Category Archives: My life stories

July 25, 2020

Tales From The Wise Sloth: The AK-47 Story

By wise sloth

In 2005 I was enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and stationed at Sembach Air Force Base, Germany. The experience was culturally amazing and freezing cold.

Halfway through my two-year tour, my supervisor informed me I’d been selected to receive an all expense paid trip to the largest beach in the world. That was his way of telling me I was getting deployed to Ali Al Salem Air Force Base in Kuwait.

Part of me was relieved to escape Germany’s endless subzero winter nights, but the other part of me was equally dissatisfied with Kuwait’s perpetual 120 degree sand storms. I guess I’m just a spoiled American like that. In retrospect, both experiences were adventures, but I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life in either scenario.

I’m confessing these emotions so you’ll understand how euphoric I felt when I was sitting at my desk in Kuwait and got an E-mail informing me that my next duty station would be at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii.

I re-read that E-mail 20 times before I believed it was real. Then, I printed out 20 copies and laid one on every person’s desk I worked with to rub it in their faces that God anointed me with orders to paradise.

For the next few months in Kuwait, and for the rest of my tour in Germany, I fantasized about my upcoming life in Hawaii. I imagined grass huts, luau festivals, surfing, cocktails served in hollowed out pineapples, and sex on the beach. God, I couldn’t wait!

These visions were reinforced when I finally arrived in Hawaii, inprocessed into my new squadron, and learned that I would be given a $1,200 per month housing allowance (in addition to my regular salary) to rent a home.

However, reality shattered all those dreams the moment I started house-hunting.

While I was still living in Germany, I invited my identical twin brother to come live with me. Then, when I got orders to Hawaii, it went without saying he would follow me there. So I needed to find a two-bedroom apartment. However, in 2006, the only city in Oahu I could find a two-bedroom apartment for $1,200 per month was Waipahu.

When you imagine Hawaii, you probably conjure up all the same heavenly tropes I did. In reality, Oahu is overpopulated and mostly covered in suburban sprawl and traffic jams.

When I describe Oahu to people, I say, “Imagine if you cut out New York City and put it on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and declared it to be paradise because it’s on an island where the average temperature is 83 degrees.” This analogy is admittedly over-dramatic, but it’s close enough to the truth to be useful.

There are some places on Oahu that can be legitimately considered paradise, but it costs $2000+ per month to live in those gentrified neighborhoods. Waipahu is a straight up ghetto. The whole time I lived there, I never dared to walk down the street after dark because it went without saying that I would get stabbed and robbed.

After leaving Hawaii in 2007, every time I’ve encountered people who lived there, when I tell them I lived in Waipahu, they cringe and ask, “Why the HELL did you live THERE?”

Well, why does anyone live in any ghetto? Because it’s affordable.

The apartment complex I lived in was protected by 8-foot-tall fences and gates that required a key FOB to enter or exit. Plus, there was a guard stationed at the entrance who would ask to see your resident I.D. card during business hours before letting you enter.

One night, I drove up to the front gate in my $2000 convertable Miada and was stopped by a 350+ pound, drunk Hawaiian pretending to be a security guard (even though he wasn’t wearing any kind of uniform). He was obviously friends with the gate guard, who was sitting in the guard shack laughing his ass off and obviously drunk as well. Being a scrawny tech nerd at the time, I had to endure the Hawaiian giant’s abuse of power and tell him whatever he wanted to hear while my ex-wife sat in the passenger seat and judged me for being a submissive beta male. That’s just the kind of place Waipahu is. As they say in the islands, “Might makes right.”

One lazy Sunday morning, I was sleeping in my king-sized bed with my ex-wife. A few feet away, my twin brother was sleeping off his nightly hang-over in his room. Around 9:30 AM, we were all awakened by the sound of semi-automatic gun fire directly outside our apartment followed by a man screaming, “JOHN! JOHN! YOU FUCKING MOTHER FUCKER! COME OUT HERE, JOHN! I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!”

BANG BANG BANG

Even though I’d been stationed in a war zone, I’d never seen combat. I also didn’t own a gun. However, I knew enough about these things to know that when bullets start flying, your best survival strategy is to lay down flat on the ground. So, as soon as everyone in my house jumped out of their beds and started running around like chickens with their heads cut off, I used my most authoritarian voice and ordered everyone to hit the deck and stay there.

I plastered my face to the carpet and dragged my ex-wife next to me, but my brother ran straight to the window to see what was happening. Despite my vociferous advice, he stood there, fixed to the glass, giving us a play-by-play narrative:

“Oh shit! There’s a big, fat, Hawaiian guy out there with a fucking Ak-47! Oh man! He’s going door to door, knocking on them with the but of the gun and asking random people if John lives there. Oh, shit. He’s knocking on Koa’s door. He’s not going to find John there. Uh, now they’re talking. Now they’re shaking hands. Koa’s going back inside and shutting the door. It looks like they’re all good. Now he’s pacing around aimlessly.”

BANG BANG BANG.

Then we could all hear Mr. AK-47 shout, “JOHN, WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU!!!!?? I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU, YOU MOTHER FUCKER!!! YOU RAPED MY FUCKING SISTER!!!!”

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

Obviously, someone (possibly) from my apartment complex named John raped this guy’s sister, and he came to murder him at 9:30 AM on a Sunday, but since he didn’t know where John lived, he had to go door to door asking everyone if they wanted to volunteer to be murdered for raping his sister.

After the next gun shot, my ex crawled to her side of the bed, grabbed her phone off the night stand, and dialed 911.

Her conversation went something like this:

“Hello.”

“911, what is your emergency?”

“There’s a man outside my apartment firing an AK-47 in the air. He keeps shouting that he’s looking for a man named John who raped his sister.”

“Can you describe the man?”

“He’s large. He’s Hawaiian, and he’s carrying an AK-47.”

“Ma’am. I need more details than that.”

“I can’t tell you anything more because I’m laying flat on the floor so I won’t get shot by a stray bullet.”

“Then how do you know the suspect is Hawaiian or that he has an AK-47?”

“Because my husband’s brother is standing at the window looking at him.”

“Well, ma’am. That’s just not enough information for me to go on.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not giong to get up and go look at him.”

“Ma’am, I can’t help you if you can’t give me a better description of the suspect.”

“Uhhh…. can you just send someone to our apartment complex and look for the guy shooting an AK-47?”

“Ugh. I guess we’ll send someone.” Click.

My ex looked at her phone in amazement and said, “I can’t believe that just happened. She literally said, ‘I guess we’ll send someone.'”

For the next 15 minutes, we waited on our bellies while my brother watched the meth head circle the courtyard and interrogate any tenet who opened their door when he knocked. We were holding our breath hoping he wouldn’t make it to ours when finally two Hawaiian police officers drove up and asked him to surrender. He immediately gave up his gun without resisting and allowed himself to be put in the back of the squad car.

When it was safe, all my neighbors and I came outside and started talking. It turns out the gunfire and shouting had woken up everyone, and we had all called 911.

A few minutes later, one of the cops walked up to us and asked who called the police. We all raised our hands, and then he told us, “We need each of you to come to the squad car and look in the window so you can positively I.D. the suspect.”

My outspoken Mexican neighbor told him what we were all thinking, “Hell no! I’m not going near him. I don’t want that crazy meth head to know my face so he can come back and shoot me!” The rest of us shook our heads in agreement.

The officer retorted condescendingly, “Then how can we know we have the right person?”

My neighbor replied, “You found the guy who was walking around with an AK-47, right!? So why do you need anyone to identify him?”

The officer scowled and said, “I guess we’ll take him in anyway,” then walked away.

Everyone stood there looking confused, hurt, and angry. After that, life went on, and we never heard anything else about the Sunday morning AK-47 avenger or John the rapist. We never found out if either of them ever got the punishment they deserved.

