family reunion. Our wives (sisters) had gone down earlier and we were just catching up. He was starting to be a prick about it. Telling me all the reasons why it could not be true, telling me all the reasons it could never happen.
His tape deck and radio were broken, he had gas, and he loved to eat those awful gas station hot dogs that are anywhere from 2-6 years old.
They gave him Gas.
I think that his gas is what inspired me to tell the gut pile story.
His skepticism was annoying as hell. So I told him to go to hell and watched cows flit by the windows.
It was silent except for his thunderbum.
Then we passed a dead cow.

It looked like a balloon with four legs.
All the other cows had spread out away from it, leaving it alone in its swollen nastiness.
The Brother in law stopped, and drove back.
To my "What the hell?"
He replied by getting out his 38 pistol, (he collects the money for ATMs, so he carries this cute little 38) and getting out of the truck. Apparently he was going to demonstrate the fallacy of my story by perforating this bloated bovine.
I got out and was trying to explain that the "gut pile" was no longer inside the animal and that....
He shot at it.
Six times.
It was only about twenty feet away.
He hit it twice.
I was shaking my head, more at his marksmanship then his stupidity.
I could hear a hissing sound, and a groaning noise.
He turned to me, a triumphant smirk on his bloated bespectacled brainless visage.
And behind him, the groaning turned into a flatulent moo.
As the bloated cow got up. Clearly. Not Dead.
Yet.

Tech

The first time I held an I-phone in my hand and felt its pleasing ergonomic contour I thought one thing. "This would make the perfect skipping rock, all the way across a lake if the wind was right"
Possibly this is not what the eggheads at apple planned. Nevertheless I have been waiting for the chance to skip one. In fact, if any of you wish to donate an Iphone, I shall hire film guys to document the excellent skip. Ill even put it to music and have the editor genius type human render it in slow motion so you can see every flicker of the screen as it joyfully flys to its watery death.
Technology and I do not get along.
I have trouble working with anything that may be smarter then me, which is why I stick with hammers mostly.

BIP (BeforeIPhone) I had a lot of different phones. I destroyed them. Not on purpose I promise, its just that plastic really doesn't hold up that well in my life. I hate talking on the phone anyway, so hard to read lips that way. Impossible to use body language to denote any emotion and very difficult for such as I to attempt sarcasm. To be safe, I usually avoid sarcasm altogether in any sort of vocal venue, as I have a tendency to just make people cry.
BIP I could pretend that I actually used the phones to their full capacity, now, I dont even try. Meg-giga-googa-gaaga-bytes and pixels-binary-code-OS-free source-ap are just random letters to me. Except Pixels, I dated a girl once that was very Pixel like, just like tinkerbell minus the wings. She even had the hair.
I am not a Luddite, not by any means. I welcome technology and all of its labor saving usefulness. Roofing nail guns and air compressors are two of my favorites. Anyone that has ever smashed a digit with a roofing hammer shares this feeling.

Belt fed Sheetrock screw guns are the bomb. Its like having an extra mini-hand to hold and steady the screws while you are putting them in.
Trucks kick the holy smelly shit out of wheelbarrows. Dump trucks that much again. Trust me, if you have ever mixed a yard of concrete or more in a wheelbarrow or spread a couple hundred cubic tons of gravel with a rake and a shovel, you know.
Motorcycles are faster than horses. Four wheeler's can go more places than a goat. Guns can shoot bullets further and faster then any slingshot. Stoves are much less apt to catch your tee-pee on fire then an open fire. washing machines and dishwashers can be more hygienic than a stream.
Technology. Its good for so many things.
But giving me an i-phone, or a laptop or desktop or computer of any sort is like giving a caveman a GPS. If he cant eat it, get food with it, keep warm with it or love it. Its a hammer.

All in good fun

They put a purple teddy bear on the front of my motorcycle.
Its hard to be a bad ass with a plushy riding bitch. Given the seating placement, in retrospect, I was the one riding bitch to a plushy.
That makes it so much worse.
Damn.
The bear was there for at least a week. I really wanted to write "the bear was there, but I did not care" but after the last emotional blog my man-card is on suspension until my next fist fight.
It was mean of them. I thought. The way they laughed and chortled at me.
I plotted and schemed. Failure. I hate practical jokes.
I failed at my first attempt at an April fools joke. Made my little brother puke masticated cheerios all over everyone at breakfast. Switching the sugar with the salt, not wise.
The beating (flyswatter) that I got and the very stern lecture cured me of practical humor at others expense for a while.
Until I was 17. Then I wore a scary werewolf mask and jumped on my little (younger, physically he is bigger than I) brother growling and screaming.
He was briefly startled, however, he overcame his momentary alarm fast enough to punch me in the face.
Retrospect, again, I should never have thought that a werewolf would even phase my little brother. This is the kid that later in life was attacked by a bear and retained presence of mind enough to shoot it.
With a bow and arrow.
He broke my mask and bloodied my lip.
I deserved it.
So I plotted my revenge for the plushy. It took me a long time.

