if u care at all abpot me, tell me wer to get myoelectric prottheses ehich will contai anndmove my limbs. please.;'

Most people looking at me, standing by the shredder all day feeding papers into it, might count me down as a flunky.

Huh.

Let me tell you something about that.

You have to think about why things are the way they are. Now, the papers are being shredded because they have to be destroyed. They have to be destroyed because they are dangerous. They are dangerous in the wrong hands because they could reveal salaries, compromise bids, violate personnel privacy, and start lawsuits. So you have to assign a man to shred them.

A man you can trust.

Okay? A lot of dangerous, litigable stuff passes through my hands. And I shred it. I’m the one who can be trusted. Just like a U.S. marshal. Like an FBI man.

The boss waits for one of those big cranes to go by, clanking and all painted yellow with a serial number spelled out with little metal tags. Then he steps forward quickly and hands me a sheaf of papers. “Shred these for me Willy?” he says. I say, “Yes sir!” and get right to it. Now, most people in the plant get their marching orders from a flunky of a flunky of the flunky of the boss. But I get my orders directly from him. Those intermediary flunkies can’t be trusted with the material we handle, the boss and I. So I have a direct meeting with him about once a day.

That’s the level I’m on.

Here comes Allison and I can’t help looking at her. Her hair is glossy black like a big clean waterfall. Or a pillow. I’d like to sleep on it, smelling it all night. She’s putting mail in slots right by my station at the shredder. I turn the shredder off to give the electric motor inside a rest. It gets hot sometimes and the breaker will trip. You have to watch for that. When the motor winds down I say, “Hello, Allison. Your hair looks lovely today.”

She jumps like she didn’t see me there and I startled or, or like I had brought up the subject of animal genitals or something. She is a very delicate creature. She is from Korea and women are different there. Here in America a woman comes at you swearing and making jokes about animal genitals, and then she grabs you by the crotch and asks you out on a date.

And you’d better say yes. At least that’s my experience with American women. Allison isn’t like that, though. She’s a delicate creature, and you can’t just go up to one with your big silver Texas belt buckle on, grab her by the hand, crushing a few bones there, and say: “Damn glad to meet you, honey!” And then start talking about animal genitals.

Allison is like a blushing blossom, and I will have to soothe her gently as a spring mist. She walks away and I watch her ass, small and bulbous and making that skirt bounce.

Ms. Henderson sees me watching Allison, I guess, because she gives me that cross, evil look and then ducks back in the office. I’m sure she thinks I am a flunky and that I have no right to be making love to Allison. I start up the shredder and run the sheets in three at a time, making like I hadn’t see her.

Most people will say that the machine can take only one or two sheets at a time. I always chuckle when I hear them say that. Well, for most people it’s true. They put in three sheets, and it jams. But that’s only because they don’t know how to feed in three sheets.

As it goes through, if you pay any attention at all, you can notice that it crinkles a little, and then it folds. Well, that means the machine it now trying to pull six sheets. That’s three twice. And it hums for a second and jams. Naturally. On the other hand, I feed them with careful attention to their weight and trajectory, so they go in perfectly straight and don’t fold. So you see, the machine can handle three pages at once. It’s just the consequences of poor paper insertion that it cannot handle. People never blame themselves, they always blame the machine.

About once a month some buffoon, usually a new guy, tries to shred his own papers and the machine jams. Then they call me out of the men’s room to come fix it. It always happens when I’m in the men’s room because there’s no other time anyone can get near my machine. I never look at the new guy who caused the jam, and one of the welders or electricians from the shop will take the guy aside quietly and explain that you should leave all the shredding to Willy.

After that they leave it to me.

Sometimes I think it would be nice if the sharpened rollers could be levered open, like a jaw. Then you could clear a jam in just a second. As it is I have to pull the papers out of the jaws with a pair of needle-nosed pliers, then run the machine in forward and reverse until the jam finally clears.

A new machine might be nice.

There is an announcement over the loudspeaker. “Attention!” Ms. Henderson says, “The fire unit is responding to a chemical spill in building 28.” There is a pause and then she says: “Willy Hudson, report to the office.”

That’s me. I take up my papers, the ones that haven’t been shredded yet, and I go into the office. The boss is in there nodding his head while Ms. Henderson waves her arms and shouts. Her nails are three inches long and her hair is permed out cotton candy. Even through the glass you can hear her scream: “I’ve had it with that flunky! He’s messed up for the last time!”

