George told me he has to start drug testing me. Randomly. I have to pee in a cup whenever it strikes this man's fancy.
I told him that'd be fine. I think I would pass since I consume no controlled or illegal substances; daily multi-vitamins are my drug of choice.
George said if he finds out I'm not doing enough drugs, he doesn't want me working there.
"Got to have drugs in your system to work here. Don't know how else you could stand it. I don't want any clean people working here."

Storytime:


George was working one day and some lady with an affected Texas accent walked in and asked for an old kids book, "Little Black Sambo."
"Yeah, I got it," he said. "Don't know why you'd want it."
"Well, ok. How much is it?"
"Twenty."
"Oh, now, that's a bit too much. How about ten," the lady asked.
George picks up the book and puts it inches away form the lady's face. He rips it in half and says: "Lady it's wroth more to me than my original twenty dollars to do that to you, you racist!"



One of my favorite things I've heard George say, though (he's a really intelligent guy, although a bit ornery):
"You can have enough Starbucks, McDonalds, Coldstone, and Sushi, but you can't ever have enough books."



Jarring subject change:
Liz's parents are in town. They took us to Mesa Verde, which is a massive national park. We purchased tickets for a tour of "the long house" at the visitor's center, about five minutes of driving into the park. Then, we drove about forty-five minutes into the park to get to the spot where the tour started. The drive consisted of about ten-thousand switchbacks, views of mesas, rabbit brush, junipers, pinons, and a massive line of SUVs in front of us.
We arrived at the covered picnic area to wait for the start of the tour. Standing there, you could turn in circles and see into the foggy horizon. Miles and miles of rolling desert land. A cloud system was blowing in from the east. I could see that start and finish of the rain it was dropping. To the right and left of it was arid, sunny desert. It was an intruder into the desert, but a most welcome one. Mesa Verde receives about eighteen inches of rain annually.
The storm stayed to our east and we went on our jolly way to the long house, a small community of sandstone-constructed apartments built into a massive curved-L amphitheater hundreds of feet above the dry gully below. Why the hell anyone would live there is beyond me. All those mysterious theories of the peoples' disappearance is full of crap, stories put out by the early railroad to promote tourism and sell train tickets. The people of Mesa Verde simply moved on. It's dry there. The land, sandy and rocky, farmed to it's full potential.
The railroad's story is way more romantic, although impractical and irrational at best. It was an awe-inspiring place; impressive in it's construction and it produced a lot of inquiries on my part about who lived there. These cliff dwellings were actually the last of a series of living spaces constructed by the Ancestral Puebloans who lived in the area. They were built around 1200 A.D.. Earlier spaces consisted of buildings constructed on top of the mesa and dated back to about 450 A.D., which shows that people were living in the area nearly 750 years before some idiot Native American had the idea to build a humongous city into the side of the mesa. Didn't think that one out did ya, buddy? Gotta carry all those fucking rocks down the side of a cliff.
Needless to say, the people who lived at the cliff dwellings didn't stay in residence for very long. From what the park ranger who led our tour said and from what seems most plausible to me, the people who lived here just moved out, went to better land.

There's a lot of beautiful land out here - so much to see. As a boy who grew up in the Ohio River Valley, my eyes and mind have trouble comprehending and fully appreciating the ever-changing lands out here. The dust sweeps over the mountains that seem to explode out of the earth. The wildflowers ornament the landscape like lights on a Christmas tree. The moon shines brighter than anywhere else in the world, like a hundred watt bulb in a denuded and lonely room. The people here don't become nervous and snap their heads as if on rubber bands away form you when you make eye contact. In the morning, God paints the sky with the brightest azure and heedlessly tosses a handful of cottony puffs of moisture into the atmosphere as a coup de grace to his daily masterpiece.