Hmmm... Where Did I Leave My Guillotine?

     Beings that I am a well known and notorious party animal, last Saturday night I could be found rocking out with my calculator at home doing my taxes.  That's how I roll with my life of excitement.

     Even with my usual charitable donations to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, among others, my refund came up about $500 lighter than it usually is.  One new wrinkle was that job expenses, such as union dues and costs of uniforms, can no longer be claimed as deductions.  Other credits were smaller than in past years as well and will probably get smaller in upcoming years.

     This is proof that the pigfucker tax cut that was passed a few years ago was complete bullshit.  I only ended up with an extra ten dollars in my paycheck and now my tax refund is a third smaller than it has ever been.

     That extra ten dollars in my paycheck has been more than lost to the yearly increases in health insurance costs that get sucked out of my check.  I am hanging onto the middle class by my finger nails and, along with a lot of other people, am forced to bear the brunt of this system of corporate socialism that prevents us from living lives that are more than being a cog in their machine.

     I guess I missed the meeting where it was decided that our Capitalist overlords needed to somehow be more comfortable.  The snake oil of trickle down economics never seems to go away no matter how many times it's been proven to not be beneficial to the working class.  That's not to say that it doesn't work.  Trickle down economics works exactly as designed.  The wealthy pay less in taxes and then put that money in their pockets.  That's it.  The snake oil part of the equation was when everyone bought the lie where they were supposed to hire more people and redistribute this money to us underlings.  As if a greedy pigfucker was going to spend money that they didn't need to.

     And it's only going to get worse for everyone.  Fuckface Von Clownstick's latest budget proposal contains cuts to every social program and government department that helps us look after our fellow humans.  But of course there will be more money allotted for military spending, wall building and forcing things in Space.

     Recently, Pete Buttigieg stopped speaking in empty platitudes that made no sense just long enough to claim that union workers would lose their health insurance plans under Medicare For All.  And he said this as if it were a bad thing.

     My wages have stagnated over the past twenty years due to the cost of health insurance.  I have damn near $100 a week taken out of my paycheck to pay for it.  And I'm sure other people have more taken out.  Imagine how much weight would be taken off of our collective shoulders if we had that money in our bank accounts instead of it going to Highmark or UPMC.

     What the mayor of Podunk, Indiana is trying to do is conflate health insurance with healthcare in order to scare people away from Medicare For All.  They are two different things and he is lying.  I'm sure that some of his corporate masters that are funding his campaign are executives from the insurance industry which would be no surprise.

     This is being said with a straight face to make people think that they are having the ability to choose taken away from them.  The other side of that coin is that it's a choice people should never have had to make in the first place.

     The past several contract negotiations that my union has been involved with all had extremely regressive company proposals that would have destroyed the lives of the rank and file.  Once the union agreed that the membership would pay more in insurance contributions, the company took all of those proposals off the table.  Labor could make larger gains for their members if they weren't tied down over the cost of health insurance.

     One of the other lies about Medicare For All is that all of the employees that process claims and work at call centers would all lose their jobs when private insurance companies are no longer needed. There will be a need for claims processors and call center workers when Medicare For All is up and running.  Except this time they will potentially be union government jobs with pensions and other benefits that a private company would never agree to.  The main difference will be in not ruining someone's day by denying a claim because a form was incorrectly filled out.

     As for the cost of Medicare For All, who gives a shit.  I'm tired of all of these so called Christians refusing to alleviate the suffering of their fellow man because we might have to cut the part of the budget that pays for the cages that we keep the children in.  If my tax dollars went to actually helping people and would prevent them from losing their house because they got sick instead of blowing up brown people with robots on the other side of planet, I would be perfectly fine with that.

     How is it possible that after all these years people still don't want to come to grips with the fact that the profit motive behind private insurance leads to them never wanting to pay a claim because it cuts into their profits.  The Red Scare bullshit from the 1950s worked way too well and was then used as a cover for insurance companies to make money.  Wanting everyone in the country to be able to go to a doctor without going broke somehow became the equivalent to screaming “Death To America!!!” If the con was that easy to pull off, no wonder education budgets always get cut.  Keep people stupid, keep them from thinking, keep them in line.

     And of course filling out paperwork, arguing on the phone all day with the insurance company and paying copays for every office visit is the perfect prescription for someone that is sick.  Nothing makes me feel better than trying to force a company do the thing that they are paid to do.  What would people do with all of that extra time on their hands?  That's right, they would recuperate.

