November 05, 2009
City Mouse, Country Mouse
I am at a point on the timeline of my life in which I have experienced nearly equal parts of being a city dweller and a resident of less populated areas. I was born in Chicago to parents native of it, and by way of “white flight” and ostensibly better schools, raised just a few miles up the shore.
I know from history that in previous generations it was simpler to see the difference between many of Chicago's classic ethnic neighborhoods. Gentrification has made those boundaries much less obtrusive today. Still, in most of the major metropolitan areas of America, short distances of a mile or two can represent worlds of difference. An observant visitor or any realtor worth their salt can still see this, albeit increasingly along socio-economic lines as the cultural ones are being homogenized.
While my upbringing was not technically urban, my specific neighborhood and its proximity to the city provided an experience much more so than the typical concept of suburban life (e.g. Leave It To Beaver, The Brady Bunch, etc.). Urban-like diversity was apparent in my high school's student body as well as in real estate, with homes separated by a short physical distance often having disparity of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in value.
We didn't have near as much in the way of direct supervision growing up, much less formal play dates or groups. The bicycle was the ultimate instrument of independence, shrinking my microcosm to any limit that could accommodate being back before the streetlights came on. After outgrowing that rule the bike continued to provide essential transportation since I was not one of the fortunate teens who was either provided or could afford an automobile. I miss those days and have concern that my son may not be afforded the local geography and relatively safe traffic needed for youthful neighborhood bike adventures.
I am often amused by the thought of how distances seemed so much greater in my days as a city mouse. When my eldest brother left the nest I was about eight or nine years old, and the anticipation of the 20-mile drive to go visit him in his new digs was quite titillating - one might have thought I was going on my first plane trip. To not spend the night at his place required a round trip that was practically a pioneer wagon voyage by my excitable pre-adolescent perceptions.
In contrast, the sparser population centers of my past two decades of residency have alternated between the in-town life of a couple of southern micropoli and more rural digs not far from such. By and large I have enjoyed the change, at least enough to give my old northern stomping grounds the status of “nice place to visit - wouldn't want to live there.” But now in the wide open spaces of Georgia I have friends that live 20 or more miles away. Of course the lightly traveled two-lane highways here probably require a third less travel time from the “surface street” routes of the cities and suburbs (a standing joke in Chicagoland is that it takes 45 minutes to get anywhere – in good traffic).
As to the aforementioned timeline, like anyone I hope that it includes many more decades of healthy and happy existence. And while the cultural draws of a city will always be worth the occasional long drive, I lean toward increasing my distance from the magnetic convenience of the modern business district. Years ago I moved from the Bay Area of California to the bucolic (if culturally stunted) environs of northwestern Georgia. After a few years of settling in I began a subscription to Organic Gardening magazine, which guided me in maintaining a small plot of veggies and flowers for two years running before letting expense and laziness become excuses not to.
I want to get back to things like that in the worst way. I confess to the possibility that this is just a pipe dream (my consolation being that currently I am minutes from a symphony and great Thai food). My desire to eschew city life is coupled with a perception that American society has changed too much from the quasi-urban neighborhood of my youth. Sidewalks are rare, old growth trees even more so, and these are superficial things to the real concern that modern parents have of leaving their child unwatched.
I suppose there is irony in having the most desirable areas of rural America gentrified into hobby farms and estates of various rustic-looking excess. I confess that I dream of having a few hundred topographically diverse acres on which to develop a mountain bike park. It would be naturally sustainable of course – no need to remove thousands of trees and install expensive turf that requires bajillions of gallons of water and tons of chemical fertilizers that inundate the aquifer. I guess I could settle for being a thousand feet from my nearest neighbors (none of whom require any sort of gas-powered lawn maintenance equipment), an effective composting system and enough summer sunlight for a salsa garden.
Labels: Chicago, irony, me, the past, The South, US Geography for $1200 Alex
September 11, 2008
Shanana-na, shanana-na-na (BAH-OOH)
.
Financial times being what they are, I started a new career this week. Albeit part-time, the job seems to fill the last piece of career pie with respect to the types of employers I’ve had.
Let’s see if I can remember every ingredient chronologically. If you count lemonade stand, then that’s the first incarnation of Me, Myself & I, Inc., where a number of different hats have been worn over the years. But my first gainful employment was as a paperboy, starting as a rookie afternoon carrier packing about 30-40 copies of the now defunct Chicago Daily News into a canvas bag attached to the front of my Schwinn Sting-Ray. Over time I matured into a salty morning route veteran who whisked out a couple hundred Tribunes and Sun-Timeses (and a few WSJs on the tonier side of my route) via large wagon-wheeled carts, “chauffeured” van or car and even dogsled. Yes, dogsled – definitely a highlight of my as yet unpublished, much less written, memoirs.
