"A.I." is based on a Brian Aldiss story that was published in Harper's Bazaar in 1969 and was later worked into a screen story by Ian Watson. For years, Stanley Kubrick, in his lordly-dithering way, labored and fussed over the material. In the end, he turned to "Eyes Wide Shut," but not before talking at length to Spielberg about "A.I." and suggesting that he direct it.

- From the review of A.I. in the New Yorker

Here is a link to the original story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long.

Job 7: Fill it up, regular

In the 1980s modern man met yet another technological milestone. The labors of centuries of scientific exploration and discovery had come to fruition. Man had invented the self serve gas pump. People from all walks of life, regardless of race, creed or color, could pump their own gasoline. No longer would the superstitions of the past be a barrier to modern man's desire to pump his own gasoline.

In the town of Huntington, Long Island, fear and prejudice still had a strangle hold on the gas service industry. The wealthy and elite felt gas pumping was beneath them. They were comfortable with the current state of gas delivery, and they wished to continue having their gas pumped for them. They believed it was ingrained in the very fiber of our society that immigrants and potheads should pump gasoline. They had reached a certain stature, by either hard work or inheritance, and they were concerned that, by pumping their own gasoline, they would be tearing apart the very foundation of our society. In retrospect, they were probably right.

In the mid to late 80s the Huntington town council passed an ordinance that made the self service of gasoline illegal. Claiming the dangers of self service, and the desire to protect the common citizen, they deemed self service a hazard, and banned it for ever (or at least for a few years). Hence began my career as a gas station attendant.

I worked for Northville Gas Station on Jericho Turnpike just a mile or so from our house. I wore a pale blue uniform that was basically a big baggy jump suit that was worn over street clothes. They had huge pockets in which you kept money for making change. There were no cash registers, and the office contained an old candy machine that remained mostly empty except for a few packs of old Wrigley spearmint gum and some peanut brittle. There was a dirty old desk that held an even older transiter radio that was tuned to the popular rock radio station of the time. I'm pretty sure half of the music the station played was Stairway to Heaven. The floor had a huge metal plate with a hole in the middle that covered a drop safe where attendants made drops of cash in two hundred dollar increments. The pumps were the old mechanical kind, no fancy digital displays. The prices and gallons rolled by one at a time, "clunk...clunk". Credit cards were swiped on mechanical machines where the attendant filled in the pertinent info. We were asked to tear the carbons in half, because customers feared criminal types sorting through the trash to recover credit card numbers. I don't think anyone could match up the two severed halfs of a carbon and decifer the credit card numbers. Unless, of course, they were some kind of criminal mastermind.

I liked pumping gas. People would tip you on occasion, and you had no boss to speak of. The gas station owner would come by every couple of days to make sure everything was in order and to pick up money from the safe. As long as your drops matched what was read on the meter, you were okay. It could get pretty bad when it rained or snowed. You'd be standing in the rain, eating a pizza slice because it was so busy that you didn't have time for lunch, and a big cadillac would pull up and have you check every fluid in their car. "Can you check my tire pressure too," they would ask, as you're slice dripped with rain and transmission fluid. "Be sure you don't fill it over twenty dollars," they'd say, a moment after the pump read twenty-one thirty-five. They'd spend the next five minutes complaining as a line of cars built up behind them. You'd charge them twenty, and you'd take flack from the boss because your drop was off, but it was better than cramming the pump in their mouth and filling them up to twenty-two dollars. Well, its almost better. Then they would tip you quarter. I'd find myself saying, "Thank you sir, have a nice day." What a gas whore.

Spending my life quitting smoking and then starting again, I need to remember that smoking is just fucking stupid!

"a cigarette for the beginner is a symbolic act. I am no loner my mother's child, I'm tough. I am an adventurer... As the force from the psychological symbolism subsides, the pharmacological effect takes over to sustain the habit."

