DISPATCH 3.5: GOD ROLLING AND SMOKING MY SORRY ASS PT. 2

RE: WISE INVESTMENTS, MINOR LEAGUE BEAUTY, A WHOLE LOT OF GUNK, AND THE FOUNDING OF OUR GREAT NATION

This is part two of a two part post. I usually post a little bit about my life and what I’m consuming each Friday (and by usually I mean all of twice), but last week went entirely cattywampus so I am trying to recount that instead. In doing so, I wrote over 6000 words. 

If you would like, the first portion of this post is below. I truly would have made this a single post except Substack is always telling me I’m ‘exceeding the length limit’ or some bullshit like that. Big Tech is always trying to keep the real posters down. 

In short, I drove over a nail, brought it to the mechanic to have it not fixed, was menaced by a creature, discovered a truly alarming amount of pigeons in my attic, and watched an exterminator throw glass onto my boyfriend’s car. And this all happened before Wednesday. Throughout the week, it was hard not to wonder how exactly I had brought this on myself. 

Out to dinner last week, my boyfriend and I discussed the new law that classrooms in Louisiana have to have a poster of the Ten Commandments on the wall. While this has some potentially harrowing repercussions for the First Amendment, perhaps it would be beneficial for those of us who have no religious education. In fact, my boyfriend (Jewish) and I (nothing) put our heads together to try and remember the Ten Commandments. Here is what we came up with:

To be fair, we weren’t that far off. The point of me saying all this is that maybe I’ve been coveting too much or having too many false idols or what all, and this week has been a sort of divine retribution. Maybe it’s punishment for failing to uphold the hidden eleventh commandment, no flopping (Moses forgot to write that one on the tablet, or whatever). In any case, not to spoil the rest of this post, but the week did not really go up from there. 

Wednesday morning, I dreamt I was in a graveyard trying to pay respects, but I was with a some random person who couldn’t shut the fuck up. They were making these banging noises, knocking stuff around, and I said, “This is why we can’t take you anywhere.”¹ And then I woke up, and I realized the banging sounds were in fact happening in real life – they were coming from the ceiling. It was like instead of poison, the pest control man had left a growth serum in the traps, and now there were giant mutant squirrels thrashing around in my attic. Then I remembered: the roofers. 

Now, I know I shouldn’t be complaining, because the only thing worse than being awoken by roofers at 7 in the morning is having to wake up at 6 in the morning to be on somebody else’s roof, but I’d been so caught up in the whole “more pigeons than our exterminator’s ever seen in a single house” boondoggle that I’d forgotten about the roofers. 

“Hey, look,” my boyfriend called, pointing out the window. “It’s raining roof.” Sure enough, chunks of roof were sailing past the window. 

We didn’t really have to pay the roofers any mind Wednesday morning – they appeared of their own accord and got to work. Other than, of course, the noise, which continued as I got ready for my job. And the dust from the roof coming in through the windows we had open. And the crap raining down from the ceiling around the hatch to the attic. 

We were stuck between a rock and a hard place: either leave the window open to air out the pigeon shit and attic crumbs raining from the ceiling, or close it to prevent pieces and dust from the roof flying in. Either choice seemed something of a health hazard. The other complication was that it sounded like the roofers were standing over the hatch to the attic – the entry point our pest control guy had used the day before – bolting it shut. 

My boyfriend was the one in touch with the exterminator, a word he kept forgetting and substituting with ‘executioner’. It was unclear what would happen if the executioner had to go back in the attic while the roofers were tearing it apart, or if the roofers knew about the traps and the poison and the imperative to keep pigeons out of the area. This all was my boyfriend’s problem, though, as I had to go to work. 

I was late yet again to work, and by way of explanation, told my manager about the falling chunks of roof and the potential squirrels and the more pigeons than our executioner had ever seen in a single house. He asked if I’d hurt anyone recently.

“Sounds like some real bad karma,” he said. 

There, perhaps, is another reason for all this: I’m shouldering a heavy karmic debt, so instead of living as a peaceful cow I am stuck in this human body for a lifetime, and I am now responsible for things like filing work orders and showing up to my food service job on time. 

