Brew-Ha-Ha
[ 3 Comments ] Posted on 07.22.08 under Zeitgeist Tuesday
We St. Louisans tend to be rather reverent of Anheuser-Busch. As a child my father had a little maxim that went, “There are only two kinds of people who leave the employ of Anheuser-Busch: Dead people and crazy people.”
Dad applied for a sales position at the Brewery every time they posted a classifed. I was always excited for him during those optimistic times he sent his resume and waited for an interview. Not to be. At this stage in my life I understand what a joke those classified postings for A-B jobs were. Nobody got hired on the basis of a cold resume. You had to attend one of four Catholic high schools in South County and be muscled into the company by a senior manager with a lot of clout.
I, on the other hand, was a contractor for A-B for five years. It was the best job I’ve ever had. I was paid a ridiculous wage to work with really great people selling a fun product. The attitude of 95% of the A-B workforce was, “Why so serious? We sell beer, remember?” I had a little maxim of my own. I told all my friends, “I’ll leave A-B when the guard comes and pries my fingernails away from my desk.”
That’s just about what it came to.
Following the lead of Microsoft after BillCo was sued by some whiney-ass contractors, A-B kicked in a five year limit on contract workers while I was there. At first the employees and middle-managers laughed. “No way!” they said. “We’ve got twenty-year contractors here. They carry the institutional knowledge of this company. There’s no way senior management will really send that kind of brain power out the door to serve a stupid CYA policy!”
Hmmm. Trust me. They did.
“Don’t worry,” my boss told me toward the end of days. “I’ll get you converted to an employee before your time comes!”
Next to “Lots of employees will reward you for favors by giving you their weekly free beer tickets,” the most frequent lie I heard at A-B was “I’ll convert you to an employee one day.” I saw that offer happen exactly once in my five years there. The stupid bitch they offered to convert realized conversion meant a pay cut from her inflated contractor salary and she refused the job. Two months later the five-year contractor limitations swept through and she was swept out the door with them.
The point of this ramble is that I still have friends who work at A-B. People who work at A-B won’t abide you bringing anything but A-B products into their home. That is not a joke. When you live in St. Louis and have friends that work at the brewery, you will witness this scenario.
HOST: [opens the door] “Hey Dutch, whatcha got in the bag?”
DUTCH: “Rolling Rock and some Little Kings. Deal me in!”
HOST: “Uhm, no. Sorry.”
DUTCH: “No what?”
HOST: “Not in my house, buddy. You’ll have to leave those in the car. I’ve got all the A-B products you can possibly drink waiting for you in the fridge.”
DUTCH: “You are sh!tting me.”
HOST: “Serious as a heart attack.”
So, yes. I’m an A-B guy. When I reach for beer off the grocery shelf, I’m thinking about Wil and Barbara and Kim and Trysh and Dave and Sandy Miller and Jim Temme and all the people I know and respect who depend upon little ol’ Dwight to buy Budweiser products. When I married My Beautiful Wife, she was one of those people, the kind who think it’s trendy to call A-B products “piss water.” It may have been our first real fight. I ain’t playin’. I don’t buy anything but Bud, and now MBW knows better than to bring anything else home.
I’m hurting. Really hurting.
I’m so irrationally angry at A-B for not putting up a fight to keep the product American owned. I think about all the A-B videos I worked on where a member of A-B senior management sneered at Miller Brewing for being foreign owned. My blood boils.
My first instinct is to never buy another A-B product again. Join backlash nation.
But what about Wil? What about Trysh?
I dunno. I’m heartbroken. I have no illusions that all the promises made in the storm will be ill kept in the calm that follows. After American Airlines raided TWA, there were endless commitments to keep the hub status of the city. Keep the employees. Six months later the volume of runway concrete had doubled and the number of flights had been halved. And now INBEV is going to keep kissing A-B worker’s asses after the contract ink is dry and the local Royal Family banks their billions in sales profits?
Uh… No.
Maybe I’ll just indulge in more whine.
NSFW Friday
[ 8 Comments ] Posted on 07.18.08 under NSFW Friday
I’m still on the fence about whether or not to renew my commitment to blogging.
As I typed the last post (from the lonely dorm room) I realized that the quality of the post was dreck for both grammar and content. The voice in my head said, “Screw it. It’s late. Hit the Publish button and go to bed, Dwight.” I’ve never felt that way before. Never. That’s a bad sign.
I sent this YouTube link for the new David Byrne video around to a couple of close friends last month. I’m pretty sure that it’s Not Safe For Work, even if it isn’t blatantly graphic. The tune is pretty catchy. You need to watch for at least a minute because it takes a while for the visual joke to develop.
I heard the tell-tale music coming out of Dwight Junior’s laptop after I sent him the link. I looked at him. He looked at me and rolled his eyes. He gets exasperated with the girl/boob crazy aspect of my personality. He’s Mr. Monogamy. Surrounded by cute co-eds at student orientation, he remained oblivious; true-blue to his long time girlfriend. My neck was snapping left and right as if I had a case of the St. Vitus Dance. Dwight Junior is going to kick himself when he’s 41 and looks back to realize he only had two girlfriends in his entire life. He’s got the monogamy gene. Must be latent because he didn’t get it from me and he SURE as hell didn’t get it from his bed-hopping mother.
