Damnit, I hate to leave Arizona

It's almost foreign, this keyboard, after months and months of not writing, not even typing, barely hen-pecking emails and running. And now that many of my friends who were never self-proclaimed writers are out-writing me, I guess it means I have given up writing. C'est la vie! Instead, I'm working. I work. Work comforts me. It's making money, with other men. We work and then eat and drink together, and talk about work, then we go to bed and get up and growl and gnarl at each other and pile in our trucks to do more work. Work.

What do working men talk about?

Peter about his ex and how she's trying to screw him over their house and daughter. Steve about computers and satellites and technology and mother boards and this friend we have in common who was a complete snake. Ben talks about chicks. George (pronounced Hor-Hay) barely talks inglee, but blathers on in Spick to his woman and his helper and they take over whatever room they inhabit and speak Spick and laugh out loud like they were cracking jokes about us crackers, and we know they are.

We’re putting Lottery satellites on the roofs of 7 Eleven’s and grocery stores so their system can communicate better and so people can buy tickets faster and spend more money on the dream. And this is Vsat work, which pays a lot more than going to some guy’s house and putting the little satellite dish on his wall and running cable and lighting up 438 stations, 400 of which he’ll never look at. That stuff pays “shit,” but Vsat pays four times as much, and you can do as many as you want per day. It’s good enough that people drive here from Virginia and transplant their lives and say goodbye to their families and rent a nicer house than they have at home and sit by the pool and smoke.

So we sit around and smoke, me by second hand, and bitch and eat meat, because there are no women to make sure we eat our greens, and the pool is warm, 85 degrees, and the air is 110 in the shade, and this is great work. My first day, we got on a roof with an 8 foot parapet wall and sat on the wall and hoisted shit up thirty feet and over the side and back down and kept doing it until we had the dish, the mount, and cinder blocks sitting there. Then there’s running the cable, unboxing all the boxes of Lottery crap, plugging it all together, pointing the dish, fine tuning it so you get a passing grade, then power it all up and you’re done. 6 hours. Then you travel to another site and do it again. Then there’s the paperwork, the redundant computer work, the picture uploads to prove you did it, then you take all the old systems back and load up a moving van once a week with new boxes, which is an all-day job. It’s about 15 hours a day plus.

But if that gets you down, don’t worry, it’s great work, and the chicks are hot. Very hot. They sizzle. They’re even beautiful looking at them through their spit in your eyes. They’re gorgeous, rude creatures with the indifference of sleeping, caged tigers and plenty to be rude about. There are no guys down here. Just dropouts and Mexicans. Very few rockstars and pro athletes to go around. But we regular guys can look. They can’t take that away. So they look back with smug, rude faces and smile and say, “could you catch the windows, please?” and you say, “sorry, I don’t work here, ma’am,” and they say, “oh,” as the window slides back up.

Then there was this older woman from South Africa. She was proud of her chest and made it known, and Ben competed with a strange, torn-shirt wearing little man for her affections (I posted a pic, but took it down last minute - available by request). I guess even the elderly are hot down here. Maybe they don't know better. They don't know that you can eat and be fat and not exercise or play tennis or have sensational legs at 60. There are no buffets. The grocers sell health food. Fried chicken is rare, and I still haven't seen a KFC. It's a different culture. It's brand new cars, no windows rolled down because everyone has AC, and the stores are all huge and new. Costco is the biggest I've ever seen. The Costco women are even hot, which is odd. I was in a convenience store with a McDonald's inside, and the girl working there was hot. And they're all mean, so it balances out.

So this guy, Lee, came to help us out. He’s so pure Indian it’s scary. He even talks in that jerky, Indian cadence, where each sentence sounds like a fireside story, and his ponytail hangs down to his ass, and he can scale a ladder up to a roof like nothing. I keep waiting for him to produce a knife and grab my hair and swipe me clean, leaving a glistening, white skull. But he has a couple kids and needs the work. He’s Cherokee-Navajo, from Northeast Oklahoma.

Well, that about completes the list of things. Except that I invented a motorcycle cup holder for when you go to Starbucks on your motorcycle and want to take it home. I’m working out the kinks, because the other day I got mocha all over my FZ1.

See how happy my bike is down here???