We're All Victims Here

I started seeing these signs springing up in yards and peering out windows all over town shortly after the first half-dozen protests against president Trump. While to some I imagine its message may denote something akin to the famous Egalité Liberté Fraternité that was perhaps the only worthwhile and decent part of the French Revolution, to me it's just another semiotic bit of noise pollution emanating from another dismally absurd American cultural dialectic. Have we always been so toothbrush-commercial in our ruminations, evocations, and demonstrations? Do I even REALLY want to know? I just can't take it very seriously, because guess who IS in office, and who all HAVE BEEN in office, and are in office everywhere else the grinding machinery of the sausage factory of the World System is operated. The only way I can see movements such as these being lamer and sorrier is if Spencers set up themed gas-mask kiosks at their pre-march rallies. Remember We Are the 99%? I vaguely recall it.

Actually, wait a second! I DO take it seriously, so much so that just about every time I pass by one of these escutcheons of damnfoolery I bristle in indignation — sometimes even going so far as to send a middle finger or two its way. It reeks of the same self-serving victimhood I embraced for decades, which I recently chose to divorce from my self-image and life-orientation. Not only that, but it also feels like a continuation of the Great Sell-Out of me and my kind by those we foolishly hoped stood for us. The victim mentality offends me deeply: when I realized it facilitated me pissing three decades of my life down the drain, I also realized that it's a viral germ of myriad social evils — the heart of Typhon, victims are themselves victimizers. (Why do you think the street-life posts in my blog are full of tales of thievery, fear, greed, and violence? The ugliness of the primate survival machine is demonstrably apparent down here!) We're balkanizing in part because of how this mindset closes gates and raises pikes. And it's being perpetuated largely by the fools who encourage me to meditate and yoga my shitty life on down the Yellow Brick Road, or rather by those among them who are paid to interact with me; most seek as assiduously to avoid notice of me as do the Thurston Howells they feel superior in empathy to. Apparently my pedigree of pathetic is somehow wanting to them? I who am descended from a people whose sob story is twice as long as that of slave-born African Americans and who am currently a conscripted combatant in an escalating (and very hopeless-looking) class war — that may or may not be by design?

Which is why I took another photo of my recyclables languishing behind steel gates, money going to no one in the name of ... what, exactly? It's not like I can peek through Homeskillet's window to watch him molest his niece: the bins are practically on the sidewalk! Yet he has the gall to wave a banner fifteen feet away in his yard, telling me he stands fully behind every sorry sumbitch who isn't a male Caucasian citizen ... who incidentally needs to keep his ogreish carcass off his property, or else! I wonder, if I were to somehow pull together a middlin'-fair landscaping crew from among other welfare hotel rats and street drek, would this guy hire us for a job or stick with his (I hope legal) immigrants? When you can't conceive of making the world a better place without it necessitating playing a zero-sum game of musical losers, you have no claim on enlightened OR progressive and your bumbling social engineering will result in nothing but false colors unfurled over a still sinking ship.

Taking It to the Next Level

Arbitrary life-stage benchmarks always struck me afterward as silly and ineffectual as those x-year production goals I used to hear poor Eastern European Soviet Bloc countries struggle to attain. Or even outright fascicle and sinister like the ones in Oceania that were destined for the memory hole. So, without further ado, here I am taking in a half-assed inventory of where I am and what all is happening; I've been indoors for a little over two years and seven months, am I worth taxpayer expense? lol Of course not! But I don't really care about that, anyway. I have at least gotten serious about quitting smoking and drinking, thanks to having suffered a couple serious injuries -- one of which I'm dealing with as I type. I've also managed to fuck off five jobs, but I take heart knowing that I can actually get a job when I need one and that I'm capable of keeping it for at least six months.

The result of my self-assessment is this: I need to both get a job before fall AND start taking it to the next level, this self-betterment business, now that I'm minimally functional enough to socialize a little and engage in prolonged damage control.

