I've been fond of saying that I haven't had a day off so far this month, but in point of fact, I have worked every single day since November 26th--I mean, this is getting ridiculous.  I'm working tomorrow (Sunday) again--the second time in a row--and I'm working Monday, which is my "N/S" day.  That's twenty-two days (more than three weeks!) in a row.  I mean, I did say I could use the overtime, but I could also stand to do some laundry, which is that much more time consuming without a dryer.  Also, a friend I haven't seen in a while called to invite me to a party this evening, but I just couldn't do it, even though I wanted to, because I'm just too damned tired and having difficulty breathing (plus, I was hungry).  And he just had a new baby and everything!  I felt bad about not going, but I knew that if I had gone, I'd regret it tomorrow.

So: I asked for this coming Tuesday off.  Not annual leave, not a sick day--just a break from working every single day.  It also happens to be my birthday, and no I won't turn a hundred, though it feels that way (I just did that as a joke, but I still think it's funny, so it's staying).  No, I was born in 1965--you do the math.

Not sure I'll get the day off though--so my saison d'enfer continues.  (Even if I do get it off, I'm spending my birthday doing laundry and maybe unpacking a few boxes--fun!)

Happy holidays, and I don't care what the internerds tell you about tipping your letter carrier, just know this: your delivery person remembers everything, especially this time of year.  That's all I hear about in the office ("well, they want me to forward their mail, but they're non-tippers, so I think I'll forget to do that"--and hey, you don't have to remind me that they earn a decent salary, I'm just telling you what they say in the office).  And I don't get tips because I only deliver your packages, not your letters.  If I get anything, it's from what the letter carriers decide to give me for bringing their relays to them in the course of the year.

Actually: my role in the office really sucks because I have the worst of both worlds: I have to wait for people in the freezing cold to receive their packages, especially when they have to sign for them; I have to wait to collect the mail from the blue boxes after (sometimes well after, if the packages make me run late, as they often do now) the stated collection times on the boxes, usually five pm; I have to bring relays--the sacks of sorted mail--to the letter carriers in a very timely fashion or else they whine about me being late (which would mean they might have to stay out until, oh, whenever they're actually supposed to be out there, instead of being done by noon); and nobody tips me because I'm just the driver.

Yes, I'm working ten hour days seven days a week, so I should be making pretty good money--but I have no time to myself, I have no life, . . . whine bitch moan complain ad nauseam.  And it's not like I'm sitting in a cubicle, with regular access to a bathroom, thinking or writing or grading: I'm driving, lifting, stomping through snow, walking . . .  it's a physical job, and mail is heavy.  And boy, are my hours long.

At the very least: could you please curb your dogs?  I'm not asking for much here.  Seriously.  Just pick that shit up.  We have to step into your homes sometimes, you know--you don't want us tracking that in, I don't think.  Even if it's frozen.

I don't have a dryer at the new place.  It's sort of annoying.  But not as annoying as the fact that I don't have a shower, either.  There's supposedly a shower coming at some point (when is rather unclear--I had thought it would be installed prior to my moving in), but for now, I'm having to squat in a clawfoot tub and . . . well, that's probably more than enough information for you, isn't it?  I have one of those snaky showerhead things, but that's it.

I also don't have anywhere to park my new (old) enormous vehicle, so I have to leave it in the next town over and walk home, as I will do this evening.  I did buy groceries though, so maybe I should drive them over, drop them off, and then try to find a parking spot.  Hey, it's a holiday weekend evening!  Should be easy.

I'm a whining little bitch, aren't I?

In other news, I've changed my photos around a little.  See, I don't always walk around in a postal uniform.  Just . . . well, most of the time.  Actually, I'm still in uniform as I type this.  Probably should go home & change.

Last note: I'm actually listening to the Tarantino soundtracks as I altered them for cassettes, back when I still recorded cassettes--for example, you know all those Steven Wright breaks on the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack, where he names other songs like "The World Is A Ghetto" by War, and "Doesn't Somebody Want to Be Wanted" by The Partridge Family?  Well, I actually put those in, in sequence.  I am not only a whining bitch, I am also a colossal nerd.

Aren't you glad you're reading this?

I'm moving.

I'm being forced to move, actually--but the thing is, now that I'm being forced, I'm realizing just how miserable I've been in the place I've been living for the last five years.  And now I'm thinking, why the hell did I want to stay?!

In short order: I got a car, I got evicted, I found a new place to live, and . . .

Well, there's possibly other really big news on the horizon, but I don't want to jinx anything by talking about it here before it's . . . oh, I don't know, really.

