Stalking the Salvation Army

I’ve been looking for full-time work since the end of August and today is the first of January.

Back in spring of 2012, I found work while gimping around in an orthopedic boot that ran from my knee to the toes on my left foot. I started as a volunteer desktop publisher for an environmental non-profit at the suggestion of a state job counselor who said I had to "get something" on my resume that was more recent than 2008 -- the last time I worked full time. I volunteered part time while firing off resumes and icing and elevating my foot three times a day.

I got a direct-hire temp position in Kirkland working for a mobile phone app company. This was amazing as I knew zero about smart phones but the boss was a sweetie and he brought me on because of my tech writing and Photoshop skills. I learned so much about smart phones (Android, iPhone, Blackberries, etc.) that I don't think I’ll ever own one.

Literally, as the smart phone job was ending, I got a call from UW asking me if I was interested in another direct-hire temp position. I interviewed, snagged it and worked for a month at a living wage editing HeadStart manuals.

In early September I wasn’t too worried. I’d landed two contract jobs one after another and felt confident that a third was just waiting to be unearthed on Dice.com or old, reliable Craigslist.

I worked part-time for university parking enforcement in September and early October. It involved a ton of stress working in the worst possible traffic and at 65 bucks a day, didn't even cover my rent. I took it out of desperation and because I thought it would earn me kudos with a particular HR manager and hopefully a real job. It didn't.

While I was at the  job, a guy who was a former lab tech with UW Medical Center told me a Great Recession horror story. He’d been laid off when the department he worked in had budget cuts in January 2010. He had worked for UW for 10 years. He went on Unemployment. His condo was in good order, no scary mortgages hanging over his head. He drew Unemployment and worked for the UW temp agency several months out of the year. He started to get worried when he interviewed for another lab tech job in another department at the university. He did three interviews. Three. On the third one the interviewer told him it was down to him and one other lab tech and she not only had experience in the special computer software they would be using to log blood samples, she had helped write the program. “Guess who got the job?” he said as we stood in the break room on a sunny September afternoon. He, like me, was in his forties. The woman he was up against for the lab tech job was maybe 29 or 30 and, he said, she was pretty. He’d seen her in the hall near the interviewer’s office. “Most of the jobs on the UW Hires site?” he added, “They average 200 qualified applicants for every position posted.” He had a former boyfriend who worked for UW Human Resources. He's on Tier II Unemployment now and I don't know if he's found permanent work.

In October, I pawned my Marin bike. I’d bought it used in 2006 and then paid Recycled Cycles $150 to custom build me a Mavic rear wheel because the original was shot. I’d put on a used rear rack and attached my panniers. I had a way to get around Seattle that wasn’t bus dependent and faster than walking. I sold the bike to a creepy sports pawn place for $100. It was worth about three times that. I did this so I could pay my electric bill and buy 20 bucks worth of groceries.

The same day, I walked from the bottom of U District all the way through Fremont and Ballard along the Burke-Gilman trail. I looked for HELP WANTED signs and jotted down names of likely print shops or design firms that might hire me as a typesetter or similar. I noted about six, hunted down their websites and fired off query emails and attached resumes. I never heard a word.

The following weeks, I went back to one UPS Store in Fremont twice with a copy of the company’s online application filled out (all five pages of it) and my resume. I went back to the UPS Store in Ballard that had a HELP WANTED sign three times. I hit up the Trader Joe’s next to the UPS Store three times as well. Finally, in November, that Trader Joe’s sent me a little card thanking me for applying for work but 'no thanks'. It was kind of like a cease and desist order.

I had about 20 or 25 outstanding submissions for various administrative assistant, desktop publisher and receptionist positions on UW Hires websites. I stopped visiting the website in November because I got tired of reading the words: CONSIDERED, REJECTED next to the title of the position I’d tried for.

In October I went to the new Target downtown and sat through their moronic application at a computer kiosk in the store. I don’t know how many times you can ask an applicant ‘have you ever stolen a paper clip?’ but that’s what their application consisted of. They rejected my application via email about three days later, no doubt this had something to do with their credit check (I'm $90,000 in the hole according to various student loan collection agencies).

I have been dropped by a prominent staffing vendor and picked back up and submitted for technical writing positions with Microsoft, Honeywell and Nintendo twice in 2012. This HR firm has dibs on about 75-percent of all the new job listings flown by Microsoft. Anyone who attempts to apply to Microsoft directly is a fool. Their HR site receives something like 1,000-2,000 resumes for job listings per day. At least that's what the HR site project manager told me when I interviewed with her for a content editor position in late 2008 right before the Recession and my back injury kicked in. For companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing the only way in is through a "vendor" (aka temp/headhunter agency). In corporatized America, nobody is hired directly. Why should companies risk liability when they can foist workman's comp, potential insurance and any labor issues off on generic temp agencies happy to screen thousands of IT applicants via their minimum-wage "job counselors" most of whom don't know the first thing about the positions they interview candidates for?

Around Halloween, I applied for a minimum-wage store clerk position with Office Depot downtown. I prefer working downtown because I can walk there. At the end of the interview, the nice store manager said: “Thanks for coming in. Boy, I hope I can get through all of these by Thursday.” I looked at him and he said, “You’re the first of 25 applicants I have to interview by Thursday.” This was for a minimum-wage job. The store had no HELP WANTED sign in the window and there were no job postings for that store on their corporate website. The manager told me he’d gotten over 50 walk-in applicants in October alone.

A few weeks later a temp agency in Renton, that had screwed up a job submission for me with Boeing (they sent another applicant's resume), contacted me and asked if I wanted to interview for a job with Xerox. The interview was held at Xerox’s sales office near Southcenter Mall. It was a 35-minute bus ride followed by a stroll along an express way with no sidewalk at 7 am. The interview went well. The lady liked me. I asked her how many vendors had flown resumes at her. She said, “about a hundred”. Out of that sea of applicants, she’s chosen “about two dozen” to interview. I was the first one of those two dozen she interviewed. This was for a $12/hour job working in a copy store in downtown Seattle for 18 months. The job contract would lock me in at 12 an hour, zero benefits, zero paid holidays, etc. I was told by the temp agency, if I made a peep about the wage or non-existent benefits they would simply replace me and send Xerox somebody else. 

Infographic courtesy The Atlantic, Feb. 2012

I didn't just try for downtown sales, low-end jobs. I've been trying for the more-appropriate-to-my-skills positions as well. I applied for an administrative position with Hugo House in late June while working for the mobile phone app company (I also did two in-person interviews for tech writer positions while still at the mobile app gig because I knew it was going to end). This would have been a non-profit, artsy job manning a front desk, answering phones and making copies. I got an email from Hugo House concerning this position in August. After ‘months of review’ the email said, the director had picked an applicant. They received over 250 resumes for the position. The person they chose was under 35 and an MFA candidate. What a surprise.

Here’s some of the places I’ve been online and in person:

• Woodland Park Zoo (cashiers)

• Fred Meyer (shot down due to bad credit, thanks Sallie Mae)

• Safeway (anything)

• Starbucks (barista)

• Tenzing Momo herbal shop (sale clerk)

• Microsoft via six different vendors (technical writer, content provider, SDK documentation)

• Shakti Vinyasa Yoga in Ballard (P/T front desk)

• City of Seattle (Police file clerk or fingerprint tech)

• Nordstrom’s corporate (over 29 desktop publishing, tech positions and counting)

• Macy’s (Xmas freight thrower, interviewed and told staff "full up")

• Bed, Bath & Beyond (sales clerk)

• Enterprise Solutions (vendor for Microsoft tech writer)

• Amazon (technical writer, interviewed with them FOUR times, have been submitted about 20 times for multiple content, editor and writer positions)

• Starbucks corporate (digital marketing)

• Getty Images (via Eastside vendor for image editor/cataloger)

• F5 (via my old vendor for tech writer)

• Avue Digital/USJobs (Forest Service positions – I’m too old)

• Catholic Charity Services (front desk, homeless shelter, all 12 openings)

• Navy civilian positions (they can't hire anyone with defaulted student loans)

• Bar in Ballard (no recent experience, though I've bartended in the past)

• Cafe Laddro (no recent barista experience, though I did it in 2002) 

• Seattle Goodwill (over 10 different positions) 

These are just the ones I can actually remember. The other 200  since September are a blur. Usually they were law offices looking for clerks or architectural/engineering firms looking for Adobe Creative Suite savvy people or chiropractor’s offices looking for secretaries.

