Social Opportunities?

Last night was a sort of awakening for me, regarding my stance in society and my social prospects. Like almost everyone else who is poor or destitute, I've long held firmly to the belief that I'm a worthless piece of shit that nobody with all their teeth and all their brains would desire rapport with. This belief is subconscious, of course, and made all the more difficult to acknowledge because I've wrapped it in a veneer of class-warfare arrogant disdain for the meritocrats and aristocrats who inhabit the floating world above me.

Techno Destructo and I were sitting on our “stoop” — a step around the corner from the building he currently lives in and I used to — drinking beers, smoking weed, and listening to music from my phone; the usual — when out of nowhere I find myself engaged in a long conversation with a girl named K—, who had just sold some clothes to the Buffalo Exchange across the street. I don't even know if I can remember how long it's been since I so thoroughly enjoyed a conversation with anyone other than my little Moon Goddess! Ayn Rand even managed to slip into the list of topics.

Did I get those digits? No, and I probably should have attempted to, since now that I've decided to quit drinking (for good? Let's hope so!) and resume (albeit halfheartedly and half-assedly) looking for work, I'm in sore need of new acquaintances. Perhaps that's the true measure of my self-confidence, the fact that I balked at taking the exchange to the next level ... because at the end of the day even people who ladle soup out to us bottom feeders don't want to hang out and play cribbage with them. Still, it was nice to spend time with someone not totally fucked up or wasted or crazy like the vast majority of my peers.

Not that this isolated incident belied my Untouchable social status, mind you. It's just nice to occasionally encounter an exception to the rule.

Time to Look for Work Again

I know I've said this before — and in fact have both followed through on it and failed miserably at it — but I'm going to get a job. This canning isn't getting me anywhere but struggling bitterly with finances, with a self-image that's spiraled into the drain so bad that it's caused me to become antisocial and even to take out my insecurities and frustrations on my beloved friends, and also with reluctant white-knuckle sobriety. I want a cat, a halfway decent smartphone, a better computer (no Internet service, though! I'll just game away all my free time), a driver's license (I don't even know how to drive!), and the ability to explore hobbies that require an initial outlay that chump change can't provide (like glass work).

Which means I'm going to need to draft up some kind of résumé that will successfully shine the shit of my employment history, get a haircut and lose the beard (unless I can get it trimmed somehow), probably get a new state ID card, and go out there and beat my feet — take time out from canning to drop the résumés off. I'll just have to hazard being forthright with the prospective employers and hope I luck out and find someone who isn't a corporate jackass who counts his ballpoint pens every day after his workers leave for home. Also, I'm going to have to be careful about any job offers, since my last attempt at this resulted in scraping boogers off the walls of a roach-infested shooting gallery; also, my legs aren't in great shape, so no standing at an assembly line forty hours a week.

Honestly, I hate jobs. It's always seemed to me that workers, even the skilled ones earning triple-digit salaries, are little more than those dreaming bodies in the Matrix, being imprisoned and siphoned of their energy by inhuman overlord machines (the metaphor fails at that last part, however, because our human overlords are if anything pathologically more than human). Not to mention the fact that most work seems to amount to fueling the gluttonous desires of a rapacious species hell bent on frittering away the beauty and bounty of the world one needless commodity and one indulgent service at a time. And, well, being an unskilled worker, people like me tend to get worked almost as hard as children in coal mines did a couple hundred years ago — and are just as disposable.

But, I'm probably going to get my gas shut off next month, I'm eating mostly garbage, I disgrace myself daily pushing a damn shopping cart full of what most people view as trash, I can't even afford to camp out at Hood River or Venice Beach every now and then to clear my head of the Portlandia miasma that's poisoned my mind all these years ... and I'm just not getting anywhere at all, and not even enjoying being a loser now that I somewhat give a damn about life. Yeah, even if I end up living in a camper and pumping gas, that'll be fine with me.

Welcome to Portland, Albania!

Just who in fuck ARE these new people settling into the cracks and cockroach nests of my once fair city? I pretty much know who the higher-caste immigrants are: mostly Californians, either Bay Area techies or Orange County real estate rock stars. As much as I despise California — it epitomizes all that is vapid and voracious about American corporate consumer culture — I'm realizing in increasing horror that those guys are just PRICING me out of here. Whatever's falling out of the boxcars onto my streets is woefully Balkan in its savage barbarism; these wretched new young thugs may well end up PUSHING me out of here.

I was walking from downtown to my Northwest Portland neighborhood of canning and respite from the neighborhood Bedlam on Sunday when yet another window was opened up to me on the emerging street landscape of violence and crime. I ran into a guy — a sixty-three year-old guy, mind you! — who had just gotten out of the hospital for having had his nose punched in by a girlfriend-beating douchebag in a fit of jealousy. If that weren't outrageous enough, this occurred shortly after having been released from the hospital for head trauma from another class act ... who smashed a wine bottle on his head for NOT GIVING HIM A SMOKE! And, again, the victim is sixty-three, and also limited in mobility (requiring the assistance of canes or walkers). Two violent assaults resulting in two visits to an urgent care center within twenty-four hours of each other!

While I've only lived in the welfare hotels and on the streets here since 2000, I know from suburbanite young-adult “slumming it” excursions and from accounts from elders I deem of (mostly) sound minds, that this kind of shit didn't afflict the lumpen-proletariat outside of crack houses and gone-sour dope deals (and domestic squabbles) twenty years ago. Indeed, it wasn't until about ten years ago that I started to notice a trickling in of loose-cannon aggro into Portland's more bilious of social humors. And, WHERE IN FUCK ARE THE COPS? Furthermore, WHY AREN'T THESE ASSHOLES IN THE SLAMMER? Sixteen years ago I had to worry about losing the backpack I lived out of when staggering shitfaced; now people have to worry about their similarly unfortunate peers yanking it out from beneath their heads as they're sleeping, with a few kicks to the head and ribs to discourage dissent.