Unemployment Will Make A Man Do Weird Things

The last time I was on an extended unemployment stretch, I packed up everything and moved from Missouri to Florida. After I found a room to rent in a weird guy's house, I found a job as a landscaper. Actually, we mainly just cut lawns in the heat. It only lasted for a few months, but I have a tendency to romanticize that brief employment as the best job I ever had. The boss and owner of the company, a former timeshare salesman, was a thick-accented Jersey guy who always had a joint hanging from his lips. After we were done with a yard and it looked exceptionally nice, he'd say, "It's cake!" Or he'd announce as we approached a lawn, "Make it cake, boys!" I came to interpret that direction in a way that is best interpreted by the following diagram:

So, now that I'm unemployed again, I apply for jobs online and send cover letters and resumes to the people who hire people like me, and when I run out of those, I go to the yard and work on some long-neglected corner that needs a cakemaker's touch. Then I come in and check the inbox or send out another query letter for that damned book that keeps collecting rejection letters. Or I'll mess with the design of one of my websites. Sometimes I'll even mess with the whole purpose of one of my websites. And then sometimes I'll just get a really crazy idea like building a mock cake with a landscaping theme.

Click it. It's effing huge.

Admit it. It looks delicious.

Joe Zark

Alaskans are getting understandably pissed that their state is being mocked nationwide as some sort of meth-lab trailer-trash white racist book-burning haven of religious extremists who squirt out babies every 9 months while hunting wolves from airplanes as they eat moose burgers.

I've been to Alaska twice and I can attest that it is a very nice place, more so in the summer, and that these broad generalizations and urban-snobbish opinions can easily be applied to any state in the Union. I'm sure upstate New York has its share of hill-folk. I once met a man in Leesburg, Virginia, 40 miles from Washington, DC, who talked about how "we" beat back the Yankees at a certain point on the Potomac. I know you don't have to venture too far here in Florida to find less than urbane and civilized characters. And having lived for a few years in the town of Ozark, Missouri, I can solemnly state that few regions of the United States could rival the Ozarks for backwoods closed-mindedness. (And meth labs.) Oh, they love Jesus, doncha know, but they love the white, Matthew McConaughey Jesus who votes Republican.

Joe Zark is my expression of my love/hate of the beautiful/ugly state of Missouri, which is really no different than any other state.


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