One that sticks out from early December was the Salvation Army. I started by filling out an app with their Rehab clinic down in SoDo. Then I bussed all the way to their admin offices in Shoreline. Twice. To apply for a bell ringer position. Yes, they actually pay seasonal temps 9 an hour to stand outside and ring the bell. I phone stalked the bell ringer coordinator, called her every day for a week trying to get on. I then filled out a third application and applied with another Salvation Army admin office in lower Queen Anne. The HR person was nice, appeared sympathetic. She asked me if I’d talked to their Emergency Rental Assistance administrator. I told her what I really needed was a JOB so I wouldn’t have to apply for emergency services. When I mentioned I'd tried to get on as a courtesy clerk at Metropolitan Market, she told me her husband was a deli clerk there and that their 'hiring process is really slow'. This was supposed to make me feel better?

Interesting factoid: non-profits are just like regular businesses. They are just as overwhelmed with applicants for the few to positions they have open.

So here I am, rolling into January. It’s that awkward time of year between Xmas and NYE when nobody answers their phone, several local food banks are closed and half the temp agencies aka vendors are on vacation.

I still just want the same thing I wanted for Xmas. It’s the same thing I wanted for Halloween. I’m pushing 50, I have DJD in both knees from all the damage I did to them running up hills and jogging hundreds of miles on asphalt as a wildland firefighter. I’m tired of kneeling.

Happy Kwanzaa.

'Not-Being-You Club'

Lindy West performs yet another slam dunk over on Jezebel.

As a plus-size woman who works out religiously (have for years) and is especially fond of the really, really difficult aerobic-type yoga, I totally get what she's saying. Totes.

Validation

I've been going through a super tough time financially for the last several months. The old bugaboos of unemployment and possible homelessness have stopped at my place just in time for the Hallmark Holidays. Along with them, the Specters of Past Crises have come a calling.

I had a conversation with one of my older brothers about four years ago (this is how often we talk). I told him about a stint I had working as a contract "rural carrier" for the post office back in late 2000. I mentioned the shift: usually 5:30am to 6:30pm and I mentioned the fact that I rarely had so much as a 15-minute break unless I pulled off of Mount Rose Hwy to stuff half a sandwich into my mouth, and then gunned my Hyundai on to the next clump of frozen mailboxes. His response was "I don't believe that."

I'm pretty sure my brother -- who once was a cop who got fired for beating a handcuffed suspect -- has never actually worked for the post office. I'm also pretty sure he hasn't scrambled to find a Day Job since about 1992 when he sold his company for several million dollars and dipped his toe into the gambling-addict world of day trading.

Likewise, I had a similar conversation with an older relative (they're all older than me, I was my parent's mid-40s surprise). She spent years struggling to make it and did well, has a nice home and some nice real estate income. But she did this struggling and this doing well when it was still possible to do that in this country. I was talking about my desperate three-year stint at a state university in Nevada, in the early 1990s, and how catch-as-catch-can my summer and Christmas break jobs were. My relative interjected: "But your dad helped you, right?" I explained he'd given me a couple grand when I'd first moved to Reno and that was it. My father never offered to pay for a single mind-numbing course I took at that fourth-rate college. "Really?" my relative asked, leaning in, like she was a detective and I a questionable witness. Finally she sat back in her chair and said, "Well, I don't believe that."

I don't think I'm unique. In fact, I think half the reason American society is as Depression-era stratified as it is right now is because of disbelief. Like alcoholism or drug addiction, 99-percent of the poverty problem is denial on the part of the Haves that the Have Nots even exist.

I want to reassure everybody that the real reason I can't find work is because I'm not looking hard enough. It's weirdly comfortable to the Haves if they could just blame me for my poverty. But the last interview I went on was for a $12-an-hour copy store job. The company had flown the job announcement on a website (everything is online now) and nearly one hundred vendors (headhunter/temp agencies) had responded. I was the first of 25-plus applicants the nice executive in Tukwila interviewed. One of 25. For a job that pays just a dollar above the Washington state minimum wage. No benefits. Contract would be for 18 months effectively locking me out of any health benefits and/or wage increases for over a year should I be blessedly lucky enough to be the chosen one.

So while the Haves continue to live in denial, I and half the rest of the country, slide deeper into long-term unemployment, poverty and possibly homlessness.

Merry Christmas.

Parkour ... or Zumba, maybe?

Josh looks fantastically fit. Like maybe he's been taking parkour or Zumba classes?

Whedon on Romney

The Long Haul or What I Learned at Summer Camp

When you get old, you enjoy comparing things. Things like incomes, relationships and especially people. Comparing the trajectories of people's lives is also interesting. Let's take these two for example:

Sixto Rodriguez is 70 years old. He's been making folk music since he was a teenager. His "big break" came at age 28 when his album Cold Fact was produced. Then he got ignored by the American music scene for decades.

 Rodriguez is sort of like a Hispanic Bob Dylan. His songs are about the disenfranchisement of the lower class, the resentment created by racism and the isolation of poverty. Although a fellow Detroiter, he's nothing like Eminem. For some bizarre reason, white South Africans latched onto copies of Cold Fact way back in the 1970s and 80s and declared him 'the voice of their generation'. Go figure. Unfortunately, Rodriguez didn't know he was huge in South Africa for decades. Then somebody hunted him down, now he tours and does sold-out shows. It only took 40 years for his art to be recognized, to find an appreciative audience.

And that's okay because giants like Van Gogh and Oscar Wilde never really found their audiences. They both died in relative obscurity and poverty because Van Gogh was nuts and Wilde had been disowned by London society after his indecency trial. Today Van Gogh's paintings sell for more than the GDP of some third-world countries and Wilde's plays are perpetually being re-interpreted in theaters and on film.

Let's compare Rodriguez to this woman. Lena Dunham is the daughter of New York artists. She grew up in and around the New York art scene. She attended a prestigious school in New York famous for producing artists made up of the genes of other artists. Then she graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio. It's an elite liberal arts university that has graduated a number of Pulitzer Prize winners, screenplay writers and other over-achievers. It costs $50,000 a year  to attend Oberlin. Just the tuition is $50,000. Forget room, board, a nice beer bong, etc. According to one Ohio news site, it's about $200,000 to get an undergraduate degree. Throw in a modest car accident (college kids are not the best drivers), a little pneumonia or maybe an appendicitis and that's a quarter of a million dollars to educate one kid. Wow, her parents must love her.

Dunham made an independent film when she was about 25 called Tiny Furniture and won a bunch of awards. It's about a recent college grad from an elite liberal arts college trying to decide what to do with herself after college. I'm sure this was a huge stretch for Dunham, I mean to get inside the lead character's head, examine all that self doubt and white rich person's guilt. I'm guessing Tiny Furniture is like the cinematic equivalent of Native Son. It does for wealthy white New Yorkers what Richard Wright's book did for oppressed black people in the 1940s. I mean how does one escape the curse of being rich, white and privileged? You kill your metaphorical rats, you endure the lines at the new up-scale bistro and you accept your fate to live near the top of America's social ladder. Oh, the horror.

Recently Dunham, who's been ridiculed for her successful HBO comedy Girls, signed a book deal with Random House to write a memoir/humorous confessional of her early years. The publishing deal nets her $3.5 million. (Looks like the quarter mill for that Bachelor's paid off.) And Random House has surprised no one by doing what every harebrained, cookie-cutter publisher left in America is doing: latching on to the shiniest, momentarily interesting writer and hoping this one is the goose capable of crapping gold. I mean, just think of all the slack-jawed trustafarians slouching around Williamsburg who will flock to the bookstores to buy this tome. Wait, those kids read books don't they?

And are there any physical bookstores left?

