It's been a while since I wrote- things have been fucked up around here.

I mean seriously fucked up.

Ever seen a guy dead, broken, smashed in half? How about walking through Chinatown and seeing those ducks hanging in the window that have been pressed, squashed flat as a silver dollar?

But let me start at the beginning. Remember me talking about this (ex) coworker of mine, Wade? This was a guy that was always trying to get high. If he couldn't get meth, he'd take anything he could. He'd huff drano if that's what it took.

Well, it seems that Wade read in some book a new way to get high and decided to implement it. We don't know how he got blood samples from the Mental Hospital over in Spreckels, probably bribery, but they were found on the floorboards of his pickup at work byt the cops after the accident. The samples were labeled with a patient number, and that's how they traced them to the hospital. The blood was from one Mr. Jarvis Stine, a 58 year old man who was charged (but never convicted) of murdering his two young daughters and cooking them on his barbeque for dinner. He was judged unfit to stand trial, and has been incarcerated in the "hospital" ever since. This guy Jarvis is, very, very fucked up.

So, Wade got ahold of about a third of a pint of nice, fresh blood and shot that into his arm. Then he came in for a shift. I noticed his hands were shaking when he got here, but I just figured that was his average tweaker self.

Anyway the point of my story is I got the week off. They figured I needed it, since I was the one who watched Wade climb into the steel roller and get down in the works where forty tons of pressure flattens the edge on raw metal.

Well, that was the end of Wade, and I can't say I really miss him.


Courtesy of Ralph "Gunny" Gunderson, Union Steel Works, Carbondale, CA.