I’m spreading my wings.

My job is becoming a nightmare that I can’t seem to wake up from. I lay in the bed I once begged for, desperately tossing and turning, sweating and shaking, grinding my teeth… I need someone to come and shake the shit out of me until I sit up, wide eyed gasping for breath.

It isn’t that I mind working, per se. What I do isn’t work. It’s stress. Basically, I feel like I’m in a constant struggle with every customer, every boss….every thought. Making a deal with the devil couldn’t be much more to deal with than trying to take a measly fucking week’s vacation. I’ve probably mentioned my upcoming vacation on this very forum before. That’s tough shit for you, dear reader. I’m going to complain a little more. I’m spending the hottest week of the goddam summer on the roof of my house, replacing rotten decking, and nailing down new shingles to the top of it. I should have a few more days of vacation left after next week. I believe I will spend that portion of my dear vacation installing windows in the house.

I was thinking back to my childhood days today. Thinking back, I can remember some really low times as a kid…times I honestly would have rather died than live; or rather, didn’t really care either way. Those were times, ashamedly, I have to admit aren’t so different than the times I’m living in now. The only difference is that when I was young I had a 40 acre field, full of cow shit, with a pond stocked with catfish and bluegill. Fishing was a daily event. Bait? That’s what grasshoppers were for. My god, those were good times. I could fish the depression away, it seemed. I spent the first 12-13 years of my life barefooted. I can remember RUNNING up and down the dirt road I lived on, completely shoe less.
I’m leaving, boys and girls. I’m going to go and see exactly what I’m about. I’m going to find out what I’m really made of.

One of my bosses is a very intellectual man. He has no college degree. He’s a 55-ish year old black man that stands about 5’6”. When you talk to him, you’d swear he was 6’6” and 350 pounds. He is very intimidating, to say the least. Luckily, I haven’t had to talk to him recently. He pretty much makes it known that his goal in life is to get the most out of people and help as many people as possible. If you ask him for help, though, don’t guess for a second if you’re going to get it or not. He pushes and pressures the shit out of you. The man is an “early riser”. He’ll stay up till 3 am taking shots of tequila, and he’s up at 5 am or so reading the paper, a book, or working out. The last conversation I had with this man honestly made me do some soul searching. We sat at a nice bar in the lobby of a nice hotel. He asked me “Beans, what are you about?” What am I about? I honestly don’t know. I asked for some clarity. “What are you about, sir”, I asked. He proceeded to tell me he was about helping people. Of course; this man drives a very nice car, which costs probably in the range of $175K, and lives in a $2-$3 million house. “I don’t know, sir. I really don’t know WHAT I’m about, sir”, I admitted; feeling silly for “not knowing what I’m about”. He asked me why I live in the particular state I live in. “I was born there, sir”, I told him. He chuckled and asked, “Is that where you want to live?” I explained that my family was there, and I liked it fine. The next two questions pretty much stunned me. 1.) “Where would you live if you could?” I told him I’d live somewhere in the Caribbean, if I really had my ‘druthers. 2.) “Why don’t you live there?” was the next question. I wasn’t shocked yet. I told him that I obviously couldn’t afford to live there and couldn’t make a living there if I were to take the chance. “Are you telling me you couldn’t get a job as a doorman or a bartender, and live in an apartment? You understand that you choose where you live, don’t you”, he continued to probe. As mad as he will be when I quit, because of the time, effort and money put into training me; it’s his fault I’m leaving. He’s the one that opened the door of my cage. I’m standing in the doorway of the cage, and I’m getting ready to see what these feather-covered wings were made for. I may crash and burn, but I’ll never know until I start flapping.

It’s almost as if I never noticed that there was a sky before. My God! Look at the blue freaking sky. There’s so few actually using their wings.

I ask you, dear reader; Why do you live where you do? If you’re happy, then I’m happy for you. If you’ve got family depending on you, then I respect you. If you’re just treading water, stuck in a high paying job that you hate; fucking quit that shit. I’ll meet you in the clouds.

Happy Thursday!

-Beans™

It looks like we made it. (barely)

Well, this past weekend, as most of you know, was memorial day. It was also my birthday yesterday. The hippy’s birthday was Sunday. We had planned MONTHS ago that we were going to go to this same little spot where we went hunting this past winter, on our birthdays. Well, we did.