Can't complain

When the weather has been freakishly warm and SUNNY for over two months in Seattle, it's hard to complain about anything. It's almost impossible.

Author Bio

I sent a witty one-paragraph bio to the Bridport Prize fiction writing reps because I won a minor place in the back of their upcoming literary anthology. It wasn't really funny, just witty.

Then I read a bunch of bios for last year's winners and felt super inadequate. Amongst the author bios of past winners:

• Somebody who taught English to refugees in Darfur while commuting to and from work by bicycle (think: sand dunes and snipers)
• An MBA from New York who now teaches past-life reincarnation workshops in Nepal
• An author with an MFA, an MD and a doctorate in quantum physics who, in her spare time, bathes homeless kittens that are in 'transitional housing' (the RSPCA)
• An Irish author who is a recovering alcoholic and whose work has previously appeared in Men's Fitness, Harper's Bazaar and OMNI magazine (out of print since 1998)
• An English author who was raised in Honduras in a rat-infested tree house while writing dissertations on Joyce, David Foster Wallace and string theory ... in Spanish by flashlight

It's bios like these that remind me that as a college dropout, without a degree I'm nothing!

Passive vs Active

Couldn't say no to this quote/comment on Feministing regarding ESPN's Body Issue photo spread:

In a culture in which women’s bodies are typically valued for being passive objects that are nice to look at, admiring female athletes’ bodies for being active agents that are nice to look at has the potential to be a truly great thing. 

 (Sarah Robles is not in the ESPN photo spread)

Interesting how this plays into the larger theme of objectification through passivity that I touched on in one of my posts long ago. In contemporary storytelling, female characters are seen as characters who things happen to, versus male characters who do things. Male characters are allowed to be mufti-faceted in a way female characters, especially in films, television and video games almost never are.

Underneath Prometheus

Now that I've had a second chance to see Ridley Scott's Prometheus I'm more sure of a few things.

First, the gist of it: in the near future a bazillionaire, Peter Weyland, funds a space trip to a distant planet based on a couple of archeologists' finding a stellar map. Since this is Ridley Scott, the guy who gave us Alien the quintessential blending of horror and sci-fi and also the moody, existential Blade Runner; things go bad quickly.

The ship lands on the barren planet and under the thrumming soundtrack we enter the haunted house. It quickly becomes clear that this place has more in common with the Nellis Testing Range in Nevada or Chernobyl in Russia than any mythical garden of creation.

Contrary to what most film critics have said, the supporting cast are not stereotypes. We have a black ship's captain with a Eastern European name who speaks with a Texas accent and is fond of accordions. There's also a geologist with a punk hairdo and tribal tattoos who looks like a roadie rather than a scientist. Scott is forced to move the film along at such a brisk pace we don't have time to really know who any of these characters are.

The aliens are equally enigmatic and raise lots of questions. Why do they all look like the product of a white supremacist eugenics project with freakishly perfect physiques and superman strength? Most importantly, why are they all male?

And then there's the leads: Elizabeth Shaw played by Noomi Rapace of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fame and David, an android, played by Michael Fassbender. Both actors seem right at home in dark, moody films with depressing story arcs. Fassbender described his character as asexual. I disagree. David, despite his not being a "real boy" has all the trappings of an angst-ridden 21st century man. He's conflicted, vain and seems to remember he's supposed to empathize with and interact with his fellow explorers a few moments later than he should -- just like your run-of-the-mill geek prodigy.

At it's core, Prometheus is a love story. Early on David gently strokes Elizabeth's cryogenic chamber as he watches her dreams via the magical technology of this future world. The android also watches Lawrence of Arabia and pantomimes Peter O'Toole's dialogue. It's no accident David is attracted to a film where the lead is other worldly and sees himself as alienated from his fellow English men. For a being incapable of emotions and lacking "a soul" he does a hell of a job convincing us otherwise. Underneath his conceit, David is desperate to fit in and win approval of his team members and creator, old man Weyland. David even has a couple of sibling standoffs with Vickers, one of Weyland's corporate execs who is clearly envious of David's position as the No.1 son.

And he does what every male lead inevitably does in every love story. He betrays and disappoints Elizabeth and, she in turn, has to forgive him if they're both to survive when the sky starts to fall.

Some of the most nuanced scenes in the film are between David and Elizabeth. When he realizes she's accidentally been "impregnated" by the weapon they find in this sterile Eden he's impersonal and efficient but there's a hint of envy when he asks Elizabeth if she's "recently been intimate" with her boyfriend, fellow archeologist Holloway. And the scene after Elizabeth gets the monster removed is especially interesting. Elizabeth wanders bloody and drugged through the ship and finds David gently fawning over his creator, Weyland. When David sees Elizabeth he gallantly tosses his lab coat over her and then makes an awkward pun as though her physicality, her femininity, is at once fascinating and scary to him; just like a regular man would.

This film is about the dislocation between the head and the animal body, between the intellect and it's creative science and the body with its drives and appetites for oxygen, food and sex. It's a metaphor first brought up when one of the characters asks David why he's putting his helmet on even though he doesn't breathe. It's echoed again when the explorers find a decapitated alien and in the finale.

David is an intellect who tries to rise above his albeit manufactured physical self and fails. Just like he tries to separate himself from any possible emotions for Elizabeth. Prometheus is a meditation on the quintessential male and female archetypes and what they're compelled to come together to do: create. And destroy.

Boston Review's 'How to be Poor'

Pretty interested article in the Boston Review on the sociology of poverty. I saw Charles Murray on Real Time with Bill Maher and I think he's an idiot but Fischer's article is pretty insightful:

The American impulse is to target the culture—teach abstinence, discipline kids, lecture parents, preach punctuality, provide moral training—so that the chronically poor will be ready when opportunity knocks. The alternative, more European, is to target the opportunity structure—provide jobs and practical training, guarantee health benefits and housing—so that tomorrow is more predictable and middle-class scripts are more practical.

I'm poor, I'm here, get used to it

I'll be turning 47 in a few weeks. A big number. But arthritis aside there's one thing that pisses me off more than anything else. See, I'm poor. And some people, especially my own family, are oblivious to this. You might even say they're conveniently oblivious.

This was fine 20 years ago. At 27, I was trying to go to college. (Not surprisingly, this was something I couldn't afford). But now that I'm staring 50 in the teeth, it's a bigger deal. I have no retirement, pension or 401k.

A friend (from a moderate upper-middle class family) came and visited me after I had foot surgery in February. Upon surveying my noisy, cramped apartment she said: "This is just like an apartment my parents had in college." And that would be fine, if I was still in my twenties, but I'm not.

Another friend was shocked when I asked her for a loan (which I paid back) in spring 2010 because I couldn't pay my rent. "Couldn't you take it out of savings?" she asked. "What savings?" I answered. I had a modest savings account when I'd been laid off from my last contract job in late 2008. I'd squirreled away about five grand but that was long gone by 2010 after two years of the Great Recession, unemployment/under-employment and a lingering Workman's Comp suit-slash-back injury.

That friend had a house, mostly paid for. She and her husband both worked for a software giant. They had a motorcycle, paid for. Two late-model cars, one a Porsche, paid for. They had home entertainment systems, new personal computers that were replaced seasonally and numerous other gadgets including a top-of-the-line digital camera that cost more than all the digital cameras I've owned put together. My friend and her hubby had comprehensive medical insurance. If they got the sniffles, they dropped everything and went to the nearest holistic doctor. They both had multiple gym memberships that included free massages and physical therapy. They both had retired parents who had pensions and owned their own homes.

Back in Reno circa 2000, I had an acquaintance say to me: "You're so lucky you rent. You're not tied down, you're footloose and fancy free." Yeah, footloose enough that I might loose my apartment at a moment's notice thanks to Nevada's draconian rental laws (and I did a couple times). Oh, lucky me.

I know part of my poorness is because I'm not married. I've been engaged and had live-in boyfriends in the past but these days finding my "one true love" and cramming our stuff into one rental sounds about as much fun as my next root canal. I'm not looking for anyone to "complete me". That's such a fucked up, co-dependent way of looking at relationships I could devote an entire separate post to it. Suffice it to say, I have dalliances, not live-in relationships because live-in relationships are expensive. When and if that loving feeling ends, somebody's gotta move out. Rental trucks have to be hired and breakups are expen$ive.

