Fewn - "Ten Times the Fun"

My first job was at a gas station. Full serve Sunoco. There were some pretty heavy fumes, and legally they had to post signs on the pumps saying "prolonged exposure to gas fumes has been known to cause cancer in rats". I mostly just asked for rewards cards and tried to sell carwashes as an add-on to whatever people were already buying.

Oh, a chocolate bar, would you like a carwash with that?

And cleaning things that were already clean.

I have to clean these fridge doors with windex?
Yes.
But they're already clean.
You have to.

I think this would have been my favourite song while working there if I'd known it then. I would have ripped out the direct feed to Majic 100 and plugged this song in for all the gas-pumpers and mild shoplifters to listen to.

Is this Ween?
Fuck you.

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Sergei Rachmaninoff - "Isle of the Dead"

Nothing ever scared me until I followed my father to work. I never thought the dark rings under his eyes were anything but natural, that the softening in his look when he would come home in the morning was anything but a tired happiness. I never thought it was relief. I followed him one night because I was supposed to do a project just like all the other kids called "take your kid to work day". I asked my father nicely, at dinner, and he barked something about this being his breakfast and told me to "read comics instead". I said I had to write about it, like homework, and my mother looked like she was going to scream, so I shut up. But then, that night, when I heard them saying goodbye in the foyer, I could hear my mom stifling tears because my mom always cried when my dad left for work, I left a pile of pillows in my bed and went down the fire escape which was out my baby sister's window. I followed about half a block behind, trying not to lose him, but also trying not to get noticed. He got on the 33rd train to G-line and Avenue Beta, so I did too. I almost lost him trying to find change, but I managed to catch the doors just as they were closing.

We got out at a station that looked like it hadn't been cleaned since it opened probably a hundred years ago. Outside, the neighbourhood was even worse. It was like the buildings were crying these black tar tears, and everything was wet and dirty and looked sneezed on. My dad walked quickly with his hands deep in the pockets of his leather jacket, and he just stared at the ground when he walked, he wasn't acting at all like he did at home. He walked past a bunch of dry cleaning places, though I can't imagine anyone ever getting anything cleaned around there, and turned abruptly down a flight of stairs. On the walls of the stairwell someone had spraypainted "Satan's Pussy", and the door at the bottom of the stairs was heavy and the handle was greasy. It was dark inside, and I hurried to find a corner, a place against the wall so I wouldn't be seen. From there I watched it all happen. My father would make long speeches before a crowd of lowlifes who would cheer and boo him, and after he was done, the other disgusting lowlife he was talking about would either walk away and out the door, to much cheering, or through the back hall much to the crowd's dismay. My dad seemed to be some kind of defense lawyer for some underground court where the cases were too awful to be handled by regular courts. I couldn't understand the words a lot of the time, it was like they were speaking some other language, even though most of the words were English. But my dad seemed to be in charge of most of it, second only to the judge, who wore a long dark wig that hung over his eyes and face and only his pointy nose stuck out. There were times when my dad looked like he hated it, like he thought he might die if he said another word, but there were other times in the night when he looked like he loved it, like he never wanted to do anything else. The next day, tired and smelling like hand-rolled cigarettes, I told the class that my dad was a technical writer. I brought the instruction manual for my 8-speed and told them that he had written that. It didn't seem like anyone noticed.

[via Octember.net (thanks, Evan!)]
[inspired by the song and from the painting below, from Sean's Monday post]
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