Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

i’m making progress on what R calls “dunging out” which is, i guess, like dunging out a barn. ha ha. reminds me that someone took it upon themselves to put up posters in all the toilet stalls in the bathroom at work. there are some women who work on our floor who are kinda gross. i’ll go to the sink, and someone’ll have left long hairs in the sink. geez. sure, brush your hair, but could you, like, clean the sink out?

apparently not.

it’s not as bad as it once was, when someone worked there who apparently had a dislike of her own shit, so much so that she seemed to have a problem actually making sure the toilet flushed. it was as if, omigod, the horror, the terror if she had to move her hand over the toilet to push the button, she might melt or something. all of it culminated in an incident where, supposedly, someone wiped shit on the walls — or so it was claimed.

anyway, due to an upsurge in cleanliness issues, someone took it upon themselves to make up cutesy little educational posters about how we don’t want the place to “look like an outhouse”, complete with a little clipart outhouse!

sitting on the john, reading that, i giggled. freak, every time i see it, i have to supress a giggle. once, i didn’t and i had to wonder if the woman in the other stall now thought i was completely and totally around the bend.

but i laughed because i wondered: who the fuck there has ever actually used an outhouse — the ones with the moon carved into the door? and then i thought, well, i’ve used an outhouse before, the kind campgrounds have, but they are usually not strewn with toilet paper and tampon tubes. what function does “outhouse” play in our imaginations? it seemed to me that it was clearly pointing at poverty. i can pictures people’s mothers saying, “do you want this place to look like an outhouse?!” with the meaning, “do you want people to think you are po white trash?” — a threat which would be especially salient in a state that is largely ground zero for the origins of such thinking.

so the phrase “dunging out” reminds me of barns, which reminds me that it was the idea of barns and farms and country living that was the threat of po’ white trash poverty when i grew up.

“do you think you live in a barn?” my mother would demand.

apparently so, since I am dunging out according to R.

this dunging out my crap process is moving along. taking a break right now. longer than i should. i’d initially stepped out on the porch to watch it rain — coming down hard, ruining my plans to attend the art festival a couple of blocks away.

on the porch, i’d remembered that, on my walk to work the other day, i hit the sidewalk and saw a melee of black berries and seeds crushes all over the sidewalk, the blue-black-purple juices dashed in stains like a very grim jackson pollcok (sp?) painting.

what the hell happened here, i thought. it looked like there’d been some kind of food fight or perhaps someone had gotten terribly sick. our neighbor’s house is empty and had, at one point, been broken into and used as a dive by some homeless people.

the ex-husband actually owned the house, or something. the woman living there with their three kids had told R she was ex-marine, looking for a gig, possibly in QA - quality analysis in the IT biz. which was great, because we were looking for someone at the time.

so, i went over to let her know we had an opening. no one home, which was weird because usually the son was home. so i left a note. but mysteriously, never got a reply. and then we realizing the typical comings and goings had ceased.

r, who’s home all the time, noticed it first and said that he thought the family had moved out. the ex-husband, who L (the neighbor) referred to as her husband, was living in Egypt, working a contract gig for the Egyptian navy. yeah: no shit. who knew that our retired Navy goes to work for the Egyptian navy? i guess the pay’s awesome, living costs ridiculously low and subsidized by a expense account stipend to boot.

we speculated, here and there, why the sudden departure. it was truly odd since the house had been run down looking — compared to the rest of the neighborhood. but not long after we moved here, there was new siding, a spanking new fence, new gutters, and repairs to windows that had been boarded up. and as soon as that was all done: bam! gone.

it all happened right around the the great real estate bubble bust last fall, so i thought maybe they’d bought it as a fixer upper and then found themselves strapped, unable to sell. maybe to save money, she’d moved in with relatives or friends, so she wouldn’t have to pay for utilities in addition to a mortgage?

a couple of months ago, i get this knock on the front door. a rather large woman — as in Amazonian-large — with a big smile full of gold teeth asked me in a really hoarse voice if I knew where L had gone.

I told her what we knew and that we’d been totally shocked because, well, it was just unusual. all that effort in fixing up the place, and bam! gone. not even a for sale sign.

the friend told me that L had been an addict, many years ago, but had been clean for 15 years. she was worried that maybe she’d lost it after all these years of sobriety. that seemed totally weird to me but i suppose stranger things have happened.

the friend was the one who noticed that the back door was open and, to my mind, very bravely went inside to find the house ransacked by people using it as a crash pad over the winter. she called the cops and the city showed up to secure the place and post stern warnings to homeless drug addicts to keep out.

we exchanged phone numbers, so we could contact each other in case we learned anything.

meanwhile, the ex-husband shows up about 8 weeks later. i guess they’d divorced and she was staying in the family home. but, unbeknownst to him, after the two of them sunk the cash into the place to fix it up, she skipped town. i guess she’s in the area, though, since he brought his son with him. i came home one day to find the neighbor using R’s laptop and his son sitting at my desk while his dad checked his email.

they all sat around talking while R picked his brain about getting a contract job in Alexandria Egypt. normally, i would have hung out with them and socialized, but i was so exhausted from work that day, that i just wanted to lounge around and decompress. i didn’t want to stand in the kitchen, yakking, feeling my feet ache because that particular day i hadn’t worn my walking shoes.

the next couple of days, as i sat on the porch, i’d see kids walks by on the other side of the street. from the group, a young black kid was waving like crazy to me. i couldn’t see from the distance but then i realized, it was the neighbor boy. which was weird. he was enthusiastically waving. while i’d see him daily, waving as i walked home from work, he was always teenager-quiet-bordering-on-sullen.

it’s weird how you make an impression on people — especially teens — who seem to do whatever they can to suggest that they are completely unaffected by the world around them: bored, unimpressed, unenthused. *yawn*

and then it turns out, later, that’s not what was going on at all for them.

anyway, i haven’t seen him since, not since his dad was in town. meanwhile, we’ve been keeping an eye on the place while the family’s gone, mowing the lawn and such.

well, why i went into all that, who knows? i was just sitting down to tell everyone that there is such a thing as a fruiting mulberry tree that grows pretty tall as deciduous trees go. that it produces these fat berries that look like black berries and are, apparently, edible.

reminds me of hiking owego hill to go pick wild blackberries, raspberries and strawberries. i used to make stuff with them, as well as sell them at a roadside stand. buck a quart. how i thought a dollar actually recuperated my labor for picking the damn things, i’ll never know. but i guess, the pleasure of the hiking and discovering, and watching sonshine plopped in a spot of grass, eating wild berries with jucie dripping down his chubby, happy little face was the whole point.