I haven't posted in a while, but a lot has happened. My dissertation continues to take shape. I am kind of obsessed with Richard Nixon, and I am torn between empathy and deep hatred toward the crazy corrupt son of a bitch. What drove Nixon? A mean dad and a lot of resentment. I wonder why I can relate to him so much? Oh, I keed. I keed, I say. Seriously, though, my dad is a prick and I hate everybody. Anyway, I think my dissertation is going to be called, "Suck My Balls and Eat My Shit." No. I probably won't call it that. But I might. Goddamn it. I might.
What else is going on? I suppose you want to hear about my job searches. I have been looking for jobs. First of all, I found a job on Craig's List for a tutor. This looked like a great gig: something like 25 dollars an hour to teach English to a couple of kids who just moved to the country with their high-flying flag-waving well-to-do parents. Then the guy who runs the agency screwed up my first check -- mind you, I haven't tutored, let alone met, anybody yet -- and he asked that I go ahead and cash the check, but wire him the change. Yeah. So he sends me an email explaining that I should go ahead and cash the check for three thousand dollars, then send him the remaining (I don't remember the exact total, but this is probably close) twenty-seven hundred. I wrote back and said "this sounds completely legitimate, and it's definitely something I want to be a part of" and then thought nothing of it. Do internet scammers have any shred of irony? You bet they don't. I get a goddamn FedEx with what I assume is some sort of check in it. I didn't open it, and I destroyed it. Then I wrote a very clear email saying that I don't want anything to do with you people and to please stop emailing me and please seriously please stop sending me stuff. I haven't heard any more from them since. So let that be a lesson to you: internet scammers do not have a finely honed sense of irony.
Right around this time I decided to be an insurance salesman. I decided this because I put my goddamn resume on those job sites, you know which ones I'm talking about: Profession Manufacturer and Godzilla. Next thing you know Old Jed's a Millionaire. No, he really isn't. But he is seriously considering drowning himself in the cement pond down the street. I get contacted pretty quickly by two insurance companies, Metropolitan Existence and Talking Duck. I go to a job seminar that Metropolitan Existence is holding first. This crazy fucker drones on and on about how it's easy to sell insurance and financial packages for them because they have a famous cartoon character as their logo. He said that makes the brand recognizable. Then they herded us into a room and made us take a battery of tests on laptop computers. The main test was some sort of personality evaluator. It asked the same six fucking questions over and over again in about seventeen different ways. Finally I said out loud "this thing is asking us the same six fucking questions over and over again in about seventeen different ways." There was an impossibly handsome guy there named Raoul who said "you got that right, my man." Raoul had been a lawyer in Argentina and he moved up here and wanted to get into finance. He looked like Antonio Banderas must have when he was just crowding thirty. I kind of hate guys with awesome hair but I let it slide this time since he was Latino. I heard a long time ago that ninety-eight percent of Dominican men lose absolutely no hair throughout the course of their lives. I realize that Raoul (not his real name, by the way) was not Dominican but you get the idea. The guy's got great hair and I don't mind. So he and I start laughing and cutting up. The guy who ran the "seminar" was nowhere to be found. I'll just tell you his real last name because I can't think of one that would even convey how hilarious I think this name is: Breedlove. Jesus Christ. Jesus Breedlove. Breedlove -- there's a lot going on there, man. And he was okay, as far as all that goes, I guess. He gave the presentation as if he had given the presentation about a thousand times. He also gave it as if only about one out of every fifty or so people who hear it actually pursue a career with Metropolitan Existence, and he wasn't seeing that special one in the ten he had before him right then. He kind of reminded me of Richard Jenkins, before I really had a sense of who the hell Richard Jenkins was. By the way, and this is what they mean by a digression, Stepbrothers might just be the funniest movie of all time. Also, Six Feet Under is probably a really great show, but my wife and I didn't watch it per the recommended dosage. We watched five seasons in a month, and pretty much hated everybody by the time it was over. We decided the show should be called "The Story of the Unlikeable Funeral Home Family." When you think about it, that obviously has a much better ring than "Six Feet Under." "Six Feet Under" -- you don't know what the fuck you're getting there. But I digress, as I said I would. So Richard Jenkins Breedlove the III said a bunch of stuff about how cartoon characters sell a lot of insurance and then he gave us personality tests on laptops. For the life of me I could not figure out if it was good to want a lot of credit and accolades or bad to want a lot of credit and accolades. I figured I would split the difference, which probably made me seem like I had a split personality. Those fuckers never called back and I guess I'm glad.
Then, a few days later, the HR guy from Talking Duck Insurance calls me up and asks me to come in for a job seminar. I figured my suit is out so what the hell. The guy who ran this was a lot better than Breedlove. This fucking guy was the greatest person in the world. He was Practical. That should have been his name: Practical. He would say things such as "our commercials are funny. You know, the duck talks and people like that. And if you say who you work for, people go 'oh yeah. That duck talks.' And they laugh. Because the duck is funny." And then he ran with this particular point: "And we show fender-benders in our ads. You can't show people getting hurt bad because that wouldn't be funny. Fender-benders can be funny. Not people getting hurt bad, though." This is really very true when you think about it. He wasn't done, though. He talked about a new plan that they have been having great success with. Apparently no companies want to provide their employees with insurance anymore, but they still want to seem as if they are. So said companies have basically outsourced it to companies like Talking Duck, who provides policies to cover the holder in the event of a "health event." Practical talked about how they don't discuss this in their ads because the ads are designed to be funny. According to Practical: "You take a kid with cancer. That ain't funny. But a talking duck, that's funny." And he really has a point. I have a duck on my key chain. It's awesome. It quacks, and there's a flashlight in there, too. But I don't have a kid with cancer at the end of my key chain. That wouldn't be funny. That would be fucked up.
I forgot to tell you the best part. I'm getting on the elevator, and as the doors are closing who do I see coming in through the glass revolving doors? You guessed it. Raoul, Mr. Handsome Nice Hair himself. The best-looking Latin American Lawyer I have ever met has an appointment at Talking Duck to attend the same seminar that I do. And he gets on the elevator and we crack wise about the tests at Metropolitan Existence and he asks me if I'm heading downtown after this to the seminar at the Prudential Building. How did I miss that one?! No, I said. I'm not. And we sat through the Talking Duck Practical Kids with Cancer Ain't Funny Seminar and took it a hell of a lot more seriously than we did the Breedlove Presentation. And I actually signed up for an interview with the HR guy and they called me the next day to set it up. I get there a week after that and the HR guy can't make it and who is my interview with? You guessed it: Mr. Practical Kids with Cancer Ain't Funny Himself. We hit it off like fucking gangbusters. At one point he was actually writing down things I was saying because they kicked so much ass. For example, he was talking about how people need insurance because bills come due and you need income even when things are going calamitously and I said, to show that I get it, "that's right. You can't press pause on life." Holy shit he loved it. He wrote it down and asked if he could use it. I told him I was flattered and that I hoped he would. Then he was talking about the way companies outsource benefits and how it's like said companies are providing benefits when they're really only providing a chance for their employees to buy benefits from a third party but it's important for employees to feel like their company is taking care of them. I, again to show that I'm understanding, say, "sure. The idea of employees getting taken care of by their employers is culturally-ingrained." He got really enthusiastic and said, "Culturally ingrained. Yeah. I really like that. Can I use that, too?" I again said I was flattered and said sure. I was killing. KILLING. This might have been my greatest interview EVER. And it went on like that and I managed not to fuck it up and I went home.
