The Most Interesting Blog in the World.. of Josh Freakland

"I don't always see Larry, but when I do; he just sits there."

WARNING: The following is a completely made-up work of fiction depicting an alternate reality called "The Wonderful and Wacky World of Josh Freakland", and all characters/descriptions were taken directly from Josh Freakland's imagination.  It should not be interpreted as any form of real. Any similarities to actual organizations, people, places, experiences, names, events, businesses, etc. are completely coincidental. Seriously, you'd be insane to think that these descriptions are of actual people. Josh Freakland isn't even a real person, himself. 

That should do the trick. Let's begin.

About four weeks ago, I completed the transition between my first two jobs.

For my first job, my official title was "Sandwich maker". This is false. I have never been a sandwich maker. For the one week that you could say I was being trained to make sandwiches, I never 'made' them, I attempted them. I was quickly moved to the café because I was much better as a coffee barista. I specialized in giving people tastier heart palpitations than the creators of Starbux could've ever possibly imagined, as they ripped bongs and hugged trees to the top of the world coffee market. Yes, my caramel macchiatos induced a fuzzy euphoria in people whose only business here was to kiss the ass of the law with at least $250 of their hard-earned money.

It was great fun, and it made me happy, but it would eventually come to an end, once my weekly hours went into single-digits, and a friend told me that Schweiner's was finally hiring a new busboy. The job description was, for most indents and porpoises, the same thing I was doing, minus the specialty coffees. So I, Josh Freakland, applied at Schweiner's, and got the job.

It's been four weeks since then, and finally, I've been blessed with job security and the ability to recreate the movie Waiding for twenty-eight hours every week. The wonderful, wacky world of Josh Freakland has entered the melting pot.

Welcome to Schweiner's, where every day is a mixer!

Allow me to introduce you to my notable co-workers (most of the Mexicans aren't notable, and justly, aren't mentioned). This week, we'll go over the top of the food chain.


Raj:  Raj is one of the co-owners of Schweiner's. Each week on Wednesday, everyone comes to work wearing a tucked-in, collared shirt and a pair of Dipendz Diapers, ready to shit our pants trying to to look busy when we aren't on the one day he comes in. His business attire is infectiously stylish - it's a tucked-in, collared shirt. He looks like a normal, clean-cut, tall, white guy, and even has a normal, tall, white guy voice, and though his voice doesn't particularly boom, we still bow down to him like he's God. Because he is. Here's why -

Somewhere in his glorious estate, there is a room, most likely without any lighting. There, Raj sits in a most-comfortable recliner taller than even he is, with the room's width of  TV-screens towering up to the ceiling. The only space on the the desk without TVs is a two-foot -wide semi-circle, and on it sits a vintage microphone used exclusively for reminding you who you work for. Those cameras you see around the ceilings in Schweiner's? They aren't merely video cameras that Raj has a private feed to; they're Raj's eyes. HIS eyes. No joke, he's called one of our servers (the other Raj AKA Rajah) at 4pm when he wasn't even there, and delivered this stern warning: "Tuck in your shirt".

Larry: Larry is the head chef and second co-owner of Schweiner's. You can hold him personally responsible for many of the amazing, life-changing recipes that you can taste at Schweiner's, in addition to rocking his black chef's suit every time he visits. Sometimes he has paperwork, and some light discussion with someone. He appears to be a very cool dude.

I don't always see Larry, but when I do; he just sits there. 

Ric: Ric is the man that hired me. He's a good-looking guy in his early forties. I respect Ric because he doesn't fuck around. You don't need to call in backup during a stampeding rush of hungry drunkards, you need Ric. This is due to him being the type of manager that will actually join their employees in serving customers for a good portion of time, even when it isn't busy, while still doing the manager disco or whatever they do in the back office for most of the day. The employees all know what Gay does, they just don't know what Ric does. No one does.

Rumor has it, it's many, many lines of cocaine.


Gay: Gay is my other manager. He's most likely in his early 60s, and possesses an accent similar to Sarah Palin's (turns out its a Minnesota accent). A funny thing about Gay is that I knew who he was before I even applied at Schweiner's because I had heard the stories. The first bit of advice I was ever given at work was more suited for surviving a robbery. "That's Gay. Try to avoid him. If you can't, do whatever he says." Immediately, I figured that maybe this guy carries a sawed-off shotgun and enjoys pointing it threateningly at employees. I later understood what they meant - Gay is the #1 cause of you saying "Are you fucking kidding me?". Give me a moment as I put my wand to my head and extract one such memory to place in the pensieve. WOOOOOOOSH!!! We've arrived in the distant past of  last Saturday.

Saturday night. It's 8:50 PM, and Gay has decided to cut me an hour early. 
 That's okay with me, I thought, as I viewed the empty booths around me. I 
 finish my busboy cleaning/maintenance duties, and just as I'm getting to the 
 part where I limp into the women's bathroom and change their paper towels (a younger me would be so jealous), Gay comes right around the corner and says

"Gotta change da soda in dere. Have you ever done it before? Don't worry, I'll show ya how it's done." 


