Journal mcgrew's Journal: Sore Legs 13
Am I hard enough?
Am I rough enough?
Am I rich enough?
I'm not too blind to see.
I'll never be your beast of burden,
I've walked for miles...
I'm drunk and my legs hurt.
Last week when I got off work Kathie asked me to give her a ride home from the doctor's office. Getting old sucks, all the women anywhere near my age have medical problems. I took her home to feed her; she needs to gain some weight, as she lives mostly on peanut butter, and needs real food. Her doctor gave her a prescription for "ensure," my prescription is fried chicken. She'd just gotten back from her mother's, out of town. I fried some chicken and mashed potatos and gravy and veggies, we ate, and I Went to take her home.
Two blocks away something went POP and the battery light came on and I didn't have any power steering. Shit. I wrestled the damned thing home; when power steering goes out you're fighting the hydraulics. So we watched a movie and I walked her to the bus stop, waited for the bus with her, and the bus driver had this look on his face as I kissed her good night like "awww, look at those old geezers, how sweet..."
OK, it's morning now, I'm sober, and boy those two paragraphs are a mess (edit edit edit).
I walked to work the next day. I sure am glad I'm within walking distance. Friday's payday, so I don't have enough money to get the car worked on until then. Maybe I could get one of my mechanic buddies from Felbers to get that serpentine belt back on and pay him Friday, I thought. I called Donnie's, Connie answered and said he was still at work but would have him call me. I walked the two miles to the bank and back, then up to Felbers.
What luck... no mechanics there. Connie was, but she'd not seen Donnie and had come there shortly after I'd talked to her. Kathy was there, though. "Jim could fix that for you," she said. "He's down at the Brooklyn now."
He came in later and said sure, "if you can get it to my house tomorrow I'll look at it for you. I ain't gonna charge you nothin'." I drank two beers, bought a couple of forty ouncers to take home and went to Gaal's, he'd give me a ride home. "Did you look at that laptop?" he asked. "Hopeless, ain't it?"
I had indeed looked at it. It was an old Dell laptop he'd gotten from Billy that Billy had stupidly password protected in the BIOS and then forgotten the password. I did a little Googling and found that the only way to bypass the BIOS password was to take it apart, power it up, and short two pins on one of the chips. "No," I said, "I looked at it, but I'm going to have to take it completely apart to fix it. I'd say there's an 80% chance I can do it." More likely I'll slip and short something else out and ruin it worse than it already is.
The next day was Saturday, and it was blistering hot, over ninety degrees and very humid. I walked down to the bus stop and took a bus to the library and checked out a couple of movies, a couple of CDs that I promptly ripped and a couple of books; a Pratchett title I hadn't read and Charles Portis' True Grit. I still hadn't finished the Pohl book I'd checked out the week before. I was surprised that he was still alive, let alone still writing, the guy's in his nineties now.
I'd gone to Kathy's granddaughter's birthday party with her a couple of months earlier, and her son had burned a DVD from a Blu-Ray for her. It wouldn't play in the DVD player. "Maybe I can make a copy that will work," I said doubtfully. My DVD burner is ancient and won't read many disks, although it usually writes OK. To my surprise it did read the disk her son had made, and to my greater surprise the copy I burned played fine on the DVD player, so I made another copy.
Ok, now I'm a pirate. So sue me. We watched it, and it was a really good movie. It had been thirty years since I'd seen the John Wayne version, so when I was at WalMart I saw a copy of that version for seven bucks and bought it. Were it not for pirating the 2010 version the MPAA wouldn't have gotten that money. Yeah, piracy costs sales, right? At least that's what the lying bastards would have you believe. I watched the two movies back to back, and wondered which was truer to the book, which is why I "pirated" the bok from the library. I mean, I read it without paying so that's piracy, right?
I'd tried to start the car the day before, but it only clicked. Now it was completely dead; I couldn't even get the windows down. I unlocked all the doors and opened them, popped the hood, took the spare battery and jumper cables out of the trunk and hooked it up.
Nothing. One of the cables was covered with some sort of gunk. I went inside and washed my hands, got some paper towels and cleaned up the cable clips, and hooked it back up. HONK! HONK! HONK! HONK! HONK! HONK! HONK! HONK! Shit; god damned burglar alarm. I got the keys out and shut off the alarm, and went back inside to let the spare battery charge the car's battery, and started reading True Grit.
Both movies were pretty faithful to the book, and both movies were better than the book. Portis isn't a great writer by any means; he obviously had taken too many writing courses in college to be a very good writer.
