Let him eat Vegetation

Over the last month or two I've been thinking about becoming a vegetarian and, as of yesterday, decided to enact those thoughts. By next week I will have stopped eating all of the meat that I think tastes so good.

I'd like to say here that I'm going to use this entry to explain at least some of my thought process behind the reason I'm becoming a vegetarian and that I don't want to sound judgmental or preachy or anything. I'm well aware of the deliciousness of meat and that many people enjoy consuming it. I wouldn't want anyone reading this to think I thought less of them because they aren't a vegetarian or whatever, I'm not even certain I'll be able to maintain it--but I aim to try, and I'd like to say why here.

There are some obvious benefits that come to mind when talking about not eating meat. Humans are capable of eating and digesting meat--indeed I believe we crave it (as we crave sugar and salt) because it provides a huge amount of protein and energy dense fuel that would power our hunter-gatherer ancestors as they roamed the plains or jungles or whatever. Humans that didn't want to eat meat no doubt died out pretty quickly, as did humans who didn't like to eat salt. Humans that didn't want sugar were probably okay, but no doubt lived sad, lonely lives.

All that being said, humans did not evolve--I believe--to consume to enormous amounts of meat that are available to us in the modern era. Throughout history meat has been a sign of wealth and power, while the lower classes subsisted on bread and vegetables the nobility would feast on meat and wine. In medieval times even hunting on lands was illegal, the ruling classes knew that meat was as much a status symbol as a delicious meal, and they couldn't have the unwashed masses just snatching all the animals and cooking them up for themselves.

As the modern era progressed  people had more money, and they wanted what the haves had. Cars, makeup, education, and meat, of course. The insatiable demand for flesh has created an insane, bloated, and frankly inefficient mass production of meat to feed the bottomless gut of the so-called first world in its voracious desire for meat.

My sort of rambling point here is that the human body isn't really built to eat meat every day for every meal. Meat is supposed to be a boost, a treat every few weeks or so, not a staple.

So health is a legitimate reason, I think, to start eating less or no meat. But if I'm being honest it had little to no bearing on my choice to switch to vegetarianism. The two biggest factors on my choice were Superman and shit that lives on windows.

I might not have mentioned here before how much I dig Superman, despite the general idea that he's boring or dumb or whatever, I think he's pretty much the bee's knees when it comes to superheroes, and literary characters in general (there's probably a future blog post dedicated to Superman and how awesome he is, look out for it!) Anyway, there's a particularly good Superman comic called Birthright (I linked to Amazon there and not Wikipedia because I want you to purchase and read it, not just skim the synopsis on Wikipedia, and I know you can't do that if I don't give you the link) that's about the origin of Superman. In the comic he mentions being able to see an aura around living things and how it fades when they die. For some reason that touched me. I've always known that meat was the result of dead animals and never was too bothered by it, but seeing Superman marveling in the life of lions and zebras and every other living thing made me pause in a way that my logical knowledge never had. I can't explain why, but it really made me face up to what the hard reality of meat production was, the result of raising and slaughtering animals for something I wanted but did not need.

The other component, probably the bigger one, comes from cleaning windows.

I know, it's fucking weird. Just bear with me.

When I'm cleaning windows I see a lot of really nasty-looking insects that live on the windows or in the corners of them (I looked around the internet for some sort of site listing organisms that like to live on windows but all I could find were screensavers.) Mostly spiders and beetles. Lady bugs are strangely attracted to windows too for some reason, and of course there are plenty of grasshoppers and mosquitoes on there too, sometimes I even see a snail or a lizard or a slug, but those are rare.

Anyway, I realized that, as I clean windows, I always do my best to avoid killing these nasty things whenever I can. If the spider has a nest in the corner of the window, I'll try to judge if the nest can be seen from inside or easily seen from outside. If it can't, I'll just leave it where it is. If it can be seen easily and it's obvious that anyone looking at the window will know I didn't get rid of it, I'll smack it around with a squeegee until the spider and/or its babies flee the nest and I can destroy it. If a snail is sticking to the side of the window, I'll gently ease it off and try to find a nice place to deposit it on the ground, out of the footpath so no one crushes it. I'll even slide slugs off of the sills of the windows to the dirt or nearby leaves so I don't crush them with my strip-washer.

