|
|
|
special skills for killing
Tuesday, August 10 1999
As I came home from another long hard day of work, I found Kim hanging out in the courtyard with our neighbors Andy and Lisa. It was a sad occasion, Andy's last night in San Diego for a "little" while. The story is that he's got a kid back in the Midwest and big bills to pay, yet the only jobs he can get since leaving the military are $6/hr. shit jobs. So he's heading off to Las Vegas for awhile to live rent-free with a friend and make some fast money. He figures he'll be a bartender or maybe deal cards in a casino. You know, aside from the reasons for his leaving, it actually sounds like a potentially fun adventure, the sort of vacation every artist, poet and writer needs to take now and then by himself. A pilgrimage to Las Vegas could be a sort of late-20th Century vision quest; the movies always portray it that way after all. If I didn't have so many nagging commitments in my life I could do stuff like that too. But then again, I wouldn't want to be forced by harsh circumstances to head to a malignant city like Las Vegas with naïve hopes of getting rich.
While Kim and Lisa were off walking Sophie, I chatted some with Andy about how he came to be in this rather desperate condition. He says his problems all started when he left the military. Evidently his bosses had been fixing to ship him off to Kosovo and didn't take kindly to his sudden decision to return to civilian life. So they pulled a classic bureaucratic assfuck on him, the "delayed papers" torture. Since his departure, they've neglected to send him his admirable discharge documents. So now, out in the real world, no one will hire him. Potential employers see the four year gap in his employment history, he tells them he was in the military, and they want to see his discharge papers. Without those, "not even a Jack in the Box" will hire him. And it's not like the skills he developed in the military are the sort with wide civilian application; he was in the "special forces" and his job was to blow things up and kill people, often in the most barbaric fashion imaginable. The only civilian agencies hiring people to do such things are police forces, and the San Diego police department is rather fussy about who it hires.
Later on, Kim and I watched Shakespeare In Love on videotape. What a completely cornball movie! Kim told me that it has won a bunch of awards, but for the most part it was little more than a fast-moving soap opera with quaint faux-ancient British accents and every permutation of cross dressing imaginable. There was exactly one moment of plot cleverness, which concerned the death of Shakespeare's arch-rival, but long before the credits started rolling Kim was asleep and I'd slipped away to do some computer work.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?990810 feedback
previous | next |
