take your girlfriend to work day
Yesterday was take your girlfriend to work day (at least for me and Rachel). So Rachel spent the whole day riding around in my truck with me while I knocked on people's doors, collected checks, intimidated people for money, etc.
*We started out the morning at I-Hop where I had a nice breakfast anxiety attack. I'm not exactly sure why, but after a night of drinking and drugs I am almost guranteed to have a anxiety/panic attack if I sit down at a restaurant for breakfast. It usually hits right as the food is served. Maybe its because certain chemicals in my brain start secreting and squirting for eating and digestion. Or maybe its the way the gobbled up sausage flesh and pancakes starts churning and gurlgling through my guts.
But anyway, yesterdays was an anxiety attack, since it mostly only involved seat squirming and running my fingers through my hair. The line for a panic attack starts when you start running and screaming and calling people on the phone to tell them that you're dying.
*Also, for some reason I can never remember that any kind of "hot turkey" sandwich is disgusting. Hot turkey is inevitably slimey and gross, and I never finish any kind of hot turkey sandwich, and I always tell myself: never order any kind of hot turkey again. But a few weeks later I forget and order some sort of hot turkey sandwich.
Between the anxiety attack the grossness of the hot turkey I barely ate anythig, and I hid a giant mound of turkey sandwich under my napkin so our very courteous and attnentive waiter wouldn't have his feelings hurt.
*Rachel and I noticed that the guy that was sitting across from us in the I-hop dining room followed us over to the convenient store, where I picked up some teeth whitening gum and water. I chew about two packs of teeth whitenging gum everyday, but I think the effect is totally counteracted by the coffee and cigarettes I smoke.
* I showed Rachel where all the peacocks live off of Orange Ave. There's literally 50 peacocks that just run wild on this one suburban street, prancing around in people's front yard and perching on thieir mailboxes. They make these piercing wails that would make you jump out of your shoes if you were all alone in the dead of night.
*Later in the aftternoon we ran across a pond full of baby aligators. Rachel had never seen a gator (in the wild) despite living on Florida for years now. She says she's really, really afraid of them and it took some coaxing to get her out of my truck to come take a look.
There was nothing scary about these little lizzards though. They had little "peanut heads" (as Rachel observed) and were only about 18" length. The mother gator was lurking under a tree shrouded den on the far side of the pond).
*I knocked a hapless burger king employee off of his bicycle as he was pedaling home from work (you know the stereo-type: 30 years old, never been laid, always listens to headphones, etc). I wasn't being a jerk or anything. I was just making a right hand turn from Dale Mabry onto South Village in Carrollwood, so I rode up in the righthand turn lane, while all of the straight traveling lanes were filled with halted cars.
Suddenly this burger kind dude darts out from behind this van right as I'm cruising around the corner. I didn't hit him or anything, but the near-miss caused him to lose his balance and fall back onto the asphalt, sending his burger king hat and walkman flying.
What was weird is that the guy made great efforts to go behind and around me to avoid any more calamity. But all he did was pedal right up into my right side blind spot as I was making my right hand turn again.
*There's this other jinx that happnes to me on a regular basis: from time to time I will get out of my truck and talk with one of our customers who is watching our guys do dangerous tree work in his yard and above his house. I will stand there and make stupid small talk with folded arms, and put the customer at ease about what we're doing.
But often, just at this moment, our crew will do something incredibly stupid, that makes us look like the three (or fifteen) stooges. This time, our climber, who was taking down a massive limb above this guy's house, tied off a chucnk of tree that wieghed as much as a moped. I could see that the rope was tenuously tied at best, and that it was far too heavy for the one groundsman that was holding the rope down below.
But for some reason, I just assumed that the guys knew what they were doing and I didn't say anything.
Of course, when the giant tree chunk was cut, the grounds man was pulled at sprinter's speed across the front yard and the log fell straight down in a free fall, nearly missing the customer's roof, and crushing his wife's flower bed.
All I could say was: "that was kind of dumb," and then "well, I've got some other job sites to check on," before hightailing it out of there.
*Anyway, these are just a few glimpses of "take your girlfriend to work day." We tried to go out and have a couple of drinks in South Tampa afterwards, but it just didn't work out. We got kicked out of a table at Bella's becuase it was for diners only and we had just seated ourselves. (On top of that, our $6.50 margaritas were served in stupid little martini glasses, and it would have taken $100 just to get a little buzz).
We tried to watch "The Last Unicorn" at my place (which Rachel swears is not just for kids, and is the greatest movie of all time). But we immediately fell asleep and woke up in the middle of the night in a disoriented state with my backdoor slamming in the wind and some strange japanese cartoon on the tv.
7:55:09 AM 
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Me and Goatbelt Matt finalized the next billboard layout. Note the new and improved helicopter--an actual police copter, rather than a bloated navy thing--and the snappier layout of the lettering.