Next I was a peon at a country club, specifically a caddy. This was a pretty dang good paying job for a high school kid, and can best be described by saying you should watch the movie Caddyshack (perhaps again), which was released at the height of my looping career with much fanfare amongst my colleagues. Brian Doyle Murray wrote the script based on his experiences caddying at a club just up the road from where I worked, and Bill Murray played at our club on a few occasions. The film is of course exaggerated for comedic effect but the basic elements are spot on. The job was great fun, and had a social subculture all its own with just the right amount of teenage shenanigans and debauchery to provide some hard-learned lessons and lasting memories.
For two summers in college I worked for the United States Postal Service as a “casual” mail carrier. Casuals would start about 10 a.m., taking over for the regular full-timers (which included my dad) who came in at six and cased up the mail going out on their route for the day. A lot of them liked burning up their vacation time with half days like that. I loved it because you worked on your own, got to be outside at different locations almost every day and meet different people, most of whom enjoyed seeing the mail arrive. I suppose if I had to do it year-round, like my dad who endured 37 northern Illinois winters of it, I would not have been as enthusiastic.
Another interesting summer job I held was as the overnight dinghy boy/watchman at a harbor on Lake Michigan. Most of the time I could sleep but occasionally had to ferry drunken fornicators back from their yachts at some ungodly hour. Couldn’t just wait till morning, eh? Well no, she has to get back before her husband wakes up. Your secret’s safe with me, pal, and even safer with that fin tip, wink wink. Each morning I had to haul a pack of burly dudes who worked from a barge at the mouth of the harbor. At sunrise they’d pile into the little 12-foot dinghy, causing displacement to the gunwales so that I sweated every turn of the outboard rudder. As a solo occupant I would have a blast cruising around the harbor doing donuts and chasing ducks (yes, I am ashamed of that) and a few times I motored out to open lake in the still of the night to have a smoke and watch the city lights in the southern distance.
My next job came after moving to California, where my brother had been living for a few years. We became roommates - I provided a reason for him to move out from a relationship that had run its course and he provided me with a job at the roofing company he worked for. This was real labor, especially working as a tear-off peon on the hot tar crew. Although I toughed it out for about a year and a half, I had no stomach for showing the initiative to move up into comfier and higher-paying ranks like where my bro was as a skilled roofer installing cedar shakes (the official roof of California). Class establishment that it was, the company ended up laying me off just before Christmas bonuses were to go out.
After some time suckling on the state teet I procured a job at a startup courier delivery company that covered the entire Bay Area. They normally didn’t hire anyone who hadn’t lived in the area for at least five years, but I am a map freak and so was able to prove my navigational prowess to get hired on. I started out as a shuttle driver, which doesn’t deliver on a route but runs between drop boxes all up the Peninsula from Santa Clara to the city (despite San Jose having long since passed San Francisco in population, the latter will always be “the city” of the Bay Area). This job was so simple and required no personal contact other than the radio dispatcher, so I frequently got stoned to the bejeezus (one of the dispatchers was my dealer), captaining my own little starship Enterprise up and down the 101. I gave up that on-the-job habit when I became a route driver, though. There was a bit more paper work and customer service involved - didn’t figure being spacey, scary red-eyed dude was so cool going in and out of all those Silicon Valley offices.
The courier job ended with my exodus from the Golden State. A brief sojourn in New Mexico had me working as a carpenter’s helper before moving on to Georgia, a place I vaguely recalled from traveling through to Florida on a couple of family trips as being hot, green and hilly. Georgia was a place that my formerly long-haired self had never considered to be a viable place to reside, but here I have now been for nearly half of my life.
My first job here was also my first foray into the retail world - a brief stint as a K-Mart cashier. It was also my first major foray into the world of southern accents, to which my attunement was directly proportional to the amount of teeth in the mouth speaking to me. At this time in my life I had, to make a long story short, renounced Christmas (still not gaga over it), and so I had the opportunity to work at the closed store on Christmas Day with a couple of other fellows straightening up and getting rid of all the X-mas displays and décor. The manager let us in and said he’d be back in a few hours, and while we performed our assigned duties we also enjoyed a boom box loudness contest and some BMX racing. Who knew rubber skid marks were such a bitch to get off linoleum?