My diet can certainly use some help. And, unfortunately, this is a lifestyle problem that tends to bump itself up against the dirty glass ceiling of poverty, so this will probably where most of my creative work-arounds will be applied. Put simply, how much money will I be making next year, five years from now ... fifteen years from now? How much of that will be my cost of living? Will I need to settle for kazoo jam sessions and solitaire for amusement, to keep from killing myself on a diet of chili mac and red forty? As it is already, I hardly stand in any of the meal lines anymore, and the food boxes around here consist mostly of the same cheap filler I'm diligently avoiding offered at the bumfeeds ... so I'm pretty much shining the shit of a baloney sandwich diet with Centrum, home-brewed kombucha, and stuff like generic cereal and carrots and onions. I'll be more of a drain on the state if I get my food stamps back, but I'll be eating better. I'll also be eating better if I get a job, but that may well end up taking money away from my GTFOofPDX fund. I'll just have to figure it out: eat more pulses, aggressively seek out produce sales, and whatever else I can do to make eating at least some decent food somewhat affordable.

As difficult as worming myself out of the bottleneck of usuriously rising food costs will doubtless be, I wouldn't be surprised if I end up a poster child for Bragg's Aminos before I log the recommended nine(?!) hours of solid sleep a night. I was going to label this a lifestyle problem monopolized by the poor, but I know full well that plenty more affluent people work or play too much to sleep any better than I do frittering the wee hours away playing the MSU-1-hacked Chrono Trigger. I suppose I could twist my arm behind my back, force myself to bed at ten by taking a hot bath, drinking cocoa, meditating and reading ... maybe pop a couple benzos? lol No, not those. I never understood why I'm so sleep resistant; one of my few clear childhood memories is of me sitting in front of the TV at two in the morning watching re-runs, my dad passed out on the couch behind me, bathed in the light of a necromancer's wand. (Hot cocoa's one of those edibles that's VERY worthwhile to make at home, by the way. Milk's always on sale somewhere and bulk cocoa can be a deal) It can be done, of course, but it's the kind of axial change around which my entire life will revolve; the same zero-sum trade-offs pain in the ass quitting drinking and smoking still is. Maybe it'll get easier as the evenings darken earlier.

Another zero-sum game is the one pertaining to the hours alloted me any given day ... or, worse yet, likely to be remaining, overall. Fortunately I don't need to care too much about the latter; but peeing, bathing, noshing, an trying to get six hours of sleep every night shrink my available day to approximately thirteen hours by my reckoning. Even working part-time I'll probably end up with between six and seven hours a day on average to do whatever I please. Which brings me to the third matter to attend to, namely the cultivating of a stimulating, edifying, contributive, and even mildly social lifestyle; stuff like Tea Party crochet matches, Android app development, writing, you name it ... as opposed to getting blazed and playing video games, wondering why nobody cool is around to do anything better than relapsing on booze with. This is the easy one, even though yes indeed hobbies can cost money, because it's just about time management.

lol It's just never enough, is it? First it was brushing and flossing, then it was behaving myself with the bank; then I thought it was all about getting and keeping a part-time service job of some kind, and steering clear of my fave liquor store; but no, now I need to take up salads, Pilates, Kaiserspiel, and other stuff I don't even know yet. What further localized entropy-reduction demands will be made on my slacker person as I careen into the abyss? Or is that one of the darkly cool things about old age: I'll be too decrepit and there'll be too little time left to do anything worthwhile anyway, so I won't have the energy or feel the need to worry about this quasi-existential crap anymore.

Jurassic Park Dining Hall

I was going to blog about something different, but yesterday’s explosive outburst of mine at a bumfeed inspired me to write about something different. Over the years I’ve been going to increasingly fewer of the bumfeeds, for two reasons:

The main reason is because of the specter of scarcity haunting our food pantries, which ten to fifteen years ago were veritable cornocopiae. It’s been making itself pretty comfortable, too! This is no anomaly: even big-money outfits like Trinity Cathedral are starting to skimp on portions and substitute garbage filler (e.g. white rice and bread) for their formerly nutritional offerings. My diet is a pretty big deal to me, even though — perhaps because of? — for most of my life it’s been mediocre to awful. What’s the point in eating when you’re only taking in simple carbs, occasionally accompanied with morsels of meats-of-evil proteins submerged in a lipid sea of arterial dismay? I could just go back to living off malt liquor, and do without the wait, putting up with idiots, and being sober for the ordeal. You’d be surprised how much 2000 kCal costs in junk food (less than five dollars at the Dollar Tree, ten at a convenience store), compared to the same amount derived from whole foods (I can’t see how this can even cost less than fifteen dollars on a good day!).