But then, I hung a purple tinky winky plushy from one guys bike and put a cute little rainbow magnet on the other guys ride

So they drained my gas tank.
Then they booby trapped my desk.
Followed by a series of phone calls and pages.
Moving on from there to Stapling my pants to my leg, gluing my tires to the ground, drilling holes in the bottom of all of my water bottles and feeding me shrimp disguised in chili.
Bastards.
They were so damn good at it.
The doctored picture of me as Hitler, posted everywhere, was my favorite.
My wee little mind was aching.
Two things happened.
A friend found a license plate cover that said "I LOVE BOYS" and I found a peel and stick permanent strawberry shortcake patch.
Perfect.
Then it was all down to timing.
Franz had a perfectly restored Buick GS X, it was going to be in its first show. The night before the show I snuck into his garage and put it on his back plate. I love boys prominently displayed on a muscle car, headed to a redneck heaven the next day.
I was laughing so hard I didn't sleep.
It took him 3/4 of the day to figure out why all the guys were slipping him phone numbers. Took him the rest of the day to cut the stripped bolts (oops) off and remove the vanity plate.
He got calls for two months from lonely guys.
John was much more aware.
I waited almost two months for him to drop his guard. When he did, angels sang. Then they choked from laughing.
He was walking in from outside, taking off his helmet. I nonchalantly slapped him (manfully!) on the back to say hey.
Planting a 4inch by 6inch strawberry shortcake permanent patch, sticky side down, on to the back right shoulder of his motorcycle jacket.

3 weeks.
He wore it for three weeks before an ex-girlfriend at a bar answered his question of  "why cant I get a date? Its like I am invisible to Women" as only a women could have answered "Baby, if you want to play for that team again you cant go out wearing the other teams uniform"
Revenge was sweet.
berry sweet.

Bother

So many things bother me.
Its an exhausting list really.
I add to it every day, only when I start enjoying the thing that formally bothered me does it get removed from the list.
Typical.
Its just so easy to be bothered.
Cause I am so secure in my own mind.
Those people, Waiting for the elevator in a FOUR story building with their gym bags nonchalantly slung over the shoulder? Who do they think they are fooling?
Why should I care?
Its a difficult thought process. Wondering what my "gym bag' is. What it contains?
Perfectly obvious to anyone who sees me.
Years ago, when I worked for the evil orange empire. I would drive by a section of office buildings every day on my way to the soul sucking box.
There was this truck, an older Nissan hard body with a roof rack. A mountain bike and a kayak nestled firmly in custom designed carriers. Ready at any moment for adventure. It parked in front of one of the big real estate companies. I would tell myself stories about that truck. About this completely cool guy that owned it. The life he led. Money enough to do what he wanted, when he wanted. Slipping away on a whim to hit a trail. Going on extended lunch breaks to float a section.
Man, his grass was green.
He got me through some long days. Thinking about when that guy would be me. Or I would be him. The adventure waiting around every corner, the chances to get the rush of life, fire in my veins.
My own life was so drab. Dull muddled colors seeping together in the bottom tray of watercolor paints. One of those kids that tries to tell themselves that they "like" the color of mixed colors. No bright vibrant yellow, no deep flavorful purple, no crisp green. Just this muddy taint that drips and mucks its merry way. Infecting all the other colors with its misogynistic glaze.
Always though I would find bright spots.
They seemed so brief, fleeting. Mayfly delights.
Life is made up of those pinpricks.
My man-card is on suspension still, from various infractions but I am going to risk the wrath of the mancartel and tell you a not so little secret. I love Musicals.
Not just the trendy popular "Phantom" and "Le Mis" but the old classics. "Camelot" "Kiss me Kate" "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" "Paint your Wagon" and most all of the others. I really like them. I even know Kathryn Grayson's real name.
My Favorite though, is "Into the Woods"
I have it on my i-pod and on my phone. Both versions, movie and Broadway.
Its a great story, not just the fairy tales, but after. What happens after the happily ever after.
Its pretty much how life is. All of life.
Contained in a lyrical and colorful stage spectacle for entertainment.
I will take my truth wherever I find it, thank you very much.
I am going to quote one line from one song.
"Are you certain what you wish is what you want?"
One very long day, near the end of my eternal shift of misery. This guy came in. Miserable, fat and lonely. Swilling his coffee out of the magical bottomless mug of java, shaking a little with the caffeine. Red eyes and doughy skin, he looked like a grub wearing a suit.
One of those guys that makes everything more difficult by a factor of ten, he followed me around while I pulled his order for him. Little things, the kind of things that the helpless dudes buy at a hardware store because they think that's what the real men do. One of those guys that watches a few too many reality shows and starts to think "HEY! I can do that!" Geez. I may be a neanderthal, but I know my limits. I couldn't program a computer or balance a checkbook or construct a grammatically correct sentence if my life depended on it.
But I can build a house from the ground up.
I know which weights to lift for which body part, I know diets and programs and fitness.
I understand things, and I am curious.
This guy? A lazy, lonely, Bored, Decadent disrespectful dunce.
I pulled his order, small hand tools and various bits and bobs of some home project he was mangling. Hearing the whole time how stupid I was from his point of view, what a dead end my life was, what a waste of everything women were, what a sad sorry state everything, every little thing was in.
He paid, hitting on the cashier, who rolled her eyes and said nothing. He demanded help to load his haul into his truck.
I figured what he really needed was a brick to the back of his head.
Sadly though, they had rules against that sort of thing.
I wheeled his cart out to his truck.
An older Nissan hard body, a kayak and a mountain bike strapped into the rack at the top.
I was stunned into motionlessness.
Grub followed my gaze, fixated on the objects of my years long jealousy.
"Oh, the bolts got all rusty and I have been to busy to cut them to get my stuff down"

