Good help is hard to find, chochacho.

Damn. So, as you know, last year Conchita quit on me, and even the chick who was tendin' the vegetable garden ended up gettin' herself fired at the peak of vegetable season. Not to mention Waterbury bein' a famous spy or whatever and then leaving. Between these three, I been havin' a pretty bad run with the help lately. Today was no different.

For a couple months I been havin' this kid Darius come clean the pool, and he's been doin' a fine enough job. He gets all the maple leaves out, and disposes of the dead potato bugs in the incinerator like I ask, and even is careful about scrubbing all the grout. The problem? He usually comes around 9am, and I been real weird about wakin' up early lately (I still can't bring myself to get the diabetes test), so I always see him, and he smiles WAY too much. The kid smiles even after he says "good morning!" and gets back into his work. I'll go back inside while he's smilin' at his scrub brush or whatever, and maybe get some fresh shorts outta the dryer, then look slyly out the window and he'll still be smilin' away like a nut. Shit drives me crazy at 9am when all I want in the world is to be left alone with my Bloody Mary and morning calamari. To have a young man constantly smiling at you is no way to live.

So, I gave him his notice this morning. He wandered into the yard, and I was standing there with a hardhat and a couple rolled-up scrolls of paper, looking extremely tense. He started to smile and asked me what was goin' on, so I laid it out real simple for him: I said I was tearin' out the pool because historical maps revealed that there used to be a graveyard where my property is, and I was worried about skeletons and the spirit world and such. He smiled real big and said that if I ever needed any help around the yard to give him a call, and then he gave me a smile and left. Shit almost destroyed me.

I hurt my foot, man.

Serious times, dogg. Paul down at Hidden Hills was helpin' me with my short game a bit earlier this week, showin' me how to blast outta sand with a little more conviction than I been showin' lately (hint: don't stand anywhere in any direction from me when I'm hittin' outta the sand trap, because you are guaranteed to get smacked by my ball). Anyhow, you know me, I can't resist a little fun in the cart, so when we were headin' back to the clubhouse (we were both pretty lit up from takin' blasts of Caramel Riyadh outta my hip flask) I took the wheel and we tried to see how fast I could drive it between these two big old lava rocks they got just off to the left of the seventeenth green.

Turns out you can't drive between the rocks at any speed, 'cause that shit is like a foot and a half too narrow, but whatever. There's the answer to the lava rock/rate of travel question. Anyhow, my foot got stuck in the steering wheel as I was ejectin' through the front of the cart, and it got all twisted to hell. Paul straight up hit the roof pillar and has this huge bloody line up the middle of his face, which serves him right because as a resident pro he should damn well have known that you can't fit a cart between those two rocks. I mean, seriously, what is he doin' there all day?

So Doc Andretti's got me in this ginky old cast (I chose the hot pink tape to go with this ill black Fila track suit with pink piping) and says I got to wear it for damn weeks! It ain't crampin' my game too bad though, since I just been mostly watchin' a lot of TiVo this summer and examining the products of a lot of mail-order food retailers. Tonight instead of hangin' down at my party I put Téodor in charge of logistics and am holding court up here in my khrybb, you know, my box, and it's low-key with cigars and some plush chairs for just a few dudes at a time, a little Santana played real quiet on the Bose. Beef and Téodor were up here for a while but they got into this heated discussion about "graphic file formats," (Gif? Ping? You know, jay-peg stuff.) and you could tell they both wanted to "honor" the other guy's opinion, you know like how dorks act, but you could also tell they were not going to change their opinions, so I got damn tired of that and told them to go down and send somebody else up. No one's been up in twenty minutes, and I bet they're both just continuing their dumb argument on the other side of my door, so I am typing on the computer. Alright, maybe this cast is crampin' my style at least somewhat. I mean, I am using a computer while at a party. No one should use a computer while they are at a party unless that computer is a pacemaker which is running their heart.