When I tap on the door, she yanks it open and says: “Get in here!” I sit down calmly and look at the director. He is flipping through some papers.

“Look,” he says, “My friends, I am a busy man and I only have a few minutes, so let’s cut to the quick on this.” In my mind that comment is aimed half at me and half at Henderson. I wonder why he puts up with her at all. “Willy, Ms. Henderson tells me there have been some problems with your performance.”

I look at her. She takes over.

“Willy, were you standing over by the shredder this morning?”

“Yes, m’am.”

“And what were you doing?”

“Shredding.”

“And were you looking at any of the documents?”
“Yes m’am, I was.”

She was thrown off a little by that, because she didn’t expect me to say yes.

“Well I admire your honesty, Willy, because that makes this all a whole lot easier. We’re going to have to let you go. You know those are sensitive documents. We shred them precisely because we can’t afford to have flunky people like yourself digging them out of the trash and looking at them. And we can only entrust them to people who are completely trustworthy. You have violated that trust.”

The director relaxed back in his chair and giggled. He waved a pencil loosely in the air. “Nellie,” he said, “this boy can look at the documents all he wants.”

“But Bill."

“He’s illiterate! Can’t read a word. He was tested a few years ago and found cognitively disabled.”

Ms. Henderson looks at me in shock.

The director continued: “That’s what makes him uniquely qualified for this job. That’s why I picked him.”

She’s speechless. Feeling kind of flush with my victory, I say: “Do you think we can get a new shredder, the kind with the lever-action jaw so I can clear jams quicker?”

“Sure, Willy,” he says. “Just get the catalog and show Nellie the picture of the one you want and she will order it for you. Now, why don’t you two go back to work and let me sort out this mess with the liquid hydrogen tanks.”

He was looking down at the papers on his desk, pushing the eraser of the pencil into his forehead. We were already forgotten. Ms. Henderson got up quickly and went out.

I shredded the rest of my papers that afternoon with satisfaction. Around four o’clock I made a photocopy of the shredder I wanted and circled it with a big red pen, for Ms. Henderson. I looked at her with a wide, sickly smile when I gave it to her. Her face was folded like a paper, jammed in the shredder.

I saw Allison flitting by in the hall I smiled at her. She smiled back. When the bell rang at five I waited at the bus stop and she came along. “Why don’t we go for a beer?” I said, “I have the wildest story for you about what happened in the office today.” I was feeling expansive.

She flinched like the rotten animal genitals were dangling in her face again, and jumped onto her bus, which sped away. I got on my own bus, mentally castrating myself for being so direct. Remember, I thought, she is gentle as flour.

A few weeks later spring comes. I shred a whole ragged stack of papers with paper clips and staples all through them, marked with red grease pen and punctuated with yellow sticky notes. I look at some of the sheets before I feed them in. I like to see the patterns made by the words on the page. Sometimes the white spaces between the words form a river running down the page. The longer the river goes the more I think: “What are the statistical chances of that?”

When Ms. Henderson pokes her crabbed face out of the office I make a special point of looking at the documents carefully. Now she is the one who has to pretend she doesn’t see me.

At lunch time I go out and sit at the rough wooden picnic table behind the building. This whole complex is thick with high-powered electric lines, long white sausages of liquefied gases, and it rumbles with trucks, cranes and fork lifts. But the few from the back of out building looks over a gorge into the state forest. The gorge is filled with more industrialism but you don’t see that from the picnic tables, only a long magnificent ridge lush with thick green pines. The pines, and some firs and oaks, are far enough away through the hazy warm air that the ridge looks almost blue. I sit here eating my lunch and imagine going hiking in that.

Allison comes down the perforated metal stairs, like the steps on a ship. She moves gracefully and kindly. She sits across from me and smiles. I smile back. “Hello,” I say, as gently as I can, so as not to frighten her. She looks down into her bag lunch, pretending to be finding something but really, I can tell, scowling.

I don’t know about this woman. I just wanted to have a nice lunch and here she comes along to spoil it. One minute she’s smiling at me and the next minute she’s snubbing me. I begin to think that maybe she has an attitude. Maybe she’s pretty on the outside and ugly on the inside.

