My Eyes are Burning

My eyes are burning.

My back is giant knot and the Motrin stopped working hours ago.

No matter what I do the rotting road kill stench keeps penetrating every pore in my body.
The winds shift and the stench and grit are attacking my very being.
I want to dive in the nearest body of water to scrub and sterilize everything.

I hate the dump.

Load two of my second weekend of tearing off my roof. The Jeep is covered in filth, the trailer is filled with the black talcum dirt and I feel like I am living in my own private “Dirty Jobs” episode.

My roof is covered with three layers of material. The top two layers are the standard 3 tab shingles which have curled and lost most of their ability to withstand the hot California sun. The bottom layer is the stuff you find built up in far corners of industrial dumps. It’s a mix of glassy tar bits, dried bits of tar paper, razory shards of colored rock and fine silt.

The remains of the old rock roof blow all over. It falls between the cracks on the boards of my attic. It blows into the gaps in my screens and window and it move drifts into my neighbors’ yards like disintegrating dust devils.
It gets in your hair, down the back of your neck and likes to stick the my skin which is covered in sweat because my roof is about 15 degrees hotter than the 75 degree weather down under the shade tree in my front yard.

My redneck rig is loaded with about 900 lbs of the waste. You can’t pull it out with shovels, the stuff stacks like newspaper tossed into a pile. The only way to get is out is have my son stand at the end of the trailer yanking it off the tailgate by hand while I stand behind and push it in small heaps toward him.

Eight more loads to go. I need to pick up pace.

Someone needs to find a way to make dumps cleaner!