It goes without saying, I hope John was brought to justice eventually. Part of me suspects the police officers who arrested Mr. AK-47 just dropped him off at his house without booking him, and given the circumstances, part of me wouldn’t fault them too much. However, we can all agree that shooting an AK-47 in the air in a densely populated urban area is bad. I hope at least they took his rifle away. In addition, I hope he got the drug abuse intervention he needed. I don’t know for a fact he was an addict, but I’m pretty confident you don’t go wandering around an unfamiliar apartment complex at 9:30 AM on a Sunday morning firing an AK-47 indiscriminately into the air unless you have a meth problem.

Epilogue:

A few years later I left the Air Force and moved back to Texas. I told this story to an old hometown friend of mine and ended it by asking rhetorically, “Where does someone even get an AK-47 from in the first place!?!? Hahaaaaa! AmIright!?!?”

He didn’t laugh at the punchline at all though. He just looked me dead in the eye and said matter-of-factly, “Dude, if you have $300, I know where you can get an AK-47 right now.”

Then I moved to New Zealand.

If you liked this story, you may also like these:

My Life Stories (in chronological order)

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July 19, 2020

Tales From The Wise Sloth: The Very Gay Cabaret

By wise sloth

In 2006 I was stationed in Hawaii in the U.S. Air Force. The first day I arrived on Oahu, I met the woman who would become my first and only ex wife. About a year and a half later, one evening, I was extremely drunk in that overly emotional kind of way where you hang onto your friend’s shoulder shouting, “I love you, bro.” In that state of mind, I slurred to her, “Baby, I’lllll take youze anywhere in the worlddd you wanna go. Just name the place, and I’ll fly you there.”

Lucidly, she snapped back, “Okay. I want to go to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand.”

Wait. What?

“Fuck,” I thought. “That’s not exactly what I meant…. But, oh well. Screw it.” A month later, I’d filed my request for three weeks of leave and booked a guided tour across Asia through a travel agency at Hickam Air Force Base.

I’d already spent four years living in Europe, where I would often just drive in a random direction Friday afternoon, stop in a town that looked interesting, and sleep in my car. So I was no amateur when it came to traveling, but I didn’t know anything about Asia. So I decided I should have someone walk me through my first experience.

The big day finally came, and we boarded a plane heading West towards “The East.”

Even though everyone told me I was crazy for going to Thailand with my committed partner, we flew to Bangkok together anyway, where, despite my best intentions, my story would still involve dozens of lady boys.

When we landed, we were met by a tour guide at the airport holding a sign with my last name written on it, just like in the movies, which made me feel like a celebrity. He drove us to a gigantic five star hotel… in the deepest, darkest bowels of Bangkok. Our room was on the 15th floor with an amazing view of the air conditioning units on the building next-door. Everything else about the place was high class beyond the status I was accustomed to.

Over the next week, our tour guide drove us around the city to all the biggest tourist traps. We visited a 5-story flea market with more exotic, shiny knick knacks than you could fill a thousand shipping containers with. We paid monks to see a golden Buddha statue worth enough money to end poverty, and then we fed a ravenous horde of catfish from a shaky skiff on a greasy river. It was all very exotic, opulent, and tinged with signs of poverty.

As our guide shuttled us around the city, we bombarded him with every question imaginable about Thailand’s history, current events, and all things sociological, political, economic, and anthropological. I could tell he genuinely enjoyed the fact that we wanted to know all of Thailand’s deepest truths, and I felt like we bonded over that.

Everyday, when we took the elevator down from our hotel room to meet our guide, we’d walk past a giant marquee sign in the hotel lobby that read, “Cabaret” in big Broadway light bulbs. Underneath the sign was a 15-foot-wide set of stairs leading down to a basement auditorium.

We couldn’t not be intrigued. So one day, we asked the front desk clerk how much the cabaret show cost, and she said, “$150 U.S. dollars per person.”

My initial reaction (in my head) was, “Yeah, fuck that.” However, we were on vacation.

The next morning, I asked our tour guide if he knew anything about the show and if it was worth the obscene price. Immediately, his eyes lit up, and he assured us it was fantastic and absolutely worth every penny. He endorsed the show so enthusiastically I decided to splurge on it against my better judgement.

The last night we were in Thailand, we bought tickets to the 11pm showing. After having a few warm up drinks in our hotel room, we made our way downstairs. I expected to walk into a cramped, seedy basement, but the stage and stadium seating were bigger than the auditorium in my high school. The light and sound systems must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was almost as impressive as the Moulin Rouge!

When we entered, a sharply dressed bellhop met us and led us to our seats. At that point, I was feeling guilty for arriving under-dressed for such a formal occasion, but I got over that with a little more liquid courage. As soon as we sat down, a waitress came by and sold us some overpriced beer and wine. Properly prepared, we settled in for a night we’d never forget.

Halfway through my first beer, the overhead lights dimmed. A spotlight cracked on, illuminating a thin, middle aged Thai man wearing high heels, panty hose, panties, and a tasteful black corset. If you need a visual image, he basically looked like A Thai version of Tim Curry from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

…and that’s… interesting. Hey, I traveled all the way to Thailand for a cultural experience, and I was getting exactly that. So I was rolling with it.

Honestly, at first I was shocked, but then I was like, “Okay. What do you got for us, Tim?”

Well, for the next two hours, in his adorably broken English, “Tim” introduced us to a parade of transvestites in various stages of the transition process who all regaled us by lip-singing American pop songs that you would have heard in an American strip club circa 2007.

The whole time I remember thinking, “GOD DAMN IT! I DIDN’T COME ALL THE WAY TO THAILAND TO LISTEN TO AMERICAN POP MUSIC!”

In between acts, a chorus line of big-booby corset-ed hot chicks (and more lingerie-clad men) would come out and do the can-can dance… or whatever.

A dozen Thai beers later, the $300+ episode of the Twilight Zone ended. Tim and his friends took a bow. The spotlight shut off, and the overhead lights came on.

Silently, my wife and I drifted upstairs to the lobby elevator. Then we took another elevator from the lobby to our suite overlooking the dingy brick wall next-door.

It was only after I brushed my teeth that I asked out loud, “What the fuck was that?”

The next morning we met our guide in front of the hotel. His assistant loaded all our luggage into the back of the van. As soon as we buckled into the back seat, he turned around and asked triumphantly, “Did you see the cabaret? How did you like it?”

I replied sheepishly, “Uh, yeah. It was interesting. I guess my only complaint is that I wish it had more hot chicks.?.?.”

He smiled as big as The Joker from the 1970’s Batman series and shouted, “HAHAAAAA!!!! They were ALL MEN!!!!!!”

Now… I’m all for respect and equality of everyone, but his intentions were malicious. That makes him the worst tour guide ever.

In retrospect though, the story was worth $300.

Still, he was the only person we didn’t tip on that trip.

If you liked this post, you may also like these:

My Life Stories (in chronological order)

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July 19, 2020

Tales From The Wise Sloth: My First Massage

By wise sloth

I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in the year 2000. After 6 months of training I was sent to my first duty station, Aviano Air Force Base, Italy. A year or so later, I met a wonderful, beautiful Italian girl who I nicknamed “Pulcina.”

I got a 3-day weekend pass for New Years of 2002. So Pulcina convinced me to take a nice vacation to Lake Bled in Slovenia. We rented a bed and breakfast from a polite Slovenian couple who gave us a soft bed and standard cheese and meat breakfasts.

It didn’t take long to walk all around town, visit all the tourist shops, and take a ferry to the cathedral on the island in the middle of the lake. The entire experience was majestic, but since our vacation took place in the dead of winter, we were freezing stiff the whole time.

Fortunately, while driving to and from the tourist sites, we kept passing a large hotel that advertised they had a swimming pool inside. We both knew European hotels would often allow the public to use their pool for a small fee, and we were desperate for that summer time feeling relief from the oppressive Slovenian winter. In fact, we predicted we’d have this chance and both brought bathing suits. So, on the final day of our vacation, we drove back to our hostel, picked up our swim gear, and drove to the hotel.

