GLOVEBOX AS PANDORAS BOX

My son and his lovely bride to be are getting married this saturday, and to make sure the future hippy grandparents to be are both in attendance, Ann is working 4 10 hour shifts so's to be off on the glorious day. I get off work at 4. Normally this isn't a problem when Ann works till 5, but she went shopping on saturday and bought enough food to last til mid week. She didn't make the connection of her planning ahead with the assassination of my "when Ann works til 5 time kill at the grocery store" strategy to avoid sitting in a barren parking lot for at least 45 minutes and sometimes over an hour. To be fair, when we both get off at 4, Ann has to wait for me to get there. Depending on the traffic that's usually between 4:18 and 4:22. Sometimes, Ann gets a late call that runs long and I end up sitting for 20 or 30 minutes even on a 4 day. So it evens out. I'm not bitching. But what is a bored boy to do, sitting in a big barren parking lot with an hour to kill? Masturbation is out because the side of the building facing the rodeo is bristling with cameras. Not placed there to catch a bored masturbating husband waiting for their wife to come, no...wait, get off , oh nevermind, plus there's no tissue.
So what did I do, you ask? From 4:19 to 5 I spun the toggle of a toggle bolt up and down the bolt by thumping it with my index finger ( while this resembles masturbation in some industrial east german way, it was a strength test ) to see how far down or up I could make the toggle go with a single thump ( almost Fruedian if you think about it long enough ). I searched my tool bag for left over peanuts.
I didn't find any. I considered sorting the mess that is my tool bag and thought better of it. I listen to Jeff Ward rail away on a bonus program for school employees in houston...80% of those qualified got a bonus and it broke down like this, ( these bonuses were based on classroom performance and decreasing the drop out rate down there in H-town) Cafe workers got an average of 132.00, Teachers got an average of 434.00, Principles got 5000.00 and "upper administrators" got 20,000. It's a fucking shame shit like this happens, considering the "upper administrators" were undoubtedly responsible for the distribution of these bonuses. During our heyday at that circle of hell known as Hines Pool, Ann and I each got a bonus of 1000 dollars. Ann for being an IT wizard and me for cleaning pools like a, well, a pool cleaner. That was before the fall. The school bonus thing pissed me off and reminded me of the larger problem in this country, which I won't go into right now because you already know what the problem is, and besides, the question remains...did I rub one out or not?
For the record...no, I did not.
But I did open the glove box. I open this glove box every day. Once in the morning to put the detachable face of my CD player in there and get a pack of cigarettes out, once in the afternoon to retrieve the face of my CD player. Now that I think about it, this daily exercise is a joke. If somebody were to break into the rodeo for purposes of liberating my stereo, all they would have to do is open the glovebox and shazaam! One Alpine CD reciever complete with handy carrying case. I guess a false sense of security is better than no sense of security at all. Also in the glove box are my fuzzy dice, relegated there years ago because the constant bobbing and weaving while riding on the rear view mirror drove Ann crazy. They always fall out to the floorboard as if to say "reinstate me to the rearview for I am so much cooler than that chicken foot hanging there now".
The rest of the stuff is old repair reciepts, oil changes, tire changes, etc. In my boredom i thumbed through this pile of secondary record and found a check stub. From Hines Pool. It was Anns. I looked at it. I winced. I found another stub, this one mine. I looked at it. I winced again. I did the math between income then and now. I winced...hard.
I closed the glovebox and thought about those days. The past, when things were flush and there were no worries. No waiting in a parking lot, itching to masturbate, waiting for the wife. And then I thought about it again. The past, I mean. I remembered Ann working 70 plus hours a week, so stressed out from the unpredictability of Andy and the waves of dysfunction that was and is Hines Pool. I remembered trying to read his mood every day with a sense of dread. I remembered the commute I hated so much. I remembered Andys mood and motives and sickness dominating our lives. Sure, the money was good, but it wasn't worth it in the long run. I miss the income. But I cherish the peace of mind.
And then I spun the toggle some more, and smiled to myself when Ann finally emerged from the building.