The Post Designed to Irritate, Fascinate, and/or Bore To Tears

Okay, first of all I have to confess at least 62% of the reason I’m doing this is because Joe seems to have an aversion to memes.

Without further ado, nor any form of explanation*, I give you my list of four.

Four jobs I’ve had
1. Meat market whipping-boy. I did exciting things like use a band saw to cut up chickens. I also ran the sausage making machine; attach the pig intestine to the “out” thingy and shovel meats and unidentified bits into the big hopper on the top. These are probably two things one shouldn’t trust to a 14-year old. I think I lasted three weeks, because I moved on to…

2. City Park Dept. Maintenance. They’d load 15 or 20 of us young teenagers into the back of the city trucks and drop us off in pairs and threes at the various city parks, along with lawn mowers, weed whackers, and “pick sticks.” Pick sticks were basically tool handles that have had a nail driven into the end and sharpened to a point. We used them to pick up litter. They’d leave us for an entire day in the park, from 7:30 until about 3 p.m. If it was a small park we’d be done with actual work by lunchtime and spend the rest of the day goofing off.

Two vivid memories: being stuck at Jindra Park in the pouring rain. Maybe 15 minutes after they dropped us off, it started to pour, and there was no place to seek shelter. We sat on a picnic table for about an hour, waiting to be picked. Unbeknownst to us, the ancient metal gas can sitting on the table with us was leaking. We thought our jeans were getting wet from the rain. They were, but we were also soaking our asses in gasoline. Turns out gasoline doesn’t have to actually burst into flame to burn your skin like a sonufabitch.

Second memory: it was a rare treat to be assigned to one of the trucks instead of a park. On a few occasions I had the honor of being on the park garbage detail. This basically meant we drove to all the parks in town emptying the 55-gallon drums that were used as trash cans. It also meant we were the ones who were called out to pick up any animals that had been killed on the streets. There’s nothing quite as fun as scraping a flattened skunk off hot asphalt in July. We’d take all the trash down to the city dump, which has a very large, very disgusting pond in it. Any animals we’d picked up, we would wire a hunk of concrete or something to it and toss it in the pond, for reasons unexplained.

3. Burger flipper at Wendy’s and two McDonald’s. Bathing your teenage face in burger grease does wonders for your complexion.

4. Production Manager at the BG News. This was in the days of waxed galleys, X-acto knives, and non-repro blue pencils. Thankfully, we were beyond the days of optical typesetting. I did learn how to shoot halftones in a big damn hurry. The best thing about the job was my usual after work activity: after we’d put the issue to bed (at 1 a.m.), John Nemec (the copy editor and a KKPsi brother of mine) and I would head across the street to Myle’s. We’d put back a large pizza and a couple pitchers of beer before they closed at 3. We were both smart enough to have no class to get to before noon on Friday.

Four movies I can watch over and over
1. The Fifth Element (I have absolutely no idea why.)
2. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
3. Band of Brothers. Yes, the whole damn thing.
4. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Four places I’ve lived
1. Apparently I lived in the projects when I was a wee small child.
2. An apartment in college with my friend Jim, an evil bitch named Renee, and Frodo the paperwad-chasing cat.
3. My grandmother’s house, with my brother Jim, after she was too frail to live alone and moved to a nursing facility. I was moving back to Cleveland from Cincinnati and her house was sitting empty. Worked out well for my mom (worrying about the empty house) and me (happy to live rent-free for five months).
4. Our very own Money Pit, a bungalow built in 1925 with a leaky basement, racoons living in the eaves, and an inch of soot falling on our faces when we tore down the original kitchen ceiling. That’s the short list of character-building challenges Jul and I faced.

Four TV shows I love watch regulary. (I had to change that one; “love” is too strong a word for anything on television.)
1. Lost
2. Mythbusters
3. This Old House
4. South Park

Four places I’ve vacationed
1. Kauai
2. Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
3. Jackson Hole, Wyoming
4. Vancouver and other parts of British Columbia

Four of my favorite dishes
1. Lasagna
2. Chicken Bryan at Carraba’s
3. A bucket of chicken at the beach with Julie
4. Key Lime Pie!

Four sites I visit daily
1. Clan Robot
2. Fark
3. Dad Gone Mad
4. Daily Dose of Imagery

Four albums I really dig
1. Boston. The first one. For my money, one of the best rock albums ever made.
2. Collective Soul, “Youth” I dig just about everything by these guys, but this album is my favorite.
3. Maroon 5, “Songs About Jane” A great collection of songs. It’ll be interesting to see if these guys can do it again.
4. Evanescence, “Fallen” Amy Lee’s voice is just amazing. That, and it’s playing on the stereo right now.
That’s the first four off the top of my head. There are plenty more.

Four places I would rather be right now
(a moving target, depending on where I am at the moment)
1. Taking Julie to Spain
2. In the pilot’s seat
3. In a movie theater with Joe, James, or my brother Jim (and of course Julie)
4. Some place warm. NE Ohio in mid-February pretty much blows.

I now challenge Joe to waste forty minutes writing up his list of four.

*Okay, one note of explanation. These things are in no particular order of preference, just the order in which they came to mind.