Sometimes I don't notice a mosquito on the window until I've crushed it with my tools. As I pick the crush corpse out of the bristles of my brush I'll feel actual real guilt. I can't explain why it bothers me so much. I hardly believe that a fucking mosquito can feel pain or experience fear or anything. I doubt the damn thing even has a brain, I probably have more neurons in my Enteric nervous system than that little bug has in its whole body--yet I still feel sad that I killed it. It wasn't hurting me, it was just chilling on a window, taking a break or whatever, and here I come with my big wet mass of fiber and crush it to death...for what? So that some people can look through a window without seeing dirt or whatever? That seems to me a pretty awful reason to kill something, even something as simple and insignificant as a mosquito or snail.

Once I really thought about all the trouble I went through to avoid killing vermin while cleaning windows, I started thinking about the animals I was consuming. I was killing them, much more indirectly than I killed the mosquito or spider, of course, but my demand for meat was contributing to the death of animals much, much more complex and sophisticated than the little ball of action and reaction that is a beetle.

I thought of my girlfriend's two cats, who obviously have different personalities and desires. I thought of an old friend who had a pet goat that would always rub against her and try to headbutt me. I've been around cows and pigs and all other sorts of livestock and I know they can be just as varied and aware as these pets.

And I realized my deep hypocrisy at struggling to spare the lives of window dwellers while going home to eat steaks. These are living creatures who very obviously can experience pain and fear, and I was taking their lives, erasing whatever experience they were able to have in this world forever and ever, so that I could consume them. I'd tell myself I had to do it, that if I didn't eat I would die--but I wouldn't die if I never ate meat.

I told myself that only eating plants was just as bad, a plant is alive, it can die--and that's true, but a plant doesn't have to die to feed a person. Indeed, some plants have evolved with the intention of having parts of themselves consumed in order to spread their offspring. There are no multi-cellular animals (that I know of) that have evolved to have a part of themselves consumed. With an animal it's all or nothing, you can't just slice off a chicken's leg and fry that up (or I suppose you could, but that would be even more horrific than just killing the damn thing.)

Now, if I stop eating meat, will the animals that die to supply the world with meat stop dying? Will they be set free to live their lives as best they can? Of course not. I doubt meat production will drop any amount at all, in fact I suspect it will continue to consume the surface of the earth (eight billion acres) in a desperate attempt to keep up with demand. Animals will continue to suffer and die and people will profit from that suffering.

But that doesn't matter. I will be at peace with myself. I will know that I have done some small thing to halt the pain of so many living things--things that are, as far as we know--totally unique in the whole universe. Pain and death inflicted on living things just so that I can enjoy something, not so that I can survive, not so that my loved ones don't die, pain for pleasure, pain for leisure...it's something that I can't stand by and accept anymore.

Now I'm not going to go join ELF (that is a link to their website which has nasty pictures and will probably make DHS start following you if you go there), or PETA or anything like that. I won't start saying that animals should be raised over humans in terms of what limited resources should be focused on or anything like that, but I will endeavor to limit the suffering and pain of everything and everyone in the whole world whenever and however I can.

It's certainly what Superman would do.

Keys and Locks

So it has been a significant amount of time since the last time I wrote a blog here, and that's primarily for two reasons.

The first one is that my last post was that rather iffy short story about Planetside 2, a story that wasn't finished. When I write something I find it incredibly difficult to write anything that isn't that until it is finished. Especially if people have read the unfinished thing. Of course, I'm also incredibly lazy so when faced with the choice of finishing a story or whatever so that I can write something else I want to write or try to grind out my quiver I'll usually pick the latter.

The other reason is that I work a lot these days, and while around ten or eleven o' clock in the morning I'll be struck with a powerful inspiration for a blog post--imagine an outline, clever one line paragraphs and all that stuff--I then wind up working until six that afternoon and by the time I get home all I want to do is eat, read, and sleep.

It pains me, not writing when I'm tired. I know if I ever want to actually really be a writer I need a schedule and the will to stick to it. But that's a discussion for another time.

Today I want to write a few thoughts about a saying I've seen floating around the internet for a while. I haven't heard it in real life thus far, and I'm thankful for that, but the saying makes me furious everytime I see it and I feel like this is the best place to vent my feelings--into more or less an empty void.

