misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

You aren't exactly learning something when I remind you that Halloween has traditionally been my favorite holiday. Halloween stands as the intersection of serveral elements I hold dear to my heart. Firstly, you have the emotion of fear and mystery as the foundation of the holiday. As i've previously explained, never is my mind more crisp and clear than when I am experiencing the adrenaline surge caused by a frightful encounter, whether that is a movie or a real-life event. I think it stems from my days in middle school, living in the brand-new home in Rancho Bernardo my family had just moved to from Buffalo Grove, Illinois. This home was big and cavernous, filled with the hollow spanish tile popular in San Diego canyon homes. Brand new, the house had none of the lived-in comfort of a usual house. It was nothing but rooms, walls, and bodies. It sat at the lip of a canyon in a newly-built community, so there was nothing beyond our backyard save for sage brush, ice plants, and endless dark. Suffice to say, it all combined to create a petri dish for my active imagination. I vividly remember waking up countless nights close to 3 AM, sure I had heard someone moving about downstairs. With fear coursing through my veins, my senses heightened. I could hear the sound of a daddy longlegs walking on the living room wall, a carpet fiber swaying under the air conditioner, the dropping of a single leaf outside onto the grass. My eyes could penetrate dark, and I could distinguish shades of shadows, pick apart single filaments of light streaming through the window. I could smell intruders. Feel them. I even had a six sense that could see through walls and floors. Simply by looking down, I could bring to mind's eye the gruff, unshaven murder creeping downstairs, his eight-inch butcher knife reflecting a metallic glow from the microwave's digital clock. Of course, once I woke up my brother to help me investigate, the murderer, and all evidence of his existence, would be gone. But I knew he had been there. I had saved myself, with help of my extraordinary sensory skill.

This clarity of thought and enhanced senses, along with the excitement of the uknown, is recalled every time I watch a horror movie, attend a haunted house, or watch Ghost Hunters. The mystery behind scientific unknowns appeals to me. The supernatural is the one thing scientists don't have an explanation for, which allows me to posit my own theories, and use my imagination. Somehow, ghosts are more exciting to me than particle physics.

The second element of Halloween that has always pleased me is the dress up factor. Something about being what you are not, and the escape and expression it allows you, has always been pleasing to me. To mention nothing of the slut factor. Halloween is the one day each year every single girl wants to dress up like a slut, which I highly approve of. At this year's Halloween party at Hotel Giraffe in the East Side, every single one of the 200 or so women there were dressed as every man's sexual fantasy. There were slutty pirates, slutty sluts, slutty cops, slutty tennis players, slutty nurses, slutty cowgirls, slutty devils, slutty angels, slutty apartment supers, slutty bears, slutty telephone maintenance repair women. I'm not sure what it is about halloween that unleashes every girls inner-slut, but I like it.

Unfortunately, my days as a Halloween fan are coming to an end. It is turning into St. Patrick's Day, or worse, a glorified Cinco De Mayo, like a Cinco de Octobre or something. It is simply an excuse to go to a bar. Nowhere can I find the ultimate Halloween celebration, which would be a night of horror movies, ouija boards, and a trip to the cemetary or local abaondoned mental hospital. So the time has come for me to stay at home for the holiday, hide in the hallways, and terrify any kid that comes remotely close to my door. It is only right to give him the gift of mental clarity that I cherish so much.

My name is Finnegan. Yes, as in Finnegan's wake. And no, i'm not Irish. If you give a shit, eventually I'll tell you all the reason for the name. But not now. It is a depressing story and I'm of the opinion that folks shouldn't be depressed within one minute of meeting you. I live in Wales. No, I'm not Welsh either. I'm a true, oreo-eating, beer-gut-owning American. Being that you, too, are American, I'm sure you don't know the first thing about Wales, so do yourselves a favor and look into it yourself. I have no intention of giving you some sort of cute, superficial Lonely Planet summary of where i live. You'll figure it out as we go.