I don’t say anything. I ignore her and watch the blue ridge.

After lunch I shred for a few hours and then Ms. Henderson pages me into the front office. As I go in, I see Allison coming out of the office, down the long, narrow corridor. She looks at me nicely and I say “Hi.”

The instant I say that she looks away and ignores me. It’s like she deliberately tricked me into saying hello to her so that she could snub me. I don’t know if you remember what that feels like and you’ll probably have to go back to high school to remember. It made me shudder.

That girl was bad. I vowed right then never to speak to her unless she spoke to me first. Then there was Ms. Henderson.

She seemed relaxed and happy. She indicated a fellow in a blue denim jumpsuit at the loading dock. He had a large cardboard box on a hand truck. I went through the little door and out onto the dock. I saw that it was a new shredder. I led him through the shop until we got to the old shredding machine. Suddenly I discovered that Ms. Henderson was right there at my elbow.

“Load up the old machine,” she said to the deliver guy, and Willy will unpack this new one. I was happy to get the new machine but, it turned out I was fortunate that feeling drained away and was replaced suddenly by wariness.

“Wait a minute,” I said, “We might as well make sure this new one work first.”

“No,” said Ms. Henderson, “You got what you want. Now we have to salvage the old machine.”

“We can’t salvage it anyway until the boss signs for it,” I said. “So just be patient for a minute while I test this thing out.” I broke open the box and started setting up the new machine.

“I’ll sign for it,” Ms. Henderson said. She couldn’t wait. She took the manifest from the delivery guy and signed it.

“Now go on,” she said to him.

“Is this signature any good?” he said.

“Of course it is, you flunky twit. Now get out of here.”

“I ain’t going nowhere until I get a valid signature.”

She popped the clutch on her larynx and flew into a whole new gear. “Your damn truck is blocking our damn driveway and you better get that damn thing out of here before I call security and have the damn thing towed away!”

“All right, all right,” he said. “Jesus, lady.”
Now I had the new shredder set up and I saw what Henderson was aiming at. This one had a levered jaw all right, which is what I wanted for dealing with jams. But it also had a stack feeder. That meant you were supposed to be able to put a tall stack of papers on the feeder, and the machine would pull them in a few at a time to shred them. The stack in the picture in the manual was taller than I usually shredded in day. You wouldn’t need a guy like me to stand there and feed it.

Henderson was planning to get rid of me by making me obsolete.

Henderson came over and gave me a piece of paper.

“This is your termination notice, Willy. We won’t be needing your services anymore.”

I looked at it and could not make heads or tails of it. “I’ll take this to the boss,” I said.

“The boss has already seen it. He signed it. Look,” she said, indicating an pattern of curly ink. “That’s his signature.”

She was smiling and glowing now, almost dancing with glee. “You’re out of here, you pathetic little flunky!”

I saw the boss coming out of the men’s room and I ran over quick. “Sir,” I said, “We have a problem. They’re about to salvage my old shredder, but the new one isn’t going to work right. We have top stop him before he takes the old one away.”

“Bill,” said Henderson, “May I remind you that you have a three-o’clock to prepare for and that you’re supposed to be in Chuck Halinan’s office right now.”

“That can wait a minute, Nellie,” he said, motioning the delivery guy to hold up with the hand truck carrying the old machine. “Explain the problem to me, Willy.”

“Well, Sir,” I said, plugging in the new machine and powering it up, “this here thing is supposed to automatically feed from a stack of papers.”

I pulled up a stack of documents typical of the ones we usually use in the office. It had staples and paper clips all through it. And the edges of the stack were not neat and straight, like in the picture. This mound of sheaves was irregular, with pages sticking out all kinds of ways, many of them bent and wrinkled. If you’ve ever handled paper, you know that there’s is no way in the universe to straighten out at stack like that once it’s gone. The law of entropy drives the universe towards disorder at all times, and cannot be reversed.

“As you can see Sir,” I said, “this real-world stack is quite different from the ideal, Platonic stack in the manual. This stack will jam, necessitating the employment of a shredder feeder employee, such as myself.”

I put the stack on the feeder and pushed the automatic shred button. Sure enough, it sucked in a few pages that had been stapled together, and jammed. A red light went on.

The boss made a clucking noise.

Henderson said: “We’ll just tell people top take their damn staples out before they shred them!”

