The Drip, a novel by Michael Gullo
In 2014, Michael hired a directional boring company to do some work on the home in Hardin Valley. The owner did the job well, and was hired two more times. All three times, the work was good, but the atmosphere was agony. The owner belittled and berated his employees in front of him. It was true and sincere cruelty, not with an eye toward employee growth as one would find on a construction site, but that cruelty that can only be seen in the allegory of kicking a cornered dog, her whimpering in agony at the helplessness of the next kick that was sure to come. Intents so cruel that to describe them as the selfish thing that they were would be to kick the dog a-more.
Step in replacement, Chris Gibson Directional Drilling. A man in his own corner, kicking himself. Chris showed up in Hardin Valley with the directional drilling version of a Grapes of Wrath Jalopy, stacked not with deliberate care for the cargo among the furniture, but a desperate race to get it all back on there and head to the pipe that waited not on the rig’s racks but at the cashing end of the check.
When Chris first came, Chris was clean, but his staff were not. Five years of projects later, dope sick every one, and by year six, Chris was too.
Only the man with sin can stay his hand the stone, and Chris epitomized that dictum, and it collapsed him. Stay the hand begot sin for the forgiveness that will come. And for a man with a guilty conscience, forgiveness was the dog that could never be petted all the way up.
For Chris, failure along the way was not the path to success, but the success of desperation’s every dread. Chris did not just collect setbacks like prizes, he curated them into display cabinets of cracked glass and jimmied locks – where, having lost the key, Chris in his endless effort to repeat his mistakes had reached in and retried the piece before putting it back on the exhibit.
December 2023, in steps Chris Gibson, Curator, same jalopy, new crack across the windshield. And with him comes absolute proof this site will never have municipal power, a negative proved only more true by Gibson’s own response to the thing. If this man is unwilling to try and earn a new failure, then the thing cannot be done. All Rock he says.