The saying is, "If a key opens many locks, it's a master key. If a lock opens to many keys, it's a shitty lock."

In case you need some context, the saying is a metaphor for male and female sexuality. Obviously the key is a penis and the lock is a vagina.

At first glance the metaphor actually seems like a good one, and since all the internet cares about are first glances, I imagine that's why it has become widespread. The reality is, of course, that the metaphor doesn't make any kind of sense at all. It just reinforces the disgusting misogyny and ignorance that seems so widespread among many corners of the internet. It should be stopped.

The idea is obviously that a woman is a lock that has to be opened by a man. The woman is stripped of responsibility here--a lock can't try to escape a key--its a question only of whether or not the key is "strong" enough to overpower the lock's defense. It's based on the most basic understanding of sex; a cock penetrates a pussy, that's sex, right? That's all there is to sex in this metaphor. I wonder if this is another reason this saying is so popular with young men who use the internet a lot?

(I can say this without indicating myself these days I think--I might not be quite to middle age yet, but I'm shedding the last vestiges of "young" too.)

Anyway, women are not locks, and men are not keys. A woman can enjoy sex, I imagine most do, probably as much as men. Women can search out sex, just as men. Hell, women don't even need men to have and enjoy sex--I wonder how a lesbian that has sex with many different women would fit into this metaphor?

The realities of how and why people have sex are far too complex and involved for any sort of saying to encapsulate them all, especially a saying as gauche as this one.

So why do I care? People might say that I'm writing this just to "white knight" women, that I'm being nice to try to get laid. I am, of course, in a more or less stable relationship and, not to brag, could have sex pretty much whenever I wanted with as much or as little effort as I wanted to exert.

Other, more cunning detractors might say that I'm buying into a culture of misandry and being taught to hate myself because of all these evil women trying to take over the world.

(A word of caution, that site I just linked to is pretty goddamn awful and hateful, so you probably shouldn't click it.)

The reality is I care because I genuinely believe in equality whenever it is possible, and females and males should be held as sexual equals just as much as they should be intellectual and physical equals (and yes I realize that absolute equality isn't possible, the strongest person in the world will almost certainly never be a woman, but it also won't be you.)

This saying brings me back to what will probably be a recurring theme in this blog, that words affect the ideas people have. These days people say that it doesn't matter how a message is given, as long as you understand it. I think this is totally false, the words we use couch an idea with flavors and textures than will change how we internalize this information into our lives. I have no doubt that there are young men reading things like this on the internet and honestly believing that women are comparable to locks, inanimate objects, obstacles to be overcome and owned. We as a society have to be more careful with the ideas that we form and release into the world, ideas are dangerous, deadly things--more than ever with the incredible speed with which they can be disseminated thanks to the damned internet, with no time for cooler heads to prevail or reasoned discussion and thought.

So don't replace your thoughts with phrases, don't use quotes or jokes or whatever to express how you think about things--think about them, express them with your own words, move beyond memes with bold text and stupid pictures.

And have as much or as little sex as you want, without judging how much or how little sex other people are having.

And now for Something Completely Different

So this is a work of boredom, and, I suppose, more procrastination. It's the first part of a story that might never be finished based on a free to play massively multiplayer online first person shooter called Planetside 2 and written without any consideration for grammar, spelling, or character development. It might appeal to two or three people I know personally, and other than that has very few redeeming qualities.

Basically what I'm saying is if you read this blog normally or something, this is not a normal entry and can be skipped without missing anything.

I still remember the day that I first met the Vahn brothers. These days it's hard to ever imagine not knowing Edo and Desfend, and the stories people tell about us and Bann make it sound like we all came through the ranks together, but there was a time before the Clan, a time when I was just a combat medic coming off of a three day R&R session after a two month deployment on Hossin. I'd been attached to the 207th heavy infantry platoon, serving on the front lines against a massive Vanu force who'd been dug in like an Indarian tick-spider. We'd rooted them out after four weeks of siege with a final desperate push led by the 207 in two sunderers and a lighting tank. 

I'd seen a lot of good men go down on Hossin, men I hadn't been able to get to in time to reconstruct.

