What does a girl even try to write when she spends 12 hours a day (7 days a week) watching 50-lb. blocks of salmon slide past on conveyor belts?
Let’s try for a patchwork streamaconsciousness blog about some things that annoy and amuse me on a daily basis.
Salmon – Humpies, chum, sockeye, coho and kings. One million round pounds pass through this place every day in 24-hour production. That means I ship about 700,000 pounds of headed and gutted salmon carcasses every day. Or 14,000 50-lb. sacks. Or 14 of the 40-foot refrigerated shipping containers picture below.
(My loading dock!)
Foreign workers – Jamaicans, Dominicans and Micronesians in particular make my days bearable with their accents and their stories. For example – Terron (Jamaica) today was telling me how a group of them went to a local bar twice to sing karaoke. The first time they got free beer for performing so well. He then went into a minute-long rendition of Eminem’s ‘Da-Doing-Doing-Doing’ song to give me an example of his mad rap skillz – sounding perfect as a Jamaican imitating a white guy imitating a Jamaican accent. The second time they went, they got kicked out for being underage.
All the Micronesians consider Portland their second home (the first being whichever island they were born on), so they keep telling me how where I live in Northeast Portland is a dangerous neighborhood (it’s not) and how we’re all going to get good and trashed at some Micro bar they know back home (we will).
More to come, but I have a very tight schedule to keep. It’s LOST time, and I need to know if Jack is going to finish this surgery or not. Sawyer and Kate’s lives are hanging in the balance, and shit is tense. Da-rama!
Then I have to be asleep by ten because 5:15 is a very terrible time of the AM to have to rise.
I miss you all, and I can’t wait to make my traditional fall rounds of visitation and merriment.