Canning Paradigm Shift

Even though I'm on the verge of yet another financial crisis, I just haven't been able to bring myself to go canning. I'm not even sure I'll be willing to make myself do it for even just a couple hours this evening, after what will probably be another bland disappointment in the guise of a healthy vegetarian dinner.

One of the things I dislike about it is that the longer I'm at it the more likely I'll cave into the temptation to drink, something I've been intending to put an end to for embarrassing numbers of years! This means I'm probably going to start tomorrow going out twice daily on micro canning runs of four or five dollars apiece, with the option to collect more if superfluity happens upon me; the idea is not to be at it for more than three hours at a time. Another thing that bothers me about canning is the presence of my betters and the imagined stares and mockery I perceive emanating from them like all people sensitive to the notion of dignity imagine when they feel they're disgracing themselves in public. The result has been that I drink up most of the money earned and eat nothing at all because I've skipped the free meals in favor of more vain striving and even more beer. This has made for a surly and depressed ball of snakes for a psychology whose teeth is always on edge. To minimize my exposure to the more affluent primates of Northwest I'm going to go out early in the morning and later in the evening, instead of during the afternoon and early evening like I have been.

Theoretically I could cultivate a dissociate mentality, something like the clinical detachment doctors charm us with as we languish in our hospital beds ... but, a) I'm a social animal, and b) I'm a mentally untrained one who would probably require some time to cultivate the healthy self-image and emotional maturity required to not let such things get to me so much. What I can do in the meantime, other than mitigating the galling effects of canning on my psyche, is to simply refuse stressing about what is already something of an ordeal. It's chump change, anyway; and since I've always been reluctant to give much of myself to real jobs that pay minimum wage and don't even offer free meals why would I invest so heavily of myself into what is merely gleaning? Seriously! On a good day I pull in maybe a little over three dollars an hour; bad days can see hourly earnings fall below a single dollar. In the long run I'll earn more from canning by quitting drinking and being chill about it than by whirling through the neighborhood like a one-man locust army whilst quaffing copious Hamm's® on the clock. It just sucks that nobody offers me chances at work or even getting a job like happens to people who panhandle; I guess the assumption is we're doing this because we'd prefer not to work? Work sucks, don't get me wrong; but a shitty job that pays quadruple what another shitty job pays is still more desirable.

If worse comes to worst, I'll let the gas get shut off until I can afford to get it re-connected, and just hope that Home Forward doesn't catch wind of it until it's no longer an issue (I've heard that utility shut-offs can jeopardize one's housing). Because I foolishly and prematurely locked myself into a contract with Century Link® for home Internet service, I can probably expect $175 in bills to be due by the middle of next month. Which I suppose probably has some people wondering why I haven't aggressively sought a job ... what every tea-party jerk thinks is the panacea to the pampered indolence of the lumpenproletariat. I'm going to, actually, but I want to be reasonably confident I'll be mentally and physically capable of getting and keeping a job. Else, what would be the point? Besides, my ID is expired, so that has to be renewed before I even think of handing in résumés ... which fiction I need to start working on. (It has to be fiction if anyone is to read even halfway through one without laughing or snorting in derision.)

Black Hitler in the Meal Line

I was standing in line at Trinity Cathedral yesterday, waiting patiently for my used-to-include-delicious-Blue-Death-chili food bag (like a sack lunch, but with canned goods), when suddenly a verbal altercation behind me pierced the wall of sound I like to surround myself with whenever I'm out suffering the babbling brook of humanity.

It was yet another angry black man from out of state, who is so bitter about being in a mostly white town that he projects his discomfort and anxiety onto the nicest white people in the country by accusing them of being racist — another New Portland social phenomenon I'm already beyond sick and tired of. I've even heard the occasional black go so far as to assert that they CAN'T be racist! Yet my experience has been there's a lot more black-on-white predation in this town than vice versa. So, you're getting back in touch with your African heritage by selling some credulous cracker oregano sprayed with Lysol®? Healing the generations of pain born out of slavery and segregation by punching a white guy in a church lunch because he wouldn't let you use his Tapatío®? It's embracing of victim-hood — especially endemic among the impoverished — that encourages worldviews and lifestyles that hinder anyone, black or white, from feeling good about themselves and living comfortable and enjoyable lives. Just think, if the Jews had done in Lisbon in the fifteenth century what black people are doing right now in Baltimore, they wouldn't have even lasted long enough to experience the Holocaust! Not only that, but victims have a distressing tendency to turn into abusers, ensuring a world perpetually enshrouded in darkness.

If I understood the situation properly — which I was at first trying not to because it was annoying — the black guy was angry at the white guy behind him in line because he thought the latter had called him a nigger. Maybe, but this is Portland, Oregon not Atlanta, Georgia, so I'm pretty confident the conflict was born out of kill-all-the-white-people delusion; this isn't the first time I've seen black people go off similarly on the whites around them, with nary an n-bomb to have dropped out of Caucasian lips. This kind of aggressive shit-talking would doubtless have gotten them into a heap of trouble back where they come from (unless they're even more segregated back East than they were in Apartheid South Africa!), so I wouldn't be surprised if they're venting all the bile they had to suppress in public back home. (We really do indulge damaged antisocial people too much here in Portland!) Even if the guy did call the guy a nigger, his malfeasance was immediately eclipsed by the hating-on-whitey tirade that lasted nearly half an hour and was still going on even after I walked off disgusted but victual-laden. Hitler would have taken notes! Apparently we Caucasians are all corrupted by Neanderthal genes into monstrous half-human world destroyers who twist the noble science and technology of Africans to nefarious exploitative ends, and are ultimately the root of all the social evils and environmental woes of our planet. Which reminds me of how Christians until recently justified their bigotry toward black people by regarding them as being descended from Noah's cursed youngest son Ham — even though no such curse is mentioned anywhere in the bible. Can I get an “Untermensch!” from the congregation? Just WHO was being the racist in this scenario? The poor target of this Afro-American fury just stood there silently, shuffling his feet nervously, probably waiting to get attacked ... not looking at all like a Klansman.

Like I mentioned earlier, this isn't the first time I've encountered these new angry African American immigrant indigents. I get that they hate their sucky lives, probably even hate themselves for being such downtrodden losers, and like everyone who feels disenfranchised look for convenient scapegoats to paint heir bulls eyes onto. Hell, I've been doing a lot of that lately myself! Recently I've been struggling bitterly with a skewed class-warfare hatred of so-called Yuppies, going so far as to snarl and sometimes even shout out poseur “Up the Revolution!” vitriol at them as I lug my bags full of recyclables down the sidewalks in Northwest Portland. Never mind the fact that they aren't Yuppies, or they are and it's not their fault I'm where I am. Well, Mr. Wanna-Be Black Panther, you're not healing bruised race relations and in fact are only reinforcing prejudice by acting like you did yesterday; just like all I'm accomplishing when I do what I is show the so-called Yuppies just how churlish we lumpen-proletariat are.