Funny, ha ha

It’s funny how the methods of thieves and robbers and criminals in general get incorporated into the very fabric of how an economy functions. The assimilation is nowhere more perfected than in the USA.

            It’s funny if you think getting reamed up the ass with a corrugated pipe is funny.

            It’s very funny how these shady behaviours get accepted by the general populace, growl as they might. To curse and express anger at being robbed is deemed to be naïve, un-American, anti-social, or even seditious.

            How has this happened?

            Gradually, over very many years; and it dates back to long before the founding of the US, doesn’t it?

            A very small example, and one revealing of my own naiveté is my current Comcast (that bastion of corporate excrescence) bill. Little did I know I was being charged for HBO every month, after the first month’s free trial. I never asked for it, I never signed on, I never said yes.

            But apparently I never said NO (perhaps I had other things to do).

            Let’s nail him! they gloated, and I was 20 bucks poorer every month for something I did not want.

            Apparently I let my guard down, forgetting how ‘things work’.

            Are corporations evil? my daughter asked me one day, as we walked along the tree-lined streets of midtown Sacramento.

            It’s more complicated than that, I answered.

            But I’m not so sure.

            The businessmen, the politicians, the lawmen; they all learn from the crooks. Somewhere in their hearts they admire the crooks and their quick successes, and seek only to find ways to do the very same things, but within the gambit of some law or other. Protection rackets, shell games, snake-oil, thinly veiled stick-ups and high-jackings – they are all accepted under the cover of the proper amount of, or layers of, authority and official and showy decoration.

            Peel the layers off the onion and you find nothing. Something has been lost - likely stolen - and it is irretrievable.

            Maybe you can live with this.

Note from the Downtrodden Man, written at 2:43 PM, on a Monday

We are truly at war all the time. Not with the terrorists. The terrorists are on our side. They hate the machine as much as we do. We should all be terrorists. At least, to those who decide to become one with the machine. Then again, most of them are really only going along with it, because they believe they can’t fight it.

            Cut off the head of the snake, indeed. That would be good. Walls of insulation protect the ones who really profit, from retribution by the masses, if they ever venture forth to complain or cause a little fuss. The walls have been built year upon year, generation upon generation, the workers themselves under direction and diligently mending all the flaws and possible points of ingress and egress. Reinforcements have always come to seal the breaches that have threatened to penetrate the walls.

            We’re not at war with another country, another culture, another race, another religion, another geopolitical region. Our enemies are right here amongst us, with their slimy fingers working their way into our minds and our hours. We need a patriotism of the self.

            Slavery is a word with multi-faceted meanings.

            Find your meaning.

            The strongest weapon is the weapon of time-suck. We watch in near helplessness as our hours get vacuumed from the dwindling balloon of our lives, only to be piled into a dumpster in a piss-stained back alley, reeking of stale shit and dead messengers, never to be retrieved.

            It gets worse, of course.

            Sometimes we’re blasted right to our faces, told we’re not good enough, not with the program perhaps, somehow diseased and dysfunctional. It’s an easy line to walk, just walk it, we’re told.

            It can get even worse if we actually pipe up and say something, or god forbid, do something.

            In spite of all our sense of self-preservation and wish for well-being we continue to say; ‘Fuck you, asshole.’ (though it may often be just under our breaths). That’s the life in us speaking.

            It all sits like a toxic stew fermenting in our guts and we just want to shit it all out, and be done with it.

            But we can’t do that. It keeps welling up inside from the continual injections from outside.

            We are truly at war all the time.

            This war is not about guns, or slogans, or placards, or protests, or marches, or bombs. It’s an everyday war, and it’s not going to end any time soon.

             

Livin' in the USA

‘$100,000’

I was merely stating what the documents I’d given her stated, our worth.

She was unimpressed and searched for the monthly income line.

‘Hmm.’ she went, which was barely perceptive to a normal person. I noticed it though.

‘I’ll call you.’

She never did.

I walked off, seeing that even though we could afford not to work for awhile, but could rather enjoy a bit of leisure, the landlords would not allow us this pleasure. We needed to work for them.

A homeless person waddled by with a grocery cart full of possessions. There was probably more stuff in that basket than I had in the tiny studio apartment I was camped out in for the time being. I noticed he had a shiny silver watch on his wrist. Both of mine were bare.

I’m only a very small step away from that, I thought.

Who knew it would come to this? In a past life being locked out was expected, but it wasn’t anymore, after I’d acquired some serious credentials.

Well, that’s my pretensions rearing their ugly heads. How foolish to believe the hype.

It would be summer soon, the real summer, not these measly days of 80’s and such. The overarching trees provided their welcome cover, and I had to wonder where I’d be when those days rolled around.

I went back to the place to watch baseball and drink beer.

Who would have thought it would come to this?

            In America you can’t rent a place no matter how much money you have (not considering millionaires and such here, only regular people with a nest-egg to live off), without a monthly income of 3x the rent.. As in many other things, Americans wear blinders and are oblivious to the realities of the world, and to a life outside the grind. Things must conform to the script. God help you if your history has been in another part of the world. That doesn’t count to an American. It doesn’t really exist.

