Work wasn't too bad, as the department, like pretty much the rest of the building on weekends, was pretty deserted and so things tend to be slightly more laid back than the weekdays. I had finished my required duties, which for the most part involve pulling and entering delivery records for the following week and sending communications for that day's customer complaints. Towards the end of my time, I got to read some of the fascinating correspondence which is mixed in with what we receive in our weekly batch of customer mail orders. Among the usual fake addresses and emails, I came across the following manifesto:
"The dead & returned Dead are Al Quaeda. The USA must die. Bring us the $40 million at the Hearst Gate & you all can live. I have extorted 200 firms... We have the necessary $ for our uprising... Barak (sic) Obama & the Germans back us. I used to work for Clinton now its Barak Obama... Bring me & the Sacramento Dead Council the $ or we will have to have community center meetings against you... Barak Obama and the Germans talk to us through telepathy... We popped the Sacramento girl cop to send you a message... This will be like the 1916 Dublin Easter uprising Germany backed to end WWI England..."
Somebody took the time to scribble all of that down and walked their sorry ass to a mailbox just to send that to us. Wow.
I asked one of the managers if we have any kind of special procedure in dealing with extortion attempts, and she mentioned that this person tends to mail in this type of rant on pretty much a weekly basis, and that the communications are relegated to the circular file. So, tough break buddy, no 40 mil waiting for you in Berkeley this week. Hope that you at least got your SSI check cashed by your payee this month without any problems. Hey, at least you made me laugh. However, everybody else who has had to read the shit seems pretty bored with the whole shtick by now, so maybe you need to take a break for a while.
After work, it was still before noon so I decided to do my usual routine and walk over to get my weekly smoothie up the street. As timing would have it, the railroad decided to run a freight through.
If you aren't familiar with Midtown Sacramento, here's the deal: right between 19th and 20th streets there is a single track cutting right through the central city pretty much from north to south. At any given time 24/7, the railroad will decide to run a train consisting of, oh, anywhere between 100 to 300 or so various types of freight cars, holding up not only vehicles but also all of the foot traffic through pretty much every cross street from C Street to Broadway on down.
If you were on J Street as I was, for example, you would probably save time by walking all the way back to the RT station at 23rd and R Street and hopping the train which goes on an overpass, thus bypassing the locomotive hauled monstrosity crawling its way along the rails through town at the moment.
I don't have that much of a problem with waiting for the train to pass, but I did find it amusing when I noticed at least 3 or 4 people waiting along with me who were frantically dialing up their cell phones, presumably to tell somebody, "Hey so-and-so, hi, hey I'm waiting for this fuckin' train to pass so I'm on my way, 'K? Bye." Reminds me of one of the reasons I'm glad that I no longer have a cell phone anymore. Yeah, the wait wasn't actually so bad, but looking back, I really wish that I'd had some Utah Phillips or at least some Johnny Cash on shuffle play while I was waiting.
Later, with train passed, and smoothie in hand, I dropped by the local supermarket for my semi-weekly one dollar donation to help California's schools. But I didn't have a dollar for the automated ticket machine, so to break a twenty, I picked up a couple of boxes of cereal on sale. Don't you just hate spacing out in the morning and realizing that you're out of cereal and forgot to keep it in stock? Well, I do. So I made sure that I'm corn flaked for at least the next month or so.
I finally got around to seeing Neil Young's film called Greendale . I didn't really have any assumptions on what I expected to see, and in the end I was actually pretty impressed. The film does, however, deliver a semi-chaotic list of messages re: art, the media, society, small-town America, consumerism, and ultimately the environment and I was wondering how mainstream American audiences would sum it up. A rock opera taken to a new level? An 83 minute music video segment? Something that would whiz over the heads of 99.6 percent of folks who are spoon fed digitally enhanced plot starved summer blockbuster extravaganzas disguised as legitimate entertainment? Who knows and who gives a fuck? I got the messages loud and clear, but then again, I'm nuts.
This evening I ran through a mixed bag of covers and originals on acoustic guitar. I normally plug in my electrics during the rest of the week, but I try to play the acoustic at least once so that I can keep in practice in that area, plus it's good for my fingers to fuck them up on an acoustic fretboard on occasion.
Tomorrow is another day. And I can actually use it in its entirety on my own decision. Lucky me.
(IMPORTANT NOTE OF GUIDANCE: This post is but one in a series called THE MUNDANE MONTH OF BLOGGING™. For those of you who are scratching your head right now and saying to yourselves, "What the fuck is he trying to prove?", Click Here, Pilgrim)
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