Fetch The Bolt Cutters Because This Land Is Your Landfill

     The past two Friday's have graced us with two record releases that couldn't have come at a better time.  Fiona Apple's Fetch The Bolt Cutters made a daring escape from her home laboratory and The Homeless Gospel Choir gave us the gift of This Land Is Your Landfill.

     I have had both records in heavy rotation since I jammed them onto my computer.  Vinyl for Fetch The Bolt Cutters is due out in July, at the earliest, and I'm still waiting for my preorder of This Land Is Your Landfill to ship out from A-F Records.  Due to the end times plague shutting everything down, it might be a while before either album is on my turntable.  That is a minor annoyance since I prefer to have liner notes and lyric sheets handy when I make poor attempts at reviewing records.

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     As far as I'm concerned, Fetch The Bolt Cutters might just be the best Punk record of the year. And if, after listening to it, you don't think Fiona Apple put out a Punk record, give it another listen and read up on how it was recorded.  Ms. Apple recorded the album at home, at times using the walls and floorboards as percussion.  From beginning to end, this record is not messing around and has the skill and attitude to back it up.

     Since Fiona Apple operates outside of the tour/record/tour/record cycle, it's been eight years since her last album, The Idler Wheel...  She seems to use that time to be very deliberate in every word and sound chosen to assemble her songs.  At times, the songs butt up against each other rhythmically but still fit together as a whole and more than once I found myself thinking, “I have no idea what just happened but it works for me.”

     Lyrically, I wouldn't say that the knives are drawn so much as the samurai sword has been honed to hair splitting sharpness and aimed in the general direction of the world around us.  Fiona Apple is tearing into society with so much more “Fuck you” in her words than any “Punk” record that I've heard in the past few years.  The debacle that led to a second sexual predator being appointed to the Supreme Court and scumbags such as Louis C.K. were definitely fuel for the songwriting fire.

     My favorite line of the record is “I told you I didn't want to go to this dinner” from “Under The Table.”  It made me recall all of the times an ex would take me to parties and other events that would require me to act like a well adjusted human being so she could show me off to her friends.  Instead of reacting when someone would inevitably say something stupid, I would end up sitting quietly and biting my tongue until it would bleed.

     Fetch The Bolt Cutters is some of Fiona Apple's best work and she keeps getting better from one record to the next.

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     After hearing a handful of the new Homeless Gospel Choir songs live and in person over the past year or so, it was great to finally get to listen to them all together and hear what Derek Zanetti had envisioned with This Land Is Your Landfill.  I knew our collective ears were in for something special but the nicest person in Punk Rock exceeded my expectations with this new record.

     The production was once again aided and abetted by Chris #2 of Anti-Flag.  The dynamic that they have together is incredible.  #2 seems to know how to push Derek to get the best out of him while also knowing when to get out of the way to let Derek be Derek.

     In addition to writing songs about trying to hold it together in the face of mental health issues and having an awareness of the world around him, Derek Zanetti has started taking aim at the internet and social media culture.  And it is odd that being on the internet is how we have to operate now that we're all stuck in quarantine and punk shows are cancelled until who knows when.

     As per usual with every Homeless Gospel Choir record, there is at least one song on This Land Is Your Landfill that calls me on my bullshit.  “Figure It Out” hit me hard.  The song is more or less about the shit sandwich that some of us have to eat when faced with the futility of the Amerikan Dream.

     One of the anonymous internet complaints that This Land Is Your Landfill has been handed is that it's not “Punk” enough.  Maybe the folks that heard the record that way need to broaden the spectrum of what they consider “Punk.”  Or, to paraphrase Bill Hicks, take a look around them and the world in which we live and try shutting the fuck up with their meaningless rules and gatekeeping.  But then again, I am the guy that just wrote that the new Fiona Apple record was punk as fuck.

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     I have had to be careful while listening to both of these records since I'm walking around with a brain injury's worth of trauma and depression while locked in solitude.  I usually have to have a Motorhead or Beastie Boys chaser immediately following to help straighten me out because both Fetch The Bolt Cutters and This Land Is Your Landfill have a lot of weight to them.