As even Rain Man knows, K-Mart sucks, so when I heard that the Red Lobster in town was hiring wait staff trainees I made that my next pursuit of a living wage. Here another Hollywood product, Waiting, serves as a fairly accurate, if only humorously mediocre, portrayal of the waiting scene, right down to the busboys sucking all the nitrous oxide out of the whipped cream canisters. The money was decent, but in that podunk micropolis there were too many cases of the “redneck tip,” whereby leaving a dollar per person at the table was deemed generous, never mind that you politely ran all-you-can-eat shrimp and light beer to these cretins for an hour and the checks for the two couples well exceeded $100. The camaraderie at RL was great – we cut up like crazy and made up silly, Weird Al-type songs about the restaurant business. My faves: one to the tune of Sade’s Smooth Operator titled “Ooh I’m Your Waiter,” and “Fry Guy,” fashioned after Mary Wells’ 1964 Motown hit. Once a month we were required to come in at 9 a.m. on Saturday for a wait staff meeting, only getting paid our paltry sub-minimum wage for the time. We often showed up in bathrobes and pajamas in protest, and then would commandeer the kitchen after the meeting for gourmet breakfast preparation by one of our colleagues who was a Le Cordon Bleu dropout. I worked this job for a few years before deciding to head into my next incarnation of self-employment.
My house painting concern was mostly just two guys and some ladders, brushes, drop cloths and other “accoutrements decoratif” packed into a 1978 Dodge pickup, a vehicle so wide that cell phone service varied between the driver’s and passenger’s sides. Things started out pretty well for two reasons. First, my partner and I had a good connection with a local contractor who fed us a lot of jobs. Second, we started up in spring just as the outdoor painting season gets into gear. Add to it our bachelor status and the modest income was plenty on which to enjoy life. So things hummed along for a while - we even survived the first winter slow season - but the following year our contractor wasn’t in need of near as much decorating work. We were also pretty clueless about self-employed income taxes and ended up going in the hole to the IRS for a few grand. The final straw was seeing that outside our original friendly contractor, two yankees weren’t particularly welcome in the old boy network of the construction trades. My partner bugged out first, and I followed a few months later to the same place he went.
That place was a very small art foundry, and the steady paycheck was welcome mainly for my new status as husband and provider while Jen was in school. The product was handcrafted bronze sculpture, mostly working editions of several hundred to a couple thousand but occasionally doing some custom work. It was neat stuff except that the metalworking aspect of it turned your hands green from the copper. I don’t imagine it was great for the lungs, either. It is still the only practical application of my “college education” as an art major. I started as an entry level metal finisher and worked my way up to management, which at a firm this small meant I had to do my job and keep an eye on everyone else. That job was primarily TIG welding, a very marketable skill, and after seven years of basically stagnant pay with bronze I left to take on work in steel fabrication for heavy equipment.
This medium-sized company was Japanese owned, which provided some interesting perspective into the differences between East and West in both industrial and corporate endeavors. Part of the production system required specific adherence to puzzling rules, such as only transporting certain parts on a cart of a certain color. This may have had more poignant management usefulness on the day shift, but I worked the much more lackadaisical night shift, where “dishonor” was much more frequent.
Jen graduated and began teaching at a school fifty miles away, so we decided to move to a rural area about 20 miles on the other side of her work, not far from her old stomping grounds near Chattanooga. In fact we rented a house from an old family friend, a place we loved and would have bought if he’d been inclined to sell. It is set in the middle of a few acres, and you couldn’t see a neighbor’s house when the leaves were full in summer. I looked for work other than welding because I was getting kind of burnt out with my fish-out-of-water status of being an erudite blue-collar worker.
Alas I was destined once again to eat my yogurt and read my Vanity Fair in the corner while all the cool kids smoked their menthols and talked about NASCAR. The new job, boiler tube fabrication, had me starting just above entry level until I earned my ASME certification, at which point my pay greatly increased. This kept me going for a few years, even in the face of some pretty shitty corporate actions, like having to work on New Year’s Day (but then not the following weekend, which would have been preferred), and the enforcement of petty rules that made the Japanese look mellow. I stayed in good graces with the owner, a fellow yankee, and actually took on my department’s foreman position. But once again the good old boys did me in by choosing to stand by and watch me fail rather than lend a hand of expertise to benefit me and the company. I gladly went back to minding my own business under a welding hood after fourteen months of being chief. Still, after five years my attitude had slipped enough to get me on the short list for the next round of layoffs, and when the time came for the ax to fall I put my head on the block without much regret.
After a period of unemployment I came across an ad in the local county rag that said they were looking for reporters, experience not necessary. I sent off a “what the hell” letter with some writing samples and forgot about it. About a month later the publisher calls me in for an interview, gives me a hokey AP writing and grammar test and shoots the shit about politics with me for about half an hour. After he hired me he showed me some of the other applications and we had a good laugh with a few. Seems several others also had a “what the hell” inclination but also the education to go with it. My pay would be about forty percent less than a certified welder, but my happiness would increase five fold.
