Fish flash: Jay says I’m working on Telegraph Ave next weekend, as a free speech vendor if free speech is allowed, or as a licensed vendor if Darwin is still forbidden. I still think we should go free speech all the way, but Jay is more cautious than me.
From Pathetic Life #16
Monday, September 18, 1995
I am so tired of Berkeley politics, but looking forward to being on Telegraph again, selling fish. Also, I need the money.
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Had breakfast with Mark H at the Cove in the Castro. Easy conversation, good food, no racist wisecracks because he’s not an idiot, and he paid. I had the cheese and spinach omelet, and it was fine, but when we left the restaurant I was still hungry.
“If we breakfast again” I said, “let’s meet at the the New Mission Café.” That’s a dirt cheap slum cafeteria, where the price is great and the food is, well, not so good as at the Cove in the Castro, but you can order more of it and it’ll still be less expensive.
Not sure whether I talked Mark into eating at the New Mission, but I talked me into it. After I’d posted flyers all around the Castro, I took a #33 there, and had a stack of flapjacks and a side of bacon.
♦ ♦ ♦
On the BART ride home to Berkeley, I fell asleep and woke up in Richmond, the end of the line. Maybe the pancakes done me in, or it was the exhaustion from all that walking around flyering.
Since I was there, what the heck, I walked around Richmond and put up some of my flyers. It’s an ordinary town, though, full of ordinary people, unlikely to call some stranger to wash their dishes.
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There were two messages on my voice mail when I checked it from home. That’s good news, right? So how come I wasn’t happy to hear the computerized voice say, “You have… two… messages”?
The first call was from a man in Oakland wants me to help him clean out his rental house. He’s evicted the tenants, and says they left a horrid mess of junk and garbage, rotten food and broken furniture all through the house. Sounds like home to me.
He wants me on the weekend, though, and this weekend I’ll be selling fish. It’s the same $5 an hour, whether I sit in the sunshine surrounded by pretty women on Telegraph Ave, or get all sweaty cleaning crap out of somebody’s rental house, so it’s not a difficult choice.
The second call was from Juan, the sound man I’ve worked with before. He needs me for a gig on Thursday night, and surprisingly, I recognized the name of the band — not because they’re famous or anything, but because a guy I worked with a few years ago plays bass for them, and several times invited me to come to their concerts. Being anti-social, I never showed up, but now I could finally hear how shitty they are.
The gig is Thursday night, though, and that’s when I’m going to be a guest on Josh’s Free Radio Berkeley show. It’s actually on in the wee hours of Friday morning, but if I’ve worked on Thursday night, getting to FRB by bus might be tricky, and I might be tired and yawn on the air.
So I called back both Juan and the guy in Oakland, and said sorry, I’m already booked.
That was damned dumb, right? Unemployment doesn’t pay well, especially when I’m not even on Unemployment. Here I am, running low on money, and five bucks an hour isn’t much. I need a steady supply of gigs at that wage, to keep surviving. And yet I just said no to two and a half days work, maybe more, plus tips.
Gotta trust your feelings, though, and my gut is telling me I need more time sitting on my fat lazy ass.
This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life. The opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance is advised.
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