blurring_the_edges_46_nocturnes birdmad Your brother moves in a week after easter and his four year old daughter is a torment unleashed directly out of hell from the minute she steps through the door. You and your nephew retreat as much as possible when he is not at school and you at work to the safety of any place other than the house, especially when you have a little more money to spend, which, while your brother is getting situated, is not too often, as you are now carrying the bulk of the family's expenses. To his credit, Andrew has not let any moss grow underneath himself and has busted all the ass in the world to find work, knowing full well that your income and the annuity payment your mom gets from your dad's insurance aren't enough to keep seven people in the same house afloat with an eighth on the way. Ultimately, he signs on with a temp agency and as if by some goofy coincidence, they put him in as an assembler a the factory where you are working. You feel a slight swell of self satisfied pride from your old childhood sibling rivalry to know that while still a peon yourself, you are higher on the food-chain and the proverbial totem pole than Andrew for once. He works in the shadow of you and the reputation you have here, not the other way around. Your sister-in-law is due in July and is suffering the stresses of the increasing heat and the general effects of bordering on her third trimester. A few times she offers to cook and when she does, the house generally regrets it, but as she studied your mom when she works the kitchen, things slowly begin to improve. Now if she would just ditch those godawful politics of hers. On a few occasions, you've heard her quoting that right-wing jackass who has been all over TV lately, gaining popularity while seeming to be disconnected from so much of reality on the whole. His fans, like your sister-in-law, spout back the opinions he feeds them. Yeah, stick around, sister, see the world from a viewpoint outside the safe, suburban existence you know and let's just see if those perceptions remain intact. After a while of working together, you and your brother re-connect in a way that you had not been close before except for those last few months before your dad died. It feels nice, but you still can't seem to manage to get him to really do anything about his hellion daughter who has managed to wreck and ravage the already untidy ecosystem of the room you and your nephew share. Eventually, the word comes down from the top that at the end of May, they are creating a night shift for some of the assembly and test positions. The pay will be ten percent differential, which isn't much, but is an improvement, plus it means you won't have to get up at four-forty-five to leave by five thirty and be at work by six_in_the_morning as the night shift won't start until the day shift lets out. In other words, dear Alex, you won't have to be at work until Five in the evening. Now does that sound sweet or what? By the way, it looks like you are finally starting to lose some of that weight you packed on leading up to the holidays. Sure, you've lost a little muscle mass, but you had gotten as high as 318, and you're down to what... two-hundred-seventy-five in five months now? That's pretty good, considering the way you eat. You keep pursuing openings as they occur at Precision, even going, as Teri's guest to their company picnic in Tempe, where Teri immediately commits the faux pas of mentioning out loud as her manager is coming up within earshot that the manager's girlfriend is a big scary bull-dyke of the worst kind. Within two weeks, no doubt at least partly because of her remarks, Teri is out of Precision but lands on her feet a week later at an even better firm a few blocks away at X-E Systems. You lack the credentials to get in at X-E but submit a few apps anyway, hoping to be considered the next time they go through another hiring burst. When the night shift finally starts at the factory, you are more than happy as here has been a recent re-organization of the structure of things and you are starting to have a lot of friction between old Andy Whitehorse, Joe Herlihy in charge of production and you. The night shift assignement is a godsend in that you don't have old Andy second-guessing you anymore and you don't have Herlihy sticking his dick in the works to stir the pot either. Outside of Harry the engineer who has been assigned as the night manager, you and Tommy Zendejas are the two most senior guys in the facility at nights and the three of you get along famously. The new schedule has more than its share of added benefits in that you don't feel the need to eat as often and you now finish your week at 3:30 AM on Friday morning and don't have to be back until 5:00 PM on Mondays. Teri makes a plan to hit San_Diego around the fourth of July weekend and you are all for it, booking the hotel room on your newly acquired credit card. You find the best rate at a rather nice place in the Old Town area and Teri is thrilled. "You know, Alex, as much as you seem to have your shit together and as sexy as you come across sometimes, if i wasn't gay, i'd start nagging you to put a ring on my finger about now, y'know." Gay or not, the thought crosses your mind until the next time you go to see her and in the process of going to pick her up for a planned evening out one night, you happen to catch sight of her in the parking lot of her apartment complex taking a rather cute brunette back to her apartment. Unfazed, you go out to The Grind to find a cute brunette of your own, scoring a something just slightly longer than a quickie in an out of the way corner before deciding to catch a movie at the Cinemark Grand next door. You end up sitting through an interesting remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which in addition to being rather brief in its running time, was effectively paranoid in the way it played out. On top of this, the actress who played the heroine of the movie was cute as all hell, further increasing the watchability of the movie. When the time comes, you and Teri take the San Diego trip and other than the few little jaunts you took on "business" purposes a couple of years back, this is the first time you have been on vacation in California since the summer you ended up finding out your dad had cancer seven years ago. You try persuading Teri to fly out, but more than anything she wanted to road-trip the hop to San Diego, and in spite of the tune up and all the other work you had either done yourself or paid to have done to your car, Teri decided, and perhaps rightly so, that she would rather take her RX-7. She shows up at 2:30 AM at the house and your mom invites her in. You have gotten all of your gear packed and ready and you have already showered and dressed before settling in for a nap. You are pleasantly awakened by Teri sitting next to you and tousling your hair telling you that it's time to go. Perhaps playing to your mom, who Teri knows you haven't told about her being a lesbian, she kisses you on the forehead as she wakes you up and then smacks you on the ass to get your attention. As you are underway, you