-Phillip Morris

Job 5: It's greener

Long Island used to be the land of fishermen and potato farms. There are still a few fisherman, but most of the potato farms went the way of the telegraph or have been converted into sod farms. Long Islanders love their grass, and god forbid they wait for seed to germinate. This great love of lawn creates a need for people to mow them. Fortunately for the lazy and wealthy, Long Island has an abundance of Latin Americans and pot head teenagers.

The summer after my career in pianos ended my next door neighbor was looking for an additional crewman for his landscape company. He had no potheads or Latinos on his crew, so I felt obligated to help him.

Landscaping isn't a bad gig. It's hard work, but you're outside, and it pays well. Frank, my boss and the F in F.P.D, paid in cash. He informed me how this benefited me, because I would not have to pay taxes. I thought it was a great idea at the time. Sure, I didn't get insurance, workmans comp, or any benefits whatsoever, but it was like making another .75 ¢ an hour. How could I refuse.

We mowed acres and acres of grass. The sun would beat down on my back turning it dark brown and leaving my underbelly a much lighter shade. By the end of the summer I resembled a frosted mini wheat. Sometimes we would stand around with the leaf blowers on our backs. They can sound like honey bees on steroids from a distance. We would adjust the throttles so the blowers would whine in tune, and then slowly oscillate them a little out of tune and then back again. It sounded like a satanic version of The Flight of the Bumble Bee.

The rest of the crew were Franky's highschool buddies, and they had very little of what was required to be a landscaper. They were white, and did not smoke pot. They were the type of guys that would turn up the radio when Billy Joel was playing. They talked mainly about beer and girls. Every monday morning I would hear about their sexual exploits from the weekend, or how so and so puked in the back of their dad's Caddie. They had names like Tony, Franky, Bobby, Al and Tony. They were big, and what they lacked in smarts they made up for in muscle. Landscaping was a way for them to get beer money, or to make payments on their IROC-Z28s. I like to refer to them as the yo-yos. "Yo Frank, wheres you want me to put this mowa," Tony would exclaimed while untangling his gold chain from his chest hair. "Yo Mark, when you gonna cut your fringin' hai, you look like a fuckin' freak," Al said lovingly as we drove to the local dump. Good times.

Earthship? isn't that a bad 70s band?

A coworker showed me a news clip of a man in Northern Wisconsin who was building himself an earthship out of old tires and sand. Kind of an interesting concept, but I could do without the mystical poetry.

"The people made shelter by assembling pieces one at a time. They put pieces together around themselves not upon themselves Soon they had created shelter around themselves They were in shelter The people also found happiness by manifesting it piece at a time They manifest happiness all around themselves not for themselves Soon they had created happiness all around themselves They were in happiness Both shelter and happiness can be achieved by focusing outside of self."

Job 6: The boy who would be king

In business finance, there are a couple of basic ideas. You have assets and you have liabilities. Receiving a 18,000 dollar annuity when you turn eighteen would be considered an asset. Purchasing your neighbor's Landscaping company for an over inflated sum would be considered a liability. Being a teenager who knows nothing about business, and spends most of his free time smoking Thai stick and watching He-Man could be considered a major liability.

I made the mistake of thinking I could run my own landscaping company. My neighbor Frank wanted out, and he helped convince me that I wanted in. I figured I would be my own boss, and I could work when I wanted to. I would be the man.

After a winter of negotiations with Frank about prices and equipment, I started the spring as the sole proprietor of F.P.D Landscaping. I called every client and informed them of the new owner, and let them know that if they stayed with us they could expect the same professional quality service. There was one small problem. I was barely eighteen, and when I got nervous I mumbled and talked under my breath. RING RING, "Hi, this is Mrk Wiaulky frm F.P.D Landscpn, I am the new, uhh, ownr, and I uhh, was wrundrin if..." This didn't go over so well, and we started the spring with a few less accounts than I had anticipated.