I'm starting a new job next week. It will be the first time I've worked as a technical writer since 2008. And, though I'm thrilled to be going back to work, I'm not eager to rejoin the Cubicle Prairie. I'm not in love with the colors gray or beige and not looking forward to staring at those colors for 40+ hours a week, while waiting for my lumbar sprain and sciatica to make a painful return.

As Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."

While contracting at Boeing in 2008, I shared a cubicle with a guy who had a heart attack. In the cubicle. At work. He's okay now but it was scary and jarring and made me take a long look at what I was doing with my life and how I wanted to live the rest of it.

As for housing, I’ve never had the privilege of owning one. I toyed with the idea in 1994 (a year of profoundly bad decisions). I had an idiot relative insist I could buy a tiny plot of land outside Reno, make a go of it in some weird mobile-home-converted-into-a-fire trap. Of course, I didn’t have the advantage of having a spouse who would support me via three minimum-wage jobs while I dipped my toe in the real estate market and pondered my wonderfulness. But I was going to a state university and student loan debt blasted whatever vague semblance of credit I might have had right out of the water.

It’s amazing that after YEARS of being poor I still have to explain that I’m poor to my relatives. They’ve been down playing my poverty to assuage their guilt for so long I am forever hearing phrases like “your apartment must be cozy.” Cut the Century 21 bullshit. A $500,000 cabin with a wood stove overlooking a lake is cozy. I live in a dumpy, low-income apartment with paper-thin walls. Just like I did when my mother was raising me. If that was “cozy” why did my Mom have so much trouble paying the winter heating bill?

When I say I'm poor, I'm not suggesting I'm Third World poor. I'm not typing this from a cardboard shack perched atop a landfill in Guatemala, the Philippines or some other living hell. I don't forage for food in dumpsters like the street urchins of the Ukraine.Yet. But sitting here in my tiny apartment, I'm close enough to the street to hear the homeless people pushing their shopping carts up the sidewalk. Unlike a whole lot of upper-middle class folks I know, I visited food banks before late 2008.

So stop whining about how much in taxes you had to pay on your stock dividends this year, rich bitch in my yoga class. And quit complaining about how your $8,000 retreat to Maui was cut short because your parents reined in your trust fund, other rich bitch. And I don't give a crap if your Lexus got towed while parked in Belltown because I haven't owned a car in eight years. This was a choice but, like 90-percent of all my decisions, it came down to money. And that's something I've never had enough of to really pass for middle class.

Better and better

64 days post op. The doc today said it looks super good, esp. the x-rays, so I can continue wearing regular shoes no problem.

22 days post-op

Got my 3 week post-op x-rays and clinic visit yesterday. They want me to go another three weeks no-weight-bearing/on the crutches. Argh! But I kinda see the point. My no.1 metatarsal looks like the curved leg of a chair (it should be relatively straight). All those years of walking on the deformity caused the foot to over compensate and form the bunion and torque the metatarsal out.

At least now I get to wash it! It looks way better, swelling's gone way down, movement has returned to the outter three toes and the middle one that was shortened. The big toe is still super stiff and sore but coming along.

Say 'no' to Blimpbaugh

Senator McCaskill,

I heard via online news that you have put forward a motion to stop having Rush Limbaugh's bust installed in your state's hall of fame.

As a non-Missourian but a U.S. citizen and registered voter, I applaud your effort. I hope you succeed.

I understand your state's hall of fame is for persons of historical note, people like Mark Twain.

I wonder what someone like Mr. Twain would think if he knew that an inflammatory, misinformed "commentator" like Limbaugh -- who earns some $50-$100 million per year -- was having his likeness installed in such an august place?

Limbaugh has never run for political office. He is not William F. Buckley, Jr. He is not even a passable George Will and he's certainly no Barry Goldwater.

Other than slur the good name of those who have successfully held office like Al Gore, make fun of actors with crippling illnesses like Michael J. Fox and refer to enlisted personnel with political views opposing his as "phony soldiers" -- what has Limbaugh done to warrant a bust in the hall of fame?

Thank you again,

-- M. Murphy
Seattle, WA

Go here to thank Senator McCaskill for her efforts to halt the installation of Limbaugh's bust.

Foot 8 days post op

1st Before/After Pic

Yesss

Feminists have a sense of humor. Here it is:

Olde Raypey Tymes

Somebody get this lizard out of my wig!

I'm coming to this debate five months late, but since I'm reading the books (just started No. 4) I wanted to say something about the controversy surrounding fantasy author, George R.R. Martin's books aka HBO series Game of Thrones.

Completely unfamiliar with this melodrama? Martin began publishing a series of fantasy novels in 1996. He's an obese, old nerd who once wrote for television, was a fan of Tolkien and decided he wanted his own Middle Earth. So Martin came up with Westeros, which is like medieval France with more dismemberment (and rape).

Except he didn't like the way Tolkien, Michael Moorcock, T.H. White and a dozen others wrote fantasy. There was too much swishing of magical swords and not enough actual hacking of limbs with "real" steel swords. Apparently, Martin is a man who knows his Society for Creative Anachronism's jousting rules -- heavy vs. light armor ... (Sorry, I nodded off for a sec). So Martin's world is envisioned with all the vérité of the Dark Ages or maybe the Inquisition. Beheadings and maimings galore!!! This is fantasy for the adults. Westeros is a place where The Lord of the Rings' Frodo-n-Sam would have been court jesters by day and S&M bottoms by night.

Except that wasn't vérité enough, he wanted Westeros to feel like effed up Europe in Olden Tymes and that meant lots of misogyny. The book's narrative voice gleefully details numerous rapes with dated cheesy verbiage.

Of all the prejudices and fears of those times, why'd he pick the monotonous rape and perpetual oppression of women???

The answer's simple. Martin's a former Catholic school boy. There are two kinds of women in the Catholic school boy universe: WHORES and virgins (yee faire maidens). The end. No multi-fauceted characters as deeply flawed as the male characters allowed. In Westeros, you're either a sexless 11-year-old girl or a WHORE. And George Martin loves that word. I counted WHORE eight times on one page in the first novel.

Never mind the fact that in re-imagining a mythic Olde Europe, Martin ineptly leaves out the primary impetus for misogyny -- women weren't allowed to own property or businesses, say 'no' to a marriage proposal, lead mass, etc. -- the Church. The religion that instigated the Inquisition, burned countless Jews, women and "witches", re-wrote the New Testament, demanded exorbitant taxes from lords to build their Liberace-style Vatican, required celibate males for their priesthood ... and the absolute subjugation of women by medieval society. So what's with all the WHORE calling, George, in a pagan society???

Well today, it's titillating for one. It's sexy if you're an overweight, pasty-white nerd to imagine helpless slave girls writhing at your feet. And this hypothetical nerd has envisioned himself as being like Conan the Barbarian, with pecs bloated from steroids, legs like oak trees and a swept back Fabio hairdo (Kal Drogo!).

But I can't blame parochial school for George's fixation on pre-teen virgins. And that's just ... creepy. In one interview he glumly explains how HBO wasn't thrilled that one of the key characters, Daenerys, is just 13 when she's "wed" to a 30-year-old barbarian. So they made her 18. And George was upset that they had to get an actual adult -- a 22-year-old actor -- to play the child bride. (Damn ye censors!).

And all his fans are crying foul because snarky blogger Sady Doyle, and other women writers, are outraged by the rabid misogyny in the books and now the TV show. The argument Alyssa Rosenberg and a dozen others ineptly make is that Things Really Were Like That Way Back When. Well, yeah maybe. And if they still were, Alyssa, you and I wouldn't be sitting at computers debating the merits of a fantasy novel. All us vagina owner would be washing some feudal lord's clothing by hand, dying during child birth or maybe standing on the slave block waiting to be auctioned off to our next owner/husband. I can't wait for the re-enactment at the next renaissance fair!

