West of You: short stories

My short story collection is up on Amazon/Kindle and can be bought here: WEST OF YOU.

And two of my short stories are now available on Kindle.

BRAVE SUCKER can be had for the rock-bottom price of $1.29, less than a cup of coffee.

And LAND OF NOD, one of the short stories which previously ran in THE SUBTOPIAN: SELECTED STORIES VOL. 2 can be read for $1.59. That's less than the cost of bagel.

Subtopian

I've been published again. This short story anthology is an earnest labor of love on the part of Trevor and a couple of other people in Portland. You can find their online magazine here: The Subtopian and the print-on-demand/Kindle version of the anthology right here on Amazon.

Everything ...

... is now here on Word Press. I took a freebie class and discovered that Blogger is bad. :( That is all.

Four of the Worst Jobs You Will Never Work

I'm sooo tired of hearing the faux liberal Bourgeoisie expound on stuff they know nada about. 

They think $10 an hour is a living wage. Go get a job that pays $10 an hour and work it for a couple of months ... if you can find one. Make your house payment/rent and your car payments with it. Pay the sitter/daycare that watches your kid while you work this supposed living wage. Buy gas, buy food and watch your paycheck disappear literally overnight, a day after it deposits into your checking. Forget internet service, your phone, car insurance, etc. -- you can't afford that on $10 an hour.

Take the eternal We Hate Walmart gang. Listen, Walmart ain't that bad. If you tell me it is, you're implying that working for Bed, Bath & Beyond, Home Depot, Chili's or CVS is heaven on earth. It's not, it's just as shitty. Ninety percent of retail work pays less than $10 an hour and raises are fairy tales.

Before you get your bought online, hipster panties in a twist I'll enlighten you. There are much, MUCH worse places to work than Walmart. Day jobs that beat you psychologically so badly you have to go on antidepressants or you start engaging in Mad Max road rage, temp gigs so dehumanizing they make wiggling your tits in some slob's face at Hooters seem entrepreneurial. Jobs so fucking awful, office shooting fantasies are the norm.

Some of the worst places to work in America are right here in Reno. Not surprising, since Nee-va-Duh is one of those Bend-Over-For-Corporations stupid Libertarian states.

Take this place for example. On the surface, their website seems legit and they're an affiliate of Microsoft so what could possibly be wrong with working there? First of all, the entire reason this creepy German temp agency was appropriated by Microsoft is because of Enron and corporate accounting scandals which led to the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. Basically, Microsoft might not have been telling their shareholders how many millions they rake in every fiscal quarter in software licensing agreements, so Arvato-Bertelsmann was created as a way to "process" all licenses. The software and database the company uses is draconian, there are redundancies on top of redundancies, unreadable pull-down menus, etc. because it was created over a decade ago and has never been updated. While temping there I was 1) required to sit and take notes for 9 hours a day, 2) my notes could never leave the office, 3) if I went to the bathroom, I had to put my notes in a drawer or risk termination and 4) I wasn't supposed to "ask too many questions" about the archaic business process. I got reprimanded for trying to type my notes up, this was seen as a waste of time. This place has about a 50% turn-over rate in the first three months. I saw people get fired for refusing to work 16-hour days, failing to punch in and out for breaks and taking more than 28 minutes for lunch.

This place is one of the shining jewels in Reno's light industry crown. It's an example of how well things can work out for a tax-revenue bankrupt state with zero social infrastructure when they fling the gate wide and let any old corporation slink in during the night when OSHA isn't looking. It's a massive refrigerated food processing facility that, until January, paid it's employees $8.75 an hour. They work in a 37F (2.7C) environment for 10 to 12 hour shift while wearing many, many layers of  safe food handling gear. Here's an abbreviated list of the Dos and Donts at SK Foods:

No earrings

No jewelry

No wedding rings

No gum

No hard candy

No water

No drinks of any kind

No piercings of any kind (including earrings)

No iPods

No radios

No talking

If you sneeze, even while you're wearing your "beard net", you have to leave the food assembly line. If you fail to remove the right gear when you go to the bathroom, you're fired. Although they don't pay you, all employees are required to show up 30 minutes prior to their shift. That means if your shift starts at 5:30am, you have to be there at five or they fire you. They have conservatively, a 70% turnover rate within the first week. There are labor temp offices that do nothing but advertise for them. Constantly. One former employee described it as "like prison". Anyway, it's something to think about while you're eating your low-fat egg sandwich at Starbucks which was made by this place.