The good news is that last week, my job was generally pretty slow. I spent a lot of time folding receipts into creative spirals or tucking my phone underneath my register to check Twitter. It was in such an instance of idle time that my coworker asked me if I invest in stocks. I told him it seemed too complicated for me. 

“It’s easy,” he said. “You just gotta buy low, sell high.” 

He told me he had made $2,500 in investing, and said he wasn’t interested in working anymore.

“My friend’s little brother, he’s six years old. He made, uh, $35 million investing,” he said. “You just gotta download one of the apps.”

He’s not the first coworker to give me financial advice: I have another coworker who seems like a typical hobbyist investor – talking about business moves and getting his money up, etc. – except his whole thing is really old cash. 

“Old pennies used to have way more copper. A penny from before 1982 is now worth two cents,” he says. “That’s literally a 200% return on investment.”²

Perhaps this could have been another solution to my woes this week: I just needed to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset and start making money moves, and the universe would respond in turn, like a reverse prosperity gospel. But instead I spent most of my downtime at work kvetching about pigeons. Beta maneuver, I suppose. 

Back at home Wednesday afternoon, I asked after Dale Gribble, curious if there had been some kind of wild west showdown between him and the roofers both trying to park their big ass trucks in our driveway and occupy the attic. My boyfriend told me the executioner never showed.

“But the squirrels – they’ll liquidate,” I said, imagining a disturbing ooze in our attic. 

My boyfriend wasn’t the only one getting tripped up on vocabulary – the word I meant was LIQUIFY. Perhaps, though, dead squirrels could be transformed into assets. It does sound like some kind of serum new age snake oil salesman would hawk online. Like adrenochrome, Vitameatavegemin, and liquid squirrels. That’s what I should have told my coworkers: I’m not interested in your investments. I have an exciting new venture for a substance which can cure all ailments. It surely does not come from my attic.

That’s the American dream, right? Selling useless or potentially dangerous supplements to guileless customers experiencing an unnamable malaise. Nothing more patriotic than questionable business opportunities – especially right before the most wonderful time of the year.

I woke up to celebrate America on Thursday at a healthy 7 AM to the sounds of hammering directly above me. But that’s okay – it was a holiday. Never mind that I still had work, or that we still hadn’t talked to our exterminator about the zoo in our house, or that my boyfriend now had a hole in the hood of his car, or that the grounds for this holiday seem quite suspect at the moment given everything going on right now. I put that all aside when my boyfriend invited me to a minor league baseball game replete with Fourth of July fireworks afterward. What’s more American than baseball and a hot dog and a couple of brewskis? Take me out to the BALLGAME! 

The problem with baseball is that there are too many numbers involved. I like basketball because there’s 10 guys, 1 basketball, and 2 hoops. Baseball has 9 innings – already an inauspicious start – plus 3 outs, 3 strikes, and 5 balls to walk (I think?). But baseball does maximize breaks in a way no other sport does: you get one halftime in football and soccer, two in hockey, but EIGHT in baseball, at least. 

These are an important part of the game so that they can, for example, bring veterans out onto the field, or make a 9 year old run a race against the mascot, or catalyze a wave. They also allow ample time to purchase many beers and several hot dogs. The overall impact is that by the time you get to the ninth inning, you’re not only invested in the score (who can really follow that anyways), but you’re swept away by the theatrics, dedicated to the mascot, swelling with pride for your Home Team. Take ME out to the ballgame! 

There’s this moment in White Noise by Don DeLillo where the narrator catches his daughter talking in her sleep, before realizing she’s repeating ‘Toyota Celica’ over and over. This was kind of the vibe when the Jumbotron showed the Taco Bell Logo, and then instructions to chant ‘TACOOOOO’ for no discernible reason. I think I heard a grown man get audibly angry behind me about the lack of participation in the yelling of TACO. 