The next day, I get a call from a lady from an organization called Higher Inspirations. The lady said she saw my resume and asked if I wanted to come in for a meeting. What the hell? So I ask what they do, and she replies that they're basically career coaches and mentors and I figure I never had an effective father figure so maybe I'd pay for one. So I agree to a meeting and I go in and meet a guy named Pablo. I won't go into great detail here because I ended up signing on with their services and I am getting a fuck ton out of the experience. I had an hour or so meeting with the guy and was ready to go, but then I realized that I really am salesman bait and I can get really enthusiastic really fast. I mean, for two whole days I thought of myself as an insurance salesman. So I asked my wife to come and talk to this guy with me and she agreed because she knows that I am really susceptiple to salesmen and to Italian people. Anyway, Pablo said a couple of things that her dad -- my father-in-law -- said and whamo cablamo Wife said let's do this. Higher Inspirations is not cheap, but the set-up is quite good. Frankly, I've learned a lot about the process of getting hired and for the first time in my life (absolutely no exaggeration) I am optimistic about my career. I even use the term, which I always hated. Soon after the HR guy from Talking Duck calls and leaves a message saying he heard what a great meeting I had with Practical and he wants to set something up real soon. I tell him that I decided to go in another directions (Pablo told me he doesn't want me selling insurance) and he says okay and wishes me luck. Then a couple of weeks later he leaves a message on the machine saying practically the same thing. I can't tell if this is a ploy or if they just don't have their shit together. Either way, I left a message for him telling him that I decided to go in another direction. But thank you.
So after that whole thing got going I had to look in the Sunday paper as part of an exercise with my career coach, Mr. Roberto. I found a data entry posting in there, which I pursued and got hired for. It's only part time, but it gives me an income and a reason to wear pants and leave the house. The job itself sucks balls, but it is not as horrible as it could be. Nobody there is a coke addict, but there is a supervisor who constantly catches me in embarrassing situations. For example, one day he asked me why I was out of breath. I had to be honest and tell him that I had spent my break running up and down the stairs because I hate to drink coffee too late because it keeps me up but I need to perk up so I thought I would get that blood flowing. Then just the other day he caught be doing fake karate in the men's room. He didn't even ask. He just looked at me.
When I got hired for that job I said to the wife "now begins the climb upward." And wouldn't you know it? I got a call from the Chimes Foundation about a grant-writing position. I had a phone interview, then an in-person interview, then an interview with the new CEO who conferenced in the old CEO and cofounder. I have a lot to say about this but there has been no decision that I know of about whether or not I got the job. I should know really soon and it's fucking killing me. I had to put a ton of money into the car and into my computer because the hard drive crashed. I have been good about backing up files, but I did lose a week's worth of dissertation. Writing about all of this makes me feel better. It feels good to talk about it all, but I am reticent to say anything about Chimes. I feel like they gave the job to somebody else. That will crush me, but I have to be honest and let you know how I feel. God, it would be so good if I got it. I would have a worthwhile job, and a truly decent income. It would be great for the resume, and the work would actually be more than worthwhile. I would be in. IN. I would be so great at that job. I'd be in the realm of education, but I wouldn't be teaching. I would be doing something tangible with my writing abilities. Oh God oh God oh God how I want this job. I think if I had it I would have heard by now, though. I had the application out before I hooked on with Higher Inspirations, but Mr. Roberto has seen me through the whole process from after the phone interview on. As I said, I'm learning a lot from him.
Closing thought: there was this Chinese Lady down in the Subway station playing a version of "Country Roads" that would make even the most hardened maniac cry. She played the guitar beautifully and had a pretty voice. More importantly, she sang the words as if she knew what they meant. Knew what they meant. And I thought the whole thing incongruent. Until last night. Bad insomnia. Flipping around. Keep returning to a John Denver documentary. What did I learn? Turns out that the Chinese Premier back in the 1970s was here in the States and asked to take back to China with him 500 cassettes of John Denver. When he got there, he distributed them to the State-run Radio and they got played. A lot. So John Denver was huge in China. And I realized that must have been why that lady played that song so well in the Park Street Station right down by the Red Line. Take me home, Mountain Momma. Take me home.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Episode Four -- Feeling Like I Did Back Then
We now live in Boston, MA. I don't have a job, but I am going to a job fair on Monday morning. I don't really want to get a job, but I don't want to teach either. I have always assumed -- more than assumed, just thought about as an inevitability -- that I would commit suicide. This isn't a cry for help, and I'm not trying to send a message. I seriously just figured, in a Roman, Hemingway and Hunter Thompson manner, that I would reach a point where I would figure that enough is enough. It turns out, though, that my debt would transfer to my wife. I didn't know that. It also turns out that if we divorced, the debt would float into the air like ether. However, my parents would likely have control over my burial. I assure you such a burial would be Medieval and stupid, and they would put my corpse on a slab in a drawer some five to ten feet off the ground. For the record, I plan to be cremated, and my ashes are to be spread in the cold northern Atlantic. Anywhere north in New Hampshire or north of there would work.
Here is a sketch I wrote about our move:
The adjustment here has been difficult. We get lost all of the time, it's noisy and people are piled on top of each other, and I miss the woods. The pizza is unbelievable, though, and M loves her classes. I'm still unemployed, but I am signed up for a job fair that is happening on the 22nd. Since that is the first full day of fall, I'm expecting a lot of good to come from it. The move was hell. M was still packing after the truck was loaded up, and was still working on her "room" at 10 30 the night before we were to leave. Keep in mind that we still had to drive to Indiana and pick up her dad, then drive back. We ended up getting back to O__ at 3 30 that Sunday morning, and the original plan had been to get up between five and six and head out. I was so goddamn mad that I stopped speaking to her for two days. What else? When I got to Indiana (we had to go in separate cars because she left hers there --no point in having two cars in Boston) at 1 00 in the morning, we found out that one of her parents' dogs has cancer and only a few months to live (he's only four). So we were exhausted and crying and then headed back to O__. We got out of town about 1 30 Sunday afternoon. We had reservations to stay in Albany, but we only made it to 300 or so miles outside of it on I-90. We ended up staying, I think, in Syracuse. So we got up the next day at 5 AM and hauled ass at 70 plus mph to get here by 2, which was when we were to meet the movers. They shined us, and the replacements did, too. We got the truck unloaded sometime the next afternoon. Then all the stuff with the phone and the internet: it took two weeks for the internet to get set up, and two and a half for the phone. Something about "bad copper." M still does not have an assistantship, and our youngest dog cannot adjust to going on walks in town. She is skittish; everything scares her, and she is particularly terrified of anything on wheels. As I said, though, M loves her classes. Also, the people here seem really great. They have been friendly and helpful, and overall it all seems very blue-state cool. [end sketch]
That said about the people, I should just tell you that we are living near undergraduates. Our building has young professionals and graduate students in it, but this being a crowded east coast city, there is another clump of buildings right across the alley from us about twenty-five feet away. Most of them are fine, but there are some retards who blare their stereo -- rap, no less; is there any form of music that so perfectly indicates how vile and degenerate this sick and dying culture has become? -- and have loud conversations on their balcony. I hope that they get brain tumors the size of pool balls on their brains, and I hope they spend their final days bleeding from their anuses, nostrils, mouths, and ears. They're not the only loud people, of course. I'm just too old to live near undergraduates. I know I'm a failure. I know that my dissertation is incomplete and I don't have any money and I'm depressive and overweight, but I can't help but think and insist that I deserve some dignity in my living arrangement. That I deserve to be able to read a book without having to put in ear plugs because of the "music" and "conversation." And our sink, which drips and seeps into my brain while I'm sleeping, the drip drip drip that is a torture to me and my teetering sanity, the sink that the maintenance man said might not get fixed because they would have to turn off the water in the whole building and there are rules and it would be "a whole fucking production," our kitchen sink leaks and it is driving me over the fucking edge. This is why people get jobs that they hate. They do it for the money, so they can live in decent neighborhoods away from trash and scum and noise and so that they can get their sinks fixed. They do it for dignity. They sacrifice the dignity of their work, they whore their minds and souls for the dignity of decent living conditions. This is what I learned. I think I am at the point existentially where I could actually become a salesperson. When I sell out, I'm going to sell out spectacularly. I'm going to own my own house in a quiet neighborhood and I'm going to pay off my debt. I'm going to keep a shotgun by the door and have the whole house wired with alarms. I'm going to install those flood lights that come on when they detect motion. I'm going to build a wall around it that's nine feet high and three feet thick. I'm going to strewn barbed wire across the top of this wall and I'm going to live in the basement.
