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And here’s a piece I wrote more than a few years ago that I just stumbled across in one of my old moleskines.

And so those days of subtle genius gone
Days spent fishing for leaves in the back yard
Full of hammocks and skinned knees, dew at dawn
And the dog has been missing since the sun went down

He bounds into view with the sun at noon
A strange creature with five legs instead of four
One dangles from his mouth, clearly not his own
And it will be used for walking no more

As blood stains the deck and drips from his mouth
It is a strangely beautiful nightmare
One that leaves a wanting for the waking
A curiosity for the mortal

Bent and broken at all the wrong angles
Flesh stripped away in no certain pattern
And no one will touch it save the dog and
Flies begin to materialize and feast

We three sit with our faces against glass
Groaning complaints of the sight and smell
And turning away is not an option

It stays for two days and quickly becomes
An average, common place sight
Like some everyday monstrosity

And when it leaves under cover of night
Reclaimed by some wandering creature
And no longer some scavenger’s bounty
We are forlorn and must look elsewhere for decay

And we are not disappointed, to say the least.

I took last year off from school and worked as a garbage man to help out the family. I drove a commercial garbage truck, which means I dealt with dumpsters and commercial trash (as opposed to residential, though I did do that once a week). I was up at 4 am or so every morning to don my blue Dickies and bright yellow shirts, stumble into Ivona’s sister’s Jeep that she let me borrow for the winter (man I miss that car, even though it was falling apart), and drive a couple towns over to start my route.

When people ask me about driving a garbage truck, I usually tell them it’s as bad as it sounds, only worse, and then I pause for a minute as if to think reflectively and tell them “well, once you got used to it, it wasn’t so bad.” Maybe I’m just a fake motherfucker, but I get sick of answering the same questions all the time, so I at least have fun trying to perfect the same responses, or make up ridiculous answers (“No man, I loved that job! I found so many cool things in the trash, and I never had to bring my own lunch, if you know what I mean!”). For the first week, I was miserable and convinced I would quit. During training I was riding around in a residential truck with a Brazilian kid named Ramon who drove like a psychopath and would pretend to be a stupid, uneducated foreigner when dealing with some of the customers (“Yes boss! Sorry boss! Next time better boss!”) while I tried to hold back laughter (he and I had actually gone to high school together and his English was pretty good).

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When people ask me if I’m happy I got married, I generally tell them it’s the best decision I’ve ever made, and every day with Ivona affirms that. People ask me why I got married so young, and while there are a lot of reasons, sometimes I just say “I guess I was the marrying type,” which really means “I’m sick of people asking me this shit.” I have canned responses for tons of questions. It probably comes from years of driving buses and cabs, and being asked the same questions constantly. But my answers about marriage, while they may be canned, are also deeply true. It’s not being married that’s so great as much as it is the person I’m married to, of course. But you know what I mean.

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