Is Martin responsible for upholding his imagined characters to some higher standard? Why should he when most other sci-fi/fantasy novelists can't be bothered and their armies of mostly white, mostly heterosexual, mostly male fans are happy to consume their writing while defending any overt sexism and racism as attempts to "keep it real." (Umm, it's pretend, okay?)

But don't make the female characters as flawed and multi-fauceted as any of the dudes and thus empower them to DO SOMETHING! Rather, George (and his ilk) incessantly objectifies them so that they just sit there like inflatable dolls waiting for something to be DONE TO THEM.

Like Sansa. She just sits there, cries a lot and is the negative stereotype of the vapid, helpless, pretty teenager. Likewise Daenerys, the teen queen, who isn't allowed to have a sex life with Jora Mormount or anybody because ... because ... because ... in Martin's eyes she has to stay vaguely virginal or else she'll fall off the misogynistic precipice and into the stereotype of WHORE. And we all know what sexually active, adult women are!!! They're WHORES. They're manipulative, scheming, power-mad, hyper-emotional, duplicitous WHORES. Unless they're like Ygritte -- in which case they pay for their liberation with their lives, 'cos ya know womens is not to be trusted!

Yeesh.

But apparently complaints about Martin's Whore Tourette's Syndrome got back to him, because by book four, he's toned the WHORE-calling down a bit. Now Little homicidal Arya is traveling to distant lands (rather than being kidnapped by every murder/raper in yon Westeros). And Brienne (the Ugliest Woman in Westeros, oh the shame!) is on a horse galloping off to save Sansa (because what the hell else can you do with a one-dimensional female character except tie her to the tracks and then save her over and over?).

Too pretty to raype? Me thinks not.

Meanwhile, even if you like Martin's bloated sentences (Yee Olde Tyme Talk Es Dyfficult, M'Lord) and his endless over-use of adjectives and adverbs (please save me from "waddles") you've got to wonder: why aren't all the boys getting raped or threatened with rape? If Jaime Lannister is that pretty, why haven't any of these barbarous villains bent him over and horse fucked him yet?

And sure there are token gay male characters but they get conveniently killed off before George has to bother fleshing out their characters ala Renley Baratheon (already dead!). Apparently lesbians don't exist in this pseudo early-Euro world.

And what's up with the overt classism? Did George tour the Tower of London and just not get it? Monarchies are bad and democracies are good, right? Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Surely George isn't dragging us through thousands of pages of fantasy just to drop that cliche at our feet? I thought sci-fi/fantasy readers were a tad more sophisticated than that.

Fear not ye not-so-gentle readers of ye tomes. I shall continue to dodge hack sentences and dead-horse adverbs all the way to the end. I want to get to the part where little Arya grows up, has normal sex (not rape!) and sticks her sword so far up one of the misogynistic villain's asses it comes out his mouth.

P.S. Dear HBO, Peter Dinklage is a lot of things: talented, dynamic, hella fun to watch act. But he is not ugly, not by a long shot. Shame on you for casting him as the Ugly Character Standing in for the Ogreish Author.

Pooblished, pooblished again

But not for money.

The Legendary has published one of my short stories, The War with Canada, which is good as it was starting to feel really ignored (if short stories even have feelings). A couple of my other short stories were hogging all the attention.

"It's ALL about the body ..."

Miss Representation was made by documentarian/actor Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Newsom says her impetus for making Miss Representation was the birth of her daughter. She hopes her child’s life will be less limited, bigoted and oppressive than it is right now for anyone born female. Sadly, with every corporate media conglomerate owned by old white men like Rupert Murdoch that won't happen any time soon.

Feminists are aware of how pervasive misogyny is in movies, TV, the internet and magazines but Miss Representation hammers home statistic after statistic that had the SIFF audience groaning under the crippling sociological reality.

As one high school teen said, “It’s ALL about the body, not about the brain.”

Newsom didn’t have to look hard for material that reflects the dominant view in America she just had to turn on FOX News (owned by Murdoch) where shrieking “TV personalities” debate whether Sarah Palin had breast implants and why does Mrs. Clinton look so old?



Thoughtful interviews with prominent people like Pat Mitchell had the audience’s hands wringing. Mitchell heads the Paley Center for Media. Nobody is surprised hyper-sexualized and negative images of women has got teenage girls cutting themselves, developing eating disorders and becoming victims of assault in schools.

It’s like the entire media (magazines, films, TV and the internet) is now run by a bunch of angry teenage punks who care only about fake tits and catching female authority figures doing dumb things; except it’s not.

Corporate media is run by middle-aged and elderly homophobic men, all of them white, most of them fabulously wealthy, who arrogantly believe they have their fingers on the pulse of American culture. People like the porcine Rush Limbaugh (age 60, earned $285 million from 2001 to 2008) who slammed Michelle Obama for being "too fat" or shock jock Howard Stern, (57, net worth $500 million) who viciously attacked Gabourey Sibide after the film, Precious, for being over-weight and black. Previously, Stern hypocritically attacked Ellen DeGeneres for being a lesbian.

Amongst the points hammered home: America is near the bottom of countries that have women in their national governments, behind nations like Cuba and even Iraq. Girls as young as seven now experience body dysmorphic disorder, begin diets and obsess over dressing sexy.

Amongst the luminaries interviewed: Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinhem, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rachel Maddow and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. But it is experts like Jennifer Ponzer of Women in Media and News and Jim Steyer of Common Sense Media who make the most compelling points. Ponzer points out that “reality” TV shows where hyper-sexualized characters dressed like strippers fight over bachelors drowns out the voices of real female authority figures, like members of Congress.

Actress Geena Davis laments the root of the problem with television and film. Women almost never write or direct the narrative in these mediums. Hollywood is profoundly white, male and heterosexual, and filmmaker Paul Haggis points out, female characters in the past had more depth, were allowed more range and able to present characters that were more real ala Betty Davis in Dark Victory.

All these fake boobs, Girls Gone Wild and uber-violent video games like Grand Theft Auto have sent a clear message to young women: you’re just a hole, you’re good for fucking but nothing else and, you might not even measure up for that. And, girls are told, once you hit 40, just go away, disappear because a woman is only of worth when she’s young and appears sexually available. It’s a message that’s been voiced by Howard Stern on his radio show many times and chanted endlessly in so-called mainstream media like primetime sitcoms where every single female character is white, underweight and always under 40.

Never mind that Howard Stern is an ugly, old white guy with hair weave who bought his most recent wife.

Teaching women's rights

Lindsay is a public school teacher in central California and a friend of mine. She is amazing, so is her BLOG.

Happy Turkey Day to Lindsay and all her students.

Lie to Me (Please)

A novelist’s business is lying. – Ursula Le Guin, Preface to The Left Hand of Darkness

What’s the biggest mistake fledgling writers make? They’re afraid to lie. I’ve done this, everybody has. It’s an elephant-sized faux pas in fiction writing.

A great deal of writing is born out of journaling, which is an erudite way of saying keeping a diary. Writing tends to have its roots in psychological therapy and so short stories often spring from journaling. This is fine if only the roots of a story are planted in the dark, murky compost of our actual lives.

But really good fiction is just that: somebody made it up. Only from fiction can we find emotional truth. Shakespeare was never an actual prince in Denmark or any where else, but from Hamlet comes a lot of profound emotional truths about human existence including: grief, guilt and anger. Pretty much everybody with a pulse has experienced these feelings at one time or another. It’s easy to empathize with Hamlet, even if he is a prince, Danish and never really existed.

If you don’t believe me, consider these examples.

Was Annie Proulx ever a gay cowboy living in Wyoming in the 1960s? No, she’s a straight woman who was born in and spent most of her life in New England –- Stephen King’s neck of the woods -- not Ennis’ empty rural waste. But she did an award-winning job convincing us she was a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain.

Never a gay cowboy.
Was there ever a land called Narnia with a giant, Christ-like lion who talked to little English kids? No but Carroll Lewis makes us believe this in The Chronicles of Narnia.

Did an evil spirit cause the death of a family in Amityville, New York? No, but writer Jay Anson did a bang-up job convincing a lot of people that one did in The Amityville Horror. Anson performed the oldest trick in the book: he based a series of lies on a truth. A guy really did kill some family members and, like countless other convicted murderers before him, he alleged for years that the devil made him do it.

