Neanderpundit

At a garage sale (I love them, but usually I resist the impulse to buy) I picked up a two cd set of Fleetwood Mac. I have all the albums at home, but for some reason I’ve not dusted them off in ages.

So I take this disk on a little road trip, intending to listen as I drive. THe good stuff is all there; Sara. Rhiannon. Gypsy. Landslide. Even an instrumental, slowed down version of “Go insane”. The disks set on the seat on the way down, I listened to the saturday morning financial shows and dreamed of actually having cash to invest in something.

I spent yesterday morning working, talking with a customer about some vision systems etc., and in the afternoon we went to the range, for several hundred rounds of explodey goodness. The day finished with a lakeside picnic with good friends.

Getting lost and wandering through central Indiana in search of an open gas station was a little frustrating, but I got’er done, and pulled out to do the last 60 miles home. I remembered the disk, and alone with my thoughts on dark indiana backroads, I remembered why I hadn’t dusted off those albums in ages.

Fleetwood Mac- or its’ various members- had been there through a lot of my personal transitions, acting as a sort of lyrical midwife between one portion of my life and another, and the Mac music that was popular at each transition was imprinted with those emotions. So whe I hear Rhiannon, it dredges up a memory of relationship gone horribly sour, and the violent effort required to extricate myself from it. Sara is another that calls to mind a situation in which I found myself unemployed and alone, without two pennies to rub together. Landslide- well, if I need to moisturize my contact lenses I can always dial THAT one up.

So I put the disks back in the case and drove the rest of the way home in silence.

Closer now, and you will see what I mean

Dozens of regular readers of Elisson’s blog are clawing out their minds eye.

I don’t blame them, normal people recoil at the mere reference of the things inside my head- but how was I to know that normal people read Eli’s son?

Anyway, welcome, to anyone brave- or foolish- enough to have found there way here from there.

If you haven’t read Neanderpundit before, or are a new reader, you’ll find that there’s a lot of raw shit here.

Fact is, that’s intentional. A lot fo people look at the pretty in life, and forget that there is a lot of ugly too. I’ve posted about this before.

I crapblog, because as Mel Brooks proved, farting is the funniest thing a man can think about. But also because I try to bear in mind that I am dust, and to dust i shall return. The finest gourmet meal in the world, the most delicately prepared truffle laden gravy made from the drippings of individual hummingbird breasts, is less than 24 hours away from being a turd.

I blog this way to remind people that for every silver lining, there’s a dark cloud. That every girl with a fine ass, must use that beautiful and well turned backside to pinch a loaf on a regular basis. That there is a lot about life that is beautiful and wonderful, but that there is hard work associated with it.

A long time ago, I spent a week or two helping a guy set up a cable tool rig.

A cable tool, for the uninitiated, is a way of getting oil out of the ground that is about as old as it gets. A drill bit is hung on the end of a cable, and the tool is lifted and dropped over and over again, cutting through the rock. A special tool then gets dropped into the ground every so often to clear the debris. Setting and using a cable tool rig is not for the weak of spirit or back, and I worked my ass off.

Anyway, my eomployer, who I’ll call Mr Brown, had rented this rig on a ride- in other words, the guy he rented it from got a quarter of a percent of anything he hauled up out of the ground. mr Brown was a dowser, and claimed he could find oil as easily as water. So confident was he of his skill that he set this cable tool rig up in his yard.

He hired me to help him and tried to get me to do the work for a 1/8 point ride, but I needed cash, so he paid me $2.75 an hour. And he fed me lunch.

We worked from around six AM to about nine PM, with an hour for lunch. Mrs Brown would come out and stop us, and we’d go into the house and wash up. Lunch was usually chicken fried something, with lots of gravy and mashed potatoes.

After several days of this, Mr Brown (who was a southern baptist and wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful) started to walk away from the rig once in a while, and the percuissive natutre of his walk let me know he was going away to fart.

I was glad for the break myself, becuase the chicken and gravy was giving me epic gas.

Anyway. we had gone about forty feet, three or four feet at a time, and we got the bailer stuck in the wellhead, right in the pit.

So he and i are in the pit, at the bottom of the rig, wrenches and safety chains all over while we try to knock loose the jammed bailer.

And I felt the fart coming.

I pinched my cheeks together so hard I gave myself a buttocks-charlie horse. And it didn’t help. That fart was coming out, and it was coming out now.

So I farted. It wasn’t loud, but it was vile.

And there were two men and a fart in a hole barely big enough for two men.

he climbed up out of the hole after dropping his tools, and reached down to give me a hand up.

We sat on the edge of the pit for fully five minutes, not talking. The fart, still down in the pit, had no comment either.

Mr Brown looked at me and simply said “I gotta get the wife to back off the spices in that gravy”

I figured I’d been fired, but I kept on working for several more days. Mr Brown never went in the pit with me again. And the only gas ever to come out of that dry old hole was the fart I let. I think Mr Brown went on to sell insurance.