Sixth Blog

Boy, I sure don’t like the government. I simply go about my business, I don’t harm anyone, and suddenly the man penalizes me with 40 hours of community service, a $700 fine, and a $450 class. Well you know what, I hate the man. Just keep it up Uncle Sam, see what happens.









This isn’t the first time I’ve run into this. In 2007 I encountered the same stroke of bad luck, which is all it really is, and I had to work 50 hours at McInnis Park. There I mostly spent my time weeding and listening to a park ranger, I’ll just call him Gus, talk about his crumbling marriage. Gus was a nice man, but he was somewhat deeply depressed. And I don’t blame him, his job consisted of telling 14 year olds to wear a goddamn helmet, clearing away dead animals from the park roads and changing out the large duffle bags of dog shit from waste bins throughout Hamilton and Marinwood.

I realized there how some people just fall into a routine of pure, unadulterated pain. When you have to juggle a shitty job and a bad marriage, things get pretty hairy. They get pretty sticky. You no longer have much optimism about the next day. If one day you try to lift out that giant and heavy duffle bag and the bottom splits open, spilling dog shit all over the place, that’s just the way it goes, and you have to just sweep it up and try to soldier on.









This time I was given a long list of organizations I could work at, but every position had been filled, except McInnis Park who told me to come by anytime. So now I’m back there. I haven’t seen Gus though. I hope he’s OK.

So these days I spend a lot of my free time picking up garbage. I walk around that park with a bucket and trash grabber scanning for anything that isn’t natural, much like the Terminator would if he were picking up trash. This is challenging in many ways. Some things look un-natural, but are in fact natural. These things include, but are not limited to, dead snail shells and tiny white twigs. Cigarette butts are by far the most common item I pick up, but I also find lots of plastic straws, gum wrappers, bottle caps, receipts and soda-can tabs. Sometimes I’ll find a giant mess of trash somewhere, and that’s pretty stimulating. The picnic benches are a gold mine. Once in a while I’ll see a shattered beer bottle and get a little overwhelmed by the chaos. I once found a half full bag of Ritz crackers, and when I tried to pick it up all of the crackers fell out. I had to walk away from that mess. It was just too much chaos to handle.

Don’t get me wrong, I try my best to avoid work while I’m there. I look for spots to sit down that are out of view and sometimes I’ll hide out in the bathrooms so I can surf the web in peace, but I can’t stay long because it smells like shit in there. I traced the source of the smell to one particular stall. The chaos was unbelievable.

I think a lot about the long life cycle of trash. How that thin slice of plastic originally came into existence and ended up the way it did, to be eventually picked up by my trash grabber and dropped into that bucket. Where will it go from there? The world is very complicated.









On Thursdays they have soccer games at the park, and the next day there’s trash all over the field. I can’t help but wonder how this happens, how it gets that filthy. I mean, it’s everywhere, man. Do they kick their penalty shots using giant open bags of Doritos? Do they use Skittles wrappers for red cards and discard them in the air, again and again, and then spin around in circles like Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music? Or maybe they just snort amphetamines and turn over huge barrels of garbage, spreading the trash everywhere before having some giant, drugged up orgy right in the middle of the field.

As I pick up the trash and ponder these questions I often catch myself zoning out, staring at the happy families playing Frisbee together. Usually the parents give me dirty looks, clearly annoyed at the fact that I am within view of their children, but I honestly don’t care what they think. None of it matters much in the grand scheme of things. We’re really just insignificant specs of dust floating in a vast and incomprehensible abyss of chaos, plus society and culture are slowly beginning to crumble.

These past few days I’ve been listening to Warren G’s 1994 album, Regulators: G Funk Era. It’s good.

There are so many people everywhere. They just don’t quit. They’re constantly forming lines and taking all the good stuff. I tried to order chicken at Safeway yesterday, but I couldn’t. There were too many people ordering chicken, and by the time it got to me they were all out of chicken. These days I feel like if you want to get fried chicken at Safeway, it’s probably best to send in a request and wait a few days.









I’m trying to quit smoking again, and it’s very hard. Last week while driving to work I decided to throw my pack of cigarettes out the window. But two hours later I drove up and down Main Gate Road at five miles an hour looking for the pack, and I finally found it, and it was exciting and beautiful. Some people might call this addiction, but I call it passion. There are certain aspects of life that you simply have to play by ear, and a lot of people just don’t understand this. The other day Ben Russo asked me “Ryan, why did you start smoking again if you were just going to quit again later? I don’t underst—.”

The man doesn’t have a clue, and his blog is of very poor quality. It is like steamed asparagus garnished with a pile of crap.

For the past few weeks I’ve been watching a string of terrible Buddy Cop movies. I have no interest in traveling abroad, yet I can’t imagine living my whole life without understanding what Dragnet is all about. I downloaded the Lethal Weapon Quadrilogy and watched them all. They’re all bad, but the second one is the best. Out of all the films in the series, Lethal Weapon 2 provides the most thoughtful insights on the human condition. The change in style from the first film to the second represents a major shift in the underhanded values expressed in most action movies from the mid-80s to the early 90s.









I always try to place a heavy degree of reality on movies like these. I think about how the character’s lives might play out years after the film takes place. In Lethal Weapon, for example, Roger will always be in a huge amount of debt to Riggs, seeing as how Riggs broke into that drug den and rescued him and his daughter like that. Riggs will definitely go on having the upper hand in that relationship. He could repeatedly show up at their door foaming at the mouth and demanding drug money, and he could simply remind them about the time he single handedly took down 25 henchmen, finally wrestling the mob leader one on one, half naked in the rain and that family would have no choice but to apologize and pay up.

I downloaded Bad Boys but have yet to finish it because I thought it was especially terrible. I watched Beverly Hills Cop, another terrible movie, but my god… what a theme song.

I’ve been drinking a ton of coffee lately. It makes you nervous, I know, but I need it. Things are dull without coffee, and I hate that. Oh no. The thoughts pour in and one thought leads right into another, then suddenly it all cuts off like a clogged vein and that’s when I have to drink more coffee.

I got a little surprise in my mail recently from the Oakland Police Department. It looks like I didn’t make a full and complete stop before turning right on October 13th at 7:17AM. The fine is a little over $500.

They’re trying to take me down, that much is obvious. But the jokes on them, I’m still alive.









Lately I’ve found myself fantasizing about various situations in which I find about $900 in public places such as underneath a park bench or behind a dumpster. It would be awesome if tomorrow while walking home I ran into a billionaire who handed me a check for two thousand dollars, telling me to have fun and keep up the good work, or if I crossed paths with a woman pushing a baby carriage, and then suddenly the baby carriage fell over sideways and instead of there being a baby inside a bunch of hundred dollar bills fell out and then the woman just ran away. I guess I can’t count on that type of thing happening, but it’s possible.