My ears are becoming infected from the earplugs. I'm tired and I miss the woods.
I have a post that I wrote on my word program that I won't post because it's disturbing and even more offensive than this one. I might post it anyway at the end of this one. I haven't decided.
The last two books I read featured characters who started dissertations but were unable to finish them. This is seriously a coincidence. The first was All the King's Men, and the second was The Book of Daniel. I have thought about it, and I think Nausea fits into this. I can't remember if the character in Nausea was working on his dissertation, or if it was merely an academic piece. It was an historical work, I know that, which is what the dissertation in the Warren work was to be. I'm at the end of something here. The trick in such times is to be able to imagine and build the next phase while transitioning out of the one that's ending. The digits in my age equal nine and in December they will equal zero. I have been depressed since at least the eighth grade. Life is not worth living. This is also not a cry for help; it is a statement of fact. We go through life accumulating images in our minds that are too horrible for us to bear. When we die, the images go away, and that is heaven. Heaven is relief, heaven is forgetting, heaven is the images that is our consciousness evaporating into the cosmos.
Here is that post I wrote the other day. I'm sorry:
Here is a sketch I wrote about our move:
The adjustment here has been difficult. We get lost all of the time, it's noisy and people are piled on top of each other, and I miss the woods. The pizza is unbelievable, though, and M loves her classes. I'm still unemployed, but I am signed up for a job fair that is happening on the 22nd. Since that is the first full day of fall, I'm expecting a lot of good to come from it. The move was hell. M was still packing after the truck was loaded up, and was still working on her "room" at 10 30 the night before we were to leave. Keep in mind that we still had to drive to Indiana and pick up her dad, then drive back. We ended up getting back to O__ at 3 30 that Sunday morning, and the original plan had been to get up between five and six and head out. I was so goddamn mad that I stopped speaking to her for two days. What else? When I got to Indiana (we had to go in separate cars because she left hers there --no point in having two cars in Boston) at 1 00 in the morning, we found out that one of her parents' dogs has cancer and only a few months to live (he's only four). So we were exhausted and crying and then headed back to O__. We got out of town about 1 30 Sunday afternoon. We had reservations to stay in Albany, but we only made it to 300 or so miles outside of it on I-90. We ended up staying, I think, in Syracuse. So we got up the next day at 5 AM and hauled ass at 70 plus mph to get here by 2, which was when we were to meet the movers. They shined us, and the replacements did, too. We got the truck unloaded sometime the next afternoon. Then all the stuff with the phone and the internet: it took two weeks for the internet to get set up, and two and a half for the phone. Something about "bad copper." M still does not have an assistantship, and our youngest dog cannot adjust to going on walks in town. She is skittish; everything scares her, and she is particularly terrified of anything on wheels. As I said, though, M loves her classes. Also, the people here seem really great. They have been friendly and helpful, and overall it all seems very blue-state cool. [end sketch]
That said about the people, I should just tell you that we are living near undergraduates. Our building has young professionals and graduate students in it, but this being a crowded east coast city, there is another clump of buildings right across the alley from us about twenty-five feet away. Most of them are fine, but there are some retards who blare their stereo -- rap, no less; is there any form of music that so perfectly indicates how vile and degenerate this sick and dying culture has become? -- and have loud conversations on their balcony. I hope that they get brain tumors the size of pool balls on their brains, and I hope they spend their final days bleeding from their anuses, nostrils, mouths, and ears. They're not the only loud people, of course. I'm just too old to live near undergraduates. I know I'm a failure. I know that my dissertation is incomplete and I don't have any money and I'm depressive and overweight, but I can't help but think and insist that I deserve some dignity in my living arrangement. That I deserve to be able to read a book without having to put in ear plugs because of the "music" and "conversation." And our sink, which drips and seeps into my brain while I'm sleeping, the drip drip drip that is a torture to me and my teetering sanity, the sink that the maintenance man said might not get fixed because they would have to turn off the water in the whole building and there are rules and it would be "a whole fucking production," our kitchen sink leaks and it is driving me over the fucking edge. This is why people get jobs that they hate. They do it for the money, so they can live in decent neighborhoods away from trash and scum and noise and so that they can get their sinks fixed. They do it for dignity. They sacrifice the dignity of their work, they whore their minds and souls for the dignity of decent living conditions. This is what I learned. I think I am at the point existentially where I could actually become a salesperson. When I sell out, I'm going to sell out spectacularly. I'm going to own my own house in a quiet neighborhood and I'm going to pay off my debt. I'm going to keep a shotgun by the door and have the whole house wired with alarms. I'm going to install those flood lights that come on when they detect motion. I'm going to build a wall around it that's nine feet high and three feet thick. I'm going to strewn barbed wire across the top of this wall and I'm going to live in the basement.
My ears are becoming infected from the earplugs. I'm tired and I miss the woods.
I have a post that I wrote on my word program that I won't post because it's disturbing and even more offensive than this one. I might post it anyway at the end of this one. I haven't decided.
The last two books I read featured characters who started dissertations but were unable to finish them. This is seriously a coincidence. The first was All the King's Men, and the second was The Book of Daniel. I have thought about it, and I think Nausea fits into this. I can't remember if the character in Nausea was working on his dissertation, or if it was merely an academic piece. It was an historical work, I know that, which is what the dissertation in the Warren work was to be. I'm at the end of something here. The trick in such times is to be able to imagine and build the next phase while transitioning out of the one that's ending. The digits in my age equal nine and in December they will equal zero. I have been depressed since at least the eighth grade. Life is not worth living. This is also not a cry for help; it is a statement of fact. We go through life accumulating images in our minds that are too horrible for us to bear. When we die, the images go away, and that is heaven. Heaven is relief, heaven is forgetting, heaven is the images that is our consciousness evaporating into the cosmos.
Here is that post I wrote the other day. I'm sorry:
Frank Sinatra Ate My Pancakes—10 September 2008
So last week we made the move up to Boston. It took about sixteen hours to get up here from O__, Ohio and it was worth every bit of effort to move each and every centimeter. Living in O__ was much like being trapped in a rotting, cancerous anus. The bulk of the student body of M___ University should be stuffed into ovens Auschwitz-style and their ashes should be used to fertilize organic farms. Their SUVs should be dismantled and recycled, and their parents should be rounded up and beat in the face with hammers while midgets mutilate their genitals. God should issue an apology for creating such horrible people, and then He should take a Massive Shit on the Composition and Rhetoric Division of the English Department. He should also drown the Business School in his Divine Piss.