When we arrived at the reception desk we were told it would only cost a few Euros to use their pool area for the day. Being in Eastern Europe, that didn’t surprise us. What did, was that the hotel also offered 1 hour massages for $20.

I’d never had a massage before, but I’d always wanted one, and I knew I needed one. Since the price was irresistible, I bought one for myself and Pulcina. The front desk lady told us there was a waiting list. So we would have to go play in the swimming pool for an hour. Then, I would get my massage, and afterwards, Pulcina would get hers. Frankly, the timing was perfect.

So, after an hour, I got out of the pool, dried off, and headed to my appointment. I entered a small room, barely larger than a closet, and was greeted by the hottest 48-year old Slovenian MILF in history. She spoke to me in Slovenian, and I humbly confessed that I only spoke English. She immediately switched to speaking perfect English and made some small talk. After the pleasantries were over, she got down to business and informed me how the massage would proceed.

She told me I couldn’t wear my bathing suit on the table since it was wet from swimming. So I would have to undress before the session began. However, we were basically standing in a closet, and there wasn’t any changing room. I looked around for a place to undress, and when I brought my eyes back to the Slovenian MILF questioningly, she just stared back at me stoically. I thought to myself, “Hey this is Europe. They don’t care about nudity. I guess I’m just supposed to get naked.”

Cautiously though, I put my thumbs on the waist band of my bathing suit and motioned like I was going to push them down. As I did so, I made eye contact with the Slovenian MILF and raised my eyebrows. I could tell she understood what I was asking, and she simply stared back at me impatiently.

Comprehending the situation, I thought, “Fuck it. I’m on vacation.” Then I pulled my swim shorts down in front of her, fully exposing my manhood, which was cold from the swimming pool. Her stoic expression barely cracked with a sly grin as I hopped onto the massage table and covered myself with with the white sheet.

I didn’t get a “happy ending,” but she gave me the best massage I’ve ever had in my life, and I’ve worked as a massage therapist for the past four years. So I’ve had hundreds of massages. I compare all of them to hers, and I will never be able to replicate the perfection of her coconut-crushing hands.

After she finished fixing everything wrong with my life, I slid off the table, pulled my shorts back on while she watched, and then went back to the pool area. I informed Pulcina it was her turn. Then I melted into the hot tub as I watched her slosh towards the massage room.

After her massage was over, we packed up our stuff in the car and headed back to our bed and breakfast. As I was driving, I looked over to her in the passenger seat and asked, “How was your massage?”

“Fine.” She replied.

Casually, I added, “European massages are weird though… for an American.”

“How is that?” Pulcina asked.

I answered, “Well, you know…. the massage therapist said I had to take off my shorts since they were wet from swimming, but there wasn’t a changing room. So I had to get completely naked right in front of her while she watched. In America, we don’t just get naked in front of other people.”

Pulcina snapped her head towards me, and her eyes turned red as she screamed, “Turn this car around! I’ll keeeel herrrr! She did not tell me to take off my bathing suit at all!!!! I had more clothes on than you, and they were more wet than your shorts! That fucking beeeeetch!!!!”

I laughed all the way back to the bed and breakfast.

If you liked this post, you may like these also:

My Life Stories (in chronological order)

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January 16, 2020

What Happened To The Wise Sloth?

By wise sloth

Thewisesloth.com has been down since July 2018, and I’d like to explain why that happened, what I’ve been up to, and what my plans are for the future.

In the spring of 2018 my blog was getting 3,000 views per day, and I started getting offers from ad agencies asking if they could put advertisements on my site. I ignored them for a while because I didn’t want to sell my soul, but I was living in Houston working part time as a massage therapist, which gave me enough free time to write, but I was breaking my body and only making enough money to cover living expenses.

So I decided to sell my soul and put ads on my site. However, WordPress only allows you to use their ad service, which you have to apply for. I applied and never heard back from them. After the next ad agency contacted me, I accepted their offer and moved my site to BlueHost.com, which would allow me to put the necessary coding into my blog. This required me to spend a month frantically copying, pasting, editing my blogs, and optimizing my SEO on the new platform. Then, after all that work, the agency told me their advertisers didn’t want to be associated with a site that gives sex advice and talks about controversial topics. So they withdrew their offer.

A month later the SSL security certificates on my site expired, and I found out that (unless I paid more money) I would have to manually renew them every month otherwise my viewers would get a security warning that my site wasn’t safe. That turned out to be all too true, because two months later my site got infected with malware. To make matters worse, Bluehost only allows you to use their malware removal service, which costs $50 per month on top of what I was already paying them for a site that doesn’t make any money.

At the same time all this was going on, I was preparing to quit my job and move to Oregon to escape the big city life and get back to nature. I was planning on vlogging the adventure and waxing philosophically about following your dreams and yadayada, but I couldn’t afford to keep my site active, and I was overwhelmed with anxiety from the trip anyway. So I left the site down and focused on my real life.

I wish I could/would have shared my adventure, because it was pretty wacky. I drove aimlessly around Oregon for 2 months living out of my SUV and staying at free camp sites in the mountains that were choked with smoke from forest fires.

After traveling all over Oregon, I finally decided I liked Southwest Oregon best. I found a cafe with free wifi and used https://wwoof.net/ to find an internship at a farm that “paid” room and board in exchange for part time work. I stayed in a 100 year old farm house that used to be a gift shop and spent the next month and a half picking vegetables, taking care of animals, chopping down blackberry bushes, making animal skin parchment paper, and watching Youtube videos about homesteading.

After feeling out Southwest Oregon, I decided I really wasn’t impressed with it. Don’t get me wrong. The mountains were beautiful, but the civilization was frankly trashy. I decided if I was going to have to live in a ghetto behind a strip mall, I could do that for a fraction of the price back in Houston. So I drove back to Texas and resumed my suburban life exactly where I left off. My old job even gave me a $1 raise to come back.

I could have reactivated The Wise Sloth at that time, but I still needed money in general. So I used my time to focus on building a tool that helps writers plot stories. Over the next six months I put hundreds of hours into the project, and it’s still hundreds of hours away from being finished.

In the summer of 2019, I was already fed up with Houston traffic again. So I decided to give the Pacific Northwest another shot and see what Washington had to offer. I left my job again, packed up my SUV, and headed North. This time I immediately found a farming internship North of Seattle at Baker’s Acres Family Farm. I lived out of their old RV and spent the next month and a half weeding, composting, pruning tomato plants, planting/picking vegetables, and dead-heading Fuchsias.

On the weekends I drove aimlessly around Washington searching for Utopia… or at least the closest thing in my price range. I finally found a place that came near enough to what I was looking for, but the cost of rent outpaced the wages I could make as a massage therapist.

During my trip I randomly reconnected with an old friend who inspects offshore oil pipelines using remote controlled submarines. He works part time and makes three times more money than a massage therapist without breaking his body. After talking to him about his career field, it didn’t take long to change my plans.

I packed up my SUV, bid farewell to Baker’s Acres Farm and drove literally all the way across America to the International Diving Institute in South Carolina. There, I got an apartment so deep in the ghetto that Pizza Hut wouldn’t deliver, and I spent the next month learning about remote controlled submarines.

Now I’m back in Houston looking for offshore work. As long as I only have to spend 6 months out of each year in Houston, I can cope with that. In the meantime, I’ll be saving every penny I can for my retirement homestead in the mountains where I can one day open a writer’s retreat for aspiring authors.

Now that I’m at a place in my life where I can take a breath and deal with my website, I decided to move it back to WordPress and just accept that I won’t be able to monetize it or give it a really flashy theme layout. So be it. I’m just going to let the website be basic and share wisdom for the sake of it like I originally intended 10 years ago.