This, and other various chants and cheers, may seem at first to make no sense to the sober mind. For example, you might wonder if they truly can play HandClap by Fitz and the Tantrums more than five times in a single game. But once you get to the fifth go around, and you’re about six drinks in, everything starts to make sense, and you find yourself chanting ‘TACO’ with vigor, or stomping along to ‘We Will Rock You’ with reckless abandon. I can make your hands clap! Take me out to THE ballgame! 

Here is about as good a time as any to explain where the name ‘foamite’ comes from. It stands for ‘Far Out And Mentally Incompetent Train Enthusiast’³. I use this as a username in certain places because a) it’s not usually taken and b) I love trains. Now imagine the elation of a baseball game, everyone cheering as the home team brings home the bacon, and then, on the tracks behind the field: a train. Could there be a sight more gorgeous, more rousing of a national spirit, than America’s favorite pastime against the backdrop of functional public infrastructure slash transportation? 

When you’re walking home drunk from an event, it’s easy to feel like a cheetah or the most beautiful horse alive. I really believe in the whole John Mulaney secondary location bit but about my intoxicated self thinking it would be a good idea to be more drunk at another location. This is to say that after the game, we ended up at a secondary location. Not the grandest idea.

We went to a bar that had some truly heinous vibes. As in, this guy struck up a conversation with my boyfriend and I by telling us that we were weird, and then said he was gonna go kill himself in the bathroom doing blow. If you’re extremely drunk in a bar and some guy calls you a freak and then tells you about his coke addiction, what can you do in return except tell him about the nail in your tire? 

“Oh that sucks. I work in a shop, and that makes sense they left it in there,” said the drunk stranger, laughing. “I’d totally do that. That’s how mechanics are.” 

We narrowly escaped meeting this guy’s girlfriend (though he was harassing the bartender all night), scooted out of the bar, pranced home, and fell into our perfect bed for a perfect sleep. Happy Fourth. God Bless America and to all a good night. 

A collection of Charli XCX themed items I've seen this week: green Gatorade, this door I took a picture of on my drunk walk home, the permit for reroofing my apartment.

Sort of.

Though the roofers did not come back on Friday, I woke up at 7 AM of my own accord. This was because I felt very, very bad. I woke up feeling like I had two headaches at the same time. So I took an Ibuprofen and tried to collect my laundry because I had no clean work uniforms and I was due to work a double.

It soon became clear I would not make it to the laundromat. However much I hated being upright at that moment, I had to hunt through my laundry for the least dirty of my work clothes. Then I lay back down on my bed, feeling sick to my stomach. I waited for the feeling to pass so I could tear my way through my hangover and get back to work. 

For context, I don’t throw up. I haven’t thrown up since Christmas Day when I was 12 years old, so eventually I kind of figured I just couldn’t anymore. I’m very proud of my not throwing up streak – at this juncture, I don’t have a lot going for me, and it’s a pretty good flex.⁴

In my hubris, I pretty much continued thinking I was immune to throwing up – that it was something my body just couldn’t do anymore – until I was standing over the kitchen trash Friday, projectile vomiting onto the window. 

Shout out @mary

I have this coworker who used to be a med student in Cuba. Last week he told me about the importance of vitamins for adults, except because of his accent he called them ‘bitamins’. 

“Bitamins is even more important for adults than proteins,” he said to me. 

This is maybe true, and maybe this is why I blew chunks that morning: some sort of vitamin deficiency. Or maybe it was some infection from the pigeons or the roof dust. It did come to me, transferring myself to the bathroom, that there could be something wrong with me, medically speaking. 

But perhaps not eating much, followed by a half-dinner of bleu cheese crumbles and green Gatorade, plus six beers, plus two hot dogs, plus two vodka sodas, plus no water, plus Ibuprofen on an empty stomach mighttttt make you throw up. In fact, I probably could not have done more to puke had I pulled trig myself. 

This is the part where I thank my boyfriend for coaching me through the great tradition of the boot and rally. So picture me, huddled on the floor of my bathroom, vomiting for the first time in ten years, surrounded by the roofing schmutz, adjacent to the pigeon shit debris in the hallway, and due at work in less than an hour. 