But seriously, the people up here seem so much more decent than the Fuckwads and Showersacks that populate O__. God, I hate that fucking place. I cannot believe I lived there for six years. I’ve had chemotherapy treatments that were more pleasant than specific class sessions I endured as a teacher at that school. I’ve had cancer, I’ve been run over twice, and my parents abused me in a multitude of ways, but somehow I look back at my time in O__ as some of the worst years of my life. These students and their emotionally retarded parents are the motherfuckers who think that Sarah Palin was a humdinger of a choice for vice-president. These are the Deranged Country Club Nazis who think that Obama has it in for America. These are the Shrill Patriotic Charlatans who support the troops and Bush’s War in Iraq but would never consider enlisting. And at this point I have to give credit to Palin and her family. They are indeed pro-war, but her oldest child has enlisted. This is the kind of consistency, decency even, that is lacking in the Young Republican set of M___ University in O__, Ohio. These folks are the ones who think that cutting taxes on the eve of war makes perfect sense. These are the ones who will loot the treasury and burn a hole in the sky. They will raise the oceans and drown brown people and polar bears. They will mock science but laud Darwin in his Social Guise. They will lock up black people for smoking crack and poor whites for taking meth while they snort coke with their Hotshot Wall Street Yuppie Scum Friends. They are the cancerous mass on the human species. They are what’s wrong with America, with the World, with the Universe.
In other news, we still don’t have a phone or internet service. I typed this onto Word and used a library to post it [I didn't, actually post it from a library]. Before we left M___ University the wife and I wanted to do something that summed up what it was like to live in the Midwest. So we went to the Creation Museum in some horrible place in Kentucky just across the Ohio River from Indiana. It’s North of the Cincinnati Airport, which is actually in Kentucky. I have pictures. I plan to write extensively about our time at the museum. Places like that are why pot exists. I don’t smoke pot [pause] anymore, but I kind of wish I had blazed a fatty in the parking lot of that place. Yeah. More on that later.
I still don’t have a job here. The lack of the internets ain’t helping none, but I’m not too worried. I feel like I should go off on the election, but I don’t think I will in this post. I feel like the vitriol of the first couple of paragraphs of this post should suffice. I will say that I’ve started to reread All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. Please please please read it if you are at all interested in American Politics, or American Literature, or what it means to have Ideals while having to live in the Big Bad World. I recently wrote an email to one of my best friends, and in it I said that I hate human beings. He replied to that particular comment that human beings were indeed bad, except when they were writing plays and creating art and et cetera. I was a bit put off by his response. It was sunny when I wanted stormy, hopeful when I wanted hateful. After a few chapters of The Great American Novel, though, I kind of concur with what he wrote. So there’s that.
I guess I should write more about the move. Maybe later. Until then, here are a couple of random thoughts:
I love my plants. I fell in love with the tree that lived outside my window in O___. Knowing that I was going to move this summer, I grabbed some of its springtime helicopter seeds and germinated them. Three survived. They are Ashe, which I named because it’s the Dominant Male (please hum to yourself now the theme from the American version of The Office); Mailman, which I named because it doesn’t really look like the tree from which it came, which led me to think that maybe another tree got its seed in there (I might have named it Milkman); and Bounty, which I named because I germinated it on a paper towel. If I think of it, I will post pictures of these trees. I also have a Fichus that I got nine and a half years ago, a plant that my wife rescued from the garbage at the OSU Writing Center (who the fuck throws away a living plant?), a plant that was given to participants of my wife’s cousin’s wedding (a real asshole, that guy – love the plant, though), and one that I think came from said wife’s grandmother. Mailman took the journey kind of hard, but I think it will be fine. I rode up here with my plants and my two dogs. Wife rode in the truck with her dad. That guy will likely be the subject of a number of posts. I love him madly and admire him with a sincere and genuine sense of affection. He is a real gear-grinder, though. Politics is where this is headed. As I said, we’ll save it.
As I said, I'm sorry about all the hate. Fall is coming. My mind is bound to change for the better. For a little while, at least.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Episode Three -- Pomo Se Dice?
When I was first in graduate school I had trouble reading theory. I think everybody does, and there is usually a reluctance to admit it. Some people, on the other hand, make it a point to say that the reading was "gobbledygook," or that the theorist was crazy. While teaching composition, I had a student tell me that Eliot "could have made it clearer." I remember moaning to my wife that it's come to this, the self-esteem baby on board generation thinks that the problem is with TS Eliot, not their own ability to comprehend, or to sit with, his work. Baudrillard really kicked my ass, but I never thought it was him. I'm not of the self-esteem generation, though, and I kind of hate myself. So I'd be one of the last ones to blame it on the author. Years later, when reading for my PhD exams, I took an entire month to read his A System of Objects. It was well worth it, for I hit a home run using one of the passages I had fully digested. My first reading of Baudrillard, all those years ago, was the essay "The Precession of Simulacra." I have since taught that in my film studies class, but I think only eight or so percent of the class read it -- or read it past the first couple of paragraphs. Still, a few put it to good use in writing about The Truman Show, and the rest perked up when I told them that the actual book appears in The Matrix. Anyway, what I really remember about that first time I read Baudrillard was the picture of Ronald Reagan, or "Ronald Reagan," on a big screen above his wife, Nancy, after she got done with her speech at the Republican National Convention. They were pulling out all the stops that year because Walter Mondale had them sweating bullets. They knew that with Mondale's charisma and the nation's longing for a return to the Carter years, they would have to buckle down, get nasty, and even put technology to use. Baudrillard, per his title, talked about the image preceding the reality, and that bit discussed the extent to which Reagan was all image. I don't know the history of first ladies, potential or actual, speaking at conventions. I don't know if Rosalyn or Pat or who have you spoke on behalf of Jimmy and Dick. When those guys ran, conventions were about actually nominating the candidate -- and by that I mean it wasn't merely ceremonial. There were the proverbial fat cats, the machine heads and monopoly men cutting deals and glad-handing and back-stabbing and smoking cigars and talking about broads. I know that Humphrey was nominated in 1968 without having run in a single primary or caucus, and the Republican convention was a free for all as late as 1976, and the same for the Democrats as late as 1980. The conventions turned into a coronation, or pageant, or infomercial (pick your analogy) after the primary and caucus systems came to dominate the nomination process. I think -- but note that I don't know this for a fact -- this is when the wives starting talking. Do you remember the "softer side of Sears"? I think this is the equivalent of the softer side of the candidate, the side only the wife knows. The alcoholism, the impotence, the cross-dressing. No wait. Not that soft. Anyway, Baudrillard talked about the candidate appearing on the screen over the wife. Since then, it's been pretty common.
