Spring Snow

We got a couple of inches of snow here in the hinterlands, and yesterday the temperature was almost at 60 degrees. Such is March.

There was this great moment at work today. Or, more precisely, immediately after work. When the bell rang, we all punched out and headed out to the parking lot. There we all were, cleaning the snow off of our trucks, laughing, tossing snowballs at each other. Men will be boys.

Nightingale's attempts to lose his breathtakingly beautiful beachball beer gut are going well. He's lost 38 pounds in the past two weeks. He's 'eating right' and spending an hour walking fast every day. I'm teasing him: "Oh my God! Do you feel all right? You're wasting away!" I've dubbed him "Our own Calista Flockhart." He mentioned the other day that when he manages to lose the weight he wants to lose, he's planning on shaving his head "like you, Dutch."

Oh Woof! That'll make the loss of his physique easier for me to reckon with. He'll still be the hottest man in the shop in that case.

And another interesting thing on the work front. Okay. This is weird. A few months ago, one of my co-workers, apparently in an attempt to shock and horrify a new co-worker on the guys second day, posed the following question: "If you had this dead bitch who was fucking gorgeous right there and nobody was around, would you fuck her?" (It had its intended effect.) Since then, necrophilia has sort of become the favorite inside joke among us all. (The stock reply to 'How was your weekend?' is 'I didn't get to fuck any dead bitches, but it was okay.')

So anyway, the sick puppy of a co-worker who started this whole ball rolling came up to me and asked how I was liking sanding the cabinet door I was working on. "I'm loving it. I'm loving sanding this door," I replied in a flat monotone and with an expressionless face.

"Yeah?" he said, "Better than fucking a dead... body?"

Interesting. The standard trope is 'fucking a dead bitch.' But he didn't say bitch. He said body.

Now, I haven't come out and announced that I'm a homo, but I sure haven't done much to hide it. And I explained to my only female co-worker that the sticker on my jeep was a leather pride flag. And in response to Nightingale's story about how Felipe Rose, the guy in the Cherokee headdress in the Village People, once treated him to lunch, I responded by telling how a guy on my softball team was dating Felipe and Felipe broke up with him via email, and since that time, my fellow Ball Breaker has that wound reopened every time he hears the Village People.

So maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but maybe it's pretty much become known in the shop that I'm a homo.

The sick puppy in question is racist, obviously sexist, and was almost suspended from high school for calling kids 'faggot.' But he doesn't seem to mind me much.

This is all pretty new to me. I've always been out at work before. It was always pretty much understood, if only because my places of employ have either been wildly homo friendly or at the very least worldly and sophisticated in that New York City kinda way. Like on 'Will & Grace' [g].

Interesting to see how this develops.

The tension is unbearable. I hope it lasts.

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