 

Yes, this is what a call center looks like ... one that
has clean cubicles and chairs that aren't broken.

This place has been up and running since the 1990s. Everybody in Nevada was jazzed when it opened. I've met people who were fired because they were late for work due to a car accident. I knew one person who worked on one of the loading docks during Xmas. He got pneumonia, probably from breathing the frigid desert air mixed with diesel exhaust. They fired him for being sick. I met a young woman who worked there for six months. She was tough-as-nails, a real company person and even she described Amazon's fulfillment center as horrible. She worked 10-hour shifts and got two 15-minute breaks and one 30-minute lunch. If it took her 14 minutes to walk from her picking station on the lower level to the break room and back, guess how long her lunch was? Whatever your quota is at Amazon, it doesn't matter. You will be pushed to always do better. There is no acceptable quota. Everyone is in a constant state of 'not good enough'. Oh, and they strip search people. At random. All the time.

In the rush to condemn Walmart most upper-middle class people are unaware that some of the worst job environments are call centers. They're stressful by design. You're dealing with pissed off customers because their phone, TV, car, internet service, etc. doesn't work right. AT&T runs some of the worst in the country. They have chronic turnover, won't provide references for their former employees even if they leave on good terms, and their pay and raises are laughable.

This place is -- hand's down -- one of the worst I've ever worked for. They psychologically abuse their new hires starting on day one. As a long-time call center employee put it: "The whole thing is a hostile work environment." We were told not to wear jeans or tennis shoes ... by supervisors wearing T-shirts and flipflops. We were given a giddy rundown of who had been fired that day by our trainer at the beginning of every shift. And they fired people every single day I was there. If they fired someone who had been there "a long time" (more than five months) they high-fived each other. Supervisors regularly cruised the break area (a sort of pen with a tiny awning in the parking lot) to eavesdrop on new hires' conversations. People were fired for saying "crap" during break while they weren't anywhere near a phone line or an incoming call. People were fired for using their personal cell phones ... in the bathroom while on break. People were fired for "having a bad attitude" or "asking too many questions" about AT&T's absurd 20-some different databases and software we were required to use to answer dead-simple questions like "how can I order a new phone?" The call center insists that they "want you to succeed and become long-term employees." This is a lie. They only really make money if their workforce is in constant turnover. 

This corporation makes money by billing AT&T every quarter so many thousands of dollars because they "have to train more new hires". It's this silly pyramid scheme where new hires lose every time. The whole thing from start to finish is designed to either get you fired or make you quit. When I was actively encouraged to rat out my fellow workers by telling supervisors if someone was "using their mute button too much" I quit.

Actual note forbidding personal cell phone use in the restrooms.

This company mismanages its workforce so badly that one of their call centers in the Philippines filed a labor suit against them. The Philippines! A part of the world where teenagers are regularly chained to sewing machines to work for pennies a day making clothes for rich Westerners.

I'd like all the people Thom Hartmann calls the "Bourgeoisie petty rich" to please shut the fuck up. If you and your spouses' combined income is $75,000 to $250,000 annually, just shut up about Walmart. You don't know what it's like to work at one of these places day after day, month after month, to have to choose between worse and much worser, to have to choose between crashing at a relatives indefinitely until this Recession (read: Depression) subsides, if ever, or checking into a homeless shelter (if they aren't already full). 