I received a 1972 Chevy C10 pickup truck with the purchase of my new company. After a fair amount of landscaping, we would detach the trailer at a friends house, place a keg in the truck bed that we cleverly hid under the grass clippings, and we'd drive to the nearest park to unwind from our three hours of mowing that day. It had all the makings of an after school special. A young boy, inexperienced in driving, fills himself full of beer and Thai stick, and drives a truck full of grass, friends and beer kegs around Long Island. Not my finest moment. Thankfully, fate stepped in. When we returned to my friends house the next day to retreive the trailer filled with landscaping equipment, it was gone. I think that this could be considered a liability. A note to all future business owners: don't leave your entire business in a trailer unlocked and unattended, so anyone with a trailer hitch can drive away with it. Who knew? My short lived career as a landscaping king pin was over.

...More David Sedaris audio.

"He nice, the Jesus. He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today."

Job 4: Moving on up

Every so often, I was taken along on piano moves. Piano moving was the cream of the crop job for Complete Piano Service. You'd spend most of the day driving in a van all over the tri-state area smoking weed and listing to worn out Led Zeppelin cassettes. After reaching a destination, a piano is either pulled off the trailer and leveraged into a house somewhere, or one was pulled out of a house and placed on the trailer. Seeing as I was the smallest and most inexperienced, I was the guy who carried the dolly. I would spend most of my time standing around waiting for them to tip a grand piano in a certain way so I could place a dolly under it. Most often I wouldn't be paying attention, and a mover would yell, "hey dumb fuck, pull your head out of your ass and set up the fucking dolly." Smoking pot all day really didn't help the situation. The movers generally consisted of me, my older brother Matt, Kenny, and his older brother Bruce.

We spent a lot of time in the piano van, and covered a lot of ground. Fortunately, the van was always equipped with an abundance of kazoos. My brother and all the Maguire boys had played a brass instrument of some kind in school, so they were versed in most Chicago songs, or any stupid theme song that you would normally here bellowing out of a highschool auditorium on band night. After boredom would set in, my brother and Bruce would start the musical entertainment.

Saturday
bzzratt...
In the park
bzzratt...
I think it was the fourth of July...

After they had worked through their Chicago repertoire, they would inevitably move to the Jetson's theme song. There's really nothing more beautiful than the theme from M.A.S.H belted out on kazoos.

They prided themselves on the ability to find the quickest route anywhere. They had heaps of map books, and their knowledge of the tri-state area was astounding. Every once in a while they would throw a map book at me, and say something like, "How do we get to the BQE (Brooklyn Queens Expressway) from here." I would panic. It was usually after we had just huffed a fatty, and I was intently staring at Bruce's hair, which was a big curly afro that bounced up and down when the van went over a bump. I wouldn't know where we were, which way was north, or even what stinking borough we were in. My brother would inevitably take the map book from me, and we would all sit in silence.

I didn't get to go on moves that often, and I was damn tired of polishing brass, so I left Complete Piano Service. My brother still moves pianos in New York, and his ability to make it across town during rush hour with minimal delay is astounding.

Job 3: Menial times 88

After my short lived career as a barn destructor, I was encouraged to continue working for Complete Piano Service doing odd jobs and learning the exciting trade of piano repair and restoration. For those who don't know about the inner workings of a piano, it is basically a bunch of padded hammers that pound an array of strings strung on a huge iron harp. The hammers are attached to the keys by what those in the piano trade refer to as the mechanism. It is a complex set of levers and straps and pins that allow the hammer to strike the string whenever the player presses down on a key. It all sounds very magical and artistic, but to a lowly piano peon it is a monotonous nightmare. A normal sized piano has eighty eight keys. What this means is that any menial task, however small or large, needs to be completed eighty eight times. To add further monotony, Mr. Maguire was a classical music enthusiast. There would be a non stop onslaught of classical albums, tapes and radio shows throughout the day. How many time should an adolescent boy have to listen to Fur Elise before it violates some child labor law somewhere?

If I were lucky, there would be no mechanism work for that day, and I would be awarded the task of buffing out the finishes of newly painted pianos. On a really good day, I could polish piano brass on the polishing wheel. Nothing quite like polishing the heads of hundreds of brass screws. The only thing that made the job bearable was the veritable freak show of people that seemed to migrate to the field of piano work in Long Island. If you were a habitual pot smoker or had any level of mental illness or instability, piano work was for you. Mr. Maguire was the only sober and somewhat sane member of the bunch, but oddly enough, most of the piano people in town worked for him in some capacity or another.