That was what it was, what my nifty little white medical gun actually did. I was no doctor, I'd failed out of med school back on Earth, why would any doctor have volunteered to get transported through the wormhole to Auraxis? I'd done it because I owed too much money to too many people and Auraxis was a chance to get out of it all. I'd had enough basic medical training to make it as a mine medic, but nothing else, and that training became less and less relevant as the incredible advances the Auraxian tech allowed us to make. The nanomachines--nanites--that were uncovered on Auraxis changed everything. Now you didn't need to know how to fix the human body, you just needed a medical applicator with a blueprint of human anatomy and plenty of nanites and batteries, the little alien machines would swarm into you and right any wrongs detected. Even death could be reversed if you got to the corpse soon enough, nearly the whole body could be reconstructed as long as you knew where to put the beam.

After the wormhole collapsed and we were all trapped here, after the VS started fighting the Republic and the miners formed the Conglomerate no one cared what training I had, they just wanted me out there fighting, keeping the soldiers going, trying to finally free ourselves of the oppression Terran Republic and the madness of the Vanu Sovereignty.

But that's all beside the point. The point is that on my last day of break I was walking across a courtyard on Sanctuary when two MPs flagged me down. I was informed the Suits wanted to meet with me in NC headquarters, and was then told to follow the MPs.

I'd never met the Suits, the heads of the New Conglomerate, men who had once been mine managers and shift supervisors, now doing their best to work as generals. Against the intelligence of the Vanu and the training of the Republic I'm amazed they did as well as they have. 

Inside of NCHQ I was efficiently moved through old mining offices and told to wait in a cramped room with two chairs and faded carpet. I was wearing my fatigues and the office was hot. Sweat beaded at the back of my neck as I stood staring at the door I hadn't come in through. I was nervous, and unsure of whether I should sit down or stand.

After what seemed like hours, but was probably five minutes, the door opened and three men walked through it. Two of them were soldiers wearing Reinforced Exosuit Armor--what we called ReXo suits-- and armed with  EM1 machine guns. Typical heavies. The third man was a Suit. I was stunned to see he actually was wearing a suit, a nice, black on black thing that looked like it had just come off a ship from Earth.

"Ericksson?" He asked, looking me up and down.

"Yes, sir," I responded. The Terrans claim we're anarchists in the NC, but we have discipline when it's needed.

"Combat Medic, yes? Served on Hossin with distinction?"

"I was just doing my job, sir."

The Suit smiled. He produced a tablet from somewhere and his eyes flickered over something I couldn't see.

"Your commanding officer claimed you were the best combat medic he'd seen, said you'd run into plasma streams so thick you couldn't see the ground to pull men out."

"Yes, sir." I said, "My job, sir."

The suit nodded, "Well, I think you'll do just fine for this job then, son."

"What job is that?" I asked. I was feeling incredibly confused at this point.

The Suit motioned to one of his heavies. The soldier crossed the room to open the door I had come through and two more men walked in. They were obviously brothers, with the same black hair and jawlines. One was taller, slender. The other was just slightly shorter but powerfully built, with shoulders that looked about five feet wide. They weren't wearing armor, but did have the thick canvas fatigues of the NC on.

"This is Engineer Edo Vahn and his brother Sergeant Desfend Vahn," the Suit said, the two men nodded to me, "they're going to be accompanying you on a very important mission, should you choose to accept it."

"Mission, sir?" I asked.

The suit motion to the other heavy that had been with him, who walked to the wall and flipped the light switch off. The Suit pushed something on his tablet and it projected a map of the continent of Indar against the far wall in flickering blue and red light.

"Recognize the map?" the Suit asked.

The three of us did.

"Good. Then you should know we've been locked in a stalemate with the Terran Republic on this continent for the past three weeks. They have pushed us back from the north and western regions of the continent, and now we're barely holding on to a few key regions around our warpgate."

As he spoke, the Suit motioned to the map with his hand, the map reacted, hexes lighting up in red to mark the TR's advance and blue to show our few remaining positions.

"If the Republic gets us to the warpgate there will be nothing between them and Sanctuary."

None of us said anything in response to that, Sanctuary was the only place on Auraxis that the New Conglomerate could call home, it was where our few children and non-combatants were, where what passed for families these days were kept, a place to retreat from the never ending war and feel like you were more than a machine made for fighting, held together by hardly understood alien technology.