Snapcase

     The band Snapcase has been invading my thoughts a lot lately.  They had recently reconvened for a few West Coast shows and a few test pressings of their Steps EP popped up on Discogs (both of which I have given a proper and loving home to.)

     After watching the shaky cellphone videos from these shows, I was sent running to my record shelves and gave the band a listen for the first time in a long time and haven't been able to stop since. I forgot how many layers there were to Snapcase's music.  They were much more than the overindulgent thumping double bass drum sound of their peers.

     The band hailed from Buffalo, NY and due to the proximity to Pittsburgh, Snapcase always seemed to either begin or end a leg of a tour in Pittsburgh because the city was either on the band's way to or from wherever they were going.  This gave me the chance to see the band play so many times that I lost count and I am so grateful to have taken every opportunity to see them that I could.

     I always stood in the back or off to the side with someone in the band that I used to lug gear for at the time and we would stand there slack jawed with envy over how good Snapcase was.  You'd have a hard time finding a tighter band that never seemed to have a bad night.

     Lyrically, Darryl Taberski went deeper than the “I hate my mom/I hate my dad/My girlfriend betrayed me” content of other hardcore bands of that time.  His vocal approach was more of a shout instead of the yelling like a barking dog of other bands.  This way you could actually hear what he was saying and learn a thing or two from what he was putting forth.

     Snapcase always threw a curveball at the meatheads in the pit that rolled up in their gym clothes to perform their version of rugby meets interpretive dance.  They had no idea what to do with their lawnmowers and windmills during the musical ebb and flow of a Snapcase set.

     I will forever be grateful to my friend Dave Hummel for putting a Snapcase CD under my snout when he did.  Progression Through Unlearning was one of the most jarring first listens to a record that I have ever had.  My late adolescent brain was stopped in its tracks and I was incapable of doing anything other than listening to that record all the way through and then doing it again and again.

     The hook that made me an instant fan for life was the song “Harrison Bergeron.”  Not only was it named after my favorite Kurt Vonnegut short story, it's also one of Snapcase's best songs.  If you haven't read the story or heard the song, do yourself a favor and do both.

     Snapcase had one of the strongest album arcs I have ever heard, going from Lookinglasself through their final album End Transmission.  Each record was better than the one before and they continued to build and further push the boundaries of what “hardcore” could be.  I have always been curious to know what direction they would have gone to next if they didn't hang it up in 2005.

     The basketball shorts and hoodies end of the hardcore spectrum left me behind around the same time that Snapcase broke up.  The shows started to feel like they were more about everyone taking pride in hurting each other in the pit than they were about the music.  Without Snapcase around to keep things from getting boring, I stopped going to those types of shows.  The bands all started to sound the same and I really couldn't tell the difference between one band and the next.  The music stopped moving forward and there didn't seem to be a band that was willing to give it a push to keep it from growing stagnant so I gave up on it.

     I really wish I had taken my camera to at least one Snapcase show but I never did.  Since the shows were always ticketed events, I never thought to do so.  Witnessing that band while hiding behind the stage right speaker stack would have been one hell of a way to spend an evening.

The Self-Quarantine Blues?

Addendum:  The below article was all ready to go when I found out that we lost John Prine.  So before we get on to my silly bullshit, here's a John Prine song.  Bill Withers last week and John Prine this week.  Fuck everything.

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     It's a few weeks into this self-quarantine business and I'm starting to realize how little I ever went outside to begin with.  I guess being an antisocial misanthrope who was practically a shut-in to begin with has its benefits during the plague.  It's my time to shine.

     The only real adapting that I've had to do is day jobbing from home.  After twenty years of observing the behavior of my corporate overlords, I'm surprised that even happened.  Their usual approach to a calamity is to tell the help to show our company IDs to any law enforcement we might encounter on our way to the office and try to convince them to let us pass any closed roads or checkpoints.