            For example, your credit history of paying off houses and cars and having credit cards and bills count as nothing if they were incurred in a foreign country. Recite this history and an American’s eyes will glaze over and they will disappear into the place where all things are as in America. It’s in one ear and out the other. Not even a single ching registers on the cashbox of that mentality. America is simply not geared up to deal with things and people that happen elsewhere. Try counting the forms, in whatever format, that don’t allow the option of somewhere other than the 50 states, or maybe Puerto Rico, to be chosen.

            Americans don’t really believe that there is a world outside the lower 48, and a few other add-ons - except as occasional tourist destinations.

            When I was interviewed for a position in South Africa nine years ago I was laughed at when I told them I didn’t have a passport. Believe me, now I know what they meant.

            Now I’m back, without much welcome.

            It’s all quite frustrating and I hope you will forgive me if my respect for the intelligence and soul of a people as a whole, and any number of individually seemingly kind and reasonable people, appears to have eroded a bit. It’s unavoidable. 

            I see the country as a case of mass constipation, and hope for the moment when it lets it all out.

            I know this little bit won't help anything get more sane, and I know the world is mad from pole to pole, but it makes me feel better, and I count that as a good thing.

Exploitation

Growing up I had no feel for science. In fact, I was anti-science. We all were, me and the other little hippies, who knew so very little about almost anything. Some of those people still feel that way – they’ve carried an adolescent perspective into their senior years.

            Hey, that could be a good thing - the youth that refuses to die.

            Yeah!

            I’m with that rebellion. I will protect my innocent amazement of nature, intact in the face of the mercenary drive for mammon and prestige.

            Which is what science is all about - innocent amazement of nature - and the blowhards who rail against it in favour of airy-fairy lollipops that they find succour in sucking on can go get fucked, hopefully by a horse with a cock that will rip them from asshole to jawbone.

            As for myself, I finally got into the swing of science, saw it as the play that it really is, and became enthralled by the discovery of little bits of knowledge and insight that can be gained through persistent questioning and testing.

            Make no mistake; the pursuit of science is almost exactly the same as the pursuit of art, and its outputs are often equally abstract and at the same time equally necessary, though sometimes much more practical.

            In time, I gained some respect in my field – internationally - in spite of my dissolute younger years, and often got requests to review, or edit, or participate in gatherings, or in many other ways be invited to become an accepted member of the club.

            Yes, there is a club; as there is in all human endeavour. Don’t fucking kid yourself.  

            But there’s a telling piece of the picture that doesn’t fit; though it fits perfectly with a larger view of life that I’ve held since my days of walking to school with my buddies and expressing words too cynical for such a youngster.

            I’m good enough for this and this and this, but I’m not good enough for that…the very thing that I actually need…namely a job in my case...You can insert your own need or dream here if you wish...

            A cruel and unkind exploitation is found everywhere that humans exist.

            This is what we have to live with.

The Professionals

The burden of professionalism lies like a rock on the soul of creativity. There is more to treasure in the careless tinkerings of some artists than in the carefully honed and rehearsed constructions of others.

            I said that one night as we sat around in the kitchen; she with a white wine and me with the inevitable beer.

            “You’re copping out.” she said.

            “I’m serious! People miss out on a lot because they want perfect little turds wrapped up in neat little packages, bows tied.”

            She winced. She was frustrated with me. I could see that, but I wasn’t sure why. Because surely it was true. I’d heard too many people praise too many so-and-so’s who seemed to be without soul, for their clever little ditties. There were recipes to follow.

            The clock on the wall made an abnormally loud click as the top of the hour rolled into place. It had never done that before.

            “You’re just lazy.”

            “I used to think that too, but I’m not so sure anymore. Working too hard at it seems to squelch what it is I really want to do.”

            “What is it that you really want to do?”

            “Find something new, all the time. And find honest expression.”

            “What are the chances of that?”

            “If you can do it once, you can do it again. If not, then no matter how professional you are it doesn’t really matter - might as well sell used cars.” I took a hit of beer. “It won’t always work. Sometimes it will be the same old shit, it’s true. It’s a matter of probabilities. One has to take the chance. Chances are, if you don’t try too hard, it’ll happen. As far as honest expression goes, the chances are slimmer. We have a lot of skilled people but precious little of that.”

            “The probabilistic guy.” she said. She was sceptical about this view of life, though she knew it was as organic as wheatgrass to me. Play it by the probabilities.

            “Ya, that’s me.” I took a pull off the beer, afterward squelching an incredible interior burp, a heroic implosion.

            She smiled in hopeless abandon and we both laughed, wrinkles coming together along the sides of our eyes. Silliness really was the unabashed master.

            I saw that there was a good probability that we would be making some sweet moves along the sheets quite soon, and that made me look on the bright side of things.       

            We had a chance in life, after all.