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Oct. 11th, 2004 09:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraThere are people who live in storage units. Quite a few people, actually. At 7 in the morning, the parking lots at Storage USA can get congested as everybody scurries about to clear out before the main office opens at 7:30 AM.
These people are not always the people you’d suppose. Fair number of Mexican males, presumably workers in the great local hospitality industry, but also some obvious student types and a number of white males with trucks and dogs and camper shells. One such guy was parked next to me yesterday. Welsh coal miner type in his forties with bright blue eyes and bandy, muscular arms. He toasted me from his front seat with a toothbrush. I forced a smile. His dog watched with resentful eyes.
Ten years ago he might have been someone I’d go out with.
These are the working poor. They can’t sleep on benches or underneath the wharf like the homeless guys because they hold down jobs, sometimes more than one job, and in order to hold down a job, you have to sleep. And you can’t really sleep well without maintaining flight distance. Flight distance means walls and a door. Hey! at a hundred bucks a month, these storage units are a bargain.
I don’t really know whether this is a new phenomenon or something that’s been going on since storage became an industry. There’s some irony to the fact that the working poor are being warehoused along with surplus appliances and the antique armoires that more prosperous human primates buy compulsively without any real need or even living space to put them in. If I was feeling more articulate this morning, I could riff on this for pages.
But instead I’m feeling numb, having just survived Week of the Living Mother-In-Law at close quarters. My emotions are bruised – this is a woman who does not like me. My brain is a hollow, spongiform organ. But I hate to let time go by unchronicled. I have a really horrible memory. If I don’t write it down, it might as well not have happened. So-o –
Big news on the beach last week was the dead whale:
Apparently it made the national news as Kodiak – whom I collected from Laurel Canyon for our kamakazi swoop on Disneyland – knew all about it.
“Was it very big?” he wanted to know.
“I suppose,” I said. Truly my sense of proportion has been warped by living in modern industrial America: the dead whale was only a little bit larger than a deluxe, fully equipped SUV. So it was big, but not big.
“It had been dead for a few days when it washed up on the beach,” Kodiak said.
“How do you know?”
He looked surprised by the question. “I read it in the newspaper.”
Our local newspaper – the only one I read these days since I’ve more-or-less given up on current events (too depressing) but still have a morbid preoccupation with tracking ages in obituaries – had not seen fit to include this information. I’m not surprised. The Wal-Mart ad features discount coupons for flushable kitty litter. Flushable kitty litter has been fingered in a lot of marine life obituaries. The dead seals we see several times a week, the decline of the local otter population. The culprit is leptospirosis, a common contaminant of kitty litter. I figure the whale got it too. Welcome to Earth, Ambassador XyrlX of the Galactic Confederation of Alpha Centauri. Human beings may live in storage units but pussycats are pampered, their feces being such a useful weapon in killing off competing species.
These people are not always the people you’d suppose. Fair number of Mexican males, presumably workers in the great local hospitality industry, but also some obvious student types and a number of white males with trucks and dogs and camper shells. One such guy was parked next to me yesterday. Welsh coal miner type in his forties with bright blue eyes and bandy, muscular arms. He toasted me from his front seat with a toothbrush. I forced a smile. His dog watched with resentful eyes.
Ten years ago he might have been someone I’d go out with.
These are the working poor. They can’t sleep on benches or underneath the wharf like the homeless guys because they hold down jobs, sometimes more than one job, and in order to hold down a job, you have to sleep. And you can’t really sleep well without maintaining flight distance. Flight distance means walls and a door. Hey! at a hundred bucks a month, these storage units are a bargain.
I don’t really know whether this is a new phenomenon or something that’s been going on since storage became an industry. There’s some irony to the fact that the working poor are being warehoused along with surplus appliances and the antique armoires that more prosperous human primates buy compulsively without any real need or even living space to put them in. If I was feeling more articulate this morning, I could riff on this for pages.
But instead I’m feeling numb, having just survived Week of the Living Mother-In-Law at close quarters. My emotions are bruised – this is a woman who does not like me. My brain is a hollow, spongiform organ. But I hate to let time go by unchronicled. I have a really horrible memory. If I don’t write it down, it might as well not have happened. So-o –
Big news on the beach last week was the dead whale:
Apparently it made the national news as Kodiak – whom I collected from Laurel Canyon for our kamakazi swoop on Disneyland – knew all about it.
“Was it very big?” he wanted to know.
“I suppose,” I said. Truly my sense of proportion has been warped by living in modern industrial America: the dead whale was only a little bit larger than a deluxe, fully equipped SUV. So it was big, but not big.
“It had been dead for a few days when it washed up on the beach,” Kodiak said.
“How do you know?”
He looked surprised by the question. “I read it in the newspaper.”
Our local newspaper – the only one I read these days since I’ve more-or-less given up on current events (too depressing) but still have a morbid preoccupation with tracking ages in obituaries – had not seen fit to include this information. I’m not surprised. The Wal-Mart ad features discount coupons for flushable kitty litter. Flushable kitty litter has been fingered in a lot of marine life obituaries. The dead seals we see several times a week, the decline of the local otter population. The culprit is leptospirosis, a common contaminant of kitty litter. I figure the whale got it too. Welcome to Earth, Ambassador XyrlX of the Galactic Confederation of Alpha Centauri. Human beings may live in storage units but pussycats are pampered, their feces being such a useful weapon in killing off competing species.
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-11 10:44 am (UTC)Way to write through the horrendous mother-in-law experience.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-12 07:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-11 11:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-12 07:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-12 09:36 am (UTC)