Did you go through a tumultuous marriage in your youth? Maybe got married at age 20 and then divorced at 22. Did you and your spouse literally pull each other’s hair out in fights and war over custody rights for years? Do you really want to even hint that you’re writing a story now about that event and risk getting sued? Think up a character, someone NOT like you. Change their hair color, age, height, etc. Now change the setting. If you live in Vermont (like Ms. Proulx) set the divorce story in Wyoming. If you live in Florida, set your story in Nepal.

It’s okay to lie, fellow writers, really it’s just fine. It might even inhibit an angry relative from filing suit. You will never find emotional truth until you learn how to lie about the details that bring your reader to that truth.

The Darkest State

Kevin Smith's latest effort, Red State, came out in a swirl of controversy. Whiny film critics and distributors threw figurative rocks at him after the initial screening at Sundance in January 2011. Too bad because it's a good and interesting film.

I suspect a lot of the ire leveled at Smith comes from the same peanut gallery that slammed him for 1997's Chasing Amy. They went in expecting fart and dick jokes; instead they got a scathing commentary on the state of America's deeply broken religious and political ideology.


I'm of two minds regarding the critics that trashed Red State. One, they're cynical Hipsters living deep inside the cultural bubbles of New York or L.A. and they simply don't believe that a place like Cooper's Corner could actually exist. The Heart Land is something they occasionally fly over on trips back to see the 'rents and demand more trust fund money. Or, on the other hand, they're cynical Hipsters who live in non-culturally insulated places like Memphis, Cincinnati or Austin -- and Red State flies way too close to home, which is probably a small, dusty town too much like Cooper's Corner. This second crop of critics is afraid to give a thumbs up for the film because it would ruffle feathers, put beads on them as they're driving home on dark country roads late at night.

Once upon a time I lived in one of those non-bubbles (Reno, Nev.) and I had to be careful what I wrote as a journalist or else I'd earn the rage of a local fundamentalist librarian (yes, she really existed) or a fuming minister would show up in my editor's office.

Red State is very much a here-and-now tale. Three teenage boys drive to an internet hook-up expecting sex with a horny housewife and instead are kidnapped by a fundamentalist Christian cult that has judged them "social parasites".



Smith has no qualms about mentioning Waco's infamous Branch Davidians, Fred Phelps or any other of the vast, toxic soup of Right Wing extremists who form the edge of America's political landscape. These are the real Freddy Kruegers, the real specters who haunt us not because they're horror-film scary but perhaps because they give some of us pause: how easy it would be to agree to their hate edicts like so many Glenn Beck followers. If we could identify a specific scapegoat in America (gays, blacks, immigrants) we could root them out, eliminate them and all would be Right again. We would metaphorically kill the collective self doubt that has plagued this country since its inception.

Red State rides almost entirely on the shoulders of a Rev. Phelps-inspired lunatic mesmerizingly played by veteran actor Michael Parks. Parks' Abin Cooper is a mumbling, preening dictator whose only congregation is his immediate family and grandchildren. His egotism is so complete he seduces others into, if not believing him, at least doubting themselves as in the critical scene where John Goodman's befuddled ATF agent takes him into custody.

Abin Cooper's power is his egomania. To doubt him is to doubt God. Cooper is God in the film: he sees all and, freakishly, appears to know all. With an ego the size of the Houston Stadium, he stomps out anything that offends him, especially his chosen scapegoats: homosexuals. In another life, Abin Cooper would have been a KKK leader because his kind cannot exist without scapegoats, they are the fuel for his fiery hatred and the focal point of his murderous rage.

Toward the end of Red State, Goodman's character muses over the schism that separates America politically and religiously. The metaphor of the two dogs fighting over the bone tells us that for Agent Keenan there is no doubt that the specter of rabid bigotry lives in America because it threatens to swallow reasonable men like him whole.

I have hiked ...

... and now I'm paying for it. Oh yes.

But what are you?

This is just beautiful!



I'm always behind the curve when it comes to whatever is "trending" right now in pop culture or literature but I LERV Samantha Bee's comedic autobiography. It starts out a little serious but finishes real strong.

This book has everything you could hope for in an autobiography: an idyllic Toronto childhood, unhygienic roommates, crazy divorced parents AND -- that most taboo of subjects -- animal rapists. (See page 182: Stan the Guinea Pig rapist).

Scratch my back?

A hundred years ago, way back in about 2000, if a blogger posted a link to your blog (irregardless of what it was) you reciprocated. It was the polite thing to do. Remember polite?

Alas, those days and the concurrent politeness are gone. I've had two blogs/websites listed to the right for a while and both bloggers/webmasters recently deleted some comments I made on their blogs.

You're probably jumping to conclusions thinking, what crazy shit did I say on their blogs? On one blog, I said 'Ditto, I agree with the above commenter'. And the website owner deleted my comment. Nothing risque, no profanity. The comment I was agreeing with was equally vanilla except the commenter was questioning the blogger's whole reason for having the website (it has gotten whiny and super redundant). You're a writer, you're frustrated, you've been rejected by oodles of literary journals. Okayyy ... not sure how you milked that one for over a year.



I could write a fucking novel on the freaky crap that happened to me (and my scripts) when I tried to break into the rigged spec screenplay market back in 1997-2000. I burned entire weekends and hundreds of dollars on the Hollywood Creative Directory, SASEs and query letters that I mailed fifty at a time.

I blew money I didn't have on entry fees to The Austin Heart of Film, Slamdance, Maui Writer's Conference, etc. To what end? I got part of one one script pirated by an A-list star. Though it probably wasn't him personally. More likely it was his assistant's assistant or maybe the AD's assistant who eventually ended up making a film that was somewhat like my script minus the suspense but close enough that they used the same name for a key character. And this was no Jane Jones or John Smith, it was an uncommon name with a specific spelling.

But who cares, that was a hundred years ago. So for the sake of looking forward, I've deleted that particular blog amongst the links at right. I've got better things to do than use this blog to feed the hit counts on a mediocre site that seems to be focused on looking backward at past literary failures, something any professional writer wouldn't have time to do.

Winning?

Eddie is a schleppy, hipster writer who is unemployed (is there any other kind?) and an eternal under achiever. One day he bumps into his ex's brother who gives him a little pill that looks a lot like either A) piece of dried Super Glue (ooh, don't put that in your mouth!) or B) some suspicious new type of nicotine gum.

Ever the game idiot, Eddie takes the pill and slightly dizzying CGI kicks in while he fucks his landlord's girlfriend. She agrees to do him after he miraculously tells her how to write her law school term paper, or whatever. Later that evening Eddie cleans his apartment (nothing smoking pot can't induce!!!) for the first time ever and then sits down and cranks out his soon-to-be-best-selling novel in one fell swoop.



Eddie goes gambling and wins big and then goes to the creepiest casino on earth, the stock market, and starts winning even bigger. The New York Post interviews him. Um, I thought the goal of every New Yorker was to stay out of that rag? The only people that end up on the cover of it are celebrities that have fallen off the wagon and murder suspects.

Eddie goes on a tropical vacation, screws a lot of nameless, faceless women, drives a rented sports car real fast (terrifying and enraging the locals) and then jumps off a cliff into the ocean ... because he's now totally cool.

In the voice over, Eddie describes this wonder drug as having eliminated his awkwardness, his shyness and his ignorance -- essentially everything that makes him human. Apparently this pretend drug (NZT) is like cocaine with a crystal meth chaser and an extra dollop of arrogance.

Eventually Eddie goes where all the morally deficient "winners" go, to the stock market to make millions and get into some vague argument with Robert DeNiro's minor character about "not having paid his dues" (does this mean real stock brokers HAVE?). Eddie helps DeNiro's character broker some "deal of the century" and who gives a shit if thousands of employees get laid off or ass raped? 'Cos Eddie is WINNING!!!

