In the summer of 1997 I was 17 years old, working in a cramped blowgun factory, making between 3 and 4 dollars an hour, depending on how tired and ineffective I was at assembling blowguns on that particular day. It was monotonous, unbearably hot, and slightly degrading, but the added blow, the salt methodically poured in the wound, if you will, was the steady soundtrack of bubbly top 40 radio played by my stonily silent coworkers.

It became the soundtrack to my life, a continual annoyingly catchy chorus of "babys" "you know it's true" "ooh" "aah", and so on. Grinding my teeth, my thoughts would inevitably began to center around the singers of these sorry songs; images of them, and of me taking one of the freshly assembled blowguns in my hands and puncturing precise holes into their vocal chords, rendering them mute and relatively harmless.

One particularly retched song was spun by the "should have been flogged to death in the dark basement of a third-rate comedy club many years ago" DJ in intervals of what seemed to be 10 minutes. All day long it would get played over and over again, about half of the time causing one of my machine-like fellow employees to lean over and actually TURN IT UP. The song was not returned to the previous volume upon its completion, so by the end of the day, I was

hearing it for the 18th time at a now ear-bleeding level. This final listening session generally coincided with the end of my shift and the accompanying jarring revelation that I had yet again spent the previous five hours assembling blowguns and had 15 dollars to show for it. That feeling, with that song backing it up-there are few methods of achieving such a pure sense of self-loathing and hatred.

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