It didn’t take any fancy book learnin’ to do the job, just some good social skills, an inquiring mind and a flair for writing stuff that could keep the average eighth-grader interested. I took on feature (aka fluff) stories, covered the business community (aka free advertising) and government (aka BS). In the 3-plus years I worked for this company that owned a dozen or so small papers, I interviewed people from a sixth grade history essay winner to the governor, earning three state press association awards along the way. It currently qualifies as the best job I’ve ever had (paid job, that is – nothing beats stay-at-home daddy).
So, at last we come to the new one, which, while I am quite appreciative for it in these times of increased unemployment, I don’t think it stands a chance of winning the title I just gave my last job. But now, after forays into small, medium and sort of large companies of every stripe, I enter the world of the humongous multinational corporation. Evenings and weekends I will be the cookie man, aka merchandising rep for Nabisco, owned by Kraft, which employs more than 98,000 people in 70 countries. I’ll count ‘em, order ‘em and stack ‘em at various grocers in the area, humming a tune that only a tiny cog in the corporate wheel can:
.
Financial times being what they are, I started a new career this week. Albeit part-time, the job seems to fill the last piece of career pie with respect to the types of employers I’ve had.
Let’s see if I can remember every ingredient chronologically. If you count lemonade stand, then that’s the first incarnation of Me, Myself & I, Inc., where a number of different hats have been worn over the years. But my first gainful employment was as a paperboy, starting as a rookie afternoon carrier packing about 30-40 copies of the now defunct Chicago Daily News into a canvas bag attached to the front of my Schwinn Sting-Ray. Over time I matured into a salty morning route veteran who whisked out a couple hundred Tribunes and Sun-Timeses (and a few WSJs on the tonier side of my route) via large wagon-wheeled carts, “chauffeured” van or car and even dogsled. Yes, dogsled – definitely a highlight of my as yet unpublished, much less written, memoirs.
Next I was a peon at a country club, specifically a caddy. This was a pretty dang good paying job for a high school kid, and can best be described by saying you should watch the movie Caddyshack (perhaps again), which was released at the height of my looping career with much fanfare amongst my colleagues. Brian Doyle Murray wrote the script based on his experiences caddying at a club just up the road from where I worked, and Bill Murray played at our club on a few occasions. The film is of course exaggerated for comedic effect but the basic elements are spot on. The job was great fun, and had a social subculture all its own with just the right amount of teenage shenanigans and debauchery to provide some hard-learned lessons and lasting memories.
For two summers in college I worked for the United States Postal Service as a “casual” mail carrier. Casuals would start about 10 a.m., taking over for the regular full-timers (which included my dad) who came in at six and cased up the mail going out on their route for the day. A lot of them liked burning up their vacation time with half days like that. I loved it because you worked on your own, got to be outside at different locations almost every day and meet different people, most of whom enjoyed seeing the mail arrive. I suppose if I had to do it year-round, like my dad who endured 37 northern Illinois winters of it, I would not have been as enthusiastic.
Another interesting summer job I held was as the overnight dinghy boy/watchman at a harbor on Lake Michigan. Most of the time I could sleep but occasionally had to ferry drunken fornicators back from their yachts at some ungodly hour. Couldn’t just wait till morning, eh? Well no, she has to get back before her husband wakes up. Your secret’s safe with me, pal, and even safer with that fin tip, wink wink. Each morning I had to haul a pack of burly dudes who worked from a barge at the mouth of the harbor. At sunrise they’d pile into the little 12-foot dinghy, causing displacement to the gunwales so that I sweated every turn of the outboard rudder. As a solo occupant I would have a blast cruising around the harbor doing donuts and chasing ducks (yes, I am ashamed of that) and a few times I motored out to open lake in the still of the night to have a smoke and watch the city lights in the southern distance.
My next job came after moving to California, where my brother had been living for a few years. We became roommates - I provided a reason for him to move out from a relationship that had run its course and he provided me with a job at the roofing company he worked for. This was real labor, especially working as a tear-off peon on the hot tar crew. Although I toughed it out for about a year and a half, I had no stomach for showing the initiative to move up into comfier and higher-paying ranks like where my bro was as a skilled roofer installing cedar shakes (the official roof of California). Class establishment that it was, the company ended up laying me off just before Christmas bonuses were to go out.
After some time suckling on the state teet I procured a job at a startup courier delivery company that covered the entire Bay Area. They normally didn’t hire anyone who hadn’t lived in the area for at least five years, but I am a map freak and so was able to prove my navigational prowess to get hired on. I started out as a shuttle driver, which doesn’t deliver on a route but runs between drop boxes all up the Peninsula from Santa Clara to the city (despite San Jose having long since passed San Francisco in population, the latter will always be “the city” of the Bay Area). This job was so simple and required no personal contact other than the radio dispatcher, so I frequently got stoned to the bejeezus (one of the dispatchers was my dealer), captaining my own little starship Enterprise up and down the 101. I gave up that on-the-job habit when I became a route driver, though. There was a bit more paper work and customer service involved - didn’t figure being spacey, scary red-eyed dude was so cool going in and out of all those Silicon Valley offices.