If your annual gross income is between $75,000 and $250,000 you have no idea what life for the working poor is about. Poor is something you drove by in 1989 on the way to your graduate classes at a prestigious university your rich uncle or generous grandma paid for so you would never have to endure this kind of slow spiritual death. If your dotcom startup has finally taken off, if your career as an anesthesiologist or a real estate agent or software engineer is stable, you have no idea what I'm talking about. Poor is just a bad rumor to you. Poor is somewhere you went slumming in 1992 when you worked for Cinnabon for a month between semesters at that nice private college I never so much as toured. Poor is something you contemplated when you pulled $15,000 out of your $300,000 trust to get yourself through that "rough patch" between 2009 and 2011 when you were trying to find gallery space for your performance art.

P.S. I hate the Waltons and everything their grasping, despot family stands for but they are not the only monsters in this new Gilded Age. The real Godzilla is what it has always been, apathy.

More online publishing

Two of my short stories have been published in two different online lit sites.

They're very different sites. One is very hipster-ish and the editor is very Los Angeles.

The other is survivalist-meets-vegan-sci-fi-fan and is rather Portland-ish.

Grays Harbor at Subtopian.com.

Love You Long Time at the Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles.

I take no responsibility for layout, readability or art work though, these two are actually quite tasteful.

Thank you Trevor and Robin.

Dystopian on Subtopian

I'm published again. No money for any of this but it's still nice, especially when I'm getting shot down for day jobs right and left.

http://www.subtopian.com/?p=65915

Ironically this story is about real class warfare in a dystopian America 50 years from now.

Existential attitude turning on a dime

When I was backpacking through Australia a dozen years ago, I saw something early one morning that has stuck with me for years. It was maybe 6:30am on a Sunday. Sydney was still waking up. The hostel I'd been staying at was in Potts Point, north of the crazy vibe of Kings Cross.

I was walking near Bourke Street which is kind of steep and overlooks the Botanical Gardens to the west. It's an area with elite cafes and arty gentrified Victorian townhouses most Australians couldn't begin to afford.

I was coming up this steep section of old sidewalk using all the physical fitness I'd gained while working for the Forest Service in Colorado earlier in the year. The morning light was golden and everything was misty and haloed, even the parked cars. The numerous cockatoos and parrots that permeate the city were making their wild morning ruckus. The air was cool, limpid and the harbor gave everything the exotic tang of salt air.

At the top of the hill I was scaling were a pair of birds making a joyous clucking and buzzing sound as they pecked at something on the asphalt. They were dandy creatures in neat brown feathers with neon-bright yellow beaks. They kept pausing in their pecking to squawk at each other as if they were having an intense conversation.

Indian myna birds are one of many invasive non-native species in Australia.

This was one of the few times I've felt at peace with myself and Sydney was one of the few cities I ever felt at home in.

When I reached the two birds standing in a pool of gold light I realized they weren't eating crumbs from a sandwich or something equally agreeable. They'd found a puddle of puke left by some blind-drunk tourist and were nimbly eating it.

I walked past them carefully, suddenly feeling like I'd mistaken some gauzy spiritual moment for another crude foul example of human imperfection. It was like witnessing two people in a graveyard and assuming they were mourners or relatives paying their respects only to realize they were grave robbers looting the dead.

I've been juggling the contradiction of that scene in my head ever since. On the one hand, it was a beautiful morning and the birds did look sublime. Everything looked right. On the other, the ugly reality of vomit in the streets.

If I ever meet the Dalai Lama I'll ask him what he thinks of this.

Inertia ... creeps

Essential rain/snow blowing down over the eastern Sierras into Nevada.

I've been staying in a friend's spare room for four months. I spent two of those months working a funky, seasonal warehouse job for 10 bucks an hour. It was a nice diversion from the reality that I'm almost 50 and -- for all intensive purposes -- homeless.

I've been working since I was 17. I'm flabbergasted by the whole Pirates of Wall Street /Predatory Lending/One-Percenter economic ass rape that precipitated this current Recession (read: Depression). I have never in my life seen anything like it.

