Here's a pic of me and a few of my fellow werewolf buddies outside (and inside) one of the dumpsters in town. I've got a 50-year old friend who lives with his mom and doesn't have a real job so he goes around collecting scrap metal, mostly aluminum cans, for a living. Since times are tough and I haven't been able to find any extra work other than the 20 hours a week I work as a janitor, I decided to go out gathering cans with him the other day for some extra cash, bringing my wolfen pals along with me. In the picture you can see that I am holding my FIRST CAN! Yay! It's a Diet Pepsi can and you can tell by the self-satisfied look on my face that I'm pretty proud of it.
I hadn't shaved in a few days when this picture was taken, so you can see why amongst the can-collecting crowd I'm known as the "Silver Wolf" because of the abundance of gray hairs you can see in my scruffy, half-assed beard. I've been at this can-collecting thing for a couple weeks now and I've almost filled a whole trash bag full! Hopefully in a few more days I'll have a whole bag and when I take it to the junkyard I expect to get around, I dunno, 10 bucks for it. Hey, don't laugh. That's a pack of smokes and a bag of frozen burritos and I will have EARNED it, man, not having had it given it to me as some fucking hand-out by the government.
Speaking of "hand-outs," I've been eating free lunch at this local church downtown. The food isn't too bad but the place is always jammed packed with hungry, stinky people, people like me (yeah, maybe I stink every once in awhile, so what?) who are just trying to make ends meet. I come to get free food to save money so I can pay my Internet bill and not have it disconnected unlike alot of lazy, unemployed people who come there just because they feel they are entitled, like having food in their bellies is some God-given right. Then they eat and go a block away to use free Internet at the public library's computers when I PAY for my damn Internet. But anyway, I was at this church trying to eat the other day and this big fat, greasy dude had his chair pulled out from under him by some mischievous little weasel. The big guy's plate of free food--a pork fritter, some corn and a couple cheese sticks-- went flying everywhere. The big guy got mad, got up and started grabbing the smaller dude, the two of them slipping and sliding in a puddle of Kool-Aid on the floor, and it was funny as hell. There wasn't room to sit down and eat so I just stood in a corner by the free coffee pot, stuffing this big piece of free cake into my mouth as I watched the whole sad, hilarious scene.
After I finished eating, I walked down to this garage that my can-collecting friend uses to sort out his scrap metal every week. He's alot better at collecting this stuff than I am and he spends nearly every waking hour out gathering metal up all over town, so every week he has a huge pile of it needing sorted out before it goes to the junkyard. You have to sort out the aluminum from the tin from the steel from the foil from the copper wire, etc., and he hired me on to help him do it once a week. It's an intense, fast-paced, gross job that takes about 4 hours and he pays me $25. The funny thing is that the garage we are using is just some garage for an apartment complex. Neither one of us live there, my friend just noticed it wasn't used by any tenants and took over the place. LOL. The metal-sorting isn't so bad until you run into some big foil pan full of week-old lasagna. YUCK. Then towards the end of the job all you have left is this big pile of tiny tin lids, caps, tiny bits of tin foil, etc., and I have to get on my hands and knees to sort this shit out with my hands stained and greasy with lasagna. And the other day I noticed a dog turd about an inch away from my hand. I was wearing gloves at first but it made me go too slow in picking stuff up, so I went bare-handed and when I came close to putting my hand right in that piece of dogshit I damn near regretted it. There was one point when my friend fucking yelled at me for putting an aluminum cat food can in the bag where tin is supposed to go. I got pissed and started kicking shit. He says he's going to give me a magnet next time we do it, so I can tell the difference between tin and aluminum. Tin sticks to the magnet, aluminum doesn't.
But when the work is done I take my $25, go home and have a real party because that's what life's about, making the most of what you got or what other people are willing to give to you. I do a little bit on my own, I let people do a little bit for me. Now will someone please come change my diaper for me and make me a taco? LOL.