The courier job ended with my exodus from the Golden State. A brief sojourn in New Mexico had me working as a carpenter’s helper before moving on to Georgia, a place I vaguely recalled from traveling through to Florida on a couple of family trips as being hot, green and hilly. Georgia was a place that my formerly long-haired self had never considered to be a viable place to reside, but here I have now been for nearly half of my life.
My first job here was also my first foray into the retail world - a brief stint as a K-Mart cashier. It was also my first major foray into the world of southern accents, to which my attunement was directly proportional to the amount of teeth in the mouth speaking to me. At this time in my life I had, to make a long story short, renounced Christmas (still not gaga over it), and so I had the opportunity to work at the closed store on Christmas Day with a couple of other fellows straightening up and getting rid of all the X-mas displays and décor. The manager let us in and said he’d be back in a few hours, and while we performed our assigned duties we also enjoyed a boom box loudness contest and some BMX racing. Who knew rubber skid marks were such a bitch to get off linoleum?
As even Rain Man knows, K-Mart sucks, so when I heard that the Red Lobster in town was hiring wait staff trainees I made that my next pursuit of a living wage. Here another Hollywood product, Waiting, serves as a fairly accurate, if only humorously mediocre, portrayal of the waiting scene, right down to the busboys sucking all the nitrous oxide out of the whipped cream canisters. The money was decent, but in that podunk micropolis there were too many cases of the “redneck tip,” whereby leaving a dollar per person at the table was deemed generous, never mind that you politely ran all-you-can-eat shrimp and light beer to these cretins for an hour and the checks for the two couples well exceeded $100. The camaraderie at RL was great – we cut up like crazy and made up silly, Weird Al-type songs about the restaurant business. My faves: one to the tune of Sade’s Smooth Operator titled “Ooh I’m Your Waiter,” and “Fry Guy,” fashioned after Mary Wells’ 1964 Motown hit. Once a month we were required to come in at 9 a.m. on Saturday for a wait staff meeting, only getting paid our paltry sub-minimum wage for the time. We often showed up in bathrobes and pajamas in protest, and then would commandeer the kitchen after the meeting for gourmet breakfast preparation by one of our colleagues who was a Le Cordon Bleu dropout. I worked this job for a few years before deciding to head into my next incarnation of self-employment.
My house painting concern was mostly just two guys and some ladders, brushes, drop cloths and other “accoutrements decoratif” packed into a 1978 Dodge pickup, a vehicle so wide that cell phone service varied between the driver’s and passenger’s sides. Things started out pretty well for two reasons. First, my partner and I had a good connection with a local contractor who fed us a lot of jobs. Second, we started up in spring just as the outdoor painting season gets into gear. Add to it our bachelor status and the modest income was plenty on which to enjoy life. So things hummed along for a while - we even survived the first winter slow season - but the following year our contractor wasn’t in need of near as much decorating work. We were also pretty clueless about self-employed income taxes and ended up going in the hole to the IRS for a few grand. The final straw was seeing that outside our original friendly contractor, two yankees weren’t particularly welcome in the old boy network of the construction trades. My partner bugged out first, and I followed a few months later to the same place he went.
That place was a very small art foundry, and the steady paycheck was welcome mainly for my new status as husband and provider while Jen was in school. The product was handcrafted bronze sculpture, mostly working editions of several hundred to a couple thousand but occasionally doing some custom work. It was neat stuff except that the metalworking aspect of it turned your hands green from the copper. I don’t imagine it was great for the lungs, either. It is still the only practical application of my “college education” as an art major. I started as an entry level metal finisher and worked my way up to management, which at a firm this small meant I had to do my job and keep an eye on everyone else. That job was primarily TIG welding, a very marketable skill, and after seven years of basically stagnant pay with bronze I left to take on work in steel fabrication for heavy equipment.
This medium-sized company was Japanese owned, which provided some interesting perspective into the differences between East and West in both industrial and corporate endeavors. Part of the production system required specific adherence to puzzling rules, such as only transporting certain parts on a cart of a certain color. This may have had more poignant management usefulness on the day shift, but I worked the much more lackadaisical night shift, where “dishonor” was much more frequent.