"Now," the Suit went on, motioning so that the map zoomed in on a specific region west of the NC warpgate, "this is Tawrich Tech Plant. The Republic is using the facilities there to crank out Prowler main battle tanks as fast as the nanites can assemble them. It's those tanks that are pressing us so hard. We cannot spare soldiers to attempt a counter attack to any less defended regions because every man and woman on Indar is working to keep the tanks from blitzing into the warpgate and destroying Sanctuary. Air strikes against the plant have proven useless, the air defenses there are too strong for us to punch through."

The map swerved again and held on another region, farther west than Tawrich.

"This is the Regent Rock Garrison. A strongpoint for the TR's invasion of Indar. They took it from the Vanu four months ago but since they claimed Tawrich they've left it almost empty. We have an agent already on the ground there, and he's confident that he can take the base with some reinforcement."

The Suit motioned to the heavy, who flipped the lights back on. The Suit made the map vanished and looked at the three of us.

"You three are to be that reinforcement. Your mission will be to fly, undetected, to the Garrison, to rendezvous with Specialist Jackson and then to take Regent Rock Garrison and activate the spawning tubes. From there you'll travel east to Tawrich and open up a second front at their flank and hopefully be able to enter the base and blow the generators. That should break their production line long enough for our forces to rally and counter attack."

When he was done speaking, the Suit put his tablet away and crossed his arms.

"Any questions?"

"Sir," I asked, "the three of us are supposed to make it across over a hundred miles of battlefield, meet with some 'specialist', take over an enemy garrison and then assault a Republic tech plant that the whole New Army has been unable to take in over a month?"

"That's the idea," the Suit said, "it's a desperate move, I won't lie, but you three are all highly recommended by your superior officers and your action records. If anyone in the New Conglomerate can do this, it would be you three."

For the first time since they had entered the room, one of the Vahn brothers, the shorter, wider one--Desfend--spoke.

"No problem boss."

Regrets

Sometimes I hear people say that they live life without regrets.

I never believe these people.

I don't think it's possible to go through life past the age of five and not have something you regret. It might just be regretting that you ordered chocolate instead of strawberry milk, but there has to be something you regret.

I regret many, many things.

When I was a child I always imagined that I was a good guy, the best kind of guy, for no other reason than I'd never had any evidence otherwise. As I got older opportunities for selfish or cruel or thoughtless behavior presented themselves and, like a normal person, I took advantage of these situations. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. My self image became something much more negative, I began to hate myself, to despise the sort of person I had become.

I eventually learned that all people can be selfish or cruel or careless, and that I was not quite as monstrous as I imagined myself to be. I learned that while I was not the perfectly good and nice person I imagined as a child, I also was not an amoral monster who deserved nothing but derision and spite. This, I think, is just part of growing as a person, coming to terms with some of your own failures and not hating yourself for them.

But I still regret them.

Not everything I regret is due to me consciously making "evil" decisions. Some of the things I regret are just mistakes I made that now, with the perfect clarity of hindsight, seem utterly foolish.

But it's more the idea of regret that I'm mulling over right now. Regret is a strange sort of emotion, isn't it? It's not sadness, it isn't anger. It's a sort of a combination of the both. When I feel regret I imagine a wet, soaking rag, trickling streams of emotion sopping off of a tired and worn out frame. Regret is a thief of motivation and positive thinking. It's a morass that catches one's mind and leeches the feeling out of it.

Regret is painful, but it's the pain of old wounds, a sore knee brought about by the cold weather. It's poking your tongue into the old hole where a tooth once was a feeling a lack of what should be a presence.

The most insidious thing about regret is how comforting it can be.

For many years of my life I made a friend of regret. I took a cold comfort in lamenting over the bad choices I had made and found ease in blaming those decisions for why I was living the way I was. I won't go into details but rest assured it was not a good way of living. Regret formed a cold, numbing blanket over my mind and heart, insulating me from any more pain or joy, rendering all choices down to avoidances (that is not a word.)

I think that regret can become a habit, something that gives you an excuse, "I made this bad move, now all the options are bad and I can do nothing to fix them." You can live your whole life in regret, I think many people do. I think that other people see them doing this and then lie to themselves and others, claiming that they don't have any regrets.