I remember Walter Mondale on a screen sitting in a hotel room after his wife spoke in 1984. I only remember that, and I'm not sure if it was after his wife spoke but it would seem to make sense, because I asked my dad if he was going to speak and he said no, not for a couple of days. I have fond memories of watching such political events with my dad. He had a quasi-political job, and he liked that I was interested in our government. His attention during such events came in and out in waves, and he was often sunk deep in his chair behind a newspaper while I was on the floor with my dog splitting a bowl of popcorn. I remember in 1988 when Tom Brokaw set Dan Quayle up for his National Guard question. I have to hand it to my dad. He was behind his newspaper, and per usual he had an ear out for what was happening. When Brokaw started in on his line of questioning, by the second or third one the old man came out from behind the newspaper and said "turn it up, turn it up." I turned it up as I looked up at him and then back toward the television. Quayle looked like he was having one of those dreams where you realize that you're out in public in your underwear. Let's see. What else do I remember? I don't remember Barbara Bush speaking in 1988. I don't remember Kitty Dukakis speaking either. She was probably busy being raped and murdered by Bernard Shaw. I don't remember Hillary Clinton speaking in 1992, but I do remember Barbara speaking that year. The economy was in the toilet, so the GOP shipped in all those babies and had their "family values" convention. Barbara told some cornball story that I'm sure never happened about one of her children breaking a window with a batted ball. She was pissed, so she called her husband, George. Instead of being mad, it turns out that old George was beaming proud that his boy had hit such a whopper. See, they're just regular folks like you and me. As I said, I doubt that any such thing really happened. Well, maybe young George broke some windows in a coke-fueled rage, but that ain't the way Barb told the story. What else? I remember Marilyn Quayle talking in 1992. That year, the family values year, part of the plan was to paint the Clintons as crazy hippies from the sixties. She talked about how not everybody from her generation turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. Yeah. I don't think a guy who is running for President of the United States dropped out of anything, especially society. That was the tag on the Clintons that year, though. They were painted as radicals. Sound familiar? Then, in 1996, Liddy Dole had what was called her "Oprah moment." That was when she was telling the nation about the Bob she knows, and she walked down into the audience. That's pretty much all I remember of that one. At the time I was in a bad relationship that was ending slowly and painfully, so I was probably bombed on bourbon and pot when Liddy took her stroll. I do remember later that autumn Bob Dole falling off of a stage. I never disliked Bob Dole. He always seemed like a decent guy to me, and was moderate enough for Newt Gingrich to have referred to him as a tax collector for the welfare state. Bob lost, though, and I was glad enough. By then, I was pretty tired of Bill Clinton, though. He had signed welfare reform into law, and he had also pandered to the worst in this country by signing the Defense of Marriage Act. And this guy was a radical, don't forget. As for 2000, I don't remember Tipper talking, but I do remember that kiss Al planted on her before his big speech. I was home visiting my family then, and I remember my mother saying something like "yikes." In 1992, Al had told the story of his son being run over. In 1996, he told the story of his sister dying of lung cancer. By 2000, I think Al had run out of family tragedies to mine. At least I don't remember him telling any such stories. I remember his speech having kind of a populist touch. I don't remember watching Lieberman's old lady talk, or Laura or Lynn. I don't remember the latter two talking in 2004, either, but I'll bet both were odd and scary. The same has to go for Teresa Heinz, if she even talked. I remember Kerry's daughter speaking on the night that Senator John gave his big talk. She was perfectly pleasant and humanized him a bit. It must have helped since Kerry probably won the election. He certainly carried Ohio. That's what a lot of people don't understand about 2008. Barack Obama will win the election, certainly Ohio, because Ken Blackwell is not around to rig it this time.
So last night Michelle Obama talked. I thought she did a great job. I liked her brother, her mom seemed like a sweetheart, and she must have aced Al Gore's class on conveying a family tragedy to tell the world (to paraphrase "The Office") "this is my blood -- it's red just like yours." Her father worked for thirty years in a water treatment plant in Chicago, and photographs indicate that he wore awesome glasses. He suffered from Multiple Sclerosis and passed away in 1991. I think the goal was to show the world that she is much more like Claire Huxtable than Angela Davis. I think that compared to Cindy McCain, the Hitchcock blonde that John McCain started nailing when his first wife got too old and deformed from an illness, she will be seen as down to earth and warm. I really like how she said "you see" before lining up an important point. It made her seem clear-headed and emotional all at the same time. Okay, now back to Baudrillard. I wish the night would have ended when she said "thank you." Instead, they brought her very cute children onto the stage. I can live with that. Barack and Michelle are both attractive, so the fact that they have cute kids shows that there is an order to the universe. Why oh why did they have to beam in Barack from Kansas City? It was contrived, and it made me feel like they were interacting as a family so that Middle Americans to see that these black folks are just like people. Such a linkup means that there is a delay in the conversation. He would be answering one question while one of the kids was asking another. It made it awkward. I also thought it was corny that he was sitting with a typical midwestern family. They seemed to have an Italian last name, so it is likely that they were working class Catholics. What a demographic coincidence that was. I just hope that they didn't serve him three-eyed fish for dinner. So in conclusion, great speech, Michelle, but I wish you wouldn't use your kids to score political points. I also wish you hadn't gone the video linkup route. How can something so postmodern be such a cliche? And it's just odd and weird. I'd wonder out loud how this cornball stunt played in Peoria, but who the hell cares? Obama is going to carry Illinois with ease.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Episode Two -- Karate Chopping My Balls
I won't be teaching this semester, it seems. I have said before that teaching is the only thing I've ever done for money that wasn't a complete waste of time. Teachers really get screwed in this country. I'm not talking about the pay, and I'm not really talking about high school and junior high and those who teach tots younger than that. I'm talking about college professors. I haven't lived in any country other than the United States, but I find it hard to believe that any other place in the world regards their professors with the disdain that this nation does. I write this and I mean it, but at the same time I will admit to rolling my eyes at many to most of the academics I have known. Will this be the point where I make a distinction between teachers and academics? No. I'm not an unkempt hipster who has bought into the blustery hoopla of an aging womanizer who teaches English because he thinks he's Hamlet. This Hamlet guy was, I think, a fundamentally decent man who produces essays and plays and cares deeply about his craft. He could also be narcissistic and grossly inappropriate in the classroom, and his lectures often degenerated into shtick designed to impress twenty year old girls. He needed to be desired. He also tended to mistake his theories for facts. This was, I think, a pattern that played itself out in phases. He had elaborate conjectures about war heroes and murdered children that in his mind solidified into facts upon which he built the structures of even more elaborate schema. His personality was a cross between Schneider the maintenance man on "One Day at a Time"and whatever psychopath Brando played in Last Tango in Paris. He was also a fantastic reader. He read everything under the sun, and when I was his student he seemed to give my essays and thesis (for which he was my second or third reader) the same care and consideration he gave to the big bad French theorists. He gave me careful notes, asked insightful questions, and made connections that I wouldn't have made in a hundred years of smoking the best pot on earth. He was a complicated guy, and in the year 2000 during the presidential campaign the candidate on the right made him so angry that every time our kind professor heard his name he would strike a karate pose and kick and punch.
So anyway, one time several years ago I was talking with a friend of mine. He and I had gone to the same high school and college. We spent little to no time together in college, which we were both more than okay with, but it was one of those strange things where when we went home for breaks we would spend our nights out in the same group. I think this particular conversation took place after we had graduated, and I was in a graduate program. I think he was cleaning carpets in Colorado and living with a morbidly obese Republican. His stepfather was an attorney and his mother might have been, too. He had it in his mind that he was going to go to law school. He never did, and he joined the marines when he was in his early thirties. He was sent to Iraq and the last I heard he was still doing fine, thriving even. Anyway, this one night I told him that I was interested in becoming a college professor, and he told me that his stepfather told him that those who can, do, and that those who can't, teach. That pissed me off. It pissed me off for a lot of reasons, but mostly because we had some similar experiences at home and at school. Specifically, both of our fathers were total assholes and did not treat us like human beings with thoughts and feelings and valid perspectives on the world. At college, we had the same major, and met the same professor, a wise old man who smoked cigars and talked and carried himself an awful lot like Jason Robards in Max Dugan Returns. We and everybody else who had taken one of his classes referred to him as Yahweh, and in a night of drunken revelry a bunch of us fantasized about the possibility of being near him when he died so that we could clutch his hand and have all of his knowledge pass into us. Yahweh was kind, and he took us seriously in ways that nobody in our families had. He was decent through and through, and lacked the inappropriateness, sexual and otherwise, that the aforementioned Hamlet basked in. Why this kid would say that about teachers was beyond me. Yahweh had been my first real role model, the first adult I had seen that I felt like I would be wise to emulate. And I have to the best of my ability.