Jen graduated and began teaching at a school fifty miles away, so we decided to move to a rural area about 20 miles on the other side of her work, not far from her old stomping grounds near Chattanooga. In fact we rented a house from an old family friend, a place we loved and would have bought if he’d been inclined to sell. It is set in the middle of a few acres, and you couldn’t see a neighbor’s house when the leaves were full in summer. I looked for work other than welding because I was getting kind of burnt out with my fish-out-of-water status of being an erudite blue-collar worker.
Alas I was destined once again to eat my yogurt and read my Vanity Fair in the corner while all the cool kids smoked their menthols and talked about NASCAR. The new job, boiler tube fabrication, had me starting just above entry level until I earned my ASME certification, at which point my pay greatly increased. This kept me going for a few years, even in the face of some pretty shitty corporate actions, like having to work on New Year’s Day (but then not the following weekend, which would have been preferred), and the enforcement of petty rules that made the Japanese look mellow. I stayed in good graces with the owner, a fellow yankee, and actually took on my department’s foreman position. But once again the good old boys did me in by choosing to stand by and watch me fail rather than lend a hand of expertise to benefit me and the company. I gladly went back to minding my own business under a welding hood after fourteen months of being chief. Still, after five years my attitude had slipped enough to get me on the short list for the next round of layoffs, and when the time came for the ax to fall I put my head on the block without much regret.
After a period of unemployment I came across an ad in the local county rag that said they were looking for reporters, experience not necessary. I sent off a “what the hell” letter with some writing samples and forgot about it. About a month later the publisher calls me in for an interview, gives me a hokey AP writing and grammar test and shoots the shit about politics with me for about half an hour. After he hired me he showed me some of the other applications and we had a good laugh with a few. Seems several others also had a “what the hell” inclination but also the education to go with it. My pay would be about forty percent less than a certified welder, but my happiness would increase five fold.
It didn’t take any fancy book learnin’ to do the job, just some good social skills, an inquiring mind and a flair for writing stuff that could keep the average eighth-grader interested. I took on feature (aka fluff) stories, covered the business community (aka free advertising) and government (aka BS). In the 3-plus years I worked for this company that owned a dozen or so small papers, I interviewed people from a sixth grade history essay winner to the governor, earning three state press association awards along the way. It currently qualifies as the best job I’ve ever had (paid job, that is – nothing beats stay-at-home daddy).
So, at last we come to the new one, which, while I am quite appreciative for it in these times of increased unemployment, I don’t think it stands a chance of winning the title I just gave my last job. But now, after forays into small, medium and sort of large companies of every stripe, I enter the world of the humongous multinational corporation. Evenings and weekends I will be the cookie man, aka merchandising rep for Nabisco, owned by Kraft, which employs more than 98,000 people in 70 countries. I’ll count ‘em, order ‘em and stack ‘em at various grocers in the area, humming a tune that only a tiny cog in the corporate wheel can:
.
Labels: jobs, life, me, the past, work
April 06, 2008
From the Archives
To "celebrate" once again the choices before us in this election year, we present this MTIH classic, originally posted in June 2006:
Raise your glass to the hard working people
I had a conversation last weekend about our current state of political affairs, and the Rolling Stones song Salt of the Earth was mentioned with regard to its line “Let’s think of the wavering millions / Who need leaders but get gamblers instead.”
That ambiguous line was brought home while reading an article/interview with Dick Cheney by former New York Times reporter Todd Purdum, now national editor at Vanity Fair. It’s a compelling piece, showing much of what I could have assumed about Cheney but then other stuff that proved I just don’t know Dick. For example, he was quite a prankster during his tenure as Ford’s chief of staff, and when he was Wyoming’s sole Congressman for 10 years he would make time back in the home office for a crazy coot they called Dynamite Lopez (in the pre-9/11 world he threatened that he carried a stick of dynamite with him – no worries, come on in, the Congressman will be right with you...).
But the crux of the story is about how Cheney’s character, not necessarily his ideology, has changed for the worse. Purdum speculates (and strongly so, as he interviewed a buttload of Cheney friends and aquaintances in addition to three conversations with the Veep himself) that the cause of the change falls about equally between his post-9/11 responsibilities, the massive amount of wealth he accrued with Haliburton, and his shaky health.
Interesting factoid – Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, a longtime Wyoming resident, worked on Cheney’s first congressional campaign in 1978. But the songwriter has changed his tune for sure (only slightly relieving my puzzlement over his initial support - hell, I don't guess Dems raise their head very high in the land of hate crimes). Barlow told Purdum via e-mail that Cheney’s, “dark intellect has become one of the most dangerous forces in the world; he has become a global sociopath, a creature of enormous power and intellect combined with all the empathy of a HAL 9000.”
I can just see the one-sided exchange in the West Wing, “I’m sorry Colin, I cannot allow you to do that."