     This system of sucking every last penny out of the pockets of the working class and less fortunate is not sustainable and is very close to imploding.  It has used our labor against us and will spit us out when we are no longer viable.  We will all be held upside down by our ankles and shaken until all of the loose change has fallen out of our pockets.

     Maybe it's time to bring back the guillotine.

Trying To Rise Above The Noise

     Recently, I've been thinking about the divisions in the punk scene and those who take it upon themselves to determine what is “punk” or not.  Everyone, including myself, seems to have their own set of arbitrary rules that they think everyone else should adhere to.

     If a band or person falls outside of these rules they are immediately dismissed and met with derision.  I find it odd that a style of music that was based on coloring outside of the lines turned into a scene that quickly chastises a band for coloring outside of the lines.

     I always think back to when I was in high school and the MTV trust fund punks that I went to school with had the great Rancid v. Green Day debate.  Those bands were on the “Modern Rock” radio station so frequently that I was worn out on both of them.  And neither one of those bands ever really spoke to me to begin with.

     When I gave a bit of a chuckle and an eye roll at their argument, they looked down their noses in my direction and asked me what I was listening to.  This group of people that threw the word “poser” around as if it were a slur gave the blank stare of cluelessness when I said Black Flag.

     At that time, I was working my way backwards from the Rollins Band.  Since I was only eight years old when Black Flag broke up the band was unexplored territory for me.  I had recently discovered Damaged and was mainlining all thirty five minutes of that record directly into my brain at all hours of the day.  Between “Ruby Soho” and all of the singles off of Dookie, those songs were not for me and none of them were any competition for “Rise Above” or “Room 13.”

     I was developing a taste for the extreme and more out there end of the spectrum that was far away from the radio friendly/MTV informed world that these kids were living in.  These uptight pricks also gave me my first taste of class war.  I didn't know how to give form to the thought at the time but now that I look back on it, it was definitely a bit of class war.  They would come in on Mondays with tales of kayaking, rock climbing and skiing while I sat in my room all weekend reading, writing shitty teenage poetry and listening to the CDs that I bought with my lunch money.  Those CDs were more nourishing to me than anything that could be served in the school cafeteria.

     Their dads were corporate lawyers and plastic surgeons and had no trouble throwing money at the tuition involved with going to that school.  My dad was a union wage slave that put in several hours of overtime to send me to that school and for some reason I was looked down on for that.  That's when I learned that rich people were fucked and I quickly withdrew from them.  They could keep their spikey jackets and shitty music, I made my way to the library to hang out with Sartre, Camus and any poets I could find until graduation.

     Years later, the faces have changed but the arbitrary rules and cliquey bullshit still persist.  There seems to be no way to bridge the gap between the punk bands in Pittsburgh that are interested in playing shows and building something sustainable and the bands that have a destructive, scorched earth approach to playing music.

     I have noticed that there's a part of the Pittsburgh scene that will only pay attention to bands that exist long enough to play approximately five shows and put out a demo tape.  During those five shows they'll destroy the venues and PA equipment before they fizzle out.  At some point, no one will want to host these shows and no one will want to bring their PA equipment to be doused in PBR and stomped on.

     The prevailing attitude seems to be that if you didn't want your PA equipment broken, then you shouldn't have brought it.  Which then leads me to wonder how there can be a show without a PA.  I guess that wasn't taken into consideration.

     If a band is around long enough to put out more than one record, they usually end up in a no win situation with the naysaying gatekeepers.  If they put out a record that sounds too similar to their previous work, they get slammed for putting out the same record over and over.  If a band decides to keep themselves from getting bored and puts out a record that sounds slightly different they get hit with the “What happened? They suck now” nonsense of the walking YouTube comments that only rent their music from some bullshit streaming service and never created anything in their lives.

     And how dare a band capture a decent sounding recording.  If there's anything close to a  distinguishable bass line on a record, the shouts of “Sell Outs!!!” rain down.

     It is really difficult to create something and then to be willing to share it with the rest of the world. That's why I try not to pass judgement on a band or a record.  I always ask myself the question, “Well, what band am I in?” instead of saying “Well, that sucked.”  Since these opinions are all subjective anyway, the worst I'll say is “I guess that wasn't for me” and move on to something that I really enjoy.

     One of the things that has always bothered me is the hyper competitive nature of music in Pittsburgh.  It's not sports.  There's no ranking system.  And don't we all want to get away from the every day jock bullshit that drew us to Punk in the first place?