There are many other instances of college professors (and instructors) not getting respect. And as I said, I find a lot of academics to be boobs -- a lot of intellectual masturbation about door knobs "othering" the handicapped and The Wizard of Oz being about gender roles. Yahweh himself had a lot of anger for this type of crackpottery, and types that I did not understand when I was his student. Much of this kind of thinking, that is, the door knobs and gender roles, probably comes from the push to publish. A lot of it probably also comes from mass education. If you're in a country that is going to send millions of children off to school every year, you're going to need a lot of teachers and they are not always going to be the sharpest and the brightest. College professors tend to be misfits, and this is the category that I myself fit most comfortably in. I read Hammer of the Gods in many study halls in high school, and I feel more comfortable reading books than I do interacting with most people. I feel ideas. They are palpable to me, and the intangible for me has always been real. I would have made a fantastic priest, but I do not believe in God. I despise and stink at small talk but I am good at drawing people out and getting them to think about and investigate issues that are important to them. My working philosophy is based on the idea that democracy entails making education available to as many people as humanly possible, but the challenge is to prevent that access from degenerating into mediocrity or worse. So my belief is in democratization while maintaining a vigilance for and in defense of standards. That's what I worked to bring to the classroom. So many professors I know have philosophies of their own. They can tell you with precision why they teach, what they want their students to take from their work, and how their efforts fit into the greater project that is society. I hated Tony Snow, and I think a good year is one in which both he and Tim Russert become worm food. I hated the latter for reasons that will likely come up later. I hated the former for many reasons, but especially one off the cuff remark he made when the host of the Fox Sunday morning political show. He was talking about somebody, I don't remember who it was, and Snow remarked that the person "had less common sense than a college professor." Of course, that remark is part of the cultural populism that has dominated right winged rhetoric over the course of the last forty years. Spiro Agnew, reading speeches conceived by Pat Buchanan and written by William Safire, spoke of the eastern elites and the unelected elites and the elites, the elites, the elites. Help. America this is quite serious. Of course Richard Hofstadter had already written about the paranoid style in American politics, and this paranoid style was and is at its core anti-intellectual. Fancy booklearn' is bad; the coasts, both east and west, are bad; taste is bad. Toby Keith recently said he was a Democrat and he praised Barack Obama and I don't know if this will lead to a seismic shift or not. Maybe Toby Keith will also come out in favor of college professors. As it is now, these red state kids come to college with the goal of getting a degree without having their minds corrupted, which is to say, opened. Their concept of college professors is fed to them by their daddies and Fox News and the kind of folks who didn't know that the Agnew watches were meant to be ironic. Their conception of college parties comes from Animal House and its school of imitators best summarized by the episode of "The Simpsons" when Homer goes to college and bases all he thinks he has to know on an afternoon movie called School of Hard Knockers. I'll be a campus hero indeed. I'll be the Secretary of Partying Down.
And the intellect is supposed to be effete. I always thought and suspected and came to know that the aforementioned Hamlet's problem was that he feared he was a fairy for loving poetry and drama. That was also, I'm certain, Ezra Pound's problem. Pound conceptualized the creative will as virtu, from the Latin vir, meaning man. See virile, virtue, and etcetera. The creative impulse is manly, even poetry. The critic, by contrast, is not. Mark Twain, who I love and respect, compared critics to eunuchs in the harem, saying, "They know how it's done, and see it done every day, but they can't do it themselves." Of course I'm conflating the critic and the professor, which is viable since there really is quite an overlap. Those who can, do, those who can't, become critics. With this thought so prevalent in the classroom I fear I have tended to carry a chip on my shoulder into the classroom. I felt like I would be a better teacher, certainly more respected, if I had several novels and volumes of short stories under my belt. I feel like I would have been a better teacher of film if I had actually made films. I felt secondary, of a lower caste. On an evaluation for a film class class I taught, a student wrote that the class would have been better if I had taught them about the process of making films. On an evaluation for a short story class I taught, similar critiques were made. In essence, they stated they wanted to know how it was done. The implication -- maybe it was overt, I don't care to reread them -- was that I could not do it and therefore could not pass it on. The creative writing major, which I actually had set out to write about in this post, is a joke. This is not to indict everybody in it, but broadly speaking it seems to be filled with the stupid and the shallow, turds who can't think and don't care about anything of substance. They want a key, a magic key, that they can buy -- scratch that, invest in -- so that they can make their money and live their awful lives. They don't care about ideas, they don't care about loss and what it means to actually articulate something nebulous and heretofore overwhelming. My job was not to teach people how to write books or produce films. My job was to teach people how to read books and how to watch films. My job was to teach people how to interpret, which literally means to give meaning to a work. My job was to show ways for students to realize what a work is really about, to read and see the parts that make it eternal, universal, and wholly human. Politically, I always thought that they would afterward be less prone to a demagogue. Creatively, I just don't understand how learning how to read and learning how to see, to learn to realize the symbolic level on which works actually function, wouldn't translate into learning how to create stories. God, people are stupid. Most people are stupid. "We don't wish to learn/but we hate what we don't understand."
This post is like my teaching career, I think. This isn't really the end. It's just stopping for a little while.
So anyway, one time several years ago I was talking with a friend of mine. He and I had gone to the same high school and college. We spent little to no time together in college, which we were both more than okay with, but it was one of those strange things where when we went home for breaks we would spend our nights out in the same group. I think this particular conversation took place after we had graduated, and I was in a graduate program. I think he was cleaning carpets in Colorado and living with a morbidly obese Republican. His stepfather was an attorney and his mother might have been, too. He had it in his mind that he was going to go to law school. He never did, and he joined the marines when he was in his early thirties. He was sent to Iraq and the last I heard he was still doing fine, thriving even. Anyway, this one night I told him that I was interested in becoming a college professor, and he told me that his stepfather told him that those who can, do, and that those who can't, teach. That pissed me off. It pissed me off for a lot of reasons, but mostly because we had some similar experiences at home and at school. Specifically, both of our fathers were total assholes and did not treat us like human beings with thoughts and feelings and valid perspectives on the world. At college, we had the same major, and met the same professor, a wise old man who smoked cigars and talked and carried himself an awful lot like Jason Robards in Max Dugan Returns. We and everybody else who had taken one of his classes referred to him as Yahweh, and in a night of drunken revelry a bunch of us fantasized about the possibility of being near him when he died so that we could clutch his hand and have all of his knowledge pass into us. Yahweh was kind, and he took us seriously in ways that nobody in our families had. He was decent through and through, and lacked the inappropriateness, sexual and otherwise, that the aforementioned Hamlet basked in. Why this kid would say that about teachers was beyond me. Yahweh had been my first real role model, the first adult I had seen that I felt like I would be wise to emulate. And I have to the best of my ability.
There are many other instances of college professors (and instructors) not getting respect. And as I said, I find a lot of academics to be boobs -- a lot of intellectual masturbation about door knobs "othering" the handicapped and The Wizard of Oz being about gender roles. Yahweh himself had a lot of anger for this type of crackpottery, and types that I did not understand when I was his student. Much of this kind of thinking, that is, the door knobs and gender roles, probably comes from the push to publish. A lot of it probably also comes from mass education. If you're in a country that is going to send millions of children off to school every year, you're going to need a lot of teachers and they are not always going to be the sharpest and the brightest. College professors tend to be misfits, and this is the category that I myself fit most comfortably in. I read Hammer of the Gods in many study halls in high school, and I feel more comfortable reading books than I do interacting with most people. I feel ideas. They are palpable to me, and the intangible for me has always been real. I would have made a fantastic priest, but I do not believe in God. I despise and stink at small talk but I am good at drawing people out and getting them to think about and investigate issues that are important to them. My working philosophy is based on the idea that democracy entails making education available to as many people as humanly possible, but the challenge is to prevent that access from degenerating into mediocrity or worse. So my belief is in democratization while maintaining a vigilance for and in defense of standards. That's what I worked to bring to the classroom. So many professors I know have philosophies of their own. They can tell you with precision why they teach, what they want their students to take from their work, and how their efforts fit into the greater project that is society. I hated Tony Snow, and I think a good year is one in which both he and Tim Russert become worm food. I hated the latter for reasons that will likely come up later. I hated the former for many reasons, but especially one off the cuff remark he made when the host of the Fox Sunday morning political show. He was talking about somebody, I don't remember who it was, and Snow remarked that the person "had less common sense than a college professor." Of course, that remark is part of the cultural populism that has dominated right winged rhetoric over the course of the last forty years. Spiro Agnew, reading speeches conceived by Pat Buchanan and written by William Safire, spoke of the eastern elites and the unelected elites and the elites, the elites, the elites. Help. America this is quite serious. Of course Richard Hofstadter had already written about the paranoid style in American politics, and this paranoid style was and is at its core anti-intellectual. Fancy booklearn' is bad; the coasts, both east and west, are bad; taste is bad. Toby Keith recently said he was a Democrat and he praised Barack Obama and I don't know if this will lead to a seismic shift or not. Maybe Toby Keith will also come out in favor of college professors. As it is now, these red state kids come to college with the goal of getting a degree without having their minds corrupted, which is to say, opened. Their concept of college professors is fed to them by their daddies and Fox News and the kind of folks who didn't know that the Agnew watches were meant to be ironic. Their conception of college parties comes from Animal House and its school of imitators best summarized by the episode of "The Simpsons" when Homer goes to college and bases all he thinks he has to know on an afternoon movie called School of Hard Knockers. I'll be a campus hero indeed. I'll be the Secretary of Partying Down.