I’m still planning on spending most of my upcoming free time focusing on building my plot structure tool, but I’ll still write blogs when I need to get something off my chest. I won’t be stressing over getting a post out every week though. I wish I could just devote my life to cataloging wisdom, but without a trust fund, that’s just not financially possible.

So that’s where I’m at. I’m still open to taking request for blog topics, but I’ll be spending half a year out on the ocean for the foreseeable future. So it may take a month for me to respond to E-mails.

If you liked this post, you may like these too:

My Goals
My Life Stories (in chronological order)

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October 23, 2017

What’s The Difference Between Cheap Wine and Expensive Wine?

By wise sloth

I wrote this blog after spending three months working at various vineyards in New Zealand and asking all my bosses about the process of winemaking.

Photo of me in a Vineyard somewhere near Hastings, New Zealand

The biggest difference between good wine and bad wine isn’t age. There’s wine that sells for $100 as soon as it comes off the assembly line, and it’s grown from the same grapes that the same vineyard sells for $9 a bottle. Expensive wines aren’t made from some rare, super grape, and cheap wines aren’t made from inferior grapes.The big difference in quality comes from how those grapes were treated during the growing process.

At the beginning of the growing process, every vine is treated the same. They’re planted in long, straight rows. A wooden post as tall as a grown man sticks out of the ground between every four or five plants. Three or four metal wires run perpendicularly between/along the posts. The reason those posts and wires are there is because grape vines aren’t trees. They’re vines, obviously. So, left on their own, they’ll just fall to the ground and grow in the dirt, but that would ruin the grapes. So workers have to come through the rows of plants and tie them to the bottom wire when the grape plants are tall enough to reach. Then, as the vines get taller and bushier, they’ll naturally grab onto the higher wires if their shoots happen to touch them, but a lot of the shoots just fall back down to the ground. So at some point, human beings have to walk down every row in the vineyard and pick up all the low hanging vines and tuck them up through the wires.

This doesn’t just keep the vines out of the dirt. It also gives the leaves maximum exposure to sunlight, and since grapes tend to grow towards the bottom of vines and not the top, that means when the vines are stretched upwards then most of the grape clusters will grow conveniently along the bottom wire where they can be picked without having to dig through tangled vines. There’s still work to be done before the grapes are picked though, and how that work is done will determine whether the grapes will yield premium or cheap wine.

The leaves on the grape plants need sunlight to nourish the grapes. The grapes themselves also need direct exposure to sunlight to ripen properly, but the leaves cover the grapes.  So the leaves around the grapes need to be removed from the vines, but you need to take off as few leaves as possible or else the whole plant won’t get enough light to nourish its fruit. You also need to remove those leaves without damaging the grapes. There are at least three ways to do this:

Some vineyards use sheep. If you put sheep in a vineyard when the grapes are young and sour the sheep will avoid eating them, but they’ll eat all the leaves around the grapes, and since the rest of the vines and leaves are too high for the sheep to reach they pick off just about the right amount of leaves. Inevitably though, the sheep will end up damaging a few grapes and possibly eating too many leaves.

If 100 rows of vines in a vineyard are reserved for making cheap wine then a farmer can just drive a tall, skinny tractor up and down the rows that suck or blows all the leaves off. It’s a cheap and quick method, but it damages the grapes.

The only tool in the universe capable of performing the precision task of delicately removing just the right amount of leaves is a human being. So they’re sent into the vineyards to spend all day, every day in green, roofless hallways shuffling sideways analyzing the bottoms of these walls looking for leaves that cover up the grapes and pulling them off while being careful not to bruise the grapes or remove too many leaves.

It doesn’t sound difficult to spend 9 hours walking sideways pulling leaves off of vines, and it’s true that there are more difficult jobs in the world, but leaf plucking is a unique form of torture, as every job on a vineyard is in its own way. The leaves grow just low enough that an average sized person has to bend over slightly to grab them. This doesn’t hurt if you do it once, but if you do it for 50 hours a week you’ll be in agony. That’s a fact. Once your back starts hurting from bending forward you can switch to bending your knees so it looks like you’re doing the limbo dance, except instead of going under the wall you go sideways…forever. Eventually, that’s going to hurt too. When that happens you can just fall down on your knees and pick out the leaves at chest height. If you’ve lost the will to get back up you can waddle sideways on your knees and/or crawl down a whole row that way, but you don’t have knee pads. So your knees get beat up on the rocks and twigs. And the ground is covered in a thousand doses of weed killer. So you don’t want what’s down there to get into the cuts, scrapes, and blisters in your hands and knees.

After the leaves are plucked and all the grapes are exposed along the bottom of the rows you can walk along them and see where bunches of grapes are growing at odd angles and smashing into each other. Those need to be separated and pruned. You’ll also find other bunches are growing on tiny, leafless branches that won’t be able to nourish the grapes to ripeness. Those need to be removed so the plant can nourish the grapes that are left. Sometimes there’s just too many grapes. If you remove all these extra grapes then the remaining ones will grow plump and sweet. If you don’t remove these extra grapes you’ll still get some good bunches, but you’ll also get a lot of small, under-ripe sour bunches. If simply drive a tractor down the row and harvest all the small, vinegary grapes along with the ripe, sugary ones together you’ll end up with bottom shelf hobo wine.

If your customer expects wine so pure that it doesn’t give them a headache then millions of people all over the world need to pour into their local vineyards and sacrifice the days of their youth (and/or their “golden years”) in purgatory staring at bunches of grapes, studying them, counting them, thinking about how and why to remove them so that all that’s left at harvest time are big, juicy, sugary grapes.

Once the plucking and snipping are done, then all those ripe, juicy grapes will look like a free gourmet buffet to birds. If you’ve already invested months of wages into having your grape vines groomed then you can’t afford to give your crop away to the birds. If you’re making cheap wine you might be able to afford to lose a few grapes, but if you’re making premium wine you need total security. One way you can keep birds away is by buying an airgun that’s hooked up to a tank and makes a loud blast that sounds like a gunshot every minute or so. But that doesn’t keep all the birds away all the time. Since it’s not cost effective to build a glass roof over a thousand acre vineyard, the next best thing you can do is send workers back into the wailing walls and cover the plants with nets.

Until someone invents an efficient way to put nets over plants workers will have to spend the best days of their irreplaceable lives rolling gigantic spools of nets down rows 50+ yards long in the premium section of most vineyards. Each row will have two nets, one on either side. Then two people, one on either side, will take their net and lift it over the plant where they’ll take a little plastic clip (like the ones that hold bread bags closed) and clip the two nets together. They’ll also need to bend over and reach underneath the green wall to grab the net hanging on the other side so they can pin them together underneath so birds can’t fly up through the bottom of the net. A lot of care needs to be taken to make sure the vines are wrapped up so tight that a bird the size of a cell phone can’t get in, and you can be sure they’ll try. So the workers need to end up putting five to nine clips above and below every plant. They’ll have to use more clips to patch up the holes that have inevitably been ripped in net. In nine hours they’ll go through thousands of clips. So they have to carry a big pouch full of them. It takes a lot of thought and attention to detail to clip the nets together properly. It also takes a strong back, but if you’ve been working in a vineyard for very long you’ve already got a pretty strong back.

Even with a strong back, you’re still going to go home with sore muscles every day, especially if you’re getting paid by how fast you work. As a general rule vineyard workers get paid as little as possible and get as few benefits or breaks as the law will allow in whatever country a vineyard happens to be in, and some places are worse than others. Sometimes, instead of getting minimum wage, farmers will have the workers play their own version of the Hunger Games. In this version, the contestants get paid a few cents for every plant they pluck, trim and/or cover with nets. Whoever pushes themselves the farthest past the brink of human endurance and takes the least amount of breaks and cuts the most corners will be rewarded with slightly more than minimum wage. Everybody else will get less than minimum wage, and I guess that’s the point. The only two groups of people who really win these Hunger Games are the vineyard owners (who win a new mansion) and the rich people who drink pretentiously expensive wine (who win a sweet taste in their mouth for a few minutes). You could say the vineyard workers win a job, but it’s the job of a disposable slave. You would have to be completely morally bankrupt to call the work vineyard laborers do for they pay they receive a good opportunity. It’s not an opportunity. It’s a trap. It’s a waste of life.

