My Adventures in Adulting

South Dakota

The days were bright and green.
My first walk to the store told me everything I was going to need to know about small town life. I was walking down only two blocks to the nearest corner store. I was in need of a Mountain Dew and I really needed to get away from my people.
They weren't driving me crazy or anything but I was awake and restless.
On my walk, I found that it was normal to drive farming equipment down the Main Street. Tractors and combines. A few people driving by me were really interested in who I was.
You could tell by their broken necks as they slowed from the regular speed limit of 25mph to slower than that. Some of them passed me a couple of times as they drove around the block to take a third look.
I felt really fearless and I may have liked the attention at first. But on their third pass?
Yeah on the third pass, I began that anti-social habit. You know the one....
I couldn't understand how I was so important.
I thought I could fit in pretty easy but I didn't realize I was brown. Some of these people must have never seen someone like me. And to be honest, I had never seen anything like them and I came from a ranching town. A farming community in California.
People in my old town didn't drive their combines down the main drag. But in this town, that was cool. I'm not talking about run down old grandpas tractors either. They were nice with stereo systems and whatnot.
There was a weird feeling as I walked through the doors of the Corner Pantry. It was the name of the convenience store. They had normal stuff and something new to me. They made deep fried stuff like chicken and potatoes and personal pan pizzas.
I was drying out. My head was clearing up. All I wanted really was some weed. I wanted to smoke something green if you know what I mean. I wasn't in Cali anymore.

                                2
    I met a woman and her name was Laurie. She was my sisters bestie and I cannot tell you how many besties I stole from my sister. She could. . .
   But I cannot. I had been stealing them since we were little kids.
   Laurie was 18, and me only being twenty, I thought that was a perfect age appropriate girlfriend. And so, sobering up opened my eyes a bit more to my current situation. I still had a girlfriend with three kids.
My mom hated this chick. They didn't get along and the more I cleaned the fog away, the more I realized, I didn't like her much either.
I started grasping for reality like it was teetering away. She was pretty hell bent on a happy life, but really didn't know how happy life really was.
We argued a lot. The cleaner we got, the more we fought. And being wasted a lot didn't help us know how to deal with each other when we were doing the damn thing.
It ended ugly as fuck.
She had me put in jail for some domestic bullshit and then played me out as some asshat who was violent and crazy.
Hey—-)—> our arguments were crazy. But I swear, I never was what she said I was. I never threw her around or beat her up. This was not my way. She definitely had the upper hand here though.
And so, the city put her up back on the bus and sent her home back to California with her three kids.
I wound up getting out of jail and collecting my yellow spine and the black one too, which I had written a bunch of incriminating shit in. They tried to use these words against me in the court room saying that how I came to to Dakota was illegal. And how I did get the cash to move here had been illegal, we also sold all of our shit to get there. Not everything was illegal.
But they had to release me cause everything I wrote was a crime in California and not where I was. Seems I ruined my name in that town.
   That town was the least of my worries for it seems it came as fast as went. I scored a job in this pork plant. It was called Dakota Pork. My job consisted of standing in one spot all day and shaving pig carcasses as they swung past hanging upside down dripping blood and smelling like burnt hair because they drag these pigs through lime to loosen hair and then burn them till the hair  is standing. Then it came to me to shave remaining hair and then they went down a disassembly line where they cut the ears off and so on. 
   Ham legs and ribs and whatnot. Tenderloins were cut and dropped effortlessly down a hole
In the floor. The floors below took whatever and cut things again or whatever they do to get your package that you buy from the store to you.
   I hated this job.
   What I remember most is about a week into the job,  I said something to somebody about how my hands hurting and they gave me a job ripping fat out of the carcass.
  Using your thumb, dig into the fat and then pull really hard and rip the fat coming off the inside of the rib cage.
  My hands hurt from shaving pigs!
  So they gave me a different job at night cleaning the chitlin room. This is where the intestines are dropped through the floor and then cleaned. Put into plastic packaging and then sent to the grocery store. They also make sausages and hotdog casings.
  This floor stank so bad. It was very messy with stuff intestines hold.
   It first needed to be sprayed down with a fire hose and then foamed with this chemical corrosive which ate up Bacteria.
   My first day there, in the chitlin room and I chemically burned a drip from the top of my neck and down my chest over my junk and down my leg.
   I quit that day and never collected my check.
   I walked into Kmart and scored a job.
   Night stalker.
   Man I hated that job. Both of them.
  I needed to work. Everybody does right?
  I spent a lot of these days eating gas station burritos, mountain dews and drinking liquor. Smoking weed was a normal really. It was expensive for the time but I was happy.
   Let me just say, this History book is so boring. I know.
   I'm not trying to bore you. Honest.
   You're still here? Let me know.
   How was I gonna get out of here? I needed out of South Dakota. There was no way I was gonna make a living doing what I wanted to do here in the Dakotas.
   Shit happens. I moved over night with a decision made just as quick out to Nevada.
  Laurie had a sister there who was gonna help us get started out there.
    So Elko, Nevada happens to be where I started my adult coming of age. I learned a lot about people. Trust issues and abandonment did not exist with in me. I wanted a lot and I got a lot of what I wanted.
   I could go into another three years of stories. Escapades of untold misery. Elevated Ecstasy. Mid riffs of even flow. All the fun stuff.
    Heartbreak and betrayals. Many of them. Some of them my own. I had two daughters.
   I became a whoring tattoo shop owner.
    I did all kinds of dirt.
   If I wrote it all down, there would be many pages of me just bragging. I'm not just bragging.
    If I'm honest, at least with myself, I'm sure you don't want to read about my side of the story, about some of the dirtiest stuff I did. I assure you though... there were plenty of days of real buffoonery.  I started using a bunch of stuff. Including people.
   I learned a lot about what was possible. It seemed as though nothing was at the time. I showed myself that anything was.
   I was going to make this part of my life a book just by itself but fuck that. Even my stories bore me.
   I scored a job as an exploration driller finding gold for gold mines to mine. It was dirty and filthy and I loved it. Moved back to South Dakota and worked in the famous Homestake Gold Mine finding world famous Black Hills Gold.
    I made my way back to Elko to go to work for another drilling company which payed me off in the winter and then I bought my first tattoo shop. I got fucked up. I got fucked. And then I fucked myself.
   I had a lot of fun. I really did.