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September 28, 2006
Gleaning Taters: Tea lights and Tolstoy
I'm sitting here at the Bistro in Idaho Falls, where the consultants go to die. The Bistro equates loosely to the killing fields for consultants. For your last day on the project, they bring you here. Maybe you know you're on the way out. Maybe it's a surprise to you and they hand it to you under the table once you've finished your meal. But it should be no surprise. But this is where they bring you. They feed you a nice meal...filling you up like a fatted calf, and then they lower the boom. That's how that goes. And everyone knows it.
So, I'm sitting here at the bar and my back hurts, but there's a reason it hurts...I don't wonder why. I know why it hurts. And I'm drinking a line of Nut Brown Ales at the bar all alone...I'm a friend of Bill's after all, and I'm trying to drink enough so that the pain subsides or retreats or goes where ever it is that pain slips off to when It's not shooting pulsing signals to your brain.
My back hurts cause I was climbing a sand dune on a four-wheeler this morning up at St. Anthony's National Sand Dunes...one of those big long steep sand mountains where you hit it wide open and stick the throttle with your thumb (the thumb only knows one speed, doesn't it?) and normally, when I get to the top of the dune, it's a nice rounded top and you could have a picnic if you weren't in such a hurry and you glance around and pick a line to roll down on the other side but not this time...this time I get to the top and suddenly someone took the earth away and I'm flying through the air like the space shuttle and everything slows down and I'm thinking...fuck...this is going to hurt...cause the ground is falling away beneath me.
For the rest of the story, buy my book "Killing Strangers".
Posted by Peenie Wallie on September 28, 2006 at 9:51 PM
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