Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth Class
So I actually watched this Pixar movie for the first time the other day. Amazingly fatphobic and a nice cautionary tale of the dangers revolving around unsustainable practices.
In any case, I'm quite the scrapper myself.
One year my dad asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I'm a practical kind of person and I don't desire material possessions. I told him to buy me a set of hair clippers so I could cut my own hair and save myself the $15 every few months or whatever. In fact, I specifically told him to get one that plugged into the wall so it would last longer and I wouldn't have to worry about battery life as my old one was drained. A decade later I still have it and it works fine.
Like a boss.
This whole COVID situation suits me quite well. A couple days ago I cut my own hair. #4 buzz cut, as always. I've cut my own hair over a dozen times within the last decade. The time before that was in June, so six months between haircuts, and my hair was getting pretty out of control, as people tell me it grows quite fast and there is a lot of it.
I started going gray in my early 20's and now in my late thirties I might have more gray hair than not. Sometimes I dye it, mostly not. When COVID started I dyed it blue because fuck it end of the world and all that. Surprisingly it's easy to break the ice in random social conversation when you have a vivid hair color. None of this is relevant information.
Enough about my hair already.
My car is over 25 years old with significant paint damage and some slight body damage from when some drunk idiots hit my parked car and tried to blame it on me. It's got less than 120k miles on it, so on average I drive less than 5000 miles a year.
It seems weird because sports car, but my Camaro is a beast that just won't quit. These things have a 5-star crash rating and are pretty heavy tanks, surprisingly. It's been in multiple accidents, one of which was technically my fault, but who's counting? Seriously who slams on their breaks in the rain in the middle of the night with no cars around on a dedicated right turn? Jack ass.
Guess who hit me?
Lol you can't make this shit up. This is a separate incident. The dumbass friends of the person who owns this truck presumably were being drunk idiots... they slammed the gas in reverse, not seeing my car, and the tailgate mounted the top of my parked car, pushing it back one and a half car lengths from where I parked it.
Judging by the damage to my car, it looks like these drunk morons took a baseball bat to my right side mirror in an attempt to make it look like the accident was my fault. There is zero damage to the right side of my car except for the mirror being smashed off. These guys were super smart.
When I came outside to put some stuff in my trunk they aggressively and drunkenly approached me saying I needed to pay for the damage. Of course, when the cops were called they fled the scene. Then I'm pretty sure they called up neighbors to pop up and provide false testimony that there was a mystery 3rd car that actually hit the first car and pushed it into mine, being responsible for all the damage.
These stupid fucking Livermore pigs actually wrote in an official police report that the front of this truck was struck by another car (I believe a Mustang) with enough force to push both cars 20 feet. Notice anything? The front of this car has sustained zero damage, and I was too flustered and jacked up thinking I was going to have to fight those drunken tools to contest it. The cops even separated me from these random people providing testimony to an incident that they didn't even see.
So of course I call up my insurance company and they assure me they are going to back me up, but as we all know insurance companies are totally full of shit, and because the responsible party was a hit and run mystery car there was no one to pay the settlement so no one got any money... well maybe the truck owner did but I didn't personally have collision insurance because my car is worth very little on the open market.
Had I been paying for collision insurance this whole time, I'm pretty sure the premium I paid for insurance over time still would have been more than the jackpot payout. That's how insurance companies work; they are a scam designed to play the odds and make money from their customers; duh. Hurray for capitalism.
2017
In any case, this happened way back in 2017, and I was pretty salty about it for a while, but I came to realize I learned an important lesson: Just lie to the cops to get what you want. They don't give a shit or fact check anything even with basic logic. I saw the accident. This car hit me, and the drunken fools that did it fled the scene. I'm the only witness so I win. Sorted.
That's not even the craziest part of the story because the next day I did some drugs and had a full on break with reality complete with major delusions of persecution and grandeur.
So I've some to realize that after somewhat stressful situations my brain gets jacked in to some pretty crazy chemicals that aren't there otherwise, and if I even smoke a tiny bit of weed during those times I have a very high chance of having what I would describe as a full-on shroom-flashback schizophrenic-break.
It's almost like my friend knew it was going to happen too, because he asked me several times if I was sure I was good to smoke the weed... and we've smoked weed together like dozens of times so I thought it was weird at the time that he was even asking. If fact we had smoked the day before it had happened, so I was like wtf are you talking bout, bro?
In any case I essentially DEMANDED to smoke the weed, and then we headed out to Pleasonton to meet up with some old friends for breakfast at a restaurant. Again, he asked me if I was good to drive, and I was like stfu what are you talking about of course I'm good to drive.