Eddie is such a winner he may (or may not) have murdered a woman he picks up in a bar. But never mind that because then he has to win back the Perky Blonde who dumped him for previously being a slacker and then stop the Bad Guys from stealing his stash of NZT (Christ, the comparisons to cocaine just about hit you in the face).

At one point Perky Blonde Girlfriend sez something like "This drug is a lie" -- yet another cocaine reference -- but then the script and the plot dashes off for another dizzying round of tracking cam shots and punchy soundtrack.

Of course the muddled message is the same old trope: "winners" get lots of tail and lots of money and losers don't.

All this reminds me of something a high school teacher said to me eons ago: "The most interesting people are interested."

Who would wanna spend ten minutes in a room with a know-it-all like Eddie?

Goodbye Amy

And Russell Brand surprised everyone by writing a lovely and hella insightful eulogy.

Dear Hyper Procreating Jesusfreaks,

Please stop. No really, stop. You know what's gonna happen on Dec. 31, 2011? Nothing. Likewise for Dec. 31. 2012 and every New Year after that. As the dreary bumper sticker says: Same Shit, Different Day. The traffic jams, the disappearing resources and clean air, the endless wars over religion? It will all still be here, sweetie.



No rapture. No baby Jesus come to rescue you from sublimating your libido by calling it "God's Plan" that you pump out as many babies as possible right before you develop a prolapsed uterus, agonizing pain and flop over dead. (Versus taking ownership of your sexuality and you and hubby joining a swinger's club while using lots and LOTS of contraception).

You know what I see when I look at your puffy-faced husband, a "man of God"? Hell no. I see a stray tomcat humping away on a six-month old female cat like there's no tomorrow. That one stray tomcat will fill the cages of the local Humane Society to overflowing but what's he care? He's only a dumb animal. It's society's job to be responsible for him.

Likewise, if your puffy-faced, brainwashed Jesusfreak husband dies in a car accident tomorrow, what's he care? He doesn't have to pay for your continued existence in a suburban barn/child-holding shed. Can't pay for the kid's food in his absence? Not his problem! Why dying would be an almost Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for your husband or you at this point. (So would him coming out as gay and running off to South Beach, but that's another blog).

You're doing this because "the Bible tells you so?" The Bible was written 2,000 years ago by a bunch of old Jewish men, none of whom actually knew Jesus. There's more instructions in the Bible on how to slaughter a goat or stone your daughter if you suspect her of being a slut than there is on living life in the 21st Century. I bet I could find quotations more valid and topical for the Here and Now in a car repair manual.

Breeder Jesusfreaks, your children are what we'll all be eating in a few years, when the earth's population hits 9 billion (9,000,000,000), all the oil's gone, the electricity goes out and there's no more 2-for-1 coupons at MallWort. You're not producing "God's children" you're ensuring our chowing down on soylent green. You're making cattle.

This can no longer be ignored

Last night in yoga we had one of those instructors. She attempted to inspire everybody by YELLING things like: 'Work the yoga, don't let it work you!' and 'Don't just survive your yoga.' At one point, she attempted to adjust first my deformed left foot while I was in Warrior One and then my trashed left knee. I hissed that I had "joint issues" and she wandered off to yank on someone else's knee. This isn't exclusive to Baptiste-style yoga. I had Bikram yoga instructors scold me for years, telling me 'never say never' when I insisted I couldn't do a toe stand.

Dear overly aerobicized 25-year-olds with buns o' steel, it's true. I can't do those particular poses. I know you think you know more than my podiatrist surgeon but you don't. And I know you think you know more than the army of physical therapists who helped me recover from my lower back sprain, but you don't. And I'm sure, in all your glowing health arrogance that you think my knee specialist was wrong back in 2004 when she told me I had the worst arthritis bone over-growth in my knees she'd ever seen in a person under 40 (I was 39) but you're wrong. You weren't there in September 2004, when I laid on the exam table and stared at the ceiling while my orthopedic specialist injected Synvisc into both my knees without lydocaine. With a syringe the size of a ballpoint pen. And then I had to walk home because I couldn't afford a cab.

But the real bugaboo is my mutant left foot.

I had the right one fixed in 2004. It's 100% healed and works great aside from the fact I have surgical screws in it and will never be able to stand on my toes (sorry Bikram yoga), wear high heels (not that I care) or stick it in an MRI machine (would rip the screws out of the bone).

I have what is known in podiatry circles as Morton's foot. I'm pretty sure I inherited this deformity from my Dad because he always said his father had weird "prehensile" toes. I was supposed to have corrective surgery at 18 but couldn't afford it. It's physical proof I'm partially descended from bog-trotting Irishmen who had feet like frogs.

I can make fun of it because I haven't been walking on it all day and it hasn't even really begun to sing. Morton's foot is like attempting to walk on ice skates. The majority of the weight in my left foot rests shakily on my second metatarsal, like an ice skate blade. My left ankle is 'hyper flexible' and I trip easily. Every step I take, the weight on my left comes down on the joints of my second toe, and those joints grind into the floor, shoe sole or whatever. The bunion, along with the freakishly long second toe, means I can rarely fit into women's shoes, so 90% of mine are either men's tennis shoes or Keen sandals (Godsend to the mutant footed).

I got the right one fixed in 2004 because I paid dearly for comprehensive Blue Cross insurance while working for minimum wage at a copy store. It was 60 days before I could walk across the room in an orthopedic boot without screaming in pain; 90 days before I could squeeze my right foot into a shoe without lacing it up. It was six long months before I could flush the Vicodin and get through the day without searing pain.

Thanks to America's irrational fear of socialized healthcare, I can't get my left foot fixed. Eventually I'll get a stress fracture and will end up in an ER where the doctors will tell me they can't refer me to orthopedic surgery because I have no insurance. And then I'll have to walk home.

Hot Papa Bear Seeks Twink Cub

For cuddle time in the jacuzzi and cruising WeeHoo in my convertible Jeep. Must like: guns, Irish folk music, tea parties, Reagan and light leather. No money? No problem, your Papa Bear will provide for all your super smooth twink needs. Bonus points if you are Asian or Jewish and over 30 but look 18-25.

P.S. I have an extensive collection of photos, especially of sexy-smooth waxed, slim cubs. Come hang out at my place and peruse my pics.

xxxooo -- A Man

Remembering James

Cheer up, honey, I hope you can
There is something wrong with me
My mind is filled with silvery stars
-- Wilco, Radio Cure

The first time I saw James, he was sitting in the UNR Sagebrush offices. He was a bashful 19 year old who, when he stood, was tall enough to block out the sunlight spilling from the front door. This was in fall 1992 when I started going to UNR full-time after years of bouncing around with part-time classes. He was the production editor for the student paper and thanks to his droll wit, amicable nature and deep laugh, we quickly became friends.

One day I breezed into the Sagebrush to drop off my latest story on floppy disk. James grabbed me and started dancing around the room with me.

“James, what are you doing? I gotta get to class.”

Wiggling his eyebrows he said, “I’ve never danced with a lady wearing black leather gloves before.” Squeezed up against his 6-foot-8 frame, he waltzed me around the tiny photographer’s room until we knocked some stuff over. I was actually wearing my sweaty cycling gloves but in James’ world, ladies wear black leather gloves. That’s just how he was.


James 1993
A lively assortment of computer geeks, cartoonists and budding reporters orbited around James. He had a small battalion of friends from Las Vegas who all wore the same uniform: khaki shorts, white t-shirts and mirror sunglasses. They all listened to the Violent Femmes.

In fall of 1993, when I was 26 and rolling into my second year at UNR, my mother died. Death is rarely a head-on collision. It nearly always side swipes us emotionally.

I was in a daze after her death. James and I lived in the same crappy apartment complex. I went to his door at seven in the morning and he stood there, in his t-shirt and underwear, blinking out at me. I told him what had happened, about the terse phone call from my brother. James knew I had no car. I’d sold my '61 Chevy pickup to pay for rent while I was in school.

That afternoon, James dropped everything and drove me up I-80 to Nevada City, Calif., where my Dad lived. From there I flew with my Dad and brother to Washington to sort out my Mom’s minuscule estate.

