I say we both quit our jobs and become puppeteers. I'll start work on the stage, you go gather socks.

I just gotta wait until I get my bonus in July. Then I can buy as many fancy puppet socks as you can imagine.

Fancy? No, no, the key to an effective puppet show is to steal old white tube socks as they try to escape from the dryer.

Which reminds me, stockpile buttons to sew on their faces.

White tube socks? What a crappy puppet show. I can understand using a few for Punch, Judy and Baby, but you need red for the Devil, green for Crocodile, blue for Policeman, a plaid one for Clown, a grey one for the Ghost, and an old shoelace for the Hangman.

"That's the way to do it!"

What are you, some kind of modern puppeteer or something? Here we kick it old school, g.

July? You have to wait until July for your bonus?

In that case, you need to hit the Central Park Zoo to steal wool from some sheep. Then spin the wool into yarn and knit socks. But even that's a little too DIY for me...

What are these 'bonus' things you speak of, eath creatures?

BONUS:

1) What the oil companies do, by raising prices.
2) What other companies do, by cutting hours and benefits.

Well academia isn't much better, mullac - I'm stuck putting a lot of work on a paper (from my previous lab) which I'm "not allowed" to be first author on by the people in charge of the study (who do very very very little and expect their names on the paper, too - and one of them wants to be named first author). Since I'm fulltime+ at my current site, I've been working weekends/long weekends/nights (and not getting paid to write that paper, nor the other one - then there's another paper but that's mine, so I don't get to complain about that one other than that my former supervisor being a little obtuse over it).

No, there aren't any bonuses. I'm lucky I'm getting a few bucks over the official poverty line (from my current fulltime+ position).

One day soon we'll all be walking the land looking for work. Walking through towns with one business open -- a dry goods store marked "auto parts" or "car wash" -- with a proprietor who hikes up prices for drifters like us and knocks them down for folk he grew up with. Sitting on open flatcars in the wind, holding onto our kids on high trestles, chucking rocks at rusted Hondas sitting empty and out of gas on roads cracked with dust and disuse.

Our old jobs won't seem so bad then, and the abuses will fade from our memories a little and we'll miss the comfort, but then we'll bed down in a pine forest on a spring mountainside and wake up at dawn to wild turkeys fucking, the mist will empty out of the valley like cloudy washwater from a green enamel basin, and we'll marvel at how rich we still feel.

That's really romantic, Hugh Janus - but when Ma's broke leg gets infected does one put her down with a carefully hoarded .22 or do you bash her head in with a rock (from behind, of course)?

I figure she'll fall off a train. Always was clumsy.

Okay, am I the only here who doesn't get the pun in Hugh Janus' nick? as in Huge Anus? Or I am simply broadcasting a thought that should have died with Ma and that rock she took in the haid?