Some days we would visit one of the local piano people in their natural setting. Their houses always smelt of old dust, older pianos, stale beer and pot smoke. Piano parts were thrown around. There would be an old bench here, a broken lid there, and jars and jars of odd mechanism parts or brass screws or some unidentifiable items laying everywhere. Piano people are fond of coffee cans and mason jars filled with crap. The master of all weird piano people was a man named Nick Fasina. He worked on player pianos. If I thought working on normal eighty eight key mechanisms was bad, I was dumbfounded by the complexity of the player piano mechanism. It contained miles and miles of tubing and plungers and parts and more tubes. His house was filled to the brim with cans and jars of mechanism guts and pieces. Nick could barely remember where he lived. He'd get lost driving around town. He'd lose his money, his wallet, his keys. He'd lock himself out of his house. But, Nick could pull apart a player piano, jar it all up, refurbish it, and place all the pieces back together again. It was like all the information about the player mechanism had filled up his brian and pushed out all other knowledge.

My mother and Mr. Maguire wanted to teach Kenny and I about work ethics, so they surrounded us with mentally ill disenfranchised pot head piano people. These guys were lucky if they got out of bed every day. They turned every piano job in late, if at all. They took two hour lunches, and quit work early to drink beer. I learned a lot working with these guys. I learned how to smoke pot, and to avoid people like Mr. Maguire. As one of the piano guys once told me, "You need guys like Mr. M. They keep the world turning, but you don't want them coming to your house". Amen brother.

Job 2: Barn Un-Raiser

A while after my stint as a delivery boy, my mother decided that I needed to develop a work ethic. At least, that is what she said. I am still under the strong suspicion that she wanted me out of the house. Seeing as our family had no paternal influences (my parents were divorced when I was young, and my Father had moved out to California never to be heard from again), my mother would pawn off any fatherly like duties to the neighborhood man types, uncles, or in this case Kenny's father Mr. Maguire. Mr. Maguire was a piano man. He dealt with all forms of piano repair, refinishing, restoration, buying, selling, moving and what have you. His business, oddly enough, was called Complete Piano Service. Mr. M was a thinking man. The kind of guy that would sit quietly rubbing his chin, for what seemed like hours. After being asked a simple question like, "What time will Kenny be back from the doctor", he would ponder a long while, and then respond, "Hmmm, around seven". He liked to emit the sound "hmmm" whenever rubbing his chin. "Hmmm, I think we should eat lunch, at oh, say, noon" (rub rub).

Mr. Maguire was charged with the task of teaching me a work ethic. As he felt his own son was lacking in that department, he figured he'd kill two lazy birds with one stone. He had recently purchased an old barn in Farmingdale, NY that he wanted to convert into a piano refinishing shop. After what seemed like hours of hmmms and long winded stories of his work history and the evils of laziness and sloth, he explained that he wanted us to gut the inside of "The Barn". He was actually going to pay us to destroy it. This is the kind of work Kenny and I did on a daily bases with bb guns and rocks and stuff. Talk about the right men for the job. It would seem that Mr. M really was a thinker.

The Barn destruction went well. Besides the blisters we received from crowbars and sledgehammers, we had a blast. Mr. M paid a reasonable salary, and Kenny and I were on top of the world. Unfortunately, our barn destruction days were short lived. After all demolition projects were finished, and the barn had been converted into a respectable piano facility, Kenny and I were demoted from barn destructors to lowly piano shop peons. We were reduced to doing any menial job available for Complete Piano Service. The sweet days of crowbars and sledgehammers were over.

To this day I think about starting a barn destruction company. Unfortunately, I don't think the work is out there.

A post from the other day got me thinking about all the menial jobs I have had, and I have decided to document them for posterity.

Disclaimer: this list will most likely be incomplete, and due to loss of long term memory, facts may be twisted and or fabricated. Any similarity to anyone living or dead is merely a coincidence.