     The company started out by distributing certificates from Homeland Security for us to show at roadblocks and for us to be able to buy gasoline, if we get to the point where gas stations shut down. The next day, it went to getting a headcount for volunteers to work from home so they could provide laptops.

     The following day it progressed to giving us all twenty-five foot ethernet cables to see if we would be able to run them from our modems to a spot at home where we could set up our computers.  The next morning, management met everyone at the door and told us to unplug our computers, pack up anything else we might need and to go home until further notice.  After two decades of having pens and post-it notes on lockdown, I kept waiting for security to tackle me as I walked through the parking lot with a computer tower and two monitors.

     I have had to make sure that I stick to a similar routine as if I were leaving the house to go to work.  My depression already has me operating at a level that is very much a lame version of Captain Willard at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, laying on the couch staring blankly at the ceiling.  My fear is that if I allow these habits to break down, I'll go full Colonel Kurtz and make my own army of natives out of leftover vinyl mailers and poster tubes.  The horror, the horror.

     Now that I'm working from home and all punk shows have been cancelled for the foreseeable future, I have damn near no reason to go outdoors at all anymore.  Outside of getting the mail in and a weekly Charlton Heston in The Omega Man-like run to the grocery store at 7am on Sunday mornings, I have no real need for the outside world.  I've got plenty of shit tickets and I picked up ten pounds of coffee before Zeke's decided to close so I should be alright for a while.

     After the events of the past few months this has provided me with some much needed downtime that I will gladly take advantage of.  This will give me time away from humanity to find the plot that I have so thoroughly lost without taking it out on people that don't deserve it.  I can't be a miserable prick in someone's general direction if there's no one around.

     The only thing I'm really missing is going to a punk show.  I haven't been to a show since I ventured to New York with Killer Of Sheep.  I was really in the mood for one and they all got called off as soon as I was able to make it to one.  And I do realize the strange paradox between hating to be around people while also wanting to be in a room full of them for a show.  I never said that I wasn't a hypocrite.

     Since my workstation is only a few feet away from the stereo in my living room, I've been giving myself daily listening assignments to fill the silence.  I think by the time this is all over with, I will have worn the needle on my turntable down to a nub.  I pull a stack of records off of the shelves either by artist or by some sort of theme that I cooked up in my head.  I'll keep them spinning until I get to the bottom of the stack.  I'll start at 7am and go well into the evening on some days.

     I have learned that the usual punk rock comfort food records that I used to turn to when times were difficult are not giving me the solace that I used to find in them.  There's something missing when I listen to them now and whatever it is that's gone will hopefully come back at some point.  That crutch of meaningless bullshit that I have always relied on to keep me grounded may have broken.

     But then there are other records that cut into my brain like a knife and I lose all function.  I found that out the hard way with I Used To Be So Young by The Homeless Gospel Choir.  One minute I was fine and the next I was balled up on the couch for the rest of night.

     The one constant on the turntable over the past month or so has been the reissue of Rowland S. Howard's Teenage Snuff Film that Fat Possum put out.  That man had a tone and an attitude from the most depressing pits of Hell and is right up my alley.  Teenage Snuff Film never had a North American release and was always hard to come by at a reasonable price.  The new vinyl mastering sounds lightyears better than the less than legit download that I borrowed off of the internet years ago.

     The one thing that I'm hoping to see in all of this is a battalion of apes riding horses down the middle of what used to be a busy street.  There are already roving gangs of monkeys foraging for food in Thailand so we can't be too far off from Planet Of The Apes.  Humanity has had a less then great run so let's give another species a chance.  A Sci-Fi nerd can hope, can't he?

Dammit

Context:  Here's a thing that I wrote almost a month ago.  I finally gathered the wherewithal to give it a half-assed edit and post it.

March 5^th, 2020—9:30am

     I am currently sitting in the observation area of a crematorium with my daughter and my niece. Dopesmoker, by Sleep, is playing on the headphones and is accompanied by the roar of the oven on the other side of the window.

