It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, July 25
Boy, we rather pleasantly stole money tonite at the General Hospital Security Department (GHSD)…This is in direct contrast to last nite when we were obliged to earn it…We much prefer to steal it…The local constables were on property for something or other, but it didn’t involve us, and they were here to arrest someone an ambulance brought in for something or another…That was the closest thing we had to work all nite.
Asher was in early, again, and soon enuff he and Tucker were talking about joining the service…Recall Asher reported last nite he had talked with a Marine recruiter who had somehow gotten his number – he suspects Daniel gave it to him, but Daniel’s joining the Army, so this doesn’t make sense – and the two talked about joining the Air Force and Coast Guard, because they are perceived to be easier, because boot camp is less punishing.
They are less physically demanding…I ain’t going to lie to you…Both are challenging, but don’t kid yourself, Marine recruits work harder at PT than sailors do, and we all work harder than those dorfman airmen who spend boot camp dining at carving stations and blowing up beach balls.
But once you’re in the fleet, the work is just as hard and sometimes not as glamorous as the TV commercials might have made it out to be…Especially the Coast Guard…The Chair Force may mainly involve the setting of thermostats, but Christ, the Coast Guard is hard work.
Then Johnnie joined the fun – four in the office is an awful lot, frankly – and he and Asher both live in the next county, and they got to talking about apartments out there and how most of them are crack whore dens…We strongly suspected Johnnie seemed to find this situation not completely objectionable, but Asher said his building, especially the laundry room, is going to pot, so to speak, and he’ll be glad when he leaves next month.
We did our tours and we ate and we did our project work and that was it…It was so slow we were actually happy to get off our keister at 0430 to go unlock doors, and we really didn’t mind when we missed a couple of scan points and were obliged to backtrack, because we’d done so little all nite we wanted the exercise…Between backtracking and chatting with Lora and the crew on the floor, unlock tour took a good hour, about 15 minutes more than usual and 20 minutes more than when we are really humming and walking at something faster than a lite stroll.
We upped the time on our tai chi-ish forms today…For a while now, we’ve been doing each form for one minute…Yesterday we upped the last set to 70 seconds, and today we upped all three sets…The first set was 70, the second set was 80 seconds and the last one a whopping 90 seconds per form…Let me tell you something, these are not all deep breathing forms, some are GO! Forms and the workout went from routine to challenging and it felt great.
We’ve been driving around the small town after workout recently…It’s early evening, a nice time of the day for something like this…Today we took the fairgrounds route to downtown, then turned up the hill to a residential district and drove out past the cemetery to a county road, where we turned left and went to the highway, where we turned left again…At Maple Street we turned and went a block to North Street, and we took that all the way up to whatever street the market and post office are on…Then we too Main Street the one mile home to The Shire…There are a variety of other routes, too, so hold on to your hats to see which one we do tomorrow.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0830 Friday until 1630 Sunday…8.0 hours for the day and 46.0 hours for the week, a great total heading into Saturday’s finale…You don’t want to count your 50-hour sleep weeks until you’ve actually put in the time in the sack, but we’re looking pretty good.
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The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
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