Which makes me sound like an ingrate, right? I am, but that’s because I recognize the self-interest motivating acts of altruism and therefore don’t feel compelled to reward them with asinine pedestal-raising. It’s nice that people feed the poor, but it would be even nicer if they didn’t in effect further diminish them by serving them processed foods high in simple carbs, bad fats, and sodium. Here’s a typical bumfeed: Bar-S hot dogs with pasta salad and white rice topped with canned veggies for sides, cakes and cookies for dessert, and if you’re lucky some Tang or Crystal Light to wash it down. Again, I’m led to wonder ... are we being kept alive merely so that an Untouchables caste is maintained as an impetus for disdainfully or sympathetically prejudicial hidden social engineering agendas (Political prisoners of the Brave New World — hoorah!)?

Whether that be the case or not, I wish them luck; because the second reason I’ve been avoiding the meals lines is the people who stand in them. I don’t even know how many times I’ve either explicitly stated or strongly implied that most of us Morlocks who lurk in the subterranean stratum of living beside freeways and in projects are boors, ghouls, and thugs, but we are. And that means people doing things like flipping out on you and picking a fight with you because you had the gall to get upset over the jerk violating your personal space, burglarizing your personal conversation with a friend, and in so doing laying down a Great Wall of Smack. Bad manners, to put it kindly; sometimes they pass from atrocious to pathologically ignoble. This is why I blew up yesterday; I don’t feel comfortable around people as it is, I’m not about to when the people make a mission out of their lives to step on as many others’ toes as they can. I don’t care that it’s often unintentional; living more intentionally effectively eliminates the need to have to constantly fall back on that sorry excuse.

More galling than having had to put up with troglodytes just for some empty filler that probably would have shaved five minutes shaved off my life if I’d stuck around for further indignity, is the fact that everyone branded me as the bad guy. Sure, I could have been calm and silken-tongued, but I’ve seen time and again how the diplomatic approach is viewed as a sign of weakness to be exploited. (Legions of social workers’ attempts to civilize the lumpenprolatariat are spat upon and ridiculed by the beneficiaries of their idealism; sure, I’ll enroll in your stupid positive reframing workshop if it’ll get me some bus tickets, some grub, and maybe even housing.) Which has led me to another ugly conclusion: that most bumfeeds, most charity period, serves not only to enable and institutionalize but to encourage bad behaviors.

Opportunity Cost

Nicotine gum just isn't the same as choking honest-to-goodness blokes (a.k.a “smoking...cigs”), but it's just gonna hafta do. Because I have to quit smoking if I'm to get the surgery on my wrist done, that I've avoided for months already. Fuck me! It's been busted up since mid-December! The trick will be to get me to chew enough of the stuff, because I both dislike gum and dislike THIS particular gum.

Actually, the real trick will be for me to start and keep this new sushi restaurant job. Before even setting foot in the kitchen I know this place will be weird because the schedule I received via text earlier today was something I never expected to encounter: split shifts. I remember as a teen in Europe it was par for most hospitality workers — not just the food worker subset — to work split shifts, but it's not something I've personally experienced, or even heard of, in all the food joints I've worked here and in Seattle. lol This is what I get for bragging during the interview about striding there from home in only twenty-three minutes! Split shifts suck, unless you're working in a hotel and can nap in a spare closet or even room. I'll be working four split shifts, nine to ten hours total each day (one only six and a half); though at least the days are split apart in pairs.

It's both my wrist and my feet/legs I'm worried about. My feet and/or legs will start bothering me anywhen between five and seven hours into any given shift; but what kind of grief my wrist will give me I can't know because it depends largely on whether I'll just be dish-dogging or I chucked into the ol' meat grinder, right off the bat, washing dishes and prepping (and maybe clearing tables). Considering the schedule, I fear the latter. Let's just hope acetaminophen, extensive wrapping, and cardboard on the floor if there aren't any mats, will carry me through. Not only that, but I'll be in a cast for three to four months after the surgery, so ... well, fuck, I don't know. For all I DO know, I may not even make it this first week; also there's a fair chance the orthopedist will insist I do nothing more strenuous with my right arm during recovery than swipe my debit card.

Also known to me is how sick I am of canning, sick of looking for work, and sick of failing at work. In fact, this job feels like a disaster in the making. Well, considering how I'm starting to drastically fail at people, too, keeping this job (incentive!) will give me the lion's portion of each week to be too busy to want to give a damn about failings ... er, excepting in regard to my rapport with the (I strongly suspect) conservative Christian Korean owners, whilst withdrawing from alcohol and nicotine. Have I said “Fuck me!” yet?