James gave me a hug when he left me at my Dad’s. The three months after her death were full of insomnia, extremely poor decision making and a black hole of grief. And I was furious. That’s another thing about death. It makes you furious. You hunt around for a culprit, a reason why this person you’ve lost is gone. You want to arrange a search party or maybe a witch hunt, light torches and venture out into that implacable darkness to look for the love that’s gone missing.

About six months later, James, Tami Hilton and I went for a hike in the foothills above Reno. We made jokes about the ridiculously steep trail and the desperate need Nevadans have to walk toward anything that looks green and shady on a hot day. Bounding ahead, I kept stopping every few feet and yelling “Would you just LOOK at that view!” I’d dramatically swing my arms out and mockingly tap him or Tami in the face. He’d laugh and imitate me. James and Tami joked about how some sand dunes outside of Las Vegas were shadier than others. When you’re in your twenties it’s easy to laugh at the austerity of the desert.

Around this time, some of those especially bad decisions I’d made in grief caught up with me and led to a nadir of depression by July 1994. I don’t know if I got as low as James did, but I was pretty down. In his fumbling, distracted way James tried to draw me out of it and he patiently listened to my rambling phone calls when none of my other friends would.

Years later, in 2007 he shocked me in an email by saying, "I wish I had been a better friend to you back then."

In December of 1994, the facilitators who ran that fourth-rate university glomed onto the fact that James hadn’t been attending class. They gave him the boot which was a good thing. He went back to Las Vegas, got on with an internet start up and rode the Dotcom Boom east to Massachusetts to work for Akamai. This enabled his life-long dream of opening a comic book store.

Between 1996 and 2004, I lost track of James. I caught up with him when I moved to Seattle and discovered a new form of procrastination called social networking. We exchanged emails, cute pet pictures and swapped blog posts. He told me about Massachusetts and I told him about Seattle. He sent me pictures of his son, who was the center of his universe. We railed together on our blogs about the fearful stupidity of Conservative America.

It’s unfair to James to say he was a saint or faultless. Even in college, he had mood swings and could fly into cynical, angry depressions that would leave his fellow Sagebrushers ducking for cover. In his defense, he was struggling with serious obesity and poor health. At times, when you’re overweight you’re the circus freak and I’m sure James felt compelled to play the Jolly Fat Man even when he didn’t want to. And there was his moodiness, which was years away from being diagnosed.


James 2011
Some people who knew James may choose to mull over the details of his death. Again, the compulsive need to mount up a search party, light torches and go into the endless dark to look for a culprit or a reason for our sudden unifying grief. Some people may choose to blame James’ spiritual beliefs or the lack of them. We seek cool reason where it does not live. With death we still want to categorize people, use highly subjective religious dogma to induce answers. We all want to be saved yet we know the truth. All stories, even in comic books, move deathward.

I have lost interest in the details of James’ death. I choose to remember him on that hot, dusty day when he, Tami and I were hiking in the Sierra Nevada foothills with Reno stretched out east of us in the afternoon light. Ahead of us there was a stand of aspen shading Hunter Creek and Tami was holding our water bottles. James was wiping sweat from his brow, patiently waiting for me to get the water filter going so we could drink from that stream.

Hey James, would you just look at that view.




-- Mel Murphy
Seattle, Washington
May 2011

The Agony and Ecstasy of Maoism Meeting Mindless Consumerism

I just saw Mike Daisey's funny/sad opus, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

Seattle Repertory Theater had a sardines-packed-in-a-can vibe. My seat was smack dab up against one of the theater tech's work stations. But for over two hours, Daisey was a dynamo of brilliance on stage.

Most people by now know the gist of the play -- Daisey, a life-long computer geek and die-hard Apple fan -- recounts his ups and downs worshiping at the altar of Mac and his intrepid visit to the monolithic FoxConn factory in Shenzhen, China where workers literally kill themselves making iPods and iPhones for consumers in North America and the rest of the western world.



With stand-up comedic humor and a keen perspective on social trends, Daisey verbally bounces back and forth in time between his earliest experiences with computers to the horrific revelation of what life is like for the modern factory worker in China. He recounts interviews with 14-year-old workers who have crippling arthritis in their hands from thousands of hours spent polishing iPods. People who make iPads literally don't have the dexterity to use them, and anyway, no one in China can afford to buy one.

This play got me thinking about my Dad. In 1987, he was one of couple dozen US attorneys who traveled with then AG, Edwin Meese, to China for the Joint Session on Trade, Investment, and Economic Law. Supposedly they went under the auspices of helping then still mostly Communist China to "westernize" their court system. Although, maybe Meese just wanted to compare notes with Chinese censors?

Anyhoo, I don't know if it really worked. I mean, Tiananmen Square happened just a few years later and today people are still in prison in China for protesting. The Chinese government also imprisons practitioners of Falun Gong and harvests their organs (when they're not encasing them in plastic so their remains can go on tour in the US). Also, being from the Tibet province in China really sucks. If you're Tibetan, just speaking your own language can get you thrown in prison.

My Dad made a point of recounting to me (I was 23) how ridiculously hard young Chinese people worked. He mentioned one young man who worked 10-hour shifts in a Beijing restaurant and then skipped off to his other job in the bowels of a factory some where. Then my Dad gave me the Critical Look. (Several years later I took a job as a wildland firefighter and worked 10 to 16-hour shifts fighting wildfires in insane conditions. I know, lazy me!)

My Dad was from the WWII generation. The Boot Strap Generation. The War Effort Generation. He exalted mindless labor above all else -- especially when someone else was laboring on his and my step-mother's behalf, like the hapless construction workers who built their second home for them.

It's easy to glorify and admire mythically tireless workers, especially when you're not the one running the chainsaw or, in the case of the FoxConn slaves, polishing the iPod.

Ironically, my Dad admired an ethos that was in direct opposition to the era he came from. American idealism and individuality have no place in Maosim where the worker is told he/she is exalted while simultaneously being exploited and worked to death by the State.

Daisey succinctly ties these two philosophies together in his play. China wanted to "modernize" and the US wanted dirt-cheap labor, devoid of real unions, to manufacture all the toys and gizmos Americans have been told endlessly that we are "entitled" to as free Capitalists so long as we can afford them. The mindless consumerism of the West has met the (faux) tireless Communist worker at the nadir of Orwellian dystopia in Shenzhen. It's the place where dreams of the future go to die.

Anti-suicide nets installed along the roof of one FoxConn building in China.

The lion in the horse trailer

Wow, oh wow what a documentary. If Michael Moore implied that Americans were gun fetishists, this movie argues we fetishize everything -- even hapless wild animals who become victims of our smothering codependent love.



The film follows Tim, a compassionate public safety officer in suburban Ohio as we learn in chilling detail how out of control the exotic pet business has become. Tim travels to underground exotic pet conventions in Pennsylvania where children are bought deadly African gaboon vipers as presents and terrified monkeys are auctioned off like toy dolls.

A key subject is Terry, a train wreck of a disabled man who is given two African lion cubs as pets in the hopes they will cheer him up. As in, You look down, here have a rhinoceros! Terry dutifully bottle feeds his two "house cats" until they're adults. The documentary begins when the predators are four years old and the male is over 500 pounds of dangerous animal. After one of the lions escapes and is captured chasing cars on the interstate, Terry confines the two cats to a modified horse trailer where they live out their days lying on compacted cat crap that looks as hard as cement while every fly in the state of Ohio crawls on them.

I wanted to hate Terry, I really did. He's everything that is hopelessly wrong with America. Terry is broken, overweight, unemployed and loves his exotic cats despite the increasing realization that they may kill him ... if he doesn't first.

The documentary follows Tim to the various reaches of the eastern U.S., including Florida where Burmese pythons are taking over the Everglades, out-breeding every indigenous reptile in their path.

Later, back in Ohio, Tim wonders if he's really doing any good tracking down escaped exotic predators -- wouldn't it be better to leave them in the "wild" of the suburbs and hope they don't eat a 10 year old?

The film is flawless -- all claustrophobic close ups on the humans to emphasize how confining the animal's lives must be. And, finally it is not without a happy ending. Some of the big cats do find a sort of respite on the prairie in Colorado.