Job 1: Penny Saver Delivery Boy

The Penny Saver was a small periodical that was delivered in my home town of Huntington, NY. It mainly contained ads and classifieds of people selling lawnmowers and the like. The job was handed down from my sister who had grown tired of the "stupid Penny Saver job".

The route was contained within a few blocks of my neighbourhood. As I look back today, it seems quite small, but at the time it seemed unmanageable. To make matters worse, each day you had to combine the ads and the classified together to form a compete Penny Saver. I would come home from school to see three to five piles of adverts and classifieds mocking me from our driveway. I dreaded the route, and on more than one occasion I would stop halfway through and throw the papers in the King Kulan dumpsters (King Kulan being our local grocery store). After many complaints from people not receiving their stinking Penny Saver, which was free I might add, I was forced to deliver the complete route every time.

I was finally released from my Penny Saver job when on family vacation. I let my friend Kenny handle the route while I was gone. Kenny, being smarter and lazier than I, proceeded to dump all the papers, not even combined, behind a hedge in our backyard. When I returned from vacation, the Penny Saver route was no longer. I had to feign anger in front of the proper authorities at Kenny's complete lack of regard for the humble institution that was the Penny Saver and its readership, but in private Kenny and I celebrated our victory. We could now continue our sorties to steal assorted items from the local delicatessen unhampered by the time consuming paper route.

From Mr. Kottke: A bunch of [David Sedaris] articles at Esquire (including audio).

I used to drive a van for a day care center in Saint Paul. Ben will point out that I have had almost every weird and menial job there is, and sadly this would be true (most only lasted a few days or so). Anyway, while driving kids from school to the day care center I would listen to MPR. This is when I first heard David Sedaris. He would have me laughing out loud in the van while the children repelled in fear of me. I highly recommend his books, and if you are fortunate enough to find his books on tape, buy one immediatly. Listening to him read his own material is just that much more enjoyable.

Preach the gospel Ben.

I used be one of those guys who would work ten to twelve hours a day hacking out code so some wholesale computer parts reseller could "be the leader in leveraging e-commerce platforms to deliver a focused strategic technology for proposing the procurement and efficient use of business processes" (courtesy of mouser's jargon generator).

I would pay a lot to get that time back now.

That's when I knew, it was Litzinni all along.

"I'm not fit to touch the hem of your garment." - Cake

There's nothing like a spring thunder storm in the midwest. The sky turned black and green this afternoon at work. A coworker and I went to the back door to take a gander at the oncoming storm. The air was charged with electricity, and lighting was crisscrossing the sky. This is when we realized we were propped up against the metal fire door, and figured we should probably stand away from it. The rain came so hard it blew sheets of water under the door into the building. My coworker opened the door and was drenched in rain. We ran around to the front entrance, which is a room of glass, and watched the hail fall. Some one mentioned that there was a funnel cloud spotted to the west of us, and the proceeded to explain how a glass room is probably not the best place to be when there's a tornado abound. Why do people always have to ruin the fun. get away from the metal door, don't stand by the huge plate glass windows, don't put that paper clip in the outlet...sheesh.

An old friend was in town. We met with a friend and played a little tennis. As I sat on the sideline and watched them play, I thought about how long we have know each other. How it doesn't matter how long its been since we've seen each other, or how often we get together. I also realized, as I watched them try and been each other with tennis balls when the other had his back turned, that we readily digress into our nineteen year old selves whenever the opportunity avails.

I have taken to playing a bit of tennis lately, and damn is it fun. Scott got me started again. I played handball as a kid in Queens and Long Island, and a few years back I started playing tennis. I have always enjoyed games that involved banging balls back and forth (no pun here, so keep your dirty mind to your self!).

The French Open was on this weekend, and it made me realize on simple point. I am slow. When I play tennis, my side of court can seem acres wide and miles long. When Andre plays the court seems tiny. A few steps to the net, and a quick leap to either side of the court. I have come to a conclusion. These people are robot tennis machines built by the CIA to keep the common man down.