But everyone had regrets, as dangerous as living in eternal regret can be, I think that living in denial of your regrets can be almost as bad. If you cannot admit to yourself that you sometimes make the bad choice, or even wonder what your life would have been like if you had made a different choice, even if it had not been a bad one, then you're living in denial, and even the Greeks said you should know yourself better than that.

So regret. What is it? I know I used some flowery imagery to explain it earlier, but I think it boils down to longing. It's a longing for what might have, could have, should have been. It's a relaization that there are ponts in everyone's life where choices, irreversible choices, are made and some paths open while others close forever as a result of these choices. It's the sad truth that we only have this one life to live and there are no save game files so you can see the other way it could have turned out. It's that desire to see what sort of person you could have been if things had turned out differently.

I think some regret is healthy for a person. At least I hope it is, because I have plenty. But I have worked hard to escape the burdensome comfort of my regret and try to turn it into a tool. I can imagine what sort of person I may have been had things gone differently, while realizing how interesting the things that did happen to me are and how the person I am now is the only person I can be now. I can use my regrets and lessons, and go forward into life adapting that experience to make sure that when I wind up with regrets, at least I'll end up with the right ones.

The Tenth One

So after about two months and ten blog entries (counting this one), we take a moment to quickly survey how things have improved for this intrepidly procrastinating author.

I started writing this blog when very down and depressed due to a lack of income caused by my not being employed. The night I wrote the first entry I had just sent about twenty emails to various employers on craigslist and felt pretty desperate. Imagine my surprise when the next day or so I heard back from one of them and eventually went on to work for the window cleaning company I'm at now. This development has improved my money situation significantly, although I'm still playing a pretty desperate game of catch-up with my bills and money owed to friends and family who loaned me money during my long stretch of joblessness.

The unfortunate side effect of this job is a lack of time for writing the things I want to be writing. You'll notice there has been a real slowdown in blog entries from this last month, that's because I'm working an average of eleven hours or so a day and that's six days a week. It makes writing even this thing pretty difficult, but I think I've already touched on that in an earlier blog entry.

As for the series of stories I started writing this blog to procrastinate from writing, well, that too has slowed down considerably. This development is the most depressing one that has come from my job. I find myself looking over the stories I've already competed instead of working on the current one, picking out countless flaws and grammatical errors. I'm able to fix the grammar, correct the syntax, but the underlying flaws--the bad writing--I can't help but agonize over. The stories all look so bad to me, and I have no way to see them objectively. I find it harder and harder to make myself write them, the more I procrastinate the more I start thinking that the ideas I have are stupid, and that even if they are okay that no one will ever read and enjoy them.

It's all very disheartening.

Still, I don't want to stop. I think that is the important thing. Parts of me see the stories I write and think "yeah this is shit--Twilight is better written than this crap," but another part of me still feels that urge to keep writing. So I suppose as long as I feel that urge to write I'll keep doing it.

Or writing here to procrastinate anyway.

I feel that last line would be a good place to stop the entry, that sort of fancy, thought-provoking stinger I'm so fond of, but I don't feel like being too thought provoking right now. I'm just using this entry as a sort of "state of the union" thing for all my hordes of loyal readers.

So the state is that I am working a lot more, and don't need a blog as much as I used to in order to procrastinate effectively, but I still enjoy writing the blog and writing my fiction, and so I will endeavor to continue to do both. I've heard from one person that I don't have sex with that my blog was entertaining so I suppose that's enough to keep me typing it for at least another month before I get bored and stop.

As for the collection of stories--which are tentatively subtitled Bookhunter--I plan to continue writing those as well. Perhaps I'll be able to tie those two things together a bit more as I move forward, this blog might provide at least a sense of urgency even if not providing any actual urgency about the schedule of writing I'm taking on.

So let me try to lay it out. My plan is to have the current short story I'm working on in the bank by Christmas. With that done I'll have one more story left to write before editing and proofing can start on my entire collection of seven shorts which will hopefully weigh in at about two hundred pages--which I think is a pretty respectable collection for my first venture into attempting to actually make money off of. If that sells anything at all then I'll be able to start cranking out another collection and hopefully have two or three "books" available for purchase by August of next year.

It's also very possible I'll just sit here and watch those deadlines fly by and continue to never ever get anything actually done in my life while complaining about it on the internet.

