¡Soy hombre del carne-buñuelo!

By: Michael Keith Rebstock

I work on a boat.

We transport provisions and personnel to vessels in the Gulf of Mexico.

I live on this boat for Two weeks at a time. Yes, I spend a lot of time on Facebook.

John has requested I write a blog for Blind Butcher. I told him I didn’t know what a blog really was. He assured me it didn’t matter. I said no, he promised Karma. I Told him I didn’t want to, he called me a pussy. I hate John sometimes. The only blogs I think I've ever read were his, and experience tells me - nothing he has ever done should be used as a template. I said fuck John Cramer and his karma. I went to bed.

I was awoken a few hours later by a pounding an my cabin door. “Red get up we gotta run, 12 hours out and back.” I guess karma gets up early. Good, now I don’t
have to write shit. Was karma gonna get me extra sour cream at Taco Bell? Would the CV joints on my car fix themselves? If I had written the dumb thing, would my name be an ointment poured forth to make virgins follow me?

Doubtful.

How disappointed can john really get anyway? He's an admitted Misanthrope. Everything he says is cryptic. He seethes disappointment. Before you think that’s mean, I see mental health on a continuum. Everyone's at least a little fucked up one way or another. Depending on what's wrong with you affects your perception of others. In short it's all relative to your state. I also think that aside from any genetic predispositions or nurture effects, we subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) adopt ”abnormalities” that afford us the best coping strategies for the world around us... Whatever. Cramer has settled into a nice, mild “introvertic neurosis.” (Thank you, I just made that up.) He is a cynic. One of the best. He gives enough of a fuck about the world around him to hate it, and refuses to make it worse by participating in it in any substantial way. Instead, he has opted to cringe and bitch from (and at) its redundant stupidity and obnoxious hubris. Essentially, people like me. John is a better person than me. I am astounded by my magnanimity. Myself, I have forgone the ulcers and opted out into a semi-controlled light manic state. If you find yourself struggling for defenium here, picture a buddhist monk meditating, now picture one of the Zombies from the movie 28 Days Later. OK, they both live in my skull. One spouts archaic babble, and one wants me to eat your brain. I consult them about everything. This lands my relative sanity squarely between “quirky” and “shithouse rat” (John, why are we friends again?).

For more about how cool I am, join the Facebook Group, “Rebstock,” and get all my psychotic ramblings.

Oh yeah. Fuck John, and his blog, and karma. I got out of bed. I put on my boots. I peed. I got some coffee. I checked Facebook from my phone for validation - no notifications. I suck. No E-mails. Everyone hates me. Four new people joined my group. I am a Rock Star! Validation achieved. I have attention. I have approval. I am an insecure God. I need a therapist. Hold up, someone wrote on my Wall. It's Claire, John's girlfriend. “Write The Blog, Asshole.” (I'm paraphrasing.) I have not met Claire. I hate Claire. I hate Claire not because she is telling me what to do, but because she is smarter than me. Writing the blog is better than getting into an argument and making her prove it. Fuck. I will write the blog. I closed my phone and walked out onto the deck.

On the deck I see a semi-truck and a passenger van. This is a no-brainer. I am good with people, I am charming, everyone loves me - right up until the moment that they hate me. There is no in-between. Besides, I would much rather check passports and deal with customs requirements than drive a forklift around in the dark. I approach the van, the crew pile out, they are Asian, two have mullets. These are Filipinos (the mullet is still huge in Manila). Cool. I like Filipinos. They are polite and they never vomit.

[As of the final draft of this Ive learned Filipinos make meat doughnuts. They gave me one, I didn't want it. They insisted, I refused. They got insulted, I ate the fucking thing. I ate three more.]

