Golf ball sized chunks of ice knocked out my house’s broadband connection Tuesday morning, meaning I was cut off from the media net on the day of the final vote on a new Supreme Court justice & the State of the Union 2006 address. But the real shame was being cut off from my biz, and it hurt. People around my age (23) may remember Battle Beasts, toys, small soldiers in the forms of animals who on their chest bore a heat-activated sticker that determined which element their battle expertise was tailored toward. Kids covered up these stickers with their thumbs and the body-heat would cause the reaction and the symbol of the animal-soldier’s element would appear (fire, wind, water, etc.)
Battle beasts be the dopest, ya’ll, and the first two I have had were the giraffe and the tyranosaurus. Right around the time that I heard my first rap song (“We Didn’t Start the Fire”, by Billy Joel) my grandfather Bop Bop took me to the drug store on Silver Lane in East Hartford, Connecticut and bought me the giraffe (fire) and the tyranosaurus (wind, I recall) battle beasts and I loved them and I started to collect battle beasts and I loved it. Except my favorite battle beast (rhinoceros, wind) lost one of it’s arms and so throughout my life I’ve been haunted by the idea that eventually I too will lose one arm. I believe it will be my right arm.
I’m definitely not losing my 3rdarm! Because I couldn’t sign onto the internet or have a look or even a glance at what I am sure was the most interesting day of C-SPAN in a long time, yesterday I went a little nuts. I cleaned the kitchen first doing the pots and pans and surfaces and then my cleaning spree just spiraled out of control and I cleaned the whole house. But it didn’t really help put me at ease; if any effect at all it just keyed me up more-so. In a frenzy I sloshed off through the ice & snowflakes to work at the Grill where it was almost immediately obvious as I began jabbering about my strange non-political love for Dick Cheney that I was all out of sorts.
The night went off badly even though it was not busy at all at the restaurant. Matter of fact, that probably compounded my troubles of being all jammed up and pent up from my inability to post on 3rdarm.biz. But let me digress for a paragraph or so… Tuesday, the day of no connection, began for me waking up at around 8:30 AM in the morning by Eliot’s voice in the hall saying in a high-pitch, “All jammed up! I couldn’t move it an inch, they have me all jammed up!” I woke up myseriously because usually I sleep like a bear/heavy dog and opened up one eye and looked at my bedroom door as Eliot made his exclamation. The door opened.
“Hey man, can I borrow your car? They jammed up the station wagon right good,” he said to me. I kept my one open eye on him told him that I had one set of keys on my desk and the other in my big black jacket and he took the ones from my desk and drove off in the white whip. So technically, going into work on Tuesday the day of no connection, I had no biz, no internet, no cable connect, and no white whip. Which all combined to turn me into a raving lunatic at the table with customers.
I told one woman at a table that she looked exactly like the young clerk on Judging Amy, and the man seated across from her that he bore a strong resemblance to John Stewart, both of those being very very true statements but completely unnecessary to good table service. While this was going on I had a man who had gotten no entree as the rest of his family was served their’s because I had forgotten to order in two of something so he is just sitting their with nothing, not even a shred of attention from the lunatic jabbering waiter who is telling other, happier customers that they remind him of people from TV perhaps because this waiter’s subconscious mind is in a withdrawn, sallow shape because of cable TV withdrawal.
It sucks not to get your dinner on time because a waiter has made an error… but when he doesn’t notice the error because he’s so busy a couple tables down jabbering on and on about what time Judging Amy reruns are broadcast on TNT it must be irritating. Or so I assume. Raising the error by a power was that I didn’t let the manager handle the situation but instead attempted to talk to the table myself. “This is my first month serving here…” I said somewhat deceptively. What? said one of the six farthest away from me. Speak up, I can’t hear you… this is your first day waiting tables? “Actually,” I replied matter-of-factly, “Ya’ll are my first table.” That broke the tension…
I did a very bad job there even though the restaurant bizness was very slow which logically is because giant chunks of hail knocked out my internet & cable TV connection but I think my lack of focus can also take some of the blame. In apologizing to the bosses I work for and pledging to never make the mistakes again I suppose I came off as “beating myself up over it.” Because the most senior server, the venerable Tina, told me at the end of the night that I had done enough self-flogging and that it was time to go out and find a “hairshirt.”
A hairshirt is evidently a shirt made of camel or other scratchy fur (we ain’t talkin’ chinchilla, so to speak) that is worn over whiplashes to increase suffering. Its first usage was in Psalms 34:13 in some Latin bible as, “Ego autem, cum mihi molesti essent, induebar cilicio.” I was able to translate this into English: “I but , when me annoyance to be hairshirt,” which is probably exactly what Tina meant. Or, in American English, “If you’re going to annoy me with all this redemption crap, talking about how you’ll never make another mistake in life and whatnot… shutup and put on a hairshit.”
But I don’t have any. So what I did was I packed up my computer and my Casio digital camera and a microphone and some burned bizamp DVDs and I got back my white whip and I packed up all that tech crap into it and at around 1AM last night I barrelled down the Mass Pike in my white whip towards Southern Connecticut and my family… where there is abundant ice cream and animals, cable TV and wireless, mucho love and hell, I might even shave my aunt’s cocker spaniel and make myself a nice soft hairshirt.
Ya’ll check in for extensive updates as I am down in media-land until I return to work on Saturday. I told my colleagues that when I come back to work I am going to “ride in on a horse.” Which means, as Ray Benzino recently told Allhiphop.com about his return to the Source, “Son, you’re not listening to me. You’re not listening to me, man. I’m coming back on a f**king horse, man. There is no “what if..” or “If me and Dave ain’t..” Hey, if you want the exclusive I’m telling you what the f**k it is man. I’m coming back up there and heads are rolling. You know what I’m saying, Jeremy or anybody else they got up there. I’m telling you what it is. There’s no “if me and Dave don’t.” When me and Dave are back in power, I’m coming back on a f**king horse.”