     The past three weeks have been difficult to say the least but at least I'm here to see my mother off to the very end.  It's a two to three hour process to reduce the person that gave birth to me down to a cookie jar full of calcium.  She went fast and there was little pain once the meds kicked in.  I'd much rather have that for her than the long drawn out struggle that was lined up in front of her.

     I stepped back from the planning of the arrangements in order to give other family members that showed up to help something to fill their time and help to express their own grief by lending a hand. Stepping back will also give me a minute to gather some much needed solitude.

     Over the next three days, I'm going to be surrounded by people that want to express their own grief and sympathy in my general direction and I have no idea how I'm going to handle that because I don't know where to put my own truckload of grief.  There are only so many times that I can hear, “I'm sorry for your loss,” before it starts to turn into background noise.

     Having a very low tolerance for human interaction is probably not the best place be through all of this and will wear on my patience by the time this is all over.  Trying to hold it together until this is done has been nearly impossible.  The quiet moments through the day are when the weight hits me hardest.  Trying to get through to the next day and the one after that.

     Things will slow down.  Old routines will reemerge.  Trying to remember will become the challenge as time moves on.  On my phone, I still have the last voicemail that she left me.  I haven't been able to bring myself to listen to it.  And that's okay because it will take me a while to find that stupid headphone adapter so I can plug my iPhone into my stereo and make a proper recording of it.

     Blackstar, by David Bowie, is up next and I'm sure I'm about to turn into a puddle because I am a glutton for punishment.

March 7^th, 2020—7:00pm

     After a whirlwind three days of visitations, a service and a luncheon, the job is done.  I'm sitting alone in my house and don't know what to do with myself.  I've been operating through this weird, bleary eyed exhaustion over the past few weeks and now that I have a moment to relax I can't.

     By the end of the first night of visitation, I was light headed and in a daze.  So many hands were shaken and countless hugs were received.  I saw a lot of faces that I hadn't seen in years and a lot more people that I had no idea who they were.  The entire evening went by in a blur.  At least Onion Maiden was still open by the time I was back in the area because there was no way I was going to function long enough to make anything to eat.

     Friday was the long day with the two hour visitation in the afternoon followed by a two hour dinner break and another two hour session in the evening.  It was such a flurry of activity that I didn't have a chance to actually talk to anybody in a meaningful way and can't really remember anything that happened during the two visitations.

     One of my relatives that lives near the funeral home offered to have everyone over for dinner so we wouldn't get stuck at any of the nearby restaurants.  I'm grateful that he did that so everyone else was taken care of but I needed to duck out in order to get away from the masses for a few minutes.

     That plan went to shit almost immediately.  My desire to have a quiet table for three suddenly became a table for eight.  I ended up having to stay in character over dinner instead of being able to decompress for an hour or so and to return to my natural state of being a miserable prick for a while.

     Earlier today was the last hour of visitation followed by the service and the luncheon.  Even though it was only a few hours ago, I can't really remember any details of the events.  Exhaustion and trauma are funny that way.  More than likely, it will all start coming back to me over the next few days and weeks once I have a chance to catch my breath.

     After lunch, we had to go back to the funeral home to pick up the last of the flowers and give her one last ride home.  Over the past few weeks while she was in the hospital her main goal was to make it back home so she could spend the last of her time with her family and friends but she never made it home.

     Trying to put this into words has been like pulling teeth.  My brain doesn't want to do anything besides shut down and not think about anything for a long time.  I find myself staring at the floor every so often and I have to shake myself out of it to try to regain some sort of focus.  There is really nothing to say and nothing that can be done about any of this.

     The feelings of my own mortality and the streamlined manner in which I live that this has stirred up has been less than helpful.   I can't blame anyone other than myself for getting me to where I am.  Sitting in a house by myself not knowing how to process a traumatic brain injury's worth of grief and sadness.  Not really feeling anything because I am feeling everything at once.

     Fuck it.

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.