I did get kicked out of the Suicide Football Pool this past weekend.  I'd been doing so well, until I found myself second-guessing my original choice of the Ravens over the Rams--so I picked the Cardinals over the Panthers.  In hindsight, of course, what the hell was I thinking?!  But honestly, I had Testaverde down as a curse of sorts . . .

(For those of you reading this who were previously unaware of the fact that I followed football to this extent, I would like to extend my heartfelt apologies.  It never occurred to me that I would be one of those guys myself, but I'd like to remind you that I've been working for the post office for over a year now.  The wonder is that I follow sports as little as I do, given that I live in Boston, where we have the Red Sox, the Patriots, and now, heaven forfend, the Celtics . . . )

I meant to post this last month, so I'm back-dating this entry.

Since I last wrote here, I've actually been "bumped" from my route quite often, which means that I haven't really been bringing my tape deck boom box with me as often as I'd like.

Also, the fleet's been switched around, so now I'm driving a CRV instead of an LLV--which is bad in my case, as it holds even less than before, and I seem to be taking out a lot more lately, it being fall and everything.

But the big news is: my boss gave me his car.  My last car died almost a year ago, and my boss (one of the nicest guys on earth, obviously) was originally going to sell me his car, only then the new car he was going to get fell through.  And then almost a year goes by, he finally gets a new car, and he gives me his old one!  Amazing.  And just in time (see the next post).

It's a 1994 Ford Explorer.  Now, obviously, I would never in a million years buy such a thing for myself--but free?  Well, it's hard to pass up.  However . . .

Since you asked:

Mail is delivered six days a week (Sundays are for express mail, which was what I was doing last Sunday), but the regulation work week is five days.  Also, mail volume varies from day to day, but there are generally days everyone knows are bad (Mondays, Thursdays, and lately, Saturdays, as magazines seem to have shifted their delivery dates of late).  So, in order for there to be some sort of fairness to the scheme, the regular letter carrier has a different day off every week in addition to Sunday.  (I'm not a regular letter carrier yet--I'm a PTF, or "part time flexible," meaning I work whenever, mostly every single day).

So: one week your letter carrier will have Sunday and Monday off, the next Sunday and Tuesday, then Sunday and Wednesday, und so weiter.  The kicker is that the rotation is only five weeks long and not six, which means that the carrier who gets Friday off also gets Saturday off (since the cycle starts on Saturday), so your carrier gets a three-day weekend once every five weeks.

And of course, this is rotated in groups, or else everyone would be off on the same days in the same office, which obviously wouldn't work.

There's more that I'm not going into, but that's the gist of it.  Now, aren't you glad you asked?

I have a day off today.  "What?!"  But you see, I've been working non-stop since August 6th.  That's right, even on Sunday, I was working (and Sunday was a hard day, let me tell you).  Then, last night, I was forced to bring my truck into the shop, because it was overheating (CHECK ENGINE).  I didn't really think it would be a good idea to drive my "Long Life Vehicle" into the ground.

This morning, when I went in, the truck was of course not ready ("Are you kidding? That thing is a mess!!")--but then, when I called in to the station to ask what to do, they realized that my working today would put them waaaay over budget.  I've already worked a six-day week including Sunday (our work week starts on Saturday, for reasons too complicated for me to explain here), so ta-daah: the day off.

But I hadn't planned on it.

So now, I'm at the internet cafe (my only reliable access at this point, at least until I manage to save for a new laptop or something).  I've decided to try to catch that Edward Hopper exhibit at the MFA, since it closes Sunday.  (I remember when it opened, I thought "Hell yeah!" and then . . . it's closing Sunday?!?)  It's a tad expensive, but what the hell.  I'm worth it.  Aren't I?

Oh, and I'm lugging around a bit of a summer head cold, as if my life weren't filled with enough tension and heartache.  Speaking of which, I'm also finishing my umpteenth reading of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man--you know, I can't begin to tell you how much I love that novel.  To my mind, it's second only to Melville's Moby Dick in the pantheon of Great American Novels.  Gravity's Rainbow is third--a close third, but third.