Pants

Ambient noise.
Background sounds.
Unheard mostly. The soundtrack of life.
Every place has its own flavor of noise, its own potpourri of sound. Stay there long enough and you wont even hear it anymore. Every Gym has its own. They all have things in common. The clank of weights, the whir of machines, the low drone of earphones playing muscle pumping metal directly into the brain stem. All have a common effluvium of distraction.

It can depend on the time of day.
The early morning is the whir and mumble of the before work crowd.
Morning to new afternoon is the high chirping of mommies and wives escaping the children and house for a while.
Lunch to evening is a businesslike clank of men who refuse to give in to the specter of old age, Of obsolescence.
Evening to night is the hormone infested buzz of the mating game. The meat market. The flirting and posturing mind numbing to a casual observer.
Its all there.
A life in a day.
I go in the before any of this time. The before morning crowd. The in between times when humans sleep.
Mostly I am alone.
Sometimes I have the company of a few swing shift humans, sometimes some other oddness.
One gym, a long time ago, had a crowd of centenarians.

4am they would hobble in, sit at their exercise bikes and talk. Wheeze back and forth secrets known only to those that have seen more summers then I have desire to behold. Lives these men had lived. Wars they had fought. They had undoubtedly dreamed dreams and told tales, tried as hard and as fast as they were able. Now they sat, they pedaled. The murmured amongst themselves. Their voices, gradually merged with the whir of the wheels, the maze of sound faded to a sibilant hiss of white noise.
They faded into the background. Such is the fate of us all.
To fade.
I walked around them. Moving in my own patterns among them. Heavy things and sweating things.
Running a long road to everywhere.
Every day for months, perhaps a year or two. These men.
Became ambient.
One time. Night a memory and morning not yet a dream, I was disturbed at the gym. By silence.
The background had stopped. So used to it I had become that its absence startled me into immobility.
I looked.
They were all there. Alive, sitting still, rapt attention focused on the machines in front of them.
Two women.
Young.

On elliptical machines, the hum and chirp of their motions covering the silence of the men.
I looked closer, to see what had drawn these fossils from their reverie.
Then, I saw.
Clearly.
The girl on the right, the prettier of the two. Her pants had fallen down.
Sports bra to the bottom of her bottom.
Bare.
I could see the smiles now.
The seamed faces split in joyous wonder.
I made no sound. Just watched.
As the two noticed, or felt the intensive silence behind them, they turned to look. In turning she must have felt a breeze. She seemed to float then, for a split second, off of the machine and into the air. Gravity released just long enough for her to pull her pants up and tie them. I could see her blush travel to her face from where I was.
The men.
As all men now, no longer old, no longer seamed and cracked by time, but split faces in smiling joy.
Laughed and cheered and lived again.
The girls ran away, as girls do.
The music of the men's laughter faded in my mind.
Much slower then their murmurs.

Weight

 The gym.
Its one of those places that has its own rules, its own culture.
After New Year's Day gyms are crowded.
For two weeks.
I belonged to a gym once, wow. Read that again.
I belonged.
Interesting thought that.
To rephrase.
I once paid a nominal fee to use equipment that I felt I needed to improve my physical appearance and strength in ways that I felt were unavailable to me anywhere else.
They also had a sauna.
I never spoke to anyone. I just played on the machines and became a student of the science of Weight Lifting.
To say, I lifted up heavy things and put them down again.
I watched people.
I saw things I never in my wildest dreams, or nightmares, thought that I would see.
Three naked female instructors leaving the Sauna early one morning.
A treadmill that ate a walk-man. (how dated)
Pants falling off a girl on an elliptical machine.  (http://colneyhatch.blogspot.com/2012/02/pants.html)
A hirsute naked man doing yogic stretches in the dance room.
Three nipples on a man in the coed hot tub.
A very very heavy man wedge himself inside the shower, who had to be cut out.
So many things. SO many shapes. Big people and little humans. The people that changed shape. Big to little and back again. Skinny to Muscle and more muscle and acne.
I started to notice things.
Over time.
People who did the exact same thing every day.
Every.
Single.
Day.
They stayed exactly the same.
I don't know what their lives outside of the gym were like.
But in the gym.
They stayed the same.
Wait.
Some of the women would get flotation devices implanted.
Some of the men would get balder.
Overall body shapes, of the patterned people.
Stayed the same.
I still go to the Gym.
Still see things that stretch my brain.
Watching the people.
The humans.
Its a microcosm.
Everything is really. If you experience it deeply enough.
I learn a lot.
Doing the same thing, gets the same results.
Same.
We all pick up heavy things from time to time.
The trick, is remembering that we can put them down.