The boss said, “Can you see Halinan doing that, or any of the other bananas in this shop?”

I used the lever arm to clear the jam, and selected a portion of the stack without paper clips or staples. I held it up so that everyone could see. There was a little crowd now, of project directors and technicians, all watching the defeat of Ms. Henderson.

“You see, this stack has no staples or other obstructions. But it’s mere irregularity will cause the machine to jam.”

I placed this portion of the stack on the auto-feeder and pushed the button. It sucked in and shredded the paper for four cycles, and I was starting to get nervous. Then one of the misaligned ones went in and I saw it fold over in the cutter jaws. That caused the next three behind it to fold, and the whole thing jammed and the red light came on again.

I turned back to Henderson and smiled. Then I quickly cleared the jam using the lever arm, and a felt a little like an artilleryman in battle. I punched the auto-shred button again, and the machine went through two feed cycles and jammed on the third.

I shrugged and said to the boss: “The jamming lever I asked for is nice, but the auto-feed unit that Ms. Henderson ordered doesn’t work. If she had ordered the model I asked for, we would have saved the department money.”

I handed him the termination paper MS. Henderson had given me. He looked at it. “When did I sign this?” he asked her.

“Yesterday,” she said.

The boss turned white and handed me the paper. “Shred that Willy, and keep up the good work.”

He hustled her into the office, and after the glass door closed we heard him yelling: “Damn it, Nellie, I told you never to sign for me!”

We heard her high-pitched voice begin: “Well Bill, I only...” And then everyone broke out ins smiles and words of congratulations and patted me on the back and shook my hand. Good work, Willy, they all said.

Then they went out the wide doors with their rolls of project blue-prints, tipping their hard hats and wearing rare smiles on their faces.

When I turned around Allison said hello to me.

since i was a small boy i thought she would always help me if i sked/.asked.

yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

when my hair is combed, iitchy hairs fall on my neck an shoulders. they are still there. pls brush it with a towel to get them off of me
thanks
'brush' iss not 'comb'
no
you helped mme thankks















find other bills, open them

one who was stunningly beautiful, with long wavy black hair, and a body like one of those statues in an indian restaurant, super skinny but enormous breasts, very very likely natural. she

veery unffair things = ====== ≠√ beig one to 'help' mm me, b ut on a happy npteee, the Bagoo post iis mmy sonn'sfiction.

Chapter one

One day I met this weird person, Bago. He was half solid – let me tell you that you are thinking of the wrong solid – and half liquid – you are also thinking of the wrong liquid – in other words he was half ice and half diet coke®. In yet other words he was half a frozen person. “U w’nt ou ‘eet ie arents?”, he asked. “no”, I said “do you want to meet my parents?” “O.K.”, he said


Ding dong! It was the next day. It was Bago at the door. (last night was too late, Bago had to go home) "come in" my parents called. "Oh!" Bago gasped. I looked around. My parents were sitting there drinking coffee, my computer’s printer was printing out the long book I had written, but the tablecloth had a hole in it.




Chapter two

“YOU. MADE. HIM. TURN. INTO. A. BAG.” my parents yelled. “His name is Bago, and let’s call his parents” “One problem”, my father said, “We don’t know their phone number” “Hey!” I said “look at the bag!” “It says ‘gaboo daboo, best store in the world’,” my dad said, “what does that have to do with his phone number?” “Quiet,” I said “ the next line says . . .”

now I can draag. thanks blog pals.

microsoft does not make OS X. i have no INS key. i cannot press two keys at once. i got here using universal access. i need reader help:

HOW DO I DRAG WHILE USING mousekeys ON MACINTOSH?

"You simply press the "0" key on the numerical keypad (on my keypad, anyway). This is a click-and-hold. Then just move. When done, press the "5" key to unclick.
"

HOW DO I DRAG WHILE USING mousekeys ON MACINTOSH?

would like that mixture at 6:30

towel in my lap

hold the tube too, so the syringe does not slide out

i wish that i too could step back, walk away, or go on strike.

if u will promise to ssplit he password tn 3 paeerrts wghicj u hide/tapee in 3 different rooms, and ti GET y permission ffor EACCH thing, befoe u do ANYTHINGin the account, i wil give u the login to my brok ere. u can pay my viills and look up info. ined yer help. please.

is theere a statistical equation to 'prove' plagiarism, like 15 words in a ROW is 99% likely?