This raises an interesting question. Who would willingly agree to this trap? Who would take seasonal work that pays as little as possible leaving you jobless halfway through the year with as little money as possible? There are all types, and most of them are more or less homeless. That’s why they can move with the season, and that’s why they’re desperate enough to put up with being treated like an animal.

You could say, “Yeah, but at least they’re getting paid.” The thing about that is, vineyards are making enough money for the owners to buy mansions and sports cars. If there’s that much money left over after operating costs then there’s enough money to pay the workers enough to see the dentist. If vineyards truly aren’t profitable enough to pay its workers more than slave wages then that means premium means wine can only ever exist in a society where income inequality is so bad that the poor are desperate enough to accept being treated and paid like disposable slaves.

Either way, the main ingredient that goes into making premium wine (and which is largely missing in cheap wine) is the tears of the poor. The two main ingredients that go into making cheap wine (and which is largely missing in premium wine) are vinegar and pollution.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

My Goals
My Life Stories (in chronological order)
The Life of the Poor

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October 21, 2017

(Comic) An Imagined Conversation With My Abusive, Narcissistic Father

By wise sloth
(Comic) An Imagined Conversation With My Abusive, Narcissistic Father

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Illustrated Parables
How America Works

Short, dark, surreal, articulate political comics

My Life Stories (in chronological order)
Baby Boomers and The Younger Generations

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October 20, 2017

An American Expat Visits The Occupy Auckland Protest: Part 2

By wise sloth

 

I visited the Occupy Auckland protest a few weeks ago when it started and wrote about my initial impression in another post. Yesterday I went back with my tent and spent the night. I participated in the general assembly and offered to teach the protesters how to use my formula plot template to write stories about the issues they were trying to raise awareness about, but nobody took me up on the offer. I ate a fantastic meal from their excessive kitchen facilities and spent the rest evening talking with the other campers. Here’s what I took away from the experience.

The “Occupy Auckland” camp is basically a homeless shelter draped in protest signs, and most of the non-homeless occupants seem to come from very low socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. I’m not saying this to be judgmental. I’m pointing it out as an objective observation, and it needs to be pointed out because it has some important implications.

Don’t go to “Occupy Auckland” to meet the people who are going to change the world. Go there to see why the world needs fixing. If you see mentally ill vagrants and dirty hippies there, don’t jump to the conclusion these are irresponsible, clueless moochers who came to Auckland to blow off steam before getting back to their normal lives. Those irresponsible-looking human beings have been occupying one city or another their entire lives. It’s just that nobody ever noticed them before because society kept them kicked in the gutter out of sight of the good shoppers and rugby fans. Now that the human beings the system has failed have come together in conspicuous numbers and occupied a highly-visible public space the world can’t wait to find any excuse to dismiss them again and sweep them back into the gutters so they can get back to their luxurious shopping sprees, binge drinking, mindless television-viewing and whatever other diversionary activities they can come up with to try to make themselves forget that they’re throwing their lives away in a high-stress rat race to nowhere.

What do the protesters want? What would the government have to give them to get them out of the public eye again? On the most basic level, they just want a chance, not just for themselves but for everyone alive today and everyone yet to be born. The only problem is they don’t have the educational or professional background to articulate how to fix the system that failed them and is setting up a whole new generation of unsuspecting human beings to fail as well. That’s why they’re not in politics. That’s why we rely on politicians to manage the system for us. The only problem is that the politicians don’t have the educational or professional background to fix the system either. These days politicians are professional campaigners. They get elected because they can convince naive voters that they’ll represent their needs and interests, but once they get into office they need someone to tell them how to do their job, and the only people with access to the halls of government are professional lobbyists and campaign financiers who have a vested interest in twisting politicians’ arms to represent the interests of the rich, who have a vested interest in exploiting the common worker/voter.

Why is there economic inequality? Because the only way the rich can get richer is by taking a bigger share of the poor’s income, which the top 1% have made legal by buying out the majority share of representation in government. That’s probably the crux of the protester’s message, but then the heads of state knew that before the protesters did. John Key, the prime minister of New Zealand, could walk down to Aotea Square today, set up a tent and sleep on the ground with the protesters tonight. He could raise the minimum wage, make profit sharing mandatory, raise taxes on the rich and make education free. The fact that he hasn’t acknowledged much less addressed the plight of the bottom 1% should be taken as evidence that (just like Barack Obama) he has no intention to….not until they twist his arm like the top 1% have done.

Unfortunately, the protesters don’t know how to do that. To their credit, unlike the top 1%, they’re committed to nonviolence, which is just as well because they’re so disorganized that any attempt at a violent revolution would just result in fruitless rioting. In lieu of that, they’ve resorted to blowing bubbles in banks and harassing bank clerks, who are obviously, downtrodden members of the 99% themselves. At this rate, all John Key needs to do to shut down the protesters is stand back and let them make such a nuisance of themselves that the public asks for the police to evict them back to the gutters they came from.

I saw one beacon of hope at the Occupy Auckland protest, a professional academic from the Auckland University of Technology who has been trying to inject the voice of reason into the general assemblies but getting hopelessly blocked by obstinate factions and individual, attention whoring naysayers within the assembly. If that professor (or the person who takes his place after he throws up his hands in frustrations and quits) can structure the camp into a professional public relations machine then the protesters have a chance at waking up the rest of society to the fact that the homeless and hungry are not anomalies; they’re an inevitable product of a broken system and are only a taste of what’s to come if business continues as usual.

But the protesters aren’t going to be able to do that on their own because they don’t even have the skills to secure meaningful employment for themselves. But rather than faulting them for that, we should learn this valuable lesson from them: The people most oppressed by the system are not the people most responsible for fixing the system. The people most responsible for fixing the system are those with the most power. Everyone knows money is power, but the wealthiest 1% have already drawn a line in the sand to stand against their fellow man. Luckily, money isn’t the most powerful force in the world; knowledge is.

The people with the most responsibility to speak for the poor and uneducated are the professors and university administrators. The derelict campers shouldn’t be picketing outside banks begging clerks to change the system. They should be picketing in front of the universities and begging the academics to come down from their ivory towers to accept their responsibility as the voice of reason, the voice of history, the voice of the people.

 

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also like these:

 

Protesting
My Life Stories (in chronological order)

 

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October 20, 2017

An American Expat Visits The Occupy Auckland Protest: Part 1

By wise sloth

Photo of protesters sitting on park benches, surrounded by tents and signs at the Occupy Auckland protest

I had a surreal experience the other day. To understand why it was surreal you need to understand that I was born and bred in the Bible Belt of America. I’m a white, Caucasian male who was named after a white, American, Caucasian, male war hero. I’m an honorably discharged veteran of the Iraq war with three rows of ribbons on my ribbon rack. I’m also an expat who just celebrated my two year anniversary of emigrating to New Zealand, and I left America for all the reasons people are protesting on Wall Street today.

Coming from that perspective, I went to the “Occupy Auckland” protest the other day. For those of you who don’t know or couldn’t guess, the “Occupy Auckland” event was inspired by and is being held in solidarity with the “Occupy Wall Street” “movement.”

At the time there were 40 tents camped in a public park directly off of Queen St., in downtown Auckland, which is sort of like a smaller scale version of Times Square. There were two extremely bored police officers wearing neon green reflective vests loitering in the vicinity of the protest grounds. All they had to look at to amuse themselves was a bunch of empty tents (the residents were at professional jobs and would return in the evening), a few bored hippies and a meandering stream of passing rugby tourists.