I should've known better... I follow him. We head to the back, and I watch as  he molests the DD bags of soda syrup until he finds the saggy, wrinkly, breast of Dr. Shmepper, a shadow of it's former splendor. He takes it out, yells at the bartender to move bottles in the back room, and then hefted a box of new syrup up in a way that made it seem as heavy as an engine block.

-Continued Above-




Tonight, I've treated you to a small taste of Josh's workplace relationships. Don't worry, there's more, and it's coming soon, to a blog near you!

"Stay thirsty, my compatriots."
                                                       - Josh Freakland


All pictures belong to the people who own them. Same thing with the quotes and who said them. Doesn't that just blow your mind?

The Melancholy of Josh Freakland

Welcome to the wonderful, wacky world of Josh Freakland

A person whose opinion (and blog) I admire a lot suggested I create a blog of my own about two weeks ago. Trust me when I say that I hadn't given it any thought, or even intended to do so until just now, at 6:03 in the morning.

On the verge of finally achieving sleep, the inspiration for this morning's post was electrically signaled into my brain like a healthy jolt of PTSD. Insomnia, much? Yeah - my mom just walked in the room and told me that I've lost my mind. I'm not going to contradict that because I have work at 11 AM, and haven't slept a wink.

Let's set sail by smashing the blog with a story in a bottle about the one thing that I was most hurt by in my entire life. I'm starting it this way in hopes that when you read future posts, you'll understand that my life really isn't that bad, no matter how shitty I may make it out to be, and how much my problems only apply to a lower-middle-class Caucasian male living in America. 


The Melancholy of Josh Freakland



A few years back, in the middle of my senior year of high school, I was going out with a decent-looking, curvy blonde girl. Crazy, right? Out of the few girlfriends I have had, this girl would have to be the one I am most proud of. It lasted THREE months, which was definitely a new record for me, and still reigning champion.

In the third month that I was her boy-toy, I was signed up to go on my German class's Euro-trip. First stop? Amsterdam. At this point in her life, my girlfriend was an avid anti-druggie and anti-drinker, which incidentally made her an anti-me. By the time I was on my way back to America, I had drank and smoked more than I thought I was humanly possible, thrown up on the Strassenbahn, bought hash off Streetalians (street Italians), ripped bongs with my friend's mom, been tempted by hookers, and drunkenly danced down German streets like my name was John Jakob Jingleheimer Schmidt, while people actually shouted John Jakob Jingleheimer Schmidt!

It was the best of times, it was the BEST of times, but, through it all, I still had managed to think about my girlfriend when it mattered, and I don't just mean when the hooker said "$20 suck and fuck". Not only had I resisted fucking a surprisingly hot Aryan version of Roxanne, but I had chosen to buy my girl a gift. During the waiting time for a bus in Heidelberg, I had stumbled upon a curio shop. It mostly contained garbage for being a bunch of handmade stuff. In the middle of searching for the diamond in the rough, I'd finally found it: an aesthetically pleasing handcrafted miniature piano music box with a ballerina that spun around the interior of the piece when music played.

After conversion, it was around $110 for the piano, which I had loved so much, I had only assumed my girlfriend would just as well. And even if she didn't, she'd enjoy the sentiment.

Fast-forward : I'm sitting back at home in the US opening up the piano on the landing of my stairs, because screw going all the way up stairs. After fumbling around with the gift at home to see if it worked correctly, I noticed that it wasn't working correctly - the winding mechanism was acting funky, and it'd stop playing music unless you'd nudge it midway. It sucked, and while the piece still worked and looked pretty, trying to fix this small problem had been ruled out.

I text my girlfriend telling her I brought her a gift back from Germany. "What is it!? :)" she texts back excitedly.

"I got you a miniature piano music box with a ballerina that dances inside it! There's one itsy bitsy problem with it. The winding mechanism doesn't play correctly all the time, but I really think you're gonna like it because I thought of you when I bought it! :)"

Now that I think about it, this may have not been the best way of presenting someone a gift. But, in the end, gifts are free, right? The whole point of a gift is to let someone know that they're appreciated and thought about. Enjoy that foreshadowing, and then watch this:

"so you got me a broken gift?"

"Well, not exactly. It still works, it's just that sometimes you have to nudge the winding thingy to keep the music playing. Otherwise, it's  really beautiful."

"it sounds broken"

This was the point in which I started to feel this horrible feeling in my chest, about the place where the heart should be. Once I read that message, every part of me knew what was coming and reacted accordingly. I could feel the hurt and the sadness growing inside me. I'm pretty sure I was in shock, and I seriously didn't intend to type it out in this dramatic way to her.

"....you... you don't want it?"


"not really"

Talk about crestfallen. I don't remember what I did the rest of that afternoon. All I know is that when I woke up for school the next morning, my pillow was still drying from the tears.

Josh Freakland cried himself to sleep for the first time at 18-years-old.

Well, boys and girls! That's it for story time. You've just read a tale that'd gone missing in some dusty drawer in my head for over two years and just now surfaced. Hope you enjoyed it.

This episode of The Life and Times of Josh Freakland has brought to you BAD TIMING.

Tune-in next week for more adventures!- Josh Freakland