Who am I?

ClayJay74@yahoo.com

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As you surely figured out due to the introduction on my index page, I fancy myself a unique man, and everyone that has ever met me will agree with me. I am a thirty year old maniac that moved down to Kentucky from a remote southern suburb of Chicago. It was a sleepy little bedroom town of Hebron, Indiana. I call it a bedroom town because the only people that worked in the town that they lived were teenagers, people who didn't want to drive, and the farmers. About the only jobs in Hebron were at Patz's grociery store, the many fast food restaurants, and the few farms that were outside town limits. One could make a killing bailing hay, detassling corn, or flipping burgers for the summer. I took a slightly different route, though. I actually worked for a dairy farm to the south of town. It was about a mile from my house, and I worked there every day for almost four years. The money wasn't good, but they fed me on the weekends, and everyday during the summer, the exercise was great, and it taught me how to manage my money and still have fun in the evenings. When I said that the money wasn't good, that may have been an understatement. When I first started, they paid me $180 a month (yes, a MONTH). After four years, I was making $240 a month, but they let me have one weekend off a month so that I could attend my drill weekends for the Army reserves.

The funny thing is, in two days of reserves a month, I made nearly as much money as I did working my guts out 28 or 29 days the rest of the month. When I first started working there, I was a chubby little freshman that used to live close to the windy city, and knew nothing about milking cows or baling hay. I knew that it was unpleasant right away, but I did it anyway. In fact they still called me "Little Chicago" and "City Slicker" until the day I left to go to basic training. They liked me, but if they weren't picking on you, that meant that they were mad at you, so I liked it better that way. It was a very dangerous job, and I still give props to the people that do that to raise their families everyday. I had my hand broken, one time my foot got stepped on so hard that the blood was forced out around all of my toenails, and I can't count all of the times I've been kicked, bitten, or fallen 10 to 15 feet and landed straight on my back. In more ways than one, it helped me learn what it is to be a man. I learned to take misfortune with a grain of salt, and find some amusing aspect of it. If I hadn't learned that, I would have probably killed myself long ago. (I wish that I could find a way to teach my fiancee that lesson, because she gets so worked up over the little things in life, and sometimes I have no idea how to help her)I have been beat up, picked on, turned down for many things, pissed on (figuratively)by many people, and had a baby forcibly removed from my life. Can you say "Pro-Choice?" If I dwelled on all of it, I would surely eat the business end of my shotgun and pull the trigger with my toe (it's a long shotgun!)

I moved to eastern Kentucky on October 31, 1996. I came down to help my father rebuild a farmhouse that is well over 100 years old. It was a sizeable undertaking, considering that the house did not have a single stud in any of the walls, there was considerable ant and termite damage to what wood was there, and the whole thing was sitting on shifted stacks of field stone. At every turn, we were doing battle with old rickety fireplaces, giant (and I mean HUGE) spiders, and a variety of other insects and rodents. I spent every day for about three months climbing underneath that house, removing large flat field stones with my bare hands, digging foundation holes in the hard and rocky earth, pouring concrete, and breathing the dust of whatever the animals, insects, and people have deposited under there during the century the building was standing. That is not including the nasty tan clay that covers this entire region. During a windstorm, that stuff gets everywhere. If you're down here for the summer, when you leave, and open up your hood, you'll see what I mean... it gets EVERYWHERE!!!

Anyway, this is one of the most beautiful places that I've been in the world. Its beauty more than makes up for its negative aspects. First and foremost, is the employment situation. There is hardly anything that can be described as a career around here. The most prestigious job around, and anyone who wants to work is trying for, is the local prison. Everyone I know (who wants to work) has applied for the corrections officer position. Don't you dare call them guards, or they'll get downright irate with you. I guess it's like calling a custodial engineer a janitor, it's just not politically correct. Since we finished my parents house, I moved back up north for a little over a year, but I came back down here. My first couple of months back, I worked for my brother in law, helping to make the yard look better, which included cutting the trees that were all piled up in the hollow, and digging up the garbage dump that was created by the people that owned it prior. I'm serious, you should have seen it. The people that lived there before had an area cleared to put in their trailer, which is why the trees were in the hollow. He was a drunk, who was constantly in jail, and she was a slut, who would lock her children in their room (six kids, one little room) while she would "entertain company" when her hubby was in the slammer. They didn't have running water, because after they had a well dug, their kids kept dropping stuff down the pipe, until it was impossible to get a pump down to the water level. In fact, nobody knows what all they dropped in there, so my sister and brother in law refuse to clean the well and use it. The woman had so many amorous "friends" that liked what she did to and for them that she didn't have to worry about money for anything. Instead of trying to get water to bathe, and clean the dishes, she would just use a dish until it was unbelievably dirty, then throw it in the back yard, and have one of her friends buy her more. I spent a month and a half of cutting and burning the long dead trees, digging and burning a variety of burnable garbage, and picking up more broken glass than you would find in all of the projects of Chicago.

After that, I started working for a neighbor of ours that ran a small sawmill, did odd construction jobs, and made different woodcrafts. At first everyone around thought he was the worlds greatest guy, me included. I didn't get paid much, but neither did he. We did all kinds of sawing, landscaping, construction, electrical wiring, and whatever else he could scrape up. My sister and I had a big argument, and he even let me move into the house that his aunt used to live in. It was a small stone throw away from the trailer that he and his wife lived in. I worked for him for almost three years, and everyone saw what I was seeing. We all saw the downgrade from "good guy" to "jerk-off". We had done a lot of jobs, and he was starting to get paid good money, but I wasn't seeing much of it. I had no running water in the house the whole time, but after going three months without getting paid, I had no electricity either. I lived in that house for a year without electricity. I read in the evenings by the light of an oil lamp, and I was expected to be over there to help him do whatever he wanted done seven days a week. I used to not understand how a woman could let a man make her feel like she would be nowhere without him, but I understand more now than probably any man alive. I still don't know how he did it, but he made me feel like I owed him the world, and if I didn't do what he needed, then I was biting the hand that fed me. I wish I knew how he did it, because I never saw it. The only thing I had in my life at that time, was occassionally (only because I was so busy doing odd jobs for no money that I didn't get to go out very often) my family, a few books, a lamp, and a dog. The last one was kind of a difficult situation for me. I had a dog named Zeus, he was a mutt that came from a long line of inbreeding. I know that he wasn't right, but I liked him anyway. I trained him how to sit, lay, heel, and growl on command. He was a big sweetheart, but he could act convincingly enough to make Jehova's witnesses jump back in their shiny minivans quicker than they could say, "are you ready for Jehova's return?" I actually loved that dog.

The difficulty started when one of his dogs attacked mine, because one of the many bitches were in heat. He had a large hole in his brown shaggy neck, and I did what I could afford to do to fix it. I kept up with the peroxide and alcohol, but he still got an infection. A bad one. I kept hinting around to my boss that I needed to take my pet to the veterinarian, but he kept saying that he couldn't afford to pay me right now. Yet, everytime we went on a job, and he bought himself a pop or something, I would see that he had 7 or 8 100 dollar bills in his wallet at all times. Finally, the infection got so bad that Zeus was actually scaring me. I knew he was in pain, and that hurt me, but not as much as what I had to do next. I had to shoot my own dog, because my boss was too cheap to pay me. I told my family about what all was happening, and what I had to do, and they were more than happy to let me move back in with them. After a few weeks of cleaning and moving, I was back in my sister's trailer. ***To be continued***