In a lot of ways, the protest was anticlimactic. The protesters I spoke with said that most of the pedestrians who stopped to talk with them were either mildly curious what the protest was about or wanted to express their support for the movement. The protesters also told me that on the first day of the occupation they held a march down Queen St, which drew an estimated 2000 participants, and they received $2000 in donations in their first weekend, and there has been a regular stream of old women stopping by giving them free home-cooked meals….not that they seemed to need the food because by the time I arrived they had set up a better kitchen than I have in my house.

I literally paid $160 over the past weekend to camp at a campground for 4 days, and I had access to fewer amenities, less camaraderie, less excitement and fewer picture opportunities than I would have had if I would have camped with the protesters on Queen St.

Now I’m thinking about taking my tent over there and going camping for the fun of it. Needless to say, there are a lot of Kiwis hold that the fact the protesters are so comfortable is proof that they have nothing to protest in the first place and should just go home. Even though life in New Zealand is far from perfect, but it’s a lot better than in America. Kiwis are happier and have a quantifiable better standard of living than Americans because the system works better in New Zealand.  There are fewer problems, and the problems they do have, they’ve responded more effectively to. From this perspective, some Kiwis feel the people camping on Queen St. should be celebrating instead of protesting.

Superficially they’re right, but if you trace the problems the Queen St. protesters are standing against below the surface to any depth at all, you’ll understand why all the Occupy movements are relevant and even vital. The root of the problem that all the Occupy movements are protesting against trace back to income inequality. All around the world, it’s the norm for political leadership positions to be given to those with the most money. Laws are passed that maximize profits at the expense of human life. Every business pays their workers as little as possible and charges their customers as much as possible. You literally can’t shit without being taxed or fined or otherwise billed. Poorer people pay a higher percentage of their income to shit. You need a fortune to get an education, and you need an education to get a fortune. People are even getting charged to save their money now, and it’s illegal not to pay the government whatever bizarro number it tells you that you owe the tax collector.

These are universal themes that are getting worse everywhere. Those statements may be less true in some countries, but “as America goes, so goes the world.” If the economic/political climate continues on its current trajectory then every country in the world will end up in the same dystopia within a lifetime. Soon we will all live in cookie cutter houses doing service level work for no benefits and no securities for our entire lives. We’ll have no medical care, no education, and everything we buy we’ll have to go into debt for. The only legal options we’ll have for escaping the monotony and anxiety of our lives will be tobacco, alcohol, sports, and television. Then we’ll numb ourselves to our numbness and kill ourselves as quickly as possible, not because we’re irresponsible, but because we’re unfulfilled and miserable with the unnatural, inhumane environment we’ve been forced to grow up and live in.

Even if none of that happens to any of us, it is happening to billions of people all over the world right now through no fault of their own. Every country uses varyingly modern versions of the caste system, and they’re all moving towards the American model of corporate dependency.

The Pacific Islanders have a long literary history of complaining about how colonial forces took their islands and gave it to foreigners. Well, American commercialization is the new colonialism. If you want to see what Tonga is going to look like in 30 years, just visit Oahu. It’s going to be ghettos and strip malls separated from ultra-wealthy subdivisions by dull grey roads and concrete walls. The entire world is devolving into Office Space under the American economic model. That’s not the society humans have the potential of building. That’s not humane, and that’s not how anyone wants to live.

It may not look like the protesters are changing the world yet, but they’re already changing people’s minds, and the more time they have to get organized the clearer and more persuasive their message will become. The more that message spreads the harder it will be for any single government to silence the overall movement. The protesters are planting seeds right now that may not bear fruit for a while, but the check’s in the mail, and they may prevent all of Polynesia from getting completely turned into internationally owned chains of strip malls.

 

 

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also like these:

 

Protesting

My Life Stories (in chronological order)

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September 27, 2017

What It Was Like In Houston During Hurricane Harvey

By wise sloth

My name is Travis, and I have an identical twin brother, Eric. We were born in Bryan, TX and spent our childhood bouncing around different small Texas towns. Having grown accustomed to the nomadic lifestyle, we spent our twenties and early thirties hopping cities around the world, sometimes together, sometimes solo. No matter how far we ran, somehow Texas kept sucking us back in, like roaches trying to climb out of a public toilet. A year ago, we moved into a house together in Houston. Three days ago, God decided to take the metaphor of our lives to the next level and give us a Hurricane Harvey-sized swirly.

If you’ve seen the news, you know I’m not exaggerating when I say God didn’t just take a piss on Houston. He waterboarded it. Major freeways are underneath lakes that are still expected to double in size. Two million people are under self-imposed house arrest, huddled behind boarded-up windows, living like there’s a full-scale zombie apocalypse going on outside. The meaning of life has basically been reduced to one goal: Don’t go outside.

You may be wondering, why we didn’t just evacuate when we had the chance. The answer is, evacuating was never a realistic option for most of us. Eric was here for Hurricane Ike in 2008, and he tried to evacuate, but after sitting in traffic for thirty-six hours, he finally turned around and came home. This time, we knew it’d be safer staying in a brick house than getting stuck on a sinking freeway, and we weren’t wrong.

Eric and I have family and friends all over Texas. So if we could have left, we would have had a lot of free options, but most people in Houston don’t have contacts all over Texas. Anyone living paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford to go out to eat, can’t afford to drive a hundred miles and stay at a hotel while they miss work at their hourly-wage job. I believe the main reason most people didn’t leave was because they were too poor.

We didn’t leave Houston, but we did flee our home because we live in a trailer house. Even if it could survive a flood, it wouldn’t provide any protection from the tornadoes created by the hurricane. So we packed up our most valuable possessions immediately and went to stay with a friend who owns a brick house.

The entire Houston area is in a floodplain. So over the years, the city has spent millions of dollars building a vast maze of drainage channels that you can see everywhere. Until a flood tests them, you don’t know if the ones near your house are reason for alarm or relief. By sheer luck, we ended up in a neighborhood with a fantastic drainage system. If the rain continues at its current pace, our host’s carpet won’t even get wet. Honestly, for us, this week has been a morbid vacation, which will be followed by lots of work opportunities.

Friday Night

Saturday Morning

Tuesday Morning

Part of my subconscious feels like I should have survivor’s guilt, but I didn’t ask for this. It is what it is. Plus, I have no idea if my house still exists. We tried to drive over there today to check on it, but the road into our neighborhood was completely flooded, and rescue crews were boating people out. So our week of white privilege may end with us discovering we don’t own anything anymore. At least we didn’t have much to lose because we perpetually own barely more than will fit in a truck since we’re constantly moving.

Another reason not to panic is that our landlady is a psychotic bitch who lives across the street and spies on us, looking for any excuse to take her anger out on someone she knows can’t give her the punch in the face she deserves. She overcharges us to live next to a railroad track, where train horns scream at 150 decibels all day and night like the souls of the damned being dragged to Hades at 60 miles per hour. If our “home” got swept away, it would set us free more than set us back.

Even after the rain stops, which won’t be for at least another three days, water levels are still expected to rise in low areas as it drains down from higher grounds. It’s a good thing I had the foresight to bring my work clothes with me, because I’ll probably have to go back to work before I get to go home.

In the meantime, we, and most of Houston’s residents have nothing to do but wait. The endless monotony is torture to some people, but I’m an extreme introvert with a passion for writing. I already cut activities out of my schedule to spend more hours typing in solitude. I work at my day job as few hours as I can afford, not because I’m lazy, but because I’d rather spend my life working on my passion than making the rich guy who pays me the bare minimum, richer.

I still have to keep my nose to the grindstone at least twenty-three hours per week. I can do this financially responsibly because my job pays well, but it’s also very physically demanding. So my body always hurts. Since American workers get the least vacation time of any first world country, Hurricane Harvey has been a golden opportunity to have my life back for a full week. I’m sure there are hundreds of thousands of wage slaves in the Houston area who are suffering worse than me but are still relieved to get a break from working themselves to death in 100-degree weather at a thankless, soul-crushing job.