We got to camp at about 2:00 pm Saturday. We decided to stay both Saturday and Sunday night. Saturday was spent mostly getting the fire ready for cooking, setting up tents, getting the two four-wheelers ready, and finally, cooking. We had steaks that were absolutely amazing. I almost cried on several occasions while eating it. We brought 6 cases of beer, and a couple of bottles of whiskey; for all 5 of us. Since we started drinking beer at about 2:00 on Saturday, by the time it was getting dark, we were hammered drunk. What should we do…what should we do??? RIDE FOUR-WHEELERS. Keep in mind that this is my second time to be in that camping spot and on those dirt roads. To get to our camping spot, it’s about 8-10 miles off of the paved road.

Well, ride four-wheelers, we certainly did. We rode them around, with the hippy as our leader. He’s the one who knew all the roads and trails. We found these 2 humongous logging tractors; and of course, tried to start them up, with no success. I ask the driver of the four-wheeler that I was on the back of if he minded if I drove. He didn’t care. We switched places, and he started screaming, “haul ass! haul ass!” Guess what we did… We hauled ass. We hauled ass until we didn’t know where in the hell we were. We decided to turn around, because we were both pretty certain that we were going to wrong direction. While turning around, I apparently hit the kill-switch. I didn’t know how to start his damn four-wheeler in the first place. Well, that night, he didn’t either. We were stuck, lost, out of beer, no weed, no water, no food……. I ask you, my friends, what would you do? Probably not what we did.

We decided to sleep. We waded off into the woods to get something to burn, and drug it back to the road. Everything we found to burn was soaking wet. We finally got a good fire started (in the middle of the dirt road), and laid down and slept (in the middle of the dirt road). We had slept, what I guess to be about an hour, when I was awakened by headlights. What in the hell were headlights doing coming down a road? Crazy idiots. I jumped up, and started trying to move the four-wheeler out of the middle of the road. After successfully moving the four-wheeler, I started to kick my friend telling him we needed to get out of the road (you’d think that would be obvious). It took 3 pretty solid kicks to get him back to life.

“We have to get out of here, man”, I tell him. So, we start walking down the road with not really any idea if we were walking in the right direction. He was tired and so was I, so we started looking for a place to sleep, that was slightly off the road. He pointed at one very nice spot, but it happened to be down lower than the road, and I was concerned that our friends wouldn’t see us if they came looking. We kept walking. We came upon another spot that was flat and close to the road (without actually being in it). So we started building a fire; with more wet burning materials. Once again, we got a fire going out of completely wet burning supplies. I’m talking about wet leaves, wet sticks, and wet logs. The only thing that saved our ass was the pack of king-sized Rizlas hidden away in my pocket. Within about 10 minutes, we had a decent fire going. I took my shirt off, and laid on it. I was awakened several times by bugs crawling on me.

We got lost at about midnight, as soon as the sun came up, we were up and walking again. We came upon 2 camps where all the campers were still asleep. The third one we came across, everyone was alive and moving around. We made some small talk, told them our embarrassing story, and asked for some help getting back to the four-wheeler. It’s a little bit hard for someone to give us advice on how to get back to our camp – WHEN WE DON’T KNOW WHERE WE WERE CAMPING!

We got back to the four-wheeler, and our nice new friends graciously showed us the kill-switch being off. Once we got the four-wheeler going, we figured out very soon where we were, and hauled ass back to camp. When we got there, of course the other friends were freaking out, and my special lady friend looked like she was going to punch me.

That is when we found out the rest of the story (what happened at camp the night we slept in the road). The other two guys on the four-wheeler got back to camp expecting us to be there. So they just waited, and started drinking whiskey and waiting. The hippy got belligerently drunk, and wanted to come find us; he was simply too fucking hammered. He and the special lady friend got into a screaming match because he accused her of not caring that we were dying out in the woods somewhere. The hippy got into his truck and started driving it away from the road, and deeper into the very thick woods. The special lady friend took the hippy’s keys away, because he got so angry, he started ramming his own truck with his four-wheeler. He got very angry about this, and again accused the others of not caring that we were dying out in the woods. Unbeknown to them, he had an extra key in his wallet.

I have no idea what else happened, but I wouldn’t trade this past weekend for anything.

I’m an idiot. We’re idiots. ….sleeping in the middle of the road….PAH!

-Beans™