     After all these years, I am still most comfortable listening at home.  Watching the needle land in the groove and take off at 33 and 1/3 RPMs while the music comes pouring out of the speakers is still one the most satisfying experiences that I can have.  It sure does beat catching an elbow to the head and getting sprayed with some sort of booze while trying to take pictures.

     It's been well over a month since the last time I went to a show.  I have gotten really good at talking myself out of going to several of them in the past few weeks.  I'll have my bag packed and camera charged to head out the door but through the course of the day I'll eventually convince myself that I would be better off staying in than putting up with the crowds and getting home at a late hour.  I really would have liked to have seen some of those bands but could not bring myself to venture outdoors.

     Not wanting to put up with the hassle might be part of getting older.  Either that or I'm coming to grips with no longer giving a shit and no longer being in denial about it.  Outside of the confines of my own head, none of it means anything anyway so fuck it.

     I'm not sure what could be done to close the divides and turn around the attitudes in the Pittsburgh scene and I'm also not sure if it even matters.  I'm probably the only person that thinks of this shit as if it were important but the things that keep me alive usually do draw my focus.

Sad Boy Hates His Day Job Part 666

     Having been American Dreamed into a mountain of debt that I will more than likely never pay off, being able to walk away from my bullshit office job is becoming more and more unlikely.

     I end up spending most of my time teaching management how to do their jobs.  It is indescribably disheartening trying to politely explain to an idiot that gets paid more than I do that they are, in fact, an idiot.  Bill Hicks once said something about teaching dogs card tricks.  It is very much like that. The corporate culture of failing upward is in full swing.  Being able to hear someone's blank stare over the telephone or an email is not something that I ever thought would be possible but it is a regular occurrence now.

     It doesn't help matters that the building that I work in makes no sense either.  The diesel exhaust for the power generator is right next to the outside air intake for the ventilation system.  This means that every Tuesday when the generator is tested, the building is filled with diesel fumes and makes me want to succumb to the sweet relief of carbon monoxide poisoning.

     I used to take every opportunity that I could to stick my nose in a book while at work but lately the place is so exhausting that I end up sleeping for a few minutes instead.  As much as I would like to read the collected writings of Eugene Debs, I can't keep my eyes open anymore.

     That seems to be a large part of the Capitalism/wage slave cycle that I'm stuck in.  The job keeps me worn down to the point that I can do little else other than show up at a desk at 7am.  Keeping the brain dull and the body in decline.  After twenty years, my lower back has been destroyed to the point where I have trouble walking without intense pain.  My chiropractor has probably been able to put an addition onto his house with the amount of times I've been through his office.

     And yet I still show up every day like an idiot.  Instead of taking a cue from my coworker who got themselves a six month “disability” vacation because they lost a fight against the candy machine in the break room.

     I keep having flashbacks of family gatherings where all of my uncles would sit around talking about their day jobs for the entire afternoon and over the years it turned into my cousins doing the same thing.  Two generations of people that were unable to identify as anything but their source of income.  That's one of the reasons that I stopped going to those things.  The main reason being the not so casual bigotry but also not wanting to talk about my employment when I'm not getting paid for it.

     One of the few upsides to my mountain of debt is that I can at least claim some sort of ownership to my house.  With home ownership I am somewhat protected when the crosshairs of gentrification are aimed at my neighborhood.  As much as upkeep and maintenance are a drain on my psyche, my mortgage payment will stay the same while everyone else's rent doubles.  I'm already getting offers in the mail on a weekly basis from scumbag house flippers that want to buy my house.  Gentrification has always made me wonder where people go when they can't afford to live anywhere.

     Due to the ever changing media landscape, I would have trouble spinning the writing/photography thing into a sustainable source of income.  Everything is freelance since these digital media conglomerates are buying up every outlet and laying off the the staff positions that have steady paychecks and health benefits.  On top of that, the world is already filled with an over abundance of writers and photographers that want to get paid for covering music so finding my way in as a hobbyist would be a challenge.

     And I'm pretty sure that the world doesn't need the opinions of yet another rapidly aging white guy.  I don't say that begrudgingly due to the fact that white guys have been the predominant voice over the past several hundred years.  It's been well past time to broaden the spectrum of voices that have a platform.

I'm saying that I more than likely missed my shot.  I should have wholeheartedly dedicated myself to this enterprise back in my early twenties when I could survive on half a pack of ramen noodles and three drops of Pepsi for a week and I was the only person I needed to look after.

     Instead, I opted for the safe route that landed me where I am and with few options besides sitting here filled with varying levels of existential dread.