The novelty has probably already worn off for Houston’s extroverts, who are going mad with cabin fever. The past few days have taught many of us that in a long, slow, scary situation like this, you have to find ways to stay active and positive or you’ll go insane.

There are already Youtube videos of people swimming in the streets, which is life-threateningly dangerous. The water is infested with flesh-eating bacteria from human sewage, a hundred tons of pollution, sharks, and alligators, which makes the idea of your house filling up with water a whole lot scarier than it already is.

Once all the flood water drains into the Gulf of Mexico, it will be weeks before it’s relatively safe to swim in the ocean again. Most Houstonians who lived through Hurricane Ike, Katrina, Alicia or Rita already know this, and television news reporters have been warning the Hurricane noobs to stay out of the water. Hopefully they have better luck convincing Americans not to hurt themselves than they did last week when they urged Americans not to look directly at the solar eclipse.

I’d be surprised if by next week, there isn’t a Youtube video of red necks slaloming downtown on jet skis, weaving around gangsters on inner tubes. Texas already has a, “Hold my beer and watch this!” mentality, and the only major city I’ve been to with worse drivers than Houston, is Cairo, Egypt. There are a million bad decisions made on Houston’s roads every day, and two million tigers aren’t going to change their stripes overnight just because of an apocalyptic flood.

Over a dozen helicopters and fifty boats are working twenty-four hours a day rescuing people stranded on top of cars and houses. Fortunately, since Houston is right on the Gulf of Mexico, and Texan culture has a fetish for buying really big toys you don’t need and won’t use very often, like boats, every middle-class neighborhood in the entire metro area has at least one driveway with a boat parked in it.

For such catastrophic flooding, it’s amazing the official number of deaths hasn’t reached double digits yet. There’s no telling how many lives have been saved by Bubba down the street ferrying his neighbors to safety. This is a blessing for Bubba too, since he gets to take a break from the rat race to be a genuine hero while simultaneously getting to live the dream of running red lights in his speedboat and doing donuts in parking lots.

 

I have this theory that the reason Houston drivers are so reckless, aggressive and violently entitled, is because you can only sit in demolition derby traffic for so long before everyone else’s stress rubs off on you. Well, Mother Nature put a stop to all that madness for a week and reminded us we’re not at war with our neighbors. We’re in this together.

I predict for the next month, we’ll be able to feel the same buzz in Houston as New Yorkers did after the Twin Towers collapsed. They were in pain, but for a short while, it brought the most notoriously rude city in America together. People who used to flip each other off and shout, “I’m walkin’ heeear!” put aside their differences and treated each other like family.

The post-traumatic euphoria will wear off sooner rather than later as everyone files back into the rat race and re-experiences the same stress and disrespect that turned them into road warriors in the first place. The first major tear in the social fabric will come when insurance companies remind a million homeowners and another million renters that our economy is designed to take more from its customers than it gives.

When insurance claims officers start explaining to Houston customers how dedicated they are to not helping them, Houstonians will have to direct their pain somewhere, and since they can’t fight the system because they’re too busy working to pay off all their debt, they won’t be able to direct their anger at the source of the problem. So they’ll take it out on the first person who cuts them off in the morning. It won’t take long before we all go back to force-feeding each other rage pie.

I’m not a Houston native, and if you didn’t catch it, I hate this city. The only reason I’m still here is because I’m waiting for my girlfriend to be in a position to move away with me. I’ve cursed the people here almost every time I’ve driven on the freeway, but so do they. Hurricane Harvey taught all of us different lessons. For me, it put my metropolitan stress rage into perspective.

I’ve made a surprising number of life-long friends in Houston in a very short amount of time. It’s full of good people, but there are a critical number of bad apples in the basket. A lot of those assholes were flood victims.

After driving around town (such as you can), and seeing the cosmic indifference and hopelessness of water covering all our accomplishments, possessions, goals, opportunities, like God just took a dry erase marker and wiped away everything with an indifferent flick of the wrist… I saw a punishment nobody deserves, no matter how big of an asshole they are. But it did happen to them. That’s a mind fuck I can’t unsee.

As much as I hate to admit it, I feel like this experience has made me more of an official Houstonian. For the rest of my life, anytime I meet someone who also lived through this watery nightmare, we’ll be able to nod at each other meaningfully and bond over the fact that we were both there when the shit went down, and we pulled through together.

Having said that, I’m getting the hell out of this death trap as soon as humanly possible, and God willing, never coming back.

 

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also like these:

My Life Stories (in chronological order)
Build a Better World

 

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September 27, 2017

The Aftermath of Hurricane Harvey In Houston

By wise sloth

The last week of August 2017, Hurricane Harvey dropped 33 trillion gallons of water on Texas. 9 trillion of that landed on Houston, where I live with my twin brother, Eric, in a humble trailer house. We didn’t try to evacuate because Eric did that in 2008 during Hurricane Ike. It took him 36 hours to drive 30 miles in bumper to bumper traffic before he gave up and turned around.

So we fled our trailer to spend the next five days of rain at a friend’s house, in a neighborhood with good drainage. The lawn flooded, but it never made it to the house. So we just had a morbid vacation, and we didn’t think the flood was that bad until the rains stopped and we finally ventured out.

What we saw was surreal. Most of the roads were open, but they were littered with abandoned cars at odd angles, and flood waters still blocked off random access points. So finding routes could be tricky or impossible.

If I had to summarize the nature of Hurricane Harvey’s destruction in a few words, they would be, “random and polarized.” One street would be completely underwater and inaccessible. The next road over would be completely fine. One house may be sitting in two feet of water, and their neighbor may have gotten four or none. Some businesses were open pretty much throughout the storm, and some won’t ever open again.

Even if you can’t see a waterline on the buildings, you can see how bad each neighborhood got hit by the amount of trash on the side of the road. Blocks that just have carpet and drywall set out by the curb only got a foot or two of water. When you see a yard covered in furniture, you know they got it bad.

Picture of furniture, carpet, drywall and insulation piled in front of a house in Houston after Hurricane Harvey. On the curb are two signs that say, "YARD OF THE MONTH" and "GARAGE SALE"

Keep a good sense of humor and carry on, Houston.

The house I stayed in through the storm didn’t suffer any problems. It never even lost electricity or internet. Technically, my trailer house didn’t get flooded, since it’s propped up on cinder blocks, three feet above the ground, but the water came all the way up to the floorboards, soaking them, the carpet and the air conditioning ducts underneath. So now the entire house is an unlivable toxic mold trap.

Photo the street in front of the house I stayed at during Hurricane Harvey. Water is covering the entire street but hasn't reached the sidewalk

This was the street in front of my friend’s house, where I sat through Hurricane Harvey. No problem.

Photo of the street to my house the day after Hurricane Harvey. Water has completely covered the road and surrounding fields several feet in water

This is the street to my house. Big problem.

Photo of my trailer house the day after Hurricane Harvey. Water is almost to the floor of the trailer, which is 3-4 feet above the ground

My house after the first day of flooding.

 

Photo of my landlady wearing waders, standing shin-deep in water on our front porch, looking at fish

My landlady and brother looking at fish on our front porch a few days after the rain stopped.

Eric and I moved out of our man cave, and now we’re staying with our girlfriends, who are ecstatic to have us closer to them. Thus continues Hurricane Harvey’s Twilight Zone-esque theme of polarized randomness. Everything is a cursed blessing or a blessed curse.

Disaster seems to have brought the best and worst out of the people here. When Harvey was still sitting on top of Houston, the owner of a furniture store opened his doors to anyone who needed a place with a bed to sleep on. At the same time, the owner of a mega church, Joel Osteen, locked the doors of his stadium-sized church until he was publicly shamed into letting refugees in. Then, he asked the refugees to give him donations, even though his $10.5 million mansion weathered the storm just fine.

