You Get What You Pay For

Quality over quantity.

All people have morning routines. I do too, just it's always different. Three days ago, I woke up, took a pee, got a drink of water, put the pee back, and went back to bed. Pretty good day, I'd say.

No one has morning routines. I do, and it's always the same. Two days ago, I woke up, ate a parfait, put on my Airwalks, and skateboarded over the San Francisco Gulch, which is considered to be the Grand Canyon in the little community.

Some people have mourning routines. I do, and boy is it sad. Yesterday, I woke up, read the obituaries section of the newspaper, and realized that my best friend in the whole world, my very best friend, I'm quite sad to say, didn't die. My best friend is a real piece of shit, so it's a bummer for this planet every day he's alive.

But some other guy died, and I realized that he was probably someone's best friend. I think so, anyway. What kind of person out there doesn't have a best friend? There's gotta be someone, right? I hope not. If so, I hope he is dead, unlike my best friend, Mike, who is just a real turdwad.

Come to think of it, Mike is not my best friend. I hate that guy. Yeah, Mike totally isn't my best friend. He's not even my friend, really. Actually, I don't like Mike at all. Mike is like a car with no air conditioner in the summer and also the seats are mechanical arms that repeatedly punch you in the balls (or lady balls, Mike doesn't discriminate with his shit-suckery) whenever you have to drive him.

No wait even worse Mike is like an electric car, that's how much of a butthole Mike is. Not Teslas though, those are sweet. Mike is definitely not a Tesla. If he were a Tesla he'd be my best friend. I do not even know Mike. Seriously. I don't mean that as in "Mike is so wild and intolerable that he's like a completely different person now, so in order to convey that I will claim that I do not even know Mike." I mean it as in "I do not know Mike in the slightest, I've never even met Mike--who's Mike?" However, I'm sure if I met Mike I'd like him pretty good, he seems like a swell guy.

It's really not that hard to have a best friend, honestly. All you have to do is one of two things. You can be so unique and spectacularly you and special which everyone is =) =) =) BuzzFeed hold my hand (!) life is the most beautiful Instagram filter of all (!) they should redo the Mighty Ducks with Michelle Obama as Gordon Bombay the coach yes (!) =)=)=).

Or, more likely, you can live your life as the sad sack of crap that we all are and sit at a bar every night after work watching who-cares drinking just-die-already-light until God-didn't-even-put-the-phone-back-on-the-hook-after-the-last-call. Then, after spending all of your useless and totally unimportant time working on it-doesn't-matter, there'll just be someone else there at the bar who you tag along with because doing it with someone else is at least a little better than doing it alone. That's the more reasonable way you and your best friend for life find each other, like a blind dung beetle and a heap of rhinoceros dung with so many parasites in it that it's basically alive.

So, today I thought I'd try and break up my morning routine. I woke up in my Altoid container bed, said goodbye to Jessica, my pillow and lover, had a cup of coffee in my hollowed out Kraft Jet-Puffed Miniature Marshmallow mug, and rode my bike to work. That was the change, since I usually don't ride my bike to work because people who bike to work are the worst and never shut up about how awesome it is that they're saving the world it's like jeeze it's a bike not a machine that when pedaled births an endangered animal.

When I got to work, I went about as usual. I put on my yellow hard hat, put on my tool belt, didn't put on my badge and gun because unfortunately I'm not a police officer I'm a construction worker, and stepped into the crane bucket. The crane then lifted me all the way to the top of the crane, which is all the more specific about how high it was that I wish to share, thank you very much.

When I got to the top, I got in the crane operator's cabin and did all kinds of work. I picked beams up, set beams down, moved beams around, flung some beams into a rival crane, tipping it over and killing the crane operator, Mike (finally), and then I took lunch.

Pickles, lettuce, onion, mustard, mayonnaise, sardines, hummus, and goat cheese, all on rye bread. This is not the sandwich I had. Instead, I had Chef Boyardee overstuffed meat ravioli. I heated it up in the microwave, did that breath in/blow out desperately try to cool it down thing before you eat something so hot that you know it's gonna burn you, and took a bite.

Boom. The ravioli exploded everywhere. I should have known that the overstuffed ravioli are simply too dangerous to be contained, but it was too late.

Cranes lay tipped over everywhere, all of their Mikes dead. Some weren't even at the job site. Whooping, sandhill, even Siberian cranes lay dead all over the place. And the ones that weren't dead were not happy--you can say that again! Think about the most amount of dead cranes you've ever seen in one sitting, not counting bathroom breaks. Now double it. Subtract 2, and double it again. Pick a letter of the alphabet after G but before M and assign it a numerical value (1 for G, 7 for M). Double that number. Add that to the other number you've doubled, subtracted 2 from, and doubled again. Take that sum and double it one last time. Is it 0? It is, because you've never seen dead cranes before, not like this, and certainly not like Dead Cranes on Ice, coming this fall to rinks everywhere.

"Boy that sure is a lotta dead cranes," said Cliff from Cheers. He was right. It was a lot of dead cranes. So many dead cranes. There were more dead cranes than there have been US Presidents.

Shoosh shoosh. The time whistle blew, signaling the end of the day. I took off my hard hat and belt and dropped them right where I stood, because who's going to do anything about it?

As I rode my pink bike with the cool basket and pretty tassels in the handles home, I thought about the great work I did today.

We all want everything, but we don't want to pay anything for it. It has to be made in America or we won't buy it, but anything made in America is far too expensive for us to buy.

We care so much about the accumulation of objects that all we end up doing is getting rid of the last stuff we bought to make room for more stuff that we will never use. Just think about the idea of rental storage for extra crap.

Yet for the low price of only a few dollars, the cost of a cup of coffee, I was able to kill so many crane operators and cranes, all with the simple jerk of a control stick.

How?

I fought the cycle of day in and day out and did something different. I made a difference, I stuck by my guns. I chose the path less traveled, opting to dedicate myself to only one quality crane to do my bidding as opposed to many average-at-best cranes. I was able to get out of the vortex of material excess by picking one thing that I really care about and focusing on that.

Mike was 46 years old when he died. He left behind no children and no regrets. He was an avid golfer, curious photographer, and adamant protestor of La-Z-Boy recliners. He smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and always said, "I'll get the last laugh, doc--these smokes'll never kill me."

"If the smoking doesn't kill you, the cranes will," the doctors would always say in return.

Doctors are very smart and can change the world. Not as much as a child's smile can, though =)