Just Call Me Windbag.

Last night I suddenly remembered a quasi-local blog I used to read. I haven't read in months because I just completely forgot about it. The person who does the blog works at the private for school for girls I worked at as a temp back in late summer/early fall of '97. And since these days I'm nothing but a doddering old twit with absolutely nothing to say, I'm going to drone on a bit about this temp job. Humor me. Or just leave. I don't really care.

An entry on the front page about an old fire-damaged house on the school property reminded me of a few things. An awful movie called Crazy People had been filmed partially on the school grounds in the late 80's. We temps were assigned the task of cleaning all the junk out of this fire-damaged house. Inside in a box I found a dozen or more copies of the screenplay to Crazy People. I kept a few and one of the other temps kept one, the rest ended up in the dumpster. I could've sold all of those on Ebay, but that was 1997 and I didn't think about stuff like that back then.

I've always wanted to throw a couch out of a second story window and when we were cleaning out this house I got to do just that. But, unfortunately, it wasn't very spectacular. The only interesting part was when the couch got stuck in such a way that we couldn't pull it back in and I got punch and kick it until it fell. Fun, but ultimately dull. Considerably more fun was lifting an old junky Royal electric typewriter over my head, slamming it down into the dumpster and watching it come apart. It was sort of Pete Townsend meets William Faulkner. Cathartic. I highly recommend it.

I found this big, heavy duty wooden easel in the house and decided to keep it. I guessed it was just old junk and that the school's art department had all new easels. I took it and propped it up against the front bumper of my Buick because I couldn't figure out how to get it in my car at the time. It stood there leaning against my car all day until a bit after quitting time I managed to get the thing in my car. A few days later I went into the art department and saw about twenty or thirty clones of the the easel I took home. I thought, "Oh, shit. I think I just stole an easel." But if I hadn't kept it it would've ended up in the dumpster with everything else. Anyway, it has a good home now. I gave it to my sister who's an art student.

One of the great things about working at that place was that we could keep anything that was going to be thrown away, so I ended up with a lot of junk. My most bizarre acquisition was a huge 35mm movie projector from the 40's. It's the kind of projector they put in movie theaters. I also got a couple of chairs, a suitcase, books, slightly damaged copier paper, stationary they threw out by the ton, envelopes, and god knows what else.

All in all, it was probably my most interesting temp job. (Unfortunatly, you can't tell by the way I wrote this.)