5

wiping with tissue closes off my nostril. that may be why i spelled 'not wipe' and was moving aaway when you wiped.

Why don't my motor neurons work so well?
answer that, and earn your Nobel.

i value inndepensent control ovver my actions and words/ most of u w call me 'contro; reaak.' how ironic that ALS makes me so dependent inwhat shhould be my most powerfu; years.

droid:


Brainhell’s Status

Hello has asked me to write an essay on his status. Like most of you, I suppose, I’m caught between allowing him to appear saintly and heroic (which, as those of you who have known him for quite a while will agree, we must never allow the bastard to do), and giving my true impressions of the man, with which we risk my making some truly horrifying, tasteless comments. Comments such as that Brainhell’s hiring a fellow to clear his saliva brings to my mind, every time I see it, the sketch in which Michael Palin of Monty Python, as Miles Cowperthwaite (“I don’t have a trade; but I can dance, and sing, and pick a nose as well as any man”) is hired to empty Dan Aykroyd of Saturday Night Live’s drool buckets, which he empties into the Drool Sluices, which lead to the Drool Reservoir. I’ll try not to make such comments, after I’m done pointing out that BH’s new facial hair also looks just like the beard that Frasier sported on a certain Cheers episode. I get the impression that having the beard bugs BH a little bit, but I’m not sure.
The salivating seems like one of the causes of misery. I seemed to notice BH straining at the buildup of saliva in his throat at some times. It reminded me of when I was a teen, doing hallucinogens; there would often come a clay feeling in the back of my throat because of the drugs. I didn’t know for sure whether everyone else felt the same thing (the people I asked were probably unfamiliar with the word “clammy”), but I could never wait for the feeling to go away. It seems to me that BH feels the same way.
The new fellow who is caring for BH seems a very nice guy, and seems to be doing a good job. As you probably know, BH has a board, on which are a mock keypad with letters and numbers, and many commonly used words, such as “which,” “where,” “what,” the names of his family members, and so forth. With the board, he has been able to communicate fairly well, at about half the speed at which one usually talks. However, on my last visit, I did find that BH’s pointing seems to have become less exact. I found myself unable to effectively hold the board, in such a way as to position it properly for his pointing. His caregiver had to do so for me, most often.
BH is being fed with a drip, which of course is the most alarming thing to see. I suppose they can keep a guy going indefinitely with such measures, but to a layman with no medical knowledge, the drip feeding, combined with the fact that BH has become extremely thin, seems to bode ominously. This word brings to mind another piece of psychological sleight-of-brain with which you all may be familiar: that, dear Lord, we can’t use or even think phrases like “bode ominously,” lest it magically call the worst into being, like a demon in a horror film. I just read a newspaper article discussing this; someone had discussed some awful possibility, and the other person said, “don’t even say that.” The columnist mocked them gently, because the phrase “don’t even say that” seemed to imply that mentioning the thing had the power to bring it into being. However, as you’re also aware, in the case of bodily wellness, the state of mind is very powerful. This doesn’t mean that our prayers, for which I think BH hasn’t lacked, will cause his ALS to reverse entirely, absent some almost miraculous new treatment, for which we hope that BH hangs on. It means, though, that we feel we want to be mindful of suggesting positive things such as love and wellbeing, with our words, tone of voice, and even our facial expressions, without plastering a fake smile on like Pollyanna. How do we do that? How do we think and act positively, without being Pollyanna? It’s one of those questions, just like, “how do I act assertively, without being abusive or aggressive?” The question answers itself: you act assertively, without being abusive. You act positively, without being Pollyanna. You know what it looks like. Or if you’ve never seen it modeled, take your best guess as to how a real person would look, walking the narrow path. For me, this has meant that I haven’t sighed in BH’s presence. Big deal—I often sigh, without it needing to mean anything more serious than, “wow, what a busy day it’s been!” But I don’t sigh in front of BH.