But that would be no fun, so let's not do that, okay?

(See? still had a stinger)

The Hardest Hue to Hold

On Tuesday I had a job cleaning the windows of a cardiologist's office. It was a nice office, near a large hospital and several other offices and other medical buildings. It was a one story building so I didn't need to use a pole or ladders or repel or anything. I worked alone that day and actually figured I would be able to enjoy myself, cleaning windows effectively and listening to the Comic Vine podcast.

This being a cardiologist's office, you can imagine that most of the people there were older, men and women who were starting to have real troubles with their hearts, which is pretty much the death knell for people living in the United States these days. I don't say that lightly, I had heart surgery when I was eighteen to fix a problem that would probably have killed me when I was in my 40's. Whether or not the problem was fixed in time or not I suppose I'll know in about 20 years or so.

Anyway, I got started cleaning the windows of this place. The front entrance was the most window-y, with huge glass sections turning the walls around the front door into giant windows. I started there, working from the right to the left side of the building, listening to people talk about comic books, watching the soapy water stream down the glass, just enjoying work as much as anyone can enjoy a job that requires little thought, physical exertion, and has no relation to the things one is passionate about in life.

As I approached the second to last set of the front windows, I noticed a man sitting on the other side of those windows watching me.

He was an old man, his hair had gone well past gray and into white, sweeping back from his skull in desperate strands just a bit too long. He had a sagging face, lined and creased. He was wearing a jacket in spite of the warm afternoon sun and had khaki pants on--but what I remember the most about him were his eyes.

He had blue eyes, faded like old blue jeans and watery, a sort of sheen glinted from them when he twitched them to follow my movements. And they were so, so sad. At first I thought I had just seen him glancing at me as people do, but as I worked closer to where he was I realized he was watching me intently. His sad old eyes would flicker along the arc of my arm as I slid my brush or squeegee along the glass, would look down as I pulled out a towel to wipe up any excess water. He followed my every movement with a longing and sorrow that I could feel through the transparent barrier that separated us.

He never looked at my face, just my hands, my arms, my movements.

I wondered then, and wonder now.

What was he seeing?

Ruminations of a (Beginner) Window Washer

I've been working for a new company over the last few weeks. I won't say the actual name of the company or the people involved, but I am going to talk about it for a bit here because it's my blog and I can talk about whatever the hell I want and there's nothing you can do to stop me except for stop reading this blog right now which you might do but I'd rather you didn't.

So my new job involves me cleaning windows. 

I've thought about writing this blog a few times since I started the job, but have been too tired or lazy to get it done (the Halloween event for Guild Wars 2 and the release of Assassin's Creed 3 didn't make it any easier), but I have now committed to writing about my brief experiences as a window cleaner.

The company I work for cleans many kinds of windows. At first I thought we only did high rise stuff. We do, but that's not all (there's not a ton of sky-scrapers in Baton Rouge anyway,) we also do smaller businesses and a lot of residential stuff.

More on that later.

First of all, allow me to describe the two guys I've worked with so far in this new profession. Note that the entire company is made up for just five people, counting both myself and the owner, who cleans windows himself as well.

The owner, let's call him Mounds, is a tall, slight man in his fifties. He has a low, sort of mumbling voice and a badly dinged up truck. He's also very scatterbrained, it took him over two weeks to actually get me working after he told me he wanted me to work for him. I discovered literally today that he also plays classical guitar and has a side job playing that instrument at things like weddings. He also seems to be some flavor of Christian, although not Catholic, and devout enough to go on missions to places in Africa. Make of that what you will.

While I didn't work with Mounds when I first started, I've spent most of this week and a day or two of last week working with him on a lot of residential work. It seems he's the one doing the residential stuff for now, until he can find some replacement to take over the work for him. He's a good teacher, and a nice enough guy. He often puts me in the awkward position of having to ask him to repeat himself many times because he speaks so quietly, and can be somewhat passive aggressive about certain areas of my window cleaning that may not be up to snuff, but generally he's not too bad to work with.