Turns out, I was not so good to drive, because after being on the freeway for a few exits I entered an entirely new dimension and I had a flash of being in danger of a potentially fatal car crash.
Max paranoia
It was so bad I grabbed my friend's hand and braced for impact like we were going to die right then and there. When absolutely nothing happened he just looked at me quizzically and was like, "Why are we holding hands? lol."
It was about that time that I decided hm, I guess I'm not so good to drive, and I pulled into the far right lane to get off the freeway and let my friend drive. My friend had a definite yeah-I-told-you-so vibe permeating from him, but I didn't have time to worry about that, because we were being followed by a mysterious car.
Now, sometimes I get paranoid that people are following me, so you know what I do? I make a turn or two until the car in question is no longer behind me. I swear to god this car followed me around 7 fucking turns. They even pulled into the very parking lot that I entered in order to get in the passenger seat. I did not want to get out of the car, but I also didn't want to be a delusional psychotic paranoid freak that allows their crazy to control their actions.
At that very moment, a burst burst of hail started raining down from the sky. I let out some truly maniacal laughter. What the actual fuck is going on right now?
You see, it didn't help that I was watching a show called Legion during that time period.
Legion, based on the Marvel Comics by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz, is the story of David Haller (Dan Stevens), a troubled young man who may be more than human. Diagnosed as schizophrenic as a child, David has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years.
Yep, I was watching a show about a mutant with literal God-Powers. I've entered an alternate dimension, escaped death, I'm being followed, and I created a hailstorm. So far, so good.
Oh right, did I forget that Lawrence Livermore Labs is in Livermore?
Top 5 nuke target in the entire world.
Who knows what kind of crazy shit they are doing there.
The entire lab is in a secret location hidden in an underground bunker. Pretty neat huh?
Where was I?
Ah yes, everything is going quite well. I get out of the car and trade places with my friend. He likes driving my Camaro anyway. It's a manual stick-shift.
So we get to the breakfast place and all my friends are there. I'm approaching a moment of calm and Zen. Everything is fine. Schizophrenic breaks are actually pretty fun. Normal is super boring. I'm being serious.
Then the waitress shows up and starts taking our orders. This bitch is a cop. I'm not joking. There is no way this bitch is actually a waitress. She looked like a cop; she acted like a cop; she was rude and abrasive; her posture was aggressive; she looked like she was ready to kick some ass and take names; everything about her was a red flag.
I have a lot of friends who have worked in the service industry, so I know how it works. Everyone who works as a server needs to code switch into their most fake-happy servant/slave persona. That's how you make tips; by being nice even when most people are dipshits. The bulk of their wages depend on tips.
This waitress was so far away from anything that resembled a server that it triggered me yet again.
I didn't want to order anything. As if I'm going to let "these people" serve me food that I would then eat. I was pretty thirsty, cotton mouth and all that. I think I "ordered" a water and didn't even want to drink that, but I think I did anyway.
This is actually a pretty common one: not wanting to eat food prepared by someone you don't trust. Whatever this is that I have, my mom has it a bit worse and she told me stories about how she had some food ritual to turn it from poisoned to not. Pretty insane stuff. Luckily I don't have the PTSD slapped on top so it's not nearly as bad.
I need to get the fuck out of here!
At this point my friend is practically babysitting me and worried that I'm gonna jump in my car and go do something stupid. Yep, that's exactly what I'm going to do! Out of the way, fucker!
So he follows me outside and I just tell him I wanted to look at the damage to my car again. A bad lie, but whatever.
More craziness
I shit you not, every time I went outside thinking "Hm, maybe I'll just drive away... I'd like to have some kind of escape route."... There was a car parked/stationed behind mine blocking me from doing just that. Seriously how many coincidences need to add up before they aren't coincidences at all? Like seriously, why is there a guy in a car just sitting behind my car? Pretty weird.
And so the story ends.
Nothing much happened after that. I started coming down from my wild ride. I drank the water and now I'm trapped in this alternate dimension and the labcoats are monitoring me. No big deal; it's not so bad here. Pretty similar to the other dimension honestly. Might have even died in that car crash and needed to move over to this one. 5th dimensional lateral move for the win. If Rick & Morty can do it, why can't I?
Problem solved.
Wait, what was the point of this post again? Oh yeah I was supposed to talk about how I'm a scrapper. How even if I was filthy rich I wouldn't be running around buying Lambos and stupid shit like that. Unsustainable practices; unmitigated capitalism; yada yada yada. Oh well, maybe next time. The tangent is real.