I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

BIG PERSONAL NEWS AND NEPEAN CRIME FILES...

It happened kind of fast, but I am now gainfully employed. Part-time, for now, pushing around carts in the parking lot of a local supermarket on weekday afternoons, which is about as specific as I'll ever get because I'm not one of those dumbasses that's going to endanger his prospects of staying employed by talking too much about his job during his off hours. I doubt, once I'm working, that I'll even talk about the job at all since it's not really the sort of job where there is all that much to talk about. Unless I have a random celebrity encounter or even just a random Ferrari encounter. I've seen a couple of Ferraris on the streets of Nepean... their owners gotta shop sometimes.

Obviously, it's not the sort of job most 32-year old men have, but, in my particular case, I wasted much of my adulthood so far being depressed and my severe shyness and inability to sell myself and aversion to eye contact never got me past the job interview until now. I don't want to be too dependent on pharmaceuticals, but Citalopram really had helped me a lot over the past year to diminish the depression (also, thanks to seriously taking up photography as a hobby over the past year, I'm simply getting out of the house a lot more than I used to), and the job-finding counselors for people with severe emotional issues that I am seeing helped me get a foot in the door at this store.

I think I have the right attitude about the job; I really don't care about the social status of this particular job compared to my same-aged peers (one of the advantages of not socializing much is that I don't get those kinds of inferiority complexes). I merely see it as the first rung on the ladder, a rung I probably should have climbed 16 years ago, but a rung I still need to climb in order to get anywhere important.

I think I'll improve my work ethic by watching all of the episodes of King of the Hill where Bobby gets a job and Hank doesn't like the lessons Bobby is learning, and the episodes when something happens to Hank's boss, Buck Strickland, leaving Strickland Propane under (temporary) new management that rubs Hank Hill the wrong way to the point that Hank thinks of changing careers, and the episodes wherein Dale Gribble decides to take oddball side jobs in addition to operating "Dale's Dead Bug" extermination.



Now to the Nepean crime files. (Insert Dragnet theme, otherwise known as "the Mathnet theme.)



My two big dogs are loud and like to bark. Usually, it's annoying, but, occasionally, it's justified. Sam, the black labrador-mix dog, started barking yesterday afternoon, which caught the attention of my father (who just happened to be taking a week off of work). My father looked outside and saw some random asshole, somewhere between the ages of 18 and 21, who was certainly not the mailman looking inside our mailbox. What was he after? Yesterday was the day that eligible people in our neighbourhood happened to receive their sales tax rebate cheques ($58 Canadian each), and Mr. Petty Larceny already had several of these cheques in his hand and would have helped himself to my own and my parents GST/PST rebate cheques had he not been spooked by the aural assault of my dogs and the visual shock of seeing someone actually home. I was home too, but I was listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Internet in the basement and probably wouldn't have gotten upstairs in time had no one else been upstairs. My father called the Ottawa Police. I don't think they've caught the guy yet but I'd imagine they'd have spread the word around to local banks to be on the lookout for somebody attempting to deposit multiple GST rebate cheques into the same account.




Also on the subject of local crime, one of the nicer cars in the neighbourhood is a gold Eagle Talon, which is really the early 1990s version of the Mitsubishi Eclipse released in the United States under Chrysler's now-defunct Eagle banner. On Easter Monday, I spotted this car from the bus, but, at some point over the past couple of days, it had gotten a presumably unwanted new paint job:



Ouch. If you love your car as much as I think this car's owner does, that's gotta be paintful to see.

I wonder if there's some kind of jilted ex-lover thing going on here, or whether it was just some random ne'er-do-well with a can of silver spraypaint, a desire to deface a thing of beauty, and an imagination so shallow that "Fuck you!" is the most creative sentiment of which he can conceive.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 7:05 AM