I’m back to sanding drywall this weekend. MBW put a coat of paint on the new bathroom walls, bringing to light all the mistakes in the drywall work. They are legion. It’s pretty bad. It’s been ten years since I last drywalled and I lost my skillz. Srsly.
Back to Cleveland next week. Just two more trips until I have a second frequent-flyer trip in my pocket. Gonna take My Beautiful Wife to Catalina for the honeymoon we never had.
Be well. Have a great weekend. Write something.
Pointless Without Pictures
[ 3 Comments ] Posted on 07.16.08 under Uncategorized
I didn’t bring my camera. Dwight Junior and I are staying in the dorms at his college orientation. We’re in different dorms. I’ve barely seen him. He’s making new friends and attending all the activities. It’s unusual to see him so social. It’s comforting. It’s also a bit odd to look out my sixth story window and see my six foot two wallflower walking with a pack of young ‘uns he just met.
I’ve long had recurring dreams about my old college town. Lately I’ve been having them A LOT as Dwight Junior and I talked about him going to school. Lately the dreams have involved me being back in school with Dwight Junior. Only in my dreams the buildings are all squat, square, grey boxes like soviet Russia.
This is where a picture would be worth a thousand words.
Apparently I was dreaming about this campus, despite the fact I’ve never been here before. Kinda depressing. The boy seems to like it.
All my fantasies about returning to college and living in dorms again? Oh lordy. Forget it! I forgot how industrial and crappy these rooms are. You couldn’t pay me to live like this again.
Looks Like I Picked a Bad Week to Stop Sniffing Glue
[ 12 Comments ] Posted on 07.15.08 under Uncategorized
Oy.
I’m in a bad place, emotionally.
Here’s the thumbnail:
Awhile back I mentioned that we busted a hole in our shower in order to replace/resolder the valve in the kids’ bathroom. Before the first swing of the hammer busted tile and drywall, I had no illusions I was committing myself to a long and arduous repair. About a month ago I committed to tearing the Master Bathroom down to studs and subfloor. Problem was that the builders had used an inordinate amount of concrete when they put the bathroom together. Concrete and mesh behind the tile walls. About an inch of quickset concrete and mesh under the floor tiles. We didn’t have a construction dumpster, so there was only so much destruction we could complete in any given week and still be able to roll the 800 pounds of trash to the curb. Poor sanitation guy must have his testicles tucked into his sock after the last six pickups at my house.
Then there was the installation of new can lights, switches, fan, some light replumbing and… drywalling, drywalling, drywalling. Or I guess I should say “drywalling, mudding, sanding, mudding, sanding, mudding sanding.” I’m a perfectionist, so that’s a recipe for heartbreak. Neverending.
I always wanted a Rotozip. The drywall work was my excuse to finally drop a Benjamin and get one. Major buyer’s remorse. After a half day and half a dozen dusty, crappy, ragged edge cuts, I went back to my $2 utility knife.
Long story short, it’s been two months since I had a weekend day that didn’t involve nine to ten hours a day of hard labor. The only bright spots are the time I spend gathering supplies at Lowes. The bedroom adjacent to the construction is coated in a sixteenth inch of drywall dust.
I’m summoned back to Cleveland next week.
MBW and I are headed into the THIRTEENTH legal battle with her crazy ex. Thirteen summons in the last eight years. Amazing. It’s a wonder we still have enough money to eat.
Still on Weight Watchers. I had a long plateau, but I’m losing again. 22.8 pounds. I weigh-in again in another hour, but this morning’s bathroom scale warned me not to get my hopes up.
My son leaves for college in 34 days. The school has a countdown-to-move-in clock on their web site. I keep looking at the numbers spin lower and trying not to cry like a little girl. He has totally emotionally detached from the fam. His headspace is already 300 miles away. I understand. It is the nature of things. I watched Thomas Kingsley Troupe’s video of making pancake puffs with his boy and tears were running down my face. I made a couple of produced videos of adventures with my boy when he was a wee tyke and I produced corporate videos for a living. Thomas’s rapport with his little boy reminds me so much of my bachelor years when it was just Dwight Junior and me and we were tighter than the bark on a tree.
I’m reading. I’m writing. I’m rewriting. Broke 20K words on the new novel. Finally don’t despise the opening pages. It’s coming along. The characters are making themselves known to me, doing and saying things I didn’t expect. This is the darkest thing I’ve ever written (and if you’ve read my early novels, you know that is sayin’ somethin’).
I’m mildly depressed. Blogging will be hit and miss for a while. I gotta get my mind right.
I’m still reading your blogs and following the machinations of your days. I’m a little worried about Claudia. If anybody hears anything, let me know.
The Meme I Couldn’t Resist
[ 19 Comments ] Posted on 06.30.08 under Uncategorized
Copied from Darc’s place. Nod to the others in the meme lineage, which I’m too lazy to recount here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Finally finished this effer after three attempts.)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not all of ‘em)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (the shame, the shame!)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (saw the movie, does that count?)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (No, seriously. Never got to it.)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (God knows I tried several times.)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Oy vey.)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
That’s it. 34%. There’s no way I’m reading six Dickens books or Four Austin books, no matter how laudable and classic they are held to be. I’m trying to read a little bit of a wider swath of authors. I’ve read Blyton, Marquez, and Joyce, but not the titles listed. A mile wide and an inch deep. That’s me.