And the intellect is supposed to be effete. I always thought and suspected and came to know that the aforementioned Hamlet's problem was that he feared he was a fairy for loving poetry and drama. That was also, I'm certain, Ezra Pound's problem. Pound conceptualized the creative will as virtu, from the Latin vir, meaning man. See virile, virtue, and etcetera. The creative impulse is manly, even poetry. The critic, by contrast, is not. Mark Twain, who I love and respect, compared critics to eunuchs in the harem, saying, "They know how it's done, and see it done every day, but they can't do it themselves." Of course I'm conflating the critic and the professor, which is viable since there really is quite an overlap. Those who can, do, those who can't, become critics. With this thought so prevalent in the classroom I fear I have tended to carry a chip on my shoulder into the classroom. I felt like I would be a better teacher, certainly more respected, if I had several novels and volumes of short stories under my belt. I feel like I would have been a better teacher of film if I had actually made films. I felt secondary, of a lower caste. On an evaluation for a film class class I taught, a student wrote that the class would have been better if I had taught them about the process of making films. On an evaluation for a short story class I taught, similar critiques were made. In essence, they stated they wanted to know how it was done. The implication -- maybe it was overt, I don't care to reread them -- was that I could not do it and therefore could not pass it on. The creative writing major, which I actually had set out to write about in this post, is a joke. This is not to indict everybody in it, but broadly speaking it seems to be filled with the stupid and the shallow, turds who can't think and don't care about anything of substance. They want a key, a magic key, that they can buy -- scratch that, invest in -- so that they can make their money and live their awful lives. They don't care about ideas, they don't care about loss and what it means to actually articulate something nebulous and heretofore overwhelming. My job was not to teach people how to write books or produce films. My job was to teach people how to read books and how to watch films. My job was to teach people how to interpret, which literally means to give meaning to a work. My job was to show ways for students to realize what a work is really about, to read and see the parts that make it eternal, universal, and wholly human. Politically, I always thought that they would afterward be less prone to a demagogue. Creatively, I just don't understand how learning how to read and learning how to see, to learn to realize the symbolic level on which works actually function, wouldn't translate into learning how to create stories. God, people are stupid. Most people are stupid. "We don't wish to learn/but we hate what we don't understand."
This post is like my teaching career, I think. This isn't really the end. It's just stopping for a little while.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Episode One -- Let's Go Krogering and Microchips and Vacuuming Books
Let's Go Krogering
Yesterday was Friday, August 22nd, 2008. Next week my wife and I are moving from Ohio to Boston. She will be pursuing graduate work at a prestigious school in that city. I do not plan to divulge the name of the school, but I will tell you that it leans Jesuit. I do not plan to tell you the department she will be in, but I will say that it has nothing to do with processing or selling anything. I do not know what I will be doing for work. My search for a job will be part of the storyline of this journal. I have been pursuing my own graduate degree, a PhD in a field in the Humanities. I finished my comprehensive exams, but the dissertation birth pangs are killing. So I'm ABD. I feel like I have a disease. I have depression and perfectionism. I enjoy teaching much more than I enjoy writing. I hate having to be anywhere, and I have grown to accustomed to my fat guy pants. I have to wear grown up pants now and adjust my sleeping schedule to The Man. I will have to clean up after my dogs when they defecate every single time now. No more free-range woods shitting. My life is changing. Richard Nixon was kicked out of office and then managed to publish something like six books in the twenty years of life he had left. I bet I can wear grown up pants and set an alarm and clean up poop and work a job and still finish my dissertation. Frank Sinatra may have eaten my pancakes, but that's a good thing. Frank Sinatra can eat anything he wants out of my house. He's Frank Sinatra.
Our current local grocery store is called Kroger's. Their jingle used to be "Let's Go Krogering, Let's Go Krogering, For the Best of Everything, Let's Go Krogering." Now it's, "Please don't go to motherfucking Wal-Mart, Come on -- please don't go to motherfucking Wal-Mart." For years now they have offered their customers a "Kroger Plus Card," which is one of those cards you carry in your wallet or on your key chain that they scan when you cash out. I never wanted Dick Cheney to know how much beer I drink so I always refused to accept one. Did I mention my degree in the Humanities? I know all about how Frederick Taylor and rational production and Ford's assembly line quickly turned into a bastardization of Freud and Pavlov -- especially Pavlov -- and gave the world the concept of rational consumption. I'm a demographic, and the irony always was that my refusal to get a Kroger Plus Card was an act of my demographic. It was the epitome of my demographic. I am in my thirties and I'm poor kind of by choice and I have been a graduate student for too long and I have put off working for The Man. And I use phrases such as "The Man" and I think long complicated thoughts about Redd Foxx and KISS. I never wanted a file on my consumption habits and I was only partially kidding about the Dick Cheney thing. Yeah. The information infrastructure exploited by the Nazis was in place before Addy and Joe took over the Reich. This is not to say that Amazon doesn't have recommendations for me. I use my credit card online and I watch videos on YouTube. Still, the Kroger Plus card always bothered me, and I always liked how the cashiers who weren't part of the grocery clerk turnover knew that we were the ones who didn't have a card. I know that one cashier is a short stout bitchy lady who has seemed personally offended by the fact that we don't have a card. She is not too crazy about our canvas bag, either. I also know that a guy who works there likes baseball and thinks that the government is keeping track of everything that I do despite my Plus Card Rebellion. He told me one morning when I was some combination of stoned and hung over that they knew what books I'd checked out of the library and where I buy my gas. I know that newbie cashiers would ask if I had a Kroger Plus Card, and when I said no they would ask, per their training, if I wanted one. They would ask this as they reached for the form to sign me up. One time on the 700 Club Pat interviewed a woman who had died for a little while and been sucked into hell. As she plunged into the pit demons danced and chanted "we got another one, we got another one." She bumped into the guy who had led her astray before the doctors revived her. He told her that his philosophy had been wrong and that if she got the chance she should go back and denounce it. I wonder if he's still there? Every time a newbie reached for a form I would think of the pitchfork demons chanting "we got another one." Which I understand is kind of crazy. Still, that lady may have just had a bad dream, but she was really happy not to be in hell. She meant it, man. Still again, while he was interviewing her maybe Pat himself was thinking "we got another one, we got another one," but only God knows what he really meant when he was thinking that. And God's not talking.
