Without The Harley
Maybe things aren't that bad I thought this morning at 7 a.m. on the back porch of a 5000 square foot home in the walled but not gated community of Southlake, in Kenner La. I have watched over the last several months while working on this and two other nearby homes the complete layout and infrastucture-building of a new neighborhood that is now nothing but hauled in river sand and two parallel streets. Nobody is buying the half-million dollar homes we have finished and so it is encouraging to see that someone with juevos grandes is banking on the future, developing the land behind this last street of finished or nearly finished homes as if we were in a Clinton-era heyday, instead of this Bush-is-a-failure doomsday.
I was acting like Peter Fonda at the campsite, except Jack and Dennis were missing and there were no stand-ins, which is to say I was alone in the treachery of my self- abuse. I use the past to predict the future so I was comfortable in my meager lawlessness. I try to respect the natural order of things even as I am pretty damn smug about being good at what I do. People like my work, and so who are they to question what it is I do in preparation? Of course, there is no future in getting caught so when I Iooked behind me into the house and saw the supervisor coming down the stairs I exhaled fully and dropped whatever it was and walked back into the house. He, yet another Jim in construction, met me just as I came back inside and said, "I slept here last night," which is a joke but one I briefly considered as literal truth because of the hour. It was early for Jim to be on the job. I pictured one after the other at rapid speed the possible scenarios that would account for a grown, moderately successful man to sleep on a construction site. I have a lot of sympathy for whatever it would be. My jugular was pounding visibly as I went through the motions of conversation several hours before I am generally capable of it. I was using too many words. He showed me something upstairs he thought was very important and I assured him the best I could that I would make it look better than it looked now. That's all he wanted. He left. I changed the radio station and went about doing what it is I do for a living.
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Maybe things aren't that bad I thought this morning at 7 a.m. on the back porch of a 5000 square foot home in the walled but not gated community of Southlake, in Kenner La. I have watched over the last several months while working on this and two other nearby homes the complete layout and infrastucture-building of a new neighborhood that is now nothing but hauled in river sand and two parallel streets. Nobody is buying the half-million dollar homes we have finished and so it is encouraging to see that someone with juevos grandes is banking on the future, developing the land behind this last street of finished or nearly finished homes as if we were in a Clinton-era heyday, instead of this Bush-is-a-failure doomsday.
I was acting like Peter Fonda at the campsite, except Jack and Dennis were missing and there were no stand-ins, which is to say I was alone in the treachery of my self- abuse. I use the past to predict the future so I was comfortable in my meager lawlessness. I try to respect the natural order of things even as I am pretty damn smug about being good at what I do. People like my work, and so who are they to question what it is I do in preparation? Of course, there is no future in getting caught so when I Iooked behind me into the house and saw the supervisor coming down the stairs I exhaled fully and dropped whatever it was and walked back into the house. He, yet another Jim in construction, met me just as I came back inside and said, "I slept here last night," which is a joke but one I briefly considered as literal truth because of the hour. It was early for Jim to be on the job. I pictured one after the other at rapid speed the possible scenarios that would account for a grown, moderately successful man to sleep on a construction site. I have a lot of sympathy for whatever it would be. My jugular was pounding visibly as I went through the motions of conversation several hours before I am generally capable of it. I was using too many words. He showed me something upstairs he thought was very important and I assured him the best I could that I would make it look better than it looked now. That's all he wanted. He left. I changed the radio station and went about doing what it is I do for a living.
- jimlouis 3-15-2003 6:40 am