ask Teri about that, and she says she's doing the same thing with her grandmother, telling her that you are her boyfriend so that Gran, who while nice, is very much the bible-belt version of the churchgoer and, as Teri explained, would be sorely disappointed to know that her grandbaby was a dyke. The climate change while traveling the highway is insanely obvious, going from muggy heat even in the darkest early hours of morning, to warm and dry at the edges of the high desert reaching the Arizone California border, to hot and dry descending towards San Diego and ultimately cool and humid upon reaching the city. Tired and sweaty, the two of you share a shower before settling in for a brief afternoon nap and hitting the city in the earliest parts of the evening. Feeling your sleep-spawned erection digging into the lower part of the back of her thigh, Teri pats your crotch as if it were a lap dog and says, (with a little bit of a laugh) "Down boy." As she gets out of bed and gets dressed she can apparently tell that you are blushing and teases you about it in the same voice she used the other night to acknowledge that you had tucked her into bed at her apartment. The weekend is a non-stop blast, from buying the Michael Parkes print at the art store to clubbing at Emerald City and the Fireworks and lasers that made up the big evening show by the boardwalk. By the time the trip is over, you are whishing you could have made the stay a permanent thing, but after four and a half days, you both need to get back to work. Two and a half more weeks pass and your sister-in-law goes into a fairly lengty labor, bringing forth your newest nephew, baby Stephen. Stevie is small and was born conscious but momentarily silent. As soon as the doctors in the delivery room produced a cry from him, it came as a complete surprise to find out that he was a little shrieker as it would later turn out that baby Stevie had some form of congenital heart problem that he will ultimately grow out of, but for the first few monhths of his life, the baby has a hole in his heart that will have to heal closed as he ages. Only two gripes with baby Steven: First, the boy is a shrieker, but you guess if your heart wasn't formed totally correctly the first time, you'd be pretty pissed too. Second: To account for the arrhythmic hearbeat, the poor little guy was hooked to a heart-monitor with an alarm system that shriedked at a very high volume, loud enough to, say, oh, "Wake the Dead" (end of chapter later) 030712 ... birdmad Between Stevie crying at all hours and the little hellspawn neice of yours, you would go to work every day looking and feeling like a zombie, sucking down cans and bottles of Mountain_Dew left and right, but thanks to the second shift schedule, you don't have to be up until two in the afternoon. It works for you, and so does the strange sensation of not being hungry as often or as severely while working this schedule...who knows, maybe your body is confused or something. You make a decision that gets a perplexed reaction from everyone you tell, but it just seems to make a certain amount of sense based on the way you've been feeling and where you think your health might be headed. After a couple of weeks of deliberation over the presumed benefits versus the rather obvious costs, you decide to try your hand at being a vegan, giving up meat, dairy and anything else that either was capable of independent motion or was derived from soething that was. You don't do it because you feel bad for the animals, only because you want to improve the condition you are in and because you want to continue dropping the rest of that weight you were carrying last year. It proves difficult, but saves you from a number of what prove to be stomach wrenching meals that your sister-in-law prepares in her turns in the kitchen. By the second week, you are coping quite well with the drastic change in your diet, but when you sleep you are having some intensely weird dreams about you and the rest of the guys on the night crew being vampires and moving your workbenches to the ceiling so you can work upside down because it just feels better that way. Of course the other part of this recurring vampire-dream is that you frequently fantasize about biting Dina, the new on-site rep from the temp agency that brings in all the new people. You've entertained the notion in your head about wanting to get a taste of her since she came through and started flirting with you and a couple of the other guys in the technician's block of the floor, but not quite in the same capacity as you do in the dream. By the third week, the dream is morepersistent, you attribute it to Iron deficiency, but you deliberately planned the things you eat to account for that, so you rule it out. You are down to two hundred sixty three pounds from the two-seventy-five you'd been holding at since spring. A net loss of fifty-five pounds since your peak weight around New Year's Eve By the time Teri tells you about winning a trip to Vegas from some drawing she entered on a whim, the fourth week of your vegan experiment, you are freaking out, though you don't quite know why, you have not had any conscious thought about falling off the wagon and sinking your teeth into any flesh other than in your strange dreams, but finally, after a rough, balls-to-the-wall session of cranking out product to meet a tight deadline made tighter by a series of major production-line and day-shift-test clusterfucks, wehn the lunch buzzer sounds, you head straight for the grocery store down Seventh street to Baseline and head for the Deli before it closes, thankful that they are open later than most store delis would be. Whipping out your debit card, you ask the guy who is just getting ready to close down the deli section to slice you two pounds of his best Italian roast beef at six-fifty a pound. He looks up at you and complies immediately, seeming almost afraid on the sight of you, unshaven for the last week or so and sporting a rather wolf-like layer of fuzz on your face and hops to it, working the slicer so fast you are almost afraid you might get his fingers mixed in with your cold-cuts When you get it back to the plant, you rip the bag open and without such encumberances as bread or cheese, you proceed to scarf it down, scaring your co-workers with your ravenous ingestion of the blood-rare meat. You half expect to be sick from the sudden re-introduction of flesh to your digestive tract, but other than a mild cramp and a little gas, you escape the more cruel outcomes that Teri's friend Gina warned you about if you switch back suddenly from going vegan After that, the funky dreams leave you alone and you resume dreaming of biting Dina in only the most harmless and playful ways, chagrined by the fact that she took this assignment shiortly after returning from her honeymoon. Such is life, Alex... Besides, other than fantasy, what chance do you or any of these other factory grunts really think you'd have with that one, eh? She's not one of your Scottsdale acquaintances with a penchant for rough trade, don't delude yourself, man. 030929 what's it to you? who go blather from