I run a small bar on the coast called "Merry's Kitten" (don't complain - i didn't name the fucking place. I don't like bad wordplay any more than you do). I guess I should clarify, whenever I say "the coast", I am referring to the southern coast of Wales, on the Bristol Channel, by Tenby, in Pembrokshire. Feel free to look it up. The bar, which I refuse to call a pub like all the fuckers here do, is small, filled with fat, pale tourists from "the town," which is a fancy, look-how-insider-I-am term for London. They usually come to Tenby to see Caldy Island or Pembroke Castle but get bored within a few hours, so they come here to sit on a stool, get piss drunk and munch on laver bread, some godawful snack made from oatmeal, seawood and cheese on toast (these fucking people have no idea of good food). I don't make the shit. I have it delivered each day by some 12 year-old deaf boy from the Centre. His mom is ugly in a way that only people from here can be. She sits in her kitchen and makes it for some of the places around here, and her kid bikes around each morning to deliver it. The kid is quiet, which I like, so let him hang around while I set up in the morning. The best part of my whole gig is nobody here has a problem spending 4 quid on a pint. As I'm sure you don't know what the hell that is in your beloved dollars, I'll help you out. It is about $7.50. Not bad considering I can pour about 50 pints from a keg I buy for about 60 quid (quid being slang for pound, of course. Some drunk professor from Birmingham once told me it is from "quid pro quo", meaing, according to his slobbering rendition, "somein in 'change fore anudder". These Brits sure do love their Latin.) I get some locals in here too, although I don't charge them tourist prices, not that they'd pay 'em anyway. We usually work out some sort of exchange. I'll give them some pints, they'll give me some thing I need. Favors are important in a remote town like this. Especially when you're an outsider.

Whatever your fantasy is of some English bar on the coast of the North Atlantic, I can assure you it is wrong. My bar doesn't have expensive mahagony wood, pictures of 18th century HMS cutters, or mirrors imprinted with the reflections of centuries worth of visitors. I do have a dartboard, but that is left over from the drunken local I bought the place from, and doesn't really hold darts very well. It took me a few weeks here to realize nobody wants that cliche English shit. The bar's greatest asset is a lack of pretension. I have beer, seats, a good heater, and a small TV always warmed with the images of their much beloved Premiership (I tried getting these fuckers into baseball, but it didn't catch, so to speak).

To the east of my bar is an Inn, something like a B&B, but with more rooms. If you ask me, it is a fucking glorified Motel 6 with shingles. But it gets me good business, as much from the sorry-ass employees there as from the sorry-ass tourists they serve. To the west used to be a video store, then nothing, and now is getting renovated to be some sort of Welsh souveneir shop, or at least that is what the city woman who bought the place told me. The Welsh are real proud of themselves, and have some sort of paranoid idea that everyone is out to desecrate their culture. I, for one, give a shit if they keep talking in their ugly language. Go ahead and order a pint in Welsh, but I can't promise you'll get what you ordered.

If the bar isn't what you'd expect from your movie-induced imagination, the weather certainly is. I know you haven't been to Wales, seeing as how Americans don't go anywhere a Marriott doesn't exist, but I'm sure you can guess our weather. It rains. A lot. And not those pussy raindrops you guys call rain over there. This is rain, as in freezing water that falls from the sky, as in raindrops big enough to break a bone. And it doesn't stop falling until sometime around April, for about an hour break, before it gets going again. The there is the wind. Wind that head in from the southwest, right off the Irish Sea. These winds have a smell, too. Smells like cold. Like a scream from Greenland, spiked with whale piss and supertanker exhaust. And it is pissed off by the time it gets here, the first land it hits after a few miserable days on the North Atlantic. You get used to it afterwhile, though. Reminds you something is going on in the world outside of your bar. Reminds you the world doesn't give a shit about you. Mother nature would blow you off the earth in a second if she had her way. I feel the same about her. I actually like the weather here. It suits my mood perfectly. The world doesn't really give a shit about this place, and I don't give a shit about the world, so it fits.

Not sure if you are wondering how I ended up in Wales. Eventually that'll come out. I've been meaning to start up a blog, and came across this one. As it doesn't look like the person who used to run this blog is still posting, I figure I can use the space for awhile. Saves me the trouble of having to start a new one up, and earn a readership. If this "workmonkey" who actually started this blog ever comes back, I'll be willing to let the readers decide who should stay. Mostly, I've got some secrets I've got to get off my chest. Something I did, or, rather, something I am going to do, that you just might find interesting (though I know your numb American minds have been neutered of their ability to be interested in anything for more than 2 minutes, thanks to years of the internet and Hollywood). So maybe you won't be interested. Maybe you'll just be mildly curious, as you paw at that cup of Haagen-Das i know you eat each day. But hell, I'll take that.

So let's get started.