So, back to the Stones. Regarding our need for leaders but instead getting gamblers, what could be a more accurate description of this administration? They have gambled away much of America’s and their own faithful's good will in a series of crap shoots, both foreign and domestic, that are based on about as reliable a strategy as “I just KNOW I can beat the house on this roll. Just one more.” Indeed, baby needs a new armored Humvee. In fairness, the song really offers an indictment of ineffective politicians of all stripes, pronouncing them a choice between two dreaded diseases - a strange beauty show, indeed.
So in honor of all the stay-at-home voters out there, we present the lyrics of the last tune on 1968’s Beggar’s Banquet (IM-not-so-HO, first in the series of the four greatest Stones albums which includes Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main St).
Salt of the Earth (Jagger / Richards)
Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the lowly of birth
Raise your glass to the good and the evil
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth
Say a prayer for the common foot soldier
Spare a thought for his back breaking work
Say a prayer for his wife and his children
Who burn the fires and who still till the earth
And when I search a faceless crowd
A swirling mass of gray and black and white
They don’t look real to me
In fact, they look so strange
Raise your glass to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the uncounted heads
Let’s think of the wavering millions
Who need leaders but get gamblers instead
Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter
His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows
And a parade of the gray-suited grafters
A choice of cancer or polio
And when I look into the faceless crowd
A swirling mass of grays and black and white
They don’t look real to me
Or don’t they look so strange
Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s think of the lowly of birth
Spare a thought for the rag-taggy people
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth
Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth
Let’s drink to the two thousand million
Let’s think of the humble of birth
.
Raise your glass to the hard working people
I had a conversation last weekend about our current state of political affairs, and the Rolling Stones song Salt of the Earth was mentioned with regard to its line “Let’s think of the wavering millions / Who need leaders but get gamblers instead.”
That ambiguous line was brought home while reading an article/interview with Dick Cheney by former New York Times reporter Todd Purdum, now national editor at Vanity Fair. It’s a compelling piece, showing much of what I could have assumed about Cheney but then other stuff that proved I just don’t know Dick. For example, he was quite a prankster during his tenure as Ford’s chief of staff, and when he was Wyoming’s sole Congressman for 10 years he would make time back in the home office for a crazy coot they called Dynamite Lopez (in the pre-9/11 world he threatened that he carried a stick of dynamite with him – no worries, come on in, the Congressman will be right with you...).
But the crux of the story is about how Cheney’s character, not necessarily his ideology, has changed for the worse. Purdum speculates (and strongly so, as he interviewed a buttload of Cheney friends and aquaintances in addition to three conversations with the Veep himself) that the cause of the change falls about equally between his post-9/11 responsibilities, the massive amount of wealth he accrued with Haliburton, and his shaky health.
Interesting factoid – Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, a longtime Wyoming resident, worked on Cheney’s first congressional campaign in 1978. But the songwriter has changed his tune for sure (only slightly relieving my puzzlement over his initial support - hell, I don't guess Dems raise their head very high in the land of hate crimes). Barlow told Purdum via e-mail that Cheney’s, “dark intellect has become one of the most dangerous forces in the world; he has become a global sociopath, a creature of enormous power and intellect combined with all the empathy of a HAL 9000.”
I can just see the one-sided exchange in the West Wing, “I’m sorry Colin, I cannot allow you to do that."
So, back to the Stones. Regarding our need for leaders but instead getting gamblers, what could be a more accurate description of this administration? They have gambled away much of America’s and their own faithful's good will in a series of crap shoots, both foreign and domestic, that are based on about as reliable a strategy as “I just KNOW I can beat the house on this roll. Just one more.” Indeed, baby needs a new armored Humvee. In fairness, the song really offers an indictment of ineffective politicians of all stripes, pronouncing them a choice between two dreaded diseases - a strange beauty show, indeed.
So in honor of all the stay-at-home voters out there, we present the lyrics of the last tune on 1968’s Beggar’s Banquet (IM-not-so-HO, first in the series of the four greatest Stones albums which includes Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main St).
Salt of the Earth (Jagger / Richards)
Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the lowly of birth
Raise your glass to the good and the evil
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth
Say a prayer for the common foot soldier
Spare a thought for his back breaking work
Say a prayer for his wife and his children
Who burn the fires and who still till the earth
And when I search a faceless crowd
A swirling mass of gray and black and white
They don’t look real to me
In fact, they look so strange
Raise your glass to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the uncounted heads
Let’s think of the wavering millions
Who need leaders but get gamblers instead
Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter
His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows
And a parade of the gray-suited grafters
A choice of cancer or polio
And when I look into the faceless crowd
A swirling mass of grays and black and white
They don’t look real to me
Or don’t they look so strange
Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s think of the lowly of birth
Spare a thought for the rag-taggy people
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth
Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth
Let’s drink to the two thousand million
Let’s think of the humble of birth
.
