Dear Carnival-goers,
It’s been an odd week here at BC. With many of the regular Barkers on furlough (I hear Doperbo is spending all his chits on passes to the 3D premiere of Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief) Sailor has decided to take on an intern for clerical tasks around the office and has secured me in a position that is a polar opposite of sinecure.
As resident intern here at BC I can tell you that one of the more exciting things was meeting the staff, and yes, oddly enough, the faces do match the ones you have in your head. A few of the things I have seen that will maybe give you an insight into life here at BC:
Sailor somehow wears a sombrero without a lick of irony and occasionally can be overheard saying, as if to himself or no one in particular, “fedora’s are for pussies.” HenryJames has snack time at 10:15 every day and bad things happen if this is not observed. Vasherized is a svelte 350 but can dominate a pickup game for solid 3 to 4 minute stretches. CTJ leads the noon Muschamp Mass and attendance is in no way optional. Scipio has gone missing ever since he met Tim Tebow in one of San Francisco’s more posh bathhouses and had what he said was his first step towards “theosis”.
On my first day and upon meeting SR he gave me one of those disposable dust masks so that I could “go down to the basement and take care of whatever godawful smell is down there… and make sure not to touch anything that looks like asbestos. We are not insured for that.”
To give you some sense of the layout of the space: the office is shaped like a cardioid, with each chamber representing a workspace, and in the backside of what would effectively be the left atrium, just behind Trips’ lifesize cutout of Venezuelan great Carl Herrera (sporting Gatos de Monagas gear no less), is the door to the basement with a sign that says “HenryJames knows he’s not supposed to be in here” tacked to it.
In the corner there was what appeared to be a turbid pile of canvas sacks but upon closer inspection I found what turned out to be a tethered Laotian whose dog collar identified her as Bing Bong II. Effete isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind. Sailor told me to go ahead and just have her put down rather than any expensive E.R./I.V. treatments, and then he gave me a website so that I could “find another one…and save that collar.” I guess while Scipio spends his furlough gallivanting across the foothills of northern Kazakhstan proselytizing for the Church of Latter Day Saints of the Third Coming she wasn’t exactly getting the sort of attention she was used to, or that sustains life. No worries though, Fedex has a handy app that tracks your package’s location to within a square mile of its location, and Bing Bong III is as we speak about two klicks off the coast of California.
Hope you enjoy the little windows into our world. Next week Sailor is taking us on a field trip to Mexican Disneyland. Don’t worry, we’ll definitely take pictures.