Unfortunately, in this industry they never speak English, which makes paperwork really suck and I would rather be bound in duct tape and spend the day in someones trunk than fuck with it. I took Spanish in high school, I failed it. I took it again, I failed it. I took it in College, I failed it. I took it again, I coasted by on charm. I got a job as a waiter and learned Mexican in two months. Immersion works. Had I known the industry I would end up in, I would have taken Greek, or Russian, or, well, Filipino. Since I went to high school on Earth, I was offered none of these (not that I would have passed anyway). In short (too late), I made a beeline for the forklift. When I'm not listening to a mp3 player, I soundtrack life in my head; and when I operate heavy machinery, I forgo my brain's shuffle function and head for Black Sabbath. Iron Man should do well. I start the forklift, Tony bends the first chord, I disengage the handbrake, he bends the second. Enter Ozzy. “I AM IRON MAN!” Open the fuckin' truck.

FUCK!

Stop the music.

Let me explain something.

Warehouses have a machine, this machine has a button, this button has a label, and this label reads as follows: “Fuck up dockworkers day.” Today, someone hit that button. No human could do this. The last two pallets put on the truck are in sideways. Their outside edges are past the edges of the truck door and their inside edges are touching. Go ahead and get the duct tape, open the trunk. There must be a machine. No human could be this cruel. If I'm not mistaken, this defies physics. Steven Hawking loaded this truck. They should really offer Filipino in high school. I ditch the forklift and retrieve an empty pallet. The Captain sees me doing this and comes down from his throne in the wheelhouse. He requires an explanation. I tell him I'm breaking a pallet down and rebuilding it on the ground. He says just pull it out. I tell him it will flip and fall. He says then be careful. Que Tony and Ozzy! I am agile, I am deft, I am stealthy. The pallet clears the lip of the truck, flips and falls. Please be eggs! Please be eggs! Produce. Oh well. As I am preparing an I-told-you look, he says now re-stack it. And, put a shirt on. He turns. As I look at the back of his head, only two words come to mind: Donkey Punch. I collect potatoes, I collect cantaloupe. I re-stack the pallet. By the time I've unloaded the whole truck into cargo nets, Ozzy is doing Iron Man in Spanish. “SOY HOMBRE DE METALICO!” (Yes, I know, I'm fucked up.) Does this seem too long for a blog? It's not really a good place to stop. I'll speed up. Pallets on the boat, Filipinos clear customs, We're underway. I plug in my laptop to get the attention I thrive on before going out of range. I see my wall. Now I hate Claire for telling me what to do. I go to Word, Word's gone. I go to Word Pad, Word Pad's gone. I stop hating Claire long enough to hate Vista. I am in the boat's lounge, at the moment it looks like a lounge in the Philippines. Why is everyone staring at me? I just thought, “Where the fuck is word?” And, yelled it instead, huh? A non-mullet Filipino asks me, “What wrong?” I tell him, ”nothing.” He persists and I explain. “He help you.” He points to a skinny kid in a - am I seeing this right - a Joy Division shirt? Nice. “He find.” Okay, great, please, find. The Joy Division kid takes my laptop and proceeds to go through everything on my computer . I am prepared for the laughter of 7 Filipinos when he opens a lost porn clip and they hear hams slapping. I Explain to translator dude that I like the band on the kid's shirt. This takes a while. He explains it to the kid for an inordinate amount of time to translate, say, a Bible, and I get my answer, "He didn’t know it was band.“ Just open word, dude." Eventually, I got my laptop back with the explanation, “Word gone." Perfect. Joy Division is now arguing with a mullet who pulls out one of our DVDs. They go back and forth for a while, and mullet shows me the cover. It's Transporter 3. Translator asks me, “You got #2?” How do you say this is not blockbuster in Filipino? This blog is way too long. So I'm writing this by hand and I'll type it later and by the end I will have written two blogs. Let me read it and see if I had a point……………. Nope. No point, no moral, no lesson to draw. Just me wailing on John, plugging my Facebook group, and having something to do instead of watching Transporter 3. Mission Accomplished! Thank you, Claire, now I only hate you once again. John probably just wanted me to write this to give the good blogs scale. Fuck it. Attention is attention. Fuck you, John. I'm gonna go lay in the sun and wait for the meat doughnuts to catch up with me.

REBSTOCK