Gittin' Short

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.  The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

-Sylvia Plath-

(American Pulitzer Poet, suicide, 1963)

I notice this morning, finally, that the Swifter mop leaning against the dinette wall has dirt and dust accumulated around it.  Yet another shitty little job gone to the dogs.

And speaking of dogs: which one of you Dorks left that skunk streak on the bed sheet?  It certainly wasn’t me—not even anywhere near the slice of mattress you people allow me on the far port edge of night-night.

And don’t even think about pointing paws at the cats.  They wouldn’t do this.  Cats just aren’t in to dragging their asses across any textured surface; besides, they share a litter box about the size of Rhode Island which…GET the hell outta that box and drop that cat shit!  I’m warning you!  No, I’ll pick it up, thank you!

Crap.

Running a household free of other humans is not all it’s cracked up to be.  There’s none of the marital-cohabitation bliss of blaming a partner for the entire quagmire that is amiss-and-laying-about.

When the carpets are stained with dog piss in concentric circles; when the tile lies beneath a uniform layer of grit, I can hardly yell at the Mutt Brigade that it’s their turn to clean up the mess.  Not one of them would run a freaking vacuum cleaner or turn to with broom and mop, to save their freaking lives.

Useless ingrates.

Truth be told, I’m still upset with the Psych visit Friday.  I don’t know how to address it without demeaning someone I do not understand.

Here is irony: I iz the one feeling demeaned by the experience, but I choose to say nothing of the de-meaner.  Well, OK, make your own judgment.  What would you say if the doctor told you he had been practicing for nineteen years; and kept a medical diploma on the top of a filing cabinet, still enclosed in its commencement folder?  Whaddyathinkofthatshit?

Fooof---blowing it off, blowing it off.  Mellow thoughts.  A few porno images to bring balance back to a deeply troubled mind. 

That was likely my last turn with the psychiatrist, he determining that my meds are set for at least a year.  No need to see him further.  Time to heal the damage he inadvertently caused.

I swear on my grandchild’s Girl Scout Cookies, if I encounter one more meathead in the system…I’m going to declare Open Season on the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.

I mean it; and there won’t be any goody-goody two-shoes Girl Scout pledge to go with it.

You think I’ve been brutal with American War Era lifers?  Wait till I launch into a morass of public sector scuts trying to bail out the lifeboat of an increasingly failing system.  You ain’t read nuthin’ yet!

Well, it’s an ill wind blah blah blah.  All this banter has brought me to the necessary foul mood to do this here monograph coming right up after this commercial break:

Friends, when fretful with doubt take yer meds with clout.  When doleful and glum take drugs and rum.  The meds will keep you in mediocre mood while drugs and booze will chase the blues.  Trust in your doctors and dealers with glee.  Trust them; oh trust them, a cure you will see!

Believe that, you die.

*

I dared to peek at some asshole’s calendar taped to his locker: it was May 12, 1970.  I was less than three weeks from my ten day stand down!  At once I was elated and depressed.  The preceding six weeks had been…awful.  Let me not bore you, good readers, with a rendition of that.  What came next was worse, far worse.

We ran out of boats to chip and paint.  We ran out of crap to comshaw to a dumping off place.  We seemed to have run out of work.  But in this man’s Navy, there was no such thing as idle time; not at least for bottom feeders like Frosty and the blonde headed shitty-little-jobs yeoman without the cool comfort of the Boathouse.

Bullethead dreamed up something.  Finding work appeared to be the only imagination his thick head could produce.  Out at their moorings were the fuel barges, now empty and devoid of their contents.  They were too far from the causeway to run power to the wind devils, so any residual vapor was just tough shit on anybody unfortunate to work on them. Or in them.

Fuel barges are double hulled.  To access the space, between the outer hull and the inner bulkheads, are large round metal plates about every three feet down their one hundred foot length.  Each plate is fastened like a car wheel to its brake drum by large steel bolts.  A car wheel has five or six bolts; these plates had about thirty.  The plates weighed about eighty pounds.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it (or die the little death at the hands of the lifers), was descend into the hold, and remove the plates—all of them.  The only tool required for this was a speed wrench.

There were a few discomforting features to this line of work.  Those of us with the basic nature of a tropical Orchid would have no problem working in 130 degree, 100% humidity conditions (The six inches of water we stood in often vaporized to form rain clouds in the overhead. Hot rain was no relief at all).

I had one additional challenge: I was claustrophobic.  This particular phobia came to my attention about six months before.  Some dufus dropped a tool over the side.  Apparently, it was either expensive or indispensable; I never learned, because I never laid eyes on it.

True to my nature of being firstest with the mostest, I took command of the situation, stripped to my skivvies; and dived off the moored boat to pull a Robert Wagner ala Twelve Mile Reef panache to recover the errant whatever-it-was.  The bottom was plumbed at about two fathoms.  ‘Cool’, I thought; no deeper than the diving pool at Alamo Heights back home.  Slice of pie! Piece of cake!

I would find the object in less than two minutes, to burst through the surface holding the prize up for all my cheering shipmates to see.  Chances to be a hero was so far and few between.

That, unfortunately, is not what happened.

Reaching the muddy bottom with practiced stroke, I leveled out to begin a frantic search.  Instead, I became frantic at the few inches of semi-clear water between sea floor and the murk above me. 

I panicked.  The feeling of enclosure flooded my senses with a dread that had me dog paddling to the surface, my Bob Wagner persona vanished, never to return.  Now that I was aware of this perceived menace, I never again allowed myself to step into any tiny space; I can’t even stand to watch films or TV showing  ‘buried alive’ or ‘trapped in a cave’ kinda shit.  Can’t do it.

I was able to overcome the dread of climbing down the hatch to the dank interior by virtue of two things.  First, we went down in teams.  This was necessary for those shifts lasting more than fifteen minutes.  Someone would pass out; the rest of us had to get them back to the hatch, get them on deck; and revive them with a gallon of water and enough salt tablets to salinate the Dead Sea.  The lifer-in-charge finally let up and limited the work parties to fifteen minutes--tops.  The companionship of my fellows helped my spirit by the earnest desire to not appear a chickenshit in front of my peers.

My second relief came from the fantasy of what-it-would-be-like to be with Christina again.  I spun that dream until it almost eradicated the reality of unwinding those thirty bolts per plate (rusted through, most of them—no WD-40 or solvent to assist). 

A teacher once taught us about the Great Depression and the back-to-work programs implemented by the New Deal.  He told us that San Antonio men hired by the WPA worked to create Woodlawn Lake in our town.

To keep them at ‘work’, they would dig a pit and carry the dirt in wheelbarrows to the other side of the lake.  When the mound was sufficiently heaped, they would load the dirt back in the wheelbarrows and take them back around, to fill in the hole.

To my way of thinking, that was far more productive than removing all those heavy plates. Once pried off the bulkhead, we just laid them down; no explanation was offered for doing this job.  It couldn’t be justified by some idea of pumping water out from between the hull and bulkheads.  There were access holes on the deck that permitted pump hoses to be lowered down.  It was just labor for the sake of…nothing.

I never saw the end of this ‘project’.  I woke up one morning and the asshole’s calendar announced that the ten day stand-down had finally come.  I was free of the lifers, freedom very near…at last!

With the irrationality that was the core and substance of thought in my tousled head, my first query was, ‘What the fuck am I going to do with myself for ten whole days?’

The answer came.  Oh yes, it came.  I still had a little time remaining in-country to keep jamming down on my self-destruct button.  Just give a madman a little more rope…