Jeff Bridges has the patch on the wrong eye and wears a beard. John Wayne was clean shaven. The book's Rooster wore a mustache. The 2010 movie was closer to the book than the 1969 movie; the book takes place in the winter, Mattie Ross loses her arm and the book's end matches the 2010 movie. But the 1969 film has them carting the corpses to town, as the book does and the 2010 movie doesn't. One of the best lines in the movie wasn't in the book -- "If he wanted a decent burial he would've got his self killed in the summer." However, both movies' dialog mostly comes straight from the book; if the language in the movies seems a little stilted, it's because the language in the book was, too.
Jim had said to bring the car by around two or three, so about two I put the battery and cables back in the trunk, started it, and drove to Jim's house. By then it only had enough battery to roll the front windows up, the back windows stayed down. I called Kathy to tell her that I was sitting on her picnic table. "I'm tending bar, Jim's here and he's drunk."
Shit. I trudged the two and a half miles to Felbers through the golf course in the blazing heat. When I got there Kathy was off work and drinking, and Jim was gone, down to a different bar. I gave her the car key and drank three glasses of ice water before I drank a beer. After two or three beers I trudged on home in the heat and finished the book. Kathie had said she wanted to read it, too, so I called her and told her I'd finished it. "Wow," she said, "you read fast."
"It was a short book," I said.
That night Amy showed up, having been fighting with Tim (T-TIMMAYY!!!). I'd turned her down the last two times she'd come looking to get laid, but I was more than half drunk and she simply undressed and said "come on into the bedroom." It was nice having a warm body to sleep next to for a change. The next day she went to a homeless shelter, leaving her things at my house.
George needed somebody to hook his computer up for him; he'd spent a hundred bucks having malware cleaned out of it. "Damn it, George," I said, "next time call me. I'll do it for free." I'll also install Linux dual boot and disable networking in Windows, that should keep it virus-free for a while.
The car's still sitting at Jim's. I guess I'll walk until Friday. I still haven't taken Gaal's computer apart either, so I can't fault Jim without being a hypocrite. If it's not done by Friday I guess I'll take it to a commercial garage.
I'm sober, but my legs still hurt. Too damned much walking.
.
You need 2 cars! (Score:2)
Cars are like computers, if you only have one you'll find yourself SOL at some point ;-) I guess since you can walk to work you have the McGrew Super-leg-gera to fall back on :-P
A serpentine belt isn't too hard to change, the hardest part is reaching way down into the car's guts to thread in the new one. Careful driving without one, you don't want to discharge the expensive battery to death and your coolant pump almost certainly isn't powered so you won't get far before it overheats.
Dell bios password (Score:2)
Hey McGrew, The trick with those Dells is not too hard. If the service tag extension-ie xxxxxxx-595B is as above just post the service tag an I have a little app that can work out a default password for it. The paper clip trick is a bit of a pain but does work, and shorting out doesnt seem to be an issue. You do have to pull the thing apart a fair bit but its easy on those models.
Good luck man!
Interesting (Score:1)
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Yeah. That's what I am thinking. Strangely compelled to read on.
I want to hear more about this relationship you have, Amy? Kathy? I take it you're not married?
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No, not married, I was divorced in 2003. Kathie's the girlfriend, Kathy's a different woman; Kathy lives wiith Jim and tends bar at Felbers on Sunday and Monday. Amy's dad would be a year younger than me if he was still alive, Amy and I have ben "friends with benefits" for years. Kathie's a widow whose husband drank himself to death after he got laid off ten years ago, Amy divorced her husband ten years ago when he was in prison for beating her so badly she had to get reconstructive surgery.
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Would you say friends with benefits works? It hasn't worked for me in the past... How do you make it work?
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To tell the truth I don't know. Maybe it's seeing all the drama between her and her boyfriends; she's not really a one man woman. Me, otoh, I'm a one woman man but I really need a little more commitment from Kathie; the relationship with her scares me a little somehow, and she's said she's a little scared too.
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You guys are too kind. Sometimes I get a bit too prideful reading these comments, thanks! You guys make my day.
I've had the "Paxil Diaries" ready for publication for a couple of years now but just never did it. I was going to publish them as two volumes, but I think I'll just make a single longer book. As to money, that would be nice, especially after I retire in two more years. I'll need it then.
You get a lot of reads (Score:2)
I'm glad. You know that this is good stuff.
McGrew, you are the geek's Chuck Bukowski.
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"In 1986 Time called Bukowski a 'laureate of American lowlife'.[6]
Yep, that's me!
"His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work."
I've never read Bukowski, but from the Wikipedia article on him I think you have it pegged. Now I have somebody else to look for in the library Saturday. OK, next Saturday, th
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You might try out "Factotum" or "Post Office" For short stories, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" or "Tales of Ordinary Madness".
I haven't read him since the 80's. But he sticks with you... Like Celine and B. Traven.
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I think the obvious one for McGrew to go for is "Women" :-) I'd also recommend "The Most Beautiful Woman In Town".
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"People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love."
â" Charles Bukowski, from "Women"