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Show RTVER "If s a Mexican steam shovel, right?" "Yep," I said. "And an idiot stick: a stick on one end and an idiot on the other." "Good. Do you know what a plumber is?" "I'm learning." "A plumber is a low as whaleshit. Do you know what whaleshit is?" "Nope, Foster, what's whaleshit?" "Whaleshit is on the bottom of the ocean. Whaleshit is the lowest stuff in the world." He let this sink in. "And do you know what you are?" I shook my head. "You're lower than whaleshit." About this time, I bought a guitar and wrote a song called "When You Learn to Ramble, You Learn to Lose." Underneath the whaleshit, manual labor was about the only thing that saved me. Working with a shovel and swinging a ten-pound hammer all day made thinking not nearly so painful, and after about ten hours of hitting it, thinking was nearly impossible. I was living in an old farmhouse that overlooked two-hundred acres of doomed oranges with a carpenter friend named Willy. He had a very steady head and helped pull me through my worst craziness. I'd resolved to make a big pile of money with which to win back Rosie: I'd determined to prove myself to her. Willy caught on to this and said, "Look, you don't have to prove yourself to anybody but yourself." I wrote Rosie a very bitter letter that marked the end of our love affair. After about three months of scratching the hard earth of the San Luis Rey Valley, I said screw it and I moved back to Lonestar. -135- |