I have to be told that the drip is a PEG drip, not an IV drip, which I initially took it for. A PEG drip, so BH’s wife tells me, delivers the food formula directly to the stomach. All my life, I’ve enjoyed playing with jargon, dialects, and languages of every kind. Yet I’ve never felt comfortable becoming expert in medical terms, when a friend or loved one has been in the hospital. I don’t know why I feel that way. There’s something about the idea of laymen, friends and loved ones of someone in trouble, being called upon to learn, become familiar with, and airily and effortlessly reel off medical jargon, that just makes me really angry. I don’t quite understand why. It outrages me somehow. Maybe it’s the idea that, like the doctors and nurses, we’ll also be called upon to become blasé about how bad a break it all is, if we don’t look out, and to cease caring or feeling empathy. That we’ll forget that our role in this is not to make room for disease, or to welcome it breezily into our lives, to make it comfortable, to organize our lives around it, but to banish it, to sneer at it, to ridicule it bitterly, mercilessly, to hate it. That doesn’t seem enlightened to me, when I read it. An enlightened person would say, “This is in our lives. What is it here to teach us?” But that reminds me of a button I saw someone wearing once, which said: “Please God—Not another Learning Experience.” When my cousin’s daughter had Cystic Fibrosis, from which she eventually died, my cousin mentioned an anecdote: he was in a traffic jam, and becoming angry at the traffic. After he had really become steamed, his daughter finally said to him: “This is your CF, Dad!” A chronic annoyance. I suppose we shouldn’t hate the disease, or the inconvenience or suffering we see; but should we love it? That sounds as ridiculous as hating it. Do we always anthropomorphize it? Anthropomorphizing the disease, making it into a conscious enemy; we do this because we’re incapable of understanding anything like this unless we relate it to something else in a metaphor. This is why there are always metaphors and symbols in literature, or why we never see Jesus without his parables. But what is the right way to think of the disease, if not to anthropomorphize it? Can we rally ourselves, without an enemy? Do we need to feel angry at ALS, as if it will somehow feel ashamed and back off? Will BH summon his will against it, if he doesn’t? I feel my superstitions coming into play—I’m afraid to feel too much empathy, lest that somehow invite BH’s fate to come to me, as Christopher Reeve became wheelchair-bound after taking an interest in the wheelchair-bound (I know BH has addressed this choice of words, “wheelchair-bound”). It would chill me to the bone to consider ever living with something like this, because I know that my response would be, on far too many days: “Jesus Christ Almighty, is this ever so Fucking annoying.” I have no idea what BH really thinks about it all, blog or no blog, and I don’t really know how he rises to the challenge. I pray for his strength.
BH’s mind, of course, is as active and sharp as it has always been. It seemed to me that BH was more sensitive to heat. The temperature was only around 73 degrees, but he was apparently bothered by it. The impression it conveys is that his brain, without being able to express itself in gestures or speech, is overheating, much as your car overheats more readily when it’s idling in traffic, than when it’s allowed to move.
BH’s emotional state seems good. He has, of course, good people around him, like his wife and the two little angels. This has got to ease things for him. I have only watched friends and family members with acute or chronic illnesses, so I don’t know what it’s like to walk the path. But I think that the most important thing when facing something like this is not to have to fight your own bullshit at the same time. By “bullshit,” I mean the lies that people tell themselves to skate past and paper over the times when they’ve been weak, when they haven’t been there for other people, when they’ve abused people, when they just haven’t been authentic with people. If someone goes into this labyrinth with a bad conscience from memories of lying to themselves and everyone else, then it really must be hell. If someone doesn’t have a lifetime of such memories, then they can at least face it calmly and clearly. Here’s to you, BH.

i spend much time looking aat my right nipple.

sh says i said we will no longer pay her extra. untrue. s does not answer her phone, has no == c el l , and today tod us she droppe her emaail. there is no way to make a grownup grow up. i rpea that 'i o timewe pay' (extra_. 'that's not how it works,' shs sid. oh?

........

101
501
708

my wife loves me.

in the conversation about me being cold, i pointed to the covers and the word 'raise.' because i didn't want them hooked over my shoulder, i pointed to 'no' and 'shoulder.' once again y ou thought i wanted my shoulder adjusted, complaining about the outraged shrieking noise i make, ignoring the nonsense i was trying to say with the board, setting off off the readjustment of my entire body due to your mistake. it is very hard for me to type long emails like this, so please save us both much effort by following the new rule: ALWAYS REPEAT BACK WHAT YOU THINK I ASKED FOR, AND GET MY CONSENT BEFORE YOU FULFILL.

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