The other guy whom I have worked with, and 25% of the company before I started, is a guy I'll call Paul. He's a short, stocky man in his late 30's with an impressive beard. He, I have learned, is an amature masked wrestler in his free time and drives all around the state on the weekends with a whole persona, mask, and music to wow fans of underground wrestling and demonstrate his martial prowess. I didn't believe him at first, but he's got tons of pictures and has shown me his wrestling gear.

It smelled of man.

Paul is a veteran of window washing, with over twenty-five years of experience wiping dirt off of glass and he has taught me the basics of the job in an admirable way.

For all the incredibly weird stuff these two dudes do, they both seem decent and kind and I don't really have any problems with them (aside from Paul's seeming racism, but that's another blog.)

So the job. Yeah. We do climb up some pretty high buildings, tie ropes to rickety metal structures held down with heavy weights and then jump off of the building to repel down the sides of the building and clean it. Those jobs are, so far, my favorite, because you're spending time up high above the stuff on the ground with nothing but you and the window (or side of the building, because we've done pressure washing too, although I didn't do that personally.) The biggest problem is sunburn, especially on the building we were working on last week, which had a highly reflective white roof. The sun beats down mercilessly on big buildings like that with very sparse shade to hide you from its cancerous rays.

I've developed a farmer's tan with alarming speed, and started wearing a baseball cap.

Soon I figure I'll be voting Republican and drinking Coors.

Other than the high-rise stuff we also do smaller businesses. Today I cleaned a small art gallery in Baton Rouge (I didn't even know they had art galleries here) that was just sort of built into a strip mall. Those sorts of jobs are fine because there's usually not too many windows and the ones they do have are usually large and without many panes. The art gallery was particularly awesome because it was all like ten foot wide windows with no frames at all.

Then there's the residential jobs.

Those kind of suck.

But they're also kind of awesome.

They suck because of a few reasons. The primary reason is because most of the houses we do have a lot of windows, and they're usually pretty small, pretty segmented  and pretty dirty. Especially on the outside. The next time you're strolling around your house go take a close look at the corners of the exteriors of your windows.

Know what you'll see?

Fucking spiders.

I don't know why, but spiders fucking love nesting in the corners of residential houses, especially the kinds of houses we seem to do, which is to say houses owned by rich old white people with lots of plants that grow right up against the glass and give them happy little spider bridges to come and go whenever they want.

The houses are, as I said earlier, also owned by very wealthy people and so are very large, fancy houses. This is bad because it makes me angry and depressed, knowing I'll never get to live somewhere as nice as the houses I'm seeing.

One weird trend I'm noticing with these houses, though, is that these rich people have surprisingly small TVs, shitty computers, and lots of VHS tapes. I don't know if that's just because they're older or because when you're rich you have better things to do with your time than sit on the couch and watch TV or play videogames.

It's probably the latter.

Also most of these residential jobs involve both cleaning inside as well as the outside of the house. Entirely separate from the angry jealousy I feel being inside of the house is the pain of having to awkwardly walk around a house, moving furniture, squeaking squeegees around and hunting for missed windows while the owners of the said house are reading or cooking or whatever.

The jobs are kind of awesome for only two reasons, but one of them is pretty awesome.

The lesser of the two is that when you're cleaning interiors of houses you at least get the benefit of air conditioning and shelter from the remorseless sun.

The greater one is sometimes the people will tip.

And they tip big.

Just yesterday I got $40 for cleaning a woman's windows, and she, like most of the other residential customers, was very polite the whole time Paul and I were there, giving us water and telling us we were doing a good job and all that. The $40 though, that was pretty awesome. Paul told me I could make $100 or more just from working a few residential jobs in a day with some luck, so it pretty much makes up for all the headaches of prowling around fancy houses with a dripping brush.

The job is not hard, but it can be tough. The physical toll on my body is high, mostly because I'm a saggy, paunchy 26 year old who hasn't been remotely in shape since he was 20, and long hours and weeks kind of blow (I'm going to be working 14 days straight over the course of this and next week,) but the pay is good and the job itself isn't hard to accomplish and, most importantly, I hardly have to talk to customers or teenage assholes at all.

I do worry about how it will impact my writing. I've hardly written anything since starting. When I get home I'm so tired that I just want to sit around and read or play a game for a few hours before sleeping, but I'm hoping that as my body starts to shape up I'll have more energy for writing and other fun things.

And I can at least write shitty blog entries to keep me sharp until then.