So we're moving to Boston and it's expensive up there and we need money. They always told us when we rejected the Plus Card that we could hold onto our receipts and if we signed up for a card later, we could get the money back that we would have saved. So when we remembered we would come back from the store and put the receipts into a Steak and Shake cup that lived on the counter next to a couple of my plants. Our remembering tended toward the erratic, but still we had saved several over the last three years (when we first got the idea). So with a week to go here in Ohio I went over to the Customer Service Counter at Kroger yesterday with a handful of receipts clipped together with a total that my wife had added up. I turned them over and signed up for a Kroger Plus Card. My wife had already called the company and was informed after asking that no, there was no time limit on receipts. There was also no limit on the amount one could get back. Still, the lady at the counter told me that 2005 was too long ago, so I told her about the phone call my wife had made. The customer service lady knew I was right, so she reverted to shame tactics, which never worked on me, even in kindergarten. That's why I'm not catholic anymore. So she called -- I fucking shit you not -- the "loyalty office." When told that's who she was calling, I said that I have receipts from three years ago, how much more loyal could a guy be? I watched the disappointment cloud her countenance as the loyalty office told her the news. She would have to hand over the 150-plus dollars to me. She told the worker in the service booth with her to give me the money, and to be sure to destroy the receipts. She actually said "destroy," which made the whole event incredible and probably something that will make my deathbed slideshow. She was so put off by it she actually told an employee to be sure to destroy the receipts I had been saving up. What a fucking crackpot. So with a portion of that money I bought rubberbands and packing tape. After finding the needed items I cued up in the express lane. When I went through the line, the cashier asked if I had a Kroger Plus Card. Since neither the bands nor the tape had those yellow tags affixed to their prices, I knew I wouldn't be in for any savings. So I told her "no, I don't have one." She had worked there for a while, so she didn't bother to ask if I wanted to sign up for one. She didn't know that they already had another one.
Later that day we had microchips implanted in our dogs. If they ever get lost, and some kind soul knows to have them scanned, their (and our) information will come up. We are so in the system.
And we also packed out books. We had to vacuum them before we put them in the boxes.
Yesterday was Friday, August 22nd, 2008. Next week my wife and I are moving from Ohio to Boston. She will be pursuing graduate work at a prestigious school in that city. I do not plan to divulge the name of the school, but I will tell you that it leans Jesuit. I do not plan to tell you the department she will be in, but I will say that it has nothing to do with processing or selling anything. I do not know what I will be doing for work. My search for a job will be part of the storyline of this journal. I have been pursuing my own graduate degree, a PhD in a field in the Humanities. I finished my comprehensive exams, but the dissertation birth pangs are killing. So I'm ABD. I feel like I have a disease. I have depression and perfectionism. I enjoy teaching much more than I enjoy writing. I hate having to be anywhere, and I have grown to accustomed to my fat guy pants. I have to wear grown up pants now and adjust my sleeping schedule to The Man. I will have to clean up after my dogs when they defecate every single time now. No more free-range woods shitting. My life is changing. Richard Nixon was kicked out of office and then managed to publish something like six books in the twenty years of life he had left. I bet I can wear grown up pants and set an alarm and clean up poop and work a job and still finish my dissertation. Frank Sinatra may have eaten my pancakes, but that's a good thing. Frank Sinatra can eat anything he wants out of my house. He's Frank Sinatra.
Our current local grocery store is called Kroger's. Their jingle used to be "Let's Go Krogering, Let's Go Krogering, For the Best of Everything, Let's Go Krogering." Now it's, "Please don't go to motherfucking Wal-Mart, Come on -- please don't go to motherfucking Wal-Mart." For years now they have offered their customers a "Kroger Plus Card," which is one of those cards you carry in your wallet or on your key chain that they scan when you cash out. I never wanted Dick Cheney to know how much beer I drink so I always refused to accept one. Did I mention my degree in the Humanities? I know all about how Frederick Taylor and rational production and Ford's assembly line quickly turned into a bastardization of Freud and Pavlov -- especially Pavlov -- and gave the world the concept of rational consumption. I'm a demographic, and the irony always was that my refusal to get a Kroger Plus Card was an act of my demographic. It was the epitome of my demographic. I am in my thirties and I'm poor kind of by choice and I have been a graduate student for too long and I have put off working for The Man. And I use phrases such as "The Man" and I think long complicated thoughts about Redd Foxx and KISS. I never wanted a file on my consumption habits and I was only partially kidding about the Dick Cheney thing. Yeah. The information infrastructure exploited by the Nazis was in place before Addy and Joe took over the Reich. This is not to say that Amazon doesn't have recommendations for me. I use my credit card online and I watch videos on YouTube. Still, the Kroger Plus card always bothered me, and I always liked how the cashiers who weren't part of the grocery clerk turnover knew that we were the ones who didn't have a card. I know that one cashier is a short stout bitchy lady who has seemed personally offended by the fact that we don't have a card. She is not too crazy about our canvas bag, either. I also know that a guy who works there likes baseball and thinks that the government is keeping track of everything that I do despite my Plus Card Rebellion. He told me one morning when I was some combination of stoned and hung over that they knew what books I'd checked out of the library and where I buy my gas. I know that newbie cashiers would ask if I had a Kroger Plus Card, and when I said no they would ask, per their training, if I wanted one. They would ask this as they reached for the form to sign me up. One time on the 700 Club Pat interviewed a woman who had died for a little while and been sucked into hell. As she plunged into the pit demons danced and chanted "we got another one, we got another one." She bumped into the guy who had led her astray before the doctors revived her. He told her that his philosophy had been wrong and that if she got the chance she should go back and denounce it. I wonder if he's still there? Every time a newbie reached for a form I would think of the pitchfork demons chanting "we got another one." Which I understand is kind of crazy. Still, that lady may have just had a bad dream, but she was really happy not to be in hell. She meant it, man. Still again, while he was interviewing her maybe Pat himself was thinking "we got another one, we got another one," but only God knows what he really meant when he was thinking that. And God's not talking.
So we're moving to Boston and it's expensive up there and we need money. They always told us when we rejected the Plus Card that we could hold onto our receipts and if we signed up for a card later, we could get the money back that we would have saved. So when we remembered we would come back from the store and put the receipts into a Steak and Shake cup that lived on the counter next to a couple of my plants. Our remembering tended toward the erratic, but still we had saved several over the last three years (when we first got the idea). So with a week to go here in Ohio I went over to the Customer Service Counter at Kroger yesterday with a handful of receipts clipped together with a total that my wife had added up. I turned them over and signed up for a Kroger Plus Card. My wife had already called the company and was informed after asking that no, there was no time limit on receipts. There was also no limit on the amount one could get back. Still, the lady at the counter told me that 2005 was too long ago, so I told her about the phone call my wife had made. The customer service lady knew I was right, so she reverted to shame tactics, which never worked on me, even in kindergarten. That's why I'm not catholic anymore. So she called -- I fucking shit you not -- the "loyalty office." When told that's who she was calling, I said that I have receipts from three years ago, how much more loyal could a guy be? I watched the disappointment cloud her countenance as the loyalty office told her the news. She would have to hand over the 150-plus dollars to me. She told the worker in the service booth with her to give me the money, and to be sure to destroy the receipts. She actually said "destroy," which made the whole event incredible and probably something that will make my deathbed slideshow. She was so put off by it she actually told an employee to be sure to destroy the receipts I had been saving up. What a fucking crackpot. So with a portion of that money I bought rubberbands and packing tape. After finding the needed items I cued up in the express lane. When I went through the line, the cashier asked if I had a Kroger Plus Card. Since neither the bands nor the tape had those yellow tags affixed to their prices, I knew I wouldn't be in for any savings. So I told her "no, I don't have one." She had worked there for a while, so she didn't bother to ask if I wanted to sign up for one. She didn't know that they already had another one.
Later that day we had microchips implanted in our dogs. If they ever get lost, and some kind soul knows to have them scanned, their (and our) information will come up. We are so in the system.
And we also packed out books. We had to vacuum them before we put them in the boxes.
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