Finally: like most regular guys, I'm a huge fan of Bill Simmons.  Ironically, I don't even like sports that much--I just like Simmons' writing style.  But here in my tiny little MySpace blog, while on the subject of Great American Novels, I'd just like to interject that, while Bill holds that The Natural is one of the greatest sports movies of all time . . . well, I can't join him in that, because to me, the film ruined one of the most perfect endings in all of American literature, which I used to be able to type from memory--at least, until my old age set in, and now I can barely type, let alone type passages from novels from memory.  But my point is: I can still remember seeing the film at a preview at the University of Maryland, not knowing that it would be "Hollywood"-ized, and at the moment when Redford actually hits the ball, and it goes through the lights, and the music swells, and Glenn Close is caught in her vaseline close-up: that's the moment I shot up out of my seat and yelled NNNNOOOOOOOOOO at the top of my lungs (if you were there, yeah that was me--forgive me).  They might as well have made a film of Moby Dick where Ahab caught the whale and they had a huge hip-hop party on the boat afterwards, to my mind.  That's why I'll never see The Natural ever again, and why I'll always have a little bit of hate in my heart for Barry Levinson and Robert Redford, despite everything else they've done that's been great since then.  Yes, even after Levinson was responsible for Homicide: Life on the Streets, which begat the greatest television show ever made: The Wire.  Even so.

The tape is named after a prose poem by W. S. Merwin, "What we are named for," which is on the spine of the cassette.  Where the songs would be listed is instead the first part of the poem:

To say what or where we came from has nothing to do with what or where we came from.  We do not come from there any more, but only from each word that proceeds out of the mouth of the unnamed.

And yet

The label to side one reads:

sometimes it is our only way

The label to side two reads:

of pointing to who we are.

The first side consists of the following songs:

The Strength of the Righteous (Main Title to The Untouchables)
Ennio Morricone
Matador
X-Mal Deutschland
Desire (Hollywood Remix)
U2 (I provide the link to the video because, unfortunately, I can always see it when I hear it)
Rock the Casbah
The Clash
Hang Fire
The Rolling Stones
Irresistable Bitch & Pope
Prince (yes, two in a row)
Leave the Capitol, Hit the North, & Cab It Up!
The Fall (three after two--I know)
Under Pressure
Queen & David Bowie
Sister Havana
Urge Overkill
Penguins
Lyle Lovett

For the sake of leaving something to the imagination, I will not tell you the song listing for side two.  Okay, I will tell you that the first song is "There Is No Love Between Us Any More," by Pop Will Eat Itself, and the last song is "Supernova," by Liz Phair.  But that's it.

I play this tape a lot.  And I mean a lot.  Even though it violates about a dozen unspoken rules of mixtapes.  I played it a lot before in my old car also, back when I had a car with a tape deck that worked.

Forgot once again, in my haste, to thank yum yum yellow for tapes & boxes.  Thank you, yum yum yellow, for your tapes & boxes.  I owe you dinner or something (but not sumthin' sumthin'--you do have a boyfriend, I realize).

I really ought to get back to work--they're not paying me to post on MySpace!  (It's okay, this is my lunch break, I'm not actually stealing time or anything.  I wouldn't do that.)

Around the middle of last week, the oscillations on my tape deck were so bad I had to put the machine away--Boston radio, trust me, was never an option. Then I thought, hey, what about new batteries? My little boom box takes six D batteries--remember D batteries? So, Monday morning, I obtained new ones from the nearby drugstore, and I even found a stop on my route yesterday that accepted old batteries for recycling, so I wouldn't feel bad about tossing out not-quite-depleted batteries. That seemed to do the trick, and now the loud mail-collecting machine is back in bidness, as the kids say.

So: I forgot to mention that I don't have all of my tapes together--I don't have all of my anything together. I'm a mess, a wreck, a disaster, what have you. Still, though I've been desperately searching for my homemade copy of My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless," I settled for finding my homemade copy of MBV's "Isn't Anything," which is on a sixty minute cassette rounded out by all of the "You Made Me Realise" EP ("Drive It All Over Me" might well be my favorite song by MBV), plus "I Believe" and "Emptiness Inside," from another EP, which I think I fit the rest of on my "Loveless" cassette. The challenge of cassettes, for me, was trying to use up every single second of tape without having to cut a song off.

Also: Mondays are my worst days, pretty much all the time; and for whatever reason, they seem to be getting progressively worse--I forced myself to take a midday lunch break (unlike last week), but I paid in time lost delivering parcels later that afternoon. And oh, the headaches I get! I was up till 2 am last night with my throbbing temples. It's ridiculous, really. I'd say more but I'm not as fast a typist as I used to be, plus the keyboard I'm using is missing the "period" key, so I have to use a little toothpick for that--and I really ought to be getting ready for work here. But this keyboard slows me down considerably. Probably ought to buy a new laptop in the very near future.

One last thing: I'm really looking forward to the third Bourne movie. I watched the first two again recently, and they hold up very well.