“Can you get me my phone,” I asked my boyfriend, feeling gunky in general. “I need to call out.” 

“This is going to be tough to hear, but I think you should go to work,” he said.

This was funny to me because my boyfriend – like many people familiar with my professional situation – is constantly advocating for me to take time off work, or quit my job. For context, my job sucks penis and balls. 

“But I feel like shit,” I protested. 

“Take a shower, and if you still feel bad you can call out.” 

I don’t know what argument I put up against that – probably a wretched, pitiful groan. 

“There’s nothing more American than getting fucked up on the Fourth of July, throwing up, and then having to go to work,” my boyfriend said. 

“I don’t like America,” I said lugubriously. 

“Well, there are a lot of bad parts, but there’s always been a lot of bad parts, and there are a lot of good things, too,” he said, 

Now this is how I could tell things were entirely FUBAR, so to speak: my boyfriend was espousing the virtues of America. 

Then, through some combination of magic and help from my boyfriend, I was in my work uniform, out the door, in the car, and in the Dunkin drive-through choking down a bagel.

“Do you think something bad is going to happen to me, now that I’ve broken my ten year no vomit streak?” I asked my boyfriend, who had graciously driven me. 

“No. No, that’s ridiculous,” he said. “That’s, like, the entire aesthetic of throwing up: you get all the bad shit out of your system, and you feel better after.” 

Then I was at work. 

The only thing keeping me going was meditating on Bruce Lee in the movie Fists of Fury. I went from shaking on the floor to listening to the morning restaurant alignment about being an energetic world class organization in under an hour. At that moment, post-vomit, head buzzing with hangover, wearing a stained uniform to my food service job, I WAS Bruce Lee, kicking ass, taking names, drawing on a mystical well of inner strength, etc. 

I stole a shot of espresso and locked in for the first of two shifts. 

At the beginning of the second shift, we got slammed with tickets. At this point, I was feeling shelf stable, and glad to have something to focus on besides the remnants of my hangover. My manager came over and told us that everyone was gathering in the back for a quick announcement. But we were weeded, and a few minutes later I heard a cheer from the back of the house. Oh, I thought. We missed whatever it was. Welp, hope it wasn’t important, and then I went back to putting whipped cream on desserts, which is my job. 

As I was trying to get through the rush, one of my coworkers came up and congratulated me. I took this as a joke – the restaurant probably won an award, and they were thanking me as a bit because I missed the announcement. Then another coworker told me congrats. Very funny, I thought. They’ve all coordinated this. So I was not surprised when another coworker came up and told me congrats, and another.

I was a little taken aback when my manager told us to stop working for a second and handed me a gift card. 

“I know you were too busy up here to come back for the announcement, but I just wanted to thank you for all you do,” he said, handing me a pin as well. “This is for being our employee of the month.” 

So there you have it. I’d like to thank the Academy, etc. This is actually my second time getting employee of the month within six months, the first time also following a world class hangover. While I can no longer tell Uber drivers about my no vomit streak, I can now flex my awards from my venerable profession as cashier slash whipped cream girl. Perhaps this is healthier in the long run. Though I don’t really know if our roof is fixed or what the problem was in the first place, or where our AWOL exterminator is, and though I still kind of feel like shit, and my boyfriend still  has a hole in the roof of his car, now I have a shiny new pin for my hat. And that’s the true meaning of the Fourth of July spirit. 

Employee of the month, signing off. 

MORAL OF THE STORY: BUY LOW, SELL HIGH. YOUR BODY IS A TEMPLE. WHEN IN DOUBT, BOOT IT OUT. TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME.

1. Freudians, please weigh in on how this bodes for my psychosexual development.

2. I once saw said coworker at a coffee shop up the street from me. He was recognizable because he was bending down to squint at the date on a dollar bill.

3. I think I found this term on the Wikpedia page for ‘Slur’, if you were curious.

4. So proud, in fact, that I repeated this fact over and over to an Uber driver while blackout drunk once (or so I’m told).