Arial photo of Joel Osteen's mansion, with three separate multi-room, multi-story houses and two large swimming pools

This is where Joel Osteen lives (tax-free).

Photo of a suburban street with small houses. All the yards are covered in furniture and trash from gutting houses after Hurricane Harvey

This is where the people Joel Osteen is asking for money live.

My landlady is just as greedy and sociopathic as Joel Osteen, and she has the permanent disposition of a drunk biker in a dive bar at 3 am looking for stupid shit to fight about. She won’t let me break my lease because she says my house is livable. She told me when we moved in that if we didn’t have rent on the first of the month, she’d throw all our stuff out to the curb by the end of the night, which is illegal. I could fight her on this, but I’d pay $900 to not have to spend months fighting her in court over $900.

So we paid rent like little bitches, but we get to take our time moving out and figuring out what to do with all our stuff. Most of it came from flea markets and estate sales anyway. We’ll probably just put it out by the side of the road. There are a lot of people driving around in trucks, grabbing all the free stuff they can. For the next year, Craigslist is going to be exploding in Houston with great deals on expensive furniture and household goods with mild to severe flood damage. A lot of people are going to die from the mold.

On a lighter note, both my electric company (Summer Energy) and internet provider (ATT) let me cancel my contracts with them without punishing me. I didn’t expect that, since the whole point of early termination fees is to fuck you in the first place, and ATT didn’t let my older brother, Stephen, out of his contract when he deployed to Afghanistan. Apparently, corporate greed isn’t completely bottomless… when the public is watching.

It seems if you’re more than 50% bad, disaster makes you worse. If you’re more than 50% good, disaster brings out your best. For example, an Army Ranger veteran’s house got F.U.B.A.R. flooded in Dickinson, TX, on the outskirts of the Houston metroplex. So he made a post on an unofficial Army Ranger Facebook page asking for help. Stephen and a bunch of other Ranger vets and their friends and family, drove down from San Antonio to help him fix his house.

Photo of a circular military patch that has an outline of one soldier carrying another on his back. Around the edge of the patch are the words, "HE AIN'T HEAVY. HE'S MY BROTHER."

This is the first time Stephen has been to Houston since I moved here. He never got to see my old house, but he got to see my new one, where he got to spend the night instead of. sleeping in a stranger’s home with nine other people. You can cut yourself to death with all the silver linings in Houston right now.

My twin brother, Eric, is helping our old neighbor gut his mom’s house, which flooded badly. I feel guilty because I haven’t been volunteering, but my boss put me back to work before the rain stopped. He didn’t even give us one day to pick up the pieces of our lives before sending us back to the salt mines. The joke’s on him though. He didn’t get any customers the first day or two because they were all busy picking up the pieces of their lives, unsurprisingly.

One of my coworkers asked our boss if we’d be getting paid for the time we missed, and he sent us the link to the FEMA website to apply for benefits. I hope he’s not surprised by the loyalty his employees show him in the future. I have a feeling half of them already lied to him and said they were cut off by flood water and couldn’t come to work for a few days, just so they could have a few more days of their lives to themselves.

I started back immediately, mostly because I was bored. Since I choose to work nights, my mornings are free. So I had time to drop Stephen off at the house he was clearing. My jaw dropped when I saw the next door neighbor had a sign in his front yard, facing the main highway in town that said, “You Loot We Shoot.” When I went to take a picture of it, the owner came outside and glared at me. So I took the shot real quick and left him alone, just like all the police who drove by and didn’t tell him to take it down. They didn’t turn a blind eye to it. Texas has “king of the castle” laws, which let you shoot any threatening intruder on sight.

Photo of a spray-painted sign sitting on a pile of debris by the side of the street in Dickinson, Texas after Hurricane Harvey. The sign says, "YOU LOOT. WE SHOOT."

I hoped the sign was just being dramatic until I picked Stephen up at the house where the rest of the volunteers were staying, which had a gun in every room, literally. As I got out of my truck, a lady in a minivan stopped me on the street and asked if I’d seen two young, dark-haired men run by. She said they just stole all her computer equipment. I told her I was sorry for her loss.

I’ve even heard rumors thugs have just started knocking on doors and robbing people at gunpoint. I don’t know anyone who that’s happened to, but I do have a Mexican friend who found out the liquor store next to his house got flooded. The owner couldn’t sell cases of beer in water damaged boxes. So he just put his stock on the back porch and told people walking by they could have it… but to drink at their own risk. Low-class people of every color lined up to help him clear out his damaged property.

Since the boxes were water damaged, a lot of beers fell out the bottoms and smashed on the concrete. After the frenzy, my buddy helped clean up the broken glass. So the old Asian guy gave him an extra three cases of top-shelf Texas honey whiskey. He doesn’t even really drink alcohol, but he took it because it was free. Then he showed up at my new house with a truckload of random beer covered in a thin layer of mold, which washes off easy with soap and water… hopefully.

I gave a few cases to Stephen to give to the Rangers in Dickinson, but for some reason, he didn’t. Maybe they didn’t want it. He ended up giving it to a random black who was also repairing flood damage.

Photo of a random African American dressed in dirty work cloths, holding a cardboard box containing 30 Corona beer bottles

I hope Stephen warned him to wash the bottles.

Photo of an ice chest full of random brands of beer bottles

This is what I kept. It’s about 1/5 of the original truckload.

In the blog I wrote during Hurricane Harvey, I said this disaster would make me think twice about cussing at shitty Houston drivers, and I hoped our shared experience would teach us all that we’re on the same team. Now that danger has passed, Houston drivers are shittier than ever. If they don’t care about anyone on the highway but themselves, I see no reason why I should care about their feelings. That’s a horrible way to look at reality, but that’s what I call, “The Houstonitis.” Everybody’s shit rubs off on everyone until we’re all covered in shit and angry about it. If everybody’s guilty, is anybody?

Yesterday, a man asked me to help him settle a debate he was having with a coworker. He said the mayor should have ordered an evacuation and issued better instructions. His opponent disagreed. I said it wouldn’t have made a difference because nobody cares what the mayor thinks. Most Houstonians don’t even know his or her name, including me.

The guy I was talking to went on to complain about how flood victims didn’t do enough to evacuate and prepare, themselves. He was angry that some people could have left but didn’t. Then the government had to waste resources rescuing them. I explained to him, if you’re too poor to go out to eat, you’re too poor to go anywhere but work, ever.

If any human is to blame for the cost of Hurricane Harvey, it’s the same city planners who saved us all with the world-class drainage systems woven through the Houston metroplex. Unfortunately, we wouldn’t need a multi-million dollar drainage network and disaster response teams hopscotching in and out of flooded areas, if the city was built efficiently in the first place. Houstonians wouldn’t be rabid with Houstonitis if the city wasn’t a clusterfucked maze of economic dead zones connected by congested streets.

The supreme inefficiency of Houston’s city layout makes it necessary for humans to consume tons of resources to survive. Now that flood waters have destroyed half of the infrastructure in town, it’s going to have to be thrown into a landfill and replaced, depleting more of the earth’s resources and creating more pollution, leading to more global warming, leading to more hurricanes, which will lead to more flooding and more waste until we’re all dead.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from Hurricane Harvey, it’s that we need to build more sustainable megacities if the human race is to survive and thrive. It’s not that complicated. I can draw you a picture:

1. Buy a field. 2. Mark out circles in the field. 3. Divide the circles into compartments. 4. Build reinforced sandbag walls on the lines. 5. Build a roof and install doors. 6. Install a greenhouse on the roof. 7. Live, work and expand. 8. Build outer rings connected by trains. 9. Replace suburbs with sustainable eco-rings. 10. Build eco-rings in underdevolped areas.

 

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My Life Stories (in chronological order)
Build a Better World

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