Labels: Elect Shit Sandwich, Lies and Lying Liars, politix, the past, Vote for Giant Douche
September 29, 2007
Fall Night
.
Despite numerous offers (requests?) of free babysitting service, Jen and I haven't taken many opportunities to enjoy an evening diversion since our son was born in February. In fact our first night out without him came just last week when we headed out to see a locally produced play, and with the "chaos" that ensuedin his mother's head from that, we decided it would be best to have him tag along tonight for an event that we'd considered attending for months.
Chattanooga has a great Friday night free concert series called Nightfall which runs from May through September. It takes place in a nice public square with fountains and multi-level brick wall/landscaped terraces. A stage is sunk down at the back of the square so the views can be decent if you get there early enough and the acoustics aren't half bad. Regardless of the act performing you can count on a steady crowd of a couple thousand, since the event blocks off the street for food and beer/wine sales. Yes, a good chunk of the folks come just to hang out.
Tonight was the final concert in the series and headlined one of the few names I recognized this season. I've had the pleasure of seeing several awesome acts at Nightfall, and now add tonight's performance by Howard Jones to the list.
Most anyone who knows me probably wouldn't think my musical tastes go toward the electronica and pop iconery that signifies the era of Jones' music, and for the most part they'd be right. I've mentioned before how I mostly took interest in such music during those college years of mine with a libidinous motive. But the classically-trained Jones is cream compared to the other crap, and besides that he came to the height of his prominence after that young man I was had gone west and was thusly expanding his horizons. So in the midst of catching nearly every Dead show in California between the autumns of 1985 and 1987, I had a cute little roommate (alas, with boyfriend) who was gaga over Howard Jones and with whom I had enough intriguing exchanges about music to respect and explore her tastes. She was one of the first people I knew who had a CD player, and she played the hell out of Jones' 1985 release Dream Into Action. Besides, when her friends came over to party at our shabby Victorian it wasn't like I was going to get any sleep - so let's dance!
Back to 2007: Jones is touring as an "acoustic duo," with just his keyboard and another fellow on guitar. I understand that he started the concept a couple of years back and was playing a grand piano, and though that would have been great to hear I can understand why he doesn't tour like that. He played some new stuff that I'm not familiar with, but of course obliged the bulk of those who came to listen and dance with his 80s strongholds New Song, Things Can Only Get Better, What Is Love? and my favorite (very Reggae-influenced) tune:
.
Despite numerous offers (requests?) of free babysitting service, Jen and I haven't taken many opportunities to enjoy an evening diversion since our son was born in February. In fact our first night out without him came just last week when we headed out to see a locally produced play, and with the "chaos" that ensued
Chattanooga has a great Friday night free concert series called Nightfall which runs from May through September. It takes place in a nice public square with fountains and multi-level brick wall/landscaped terraces. A stage is sunk down at the back of the square so the views can be decent if you get there early enough and the acoustics aren't half bad. Regardless of the act performing you can count on a steady crowd of a couple thousand, since the event blocks off the street for food and beer/wine sales. Yes, a good chunk of the folks come just to hang out.
Tonight was the final concert in the series and headlined one of the few names I recognized this season. I've had the pleasure of seeing several awesome acts at Nightfall, and now add tonight's performance by Howard Jones to the list.
Most anyone who knows me probably wouldn't think my musical tastes go toward the electronica and pop iconery that signifies the era of Jones' music, and for the most part they'd be right. I've mentioned before how I mostly took interest in such music during those college years of mine with a libidinous motive. But the classically-trained Jones is cream compared to the other crap, and besides that he came to the height of his prominence after that young man I was had gone west and was thusly expanding his horizons. So in the midst of catching nearly every Dead show in California between the autumns of 1985 and 1987, I had a cute little roommate (alas, with boyfriend) who was gaga over Howard Jones and with whom I had enough intriguing exchanges about music to respect and explore her tastes. She was one of the first people I knew who had a CD player, and she played the hell out of Jones' 1985 release Dream Into Action. Besides, when her friends came over to party at our shabby Victorian it wasn't like I was going to get any sleep - so let's dance!
Back to 2007: Jones is touring as an "acoustic duo," with just his keyboard and another fellow on guitar. I understand that he started the concept a couple of years back and was playing a grand piano, and though that would have been great to hear I can understand why he doesn't tour like that. He played some new stuff that I'm not familiar with, but of course obliged the bulk of those who came to listen and dance with his 80s strongholds New Song, Things Can Only Get Better, What Is Love? and my favorite (very Reggae-influenced) tune:
.
Labels: music, my youth, the past
