Immigration Day

The weed whackers were out in force. They came from South of the Border and drove up in trucks with trailers for the mowers. A holy racket took place. Mucho trabaho over nothing. I was stuck on one tricky paragraph that didn’t want to scan. Outside, it sounded like an F-16 landing in the street. I hoped it was one of ours. I looked out the door and saw grass in mid air, its life cut short.  Clouds of dust covered my seven-cylinder Chevy wagon. Now, I thought, I’d have to wait for a rainstorm to clean it up.

Most authors have some sort of writer’s block but not me. I am held to lower standards. Plus, I don’t have a publisher or an agent. That sucks. I post my work on a blog that pays tens cent per piece, 250 words. The next day another troop of lawn manicurists arrived at another neighbor’s yard. I was waiting for the nectarines to ripen when I heard footsteps on the porch. I reached for a kitchen knife. It was the mailman with my monthly bills. We instructed each other to ‘Have A Good One’ and I retreated back to my sofa chair with my knife. I decided to kick up the espresso machine to help finish my essay on garden tools. It started out well then trailed off into a diatribe about how rap music sucks. I know more about hip-hop than you might think since I reside in Philadelphia – this explains why I don’t have an agent. I used to listen to DJ John Peel (may he rest in peace) in London in the Eighties when rap and hard-core off-set one another. Sampling was new and totally connected to post-modern theories. See Beastie Boys. What did I say about trailing off?

Later, I stared out the window when I noticed the din subsiding. Always a bad sign, staring out the window. Hours drift by in a minute. I forced myself back to my Venus-on-a-Halfshell lap-top and finished the article about a chainsaw on a stick for hard to reach twigs. It was louder than an Egyptian F-16. I imagined a Mig-19 in fifth gear. I made note of this in my consumer report for Candy’s Man. The next day the review returned via a black-cloud. I had been summarily dismissed. You may wonder how a content provider can be fired by someone they’ve never met? The next article was a very short essay about faceless-assholes who fire work-at-home creatives.