Even at the nadir of Reagan's regime, in 1986, I was able to find a myriad of temp jobs while living in Sacramento. Jobs where I put shit in boxes for a month and then that ended. And I moved on to cleaning luxury homes in the Sacramento Valley for seven bucks an hour. Homes with ridiculous floor space, sunken living rooms, multiple hot tubs and three-car garages overlooking the baked, flat haze of central California.

I lugged turf on landscaping crews and pulled thousands of weeds alongside Interstate 5 in 100-degree heat. Thinking back, the outdoor jobs were usually the best ones. Something about the Pink Collar Ghetto always made me wince. My mother was a slave in that ghetto almost until she died. Her servile role in office bureaucracies was the reason why I balked at learning to type until I was 23 years old. I just took a typing test the other day and I'm now clocking at 62wpm, which is 7wpm faster than I was a couple years ago. It's like the older I get, the less needed I am in the workplace, the ironically more efficient I become.

I've been misled, deceived and had smoke blown up my ass by so many contract temp agencies, I've lost count. I've been promised jobs that were a "shoe in", that were "virtually guaranteed" and that I'd be "an ideal fit for" only to have the recruiter lose my phone number three days after submitting my resume to Intel, to Microsoft, to Amazon, to (insert dotcom name here). The IT industry does not like women, especially women over 40 who come from a non-technical background (English and journalism) and they openly despise older job applicants.

Usually when my resume gets flown by some tech firm, I slack off a bit, some weird naive part of my brain thinks this is it, the tide's turning. And almost always, I don't get picked.

Maybe Michael Ruppert is right. Maybe this is the last gasp of our petroleum and consumer-based society. I had no idea collapse would be this anti-climatic, this monotonous.

Enjoy your PM10

This is what the air looked like in Reno, Nevada (aka Truckee Meadows) on December 20, 2013. Isn't it lovely? There are two freeways that intersect in Truckee Meadows: I-80 and 395. Commercial trucks, travelers, tour buses and locals drive on these freeways 24/7. The air, and our lungs, never get a day off.

The preferred personal vehicle in Reno is a full-size pickup. The favorite make is the Dodge Ram, which gets about 11 mpg city and weighs 4,600-5,000 pounds depending on the model. The second favorite is the Toyota Tundra -- the oxymoron of Toyota because it is neither compact nor economical. It weighs in at about 5,500 pounds, again depending on the model and modifications. When I was on the freeway a week ago, I counted four Dodge Rams in my lane and two Toyota Tundras in the lane to my right. These massive pickups outnumber passenger cars in Truckee Meadows about two to one.

I first heard about PM10 in 1995 when I was fresh out of journalism school and working for a newspaper two hours northeast of Los Angeles.

Modern vehicles along with modern tires have created particulate matter at atmospheric levels never seen before on earth. When cars first became common, in the 1920s, the average vehicle topped out at about 45mph and their tires were made from actual rubber from rubber trees. Ford Model Ts weighed about 1,500 pounds and did about 13 to 20 mpg. Tires are now rarely made from rubber trees but rather polyester and nylon -- two prominent petroleum by-products made from crude oil. They're much harder than early tires and they hit the asphalt as they're spinning at twice the speed of early tires. Basically, a car or truck tire, is a spinning crusher that pulverizes sand, dirt and debris and makes it smaller -- usually 10 microns all the way down to 2.5. This ultra-fine dust rises into the lower atmosphere.

If you live in a fairly verdant region that sees a lot of precipitation, like New England or the Pacific Northwest, the particulate matter doesn't stay in the air very long. It's knocked by frequent rains or snow to the ground where it sifts into the water table. Unfortunately, in desert environments like the American West, northern China (Mongolia), the Middle East, Bolivia, etc. -- where there is little or no precipitation, this particulate matter stays in the lower atmosphere. In northern China, cities like Gansu situated near the Mongolian Desert have some of the worst air quality in the world. Granted, this is partly due to the fact the Chinese burn coal to heat their homes but it's also because Mongolia is a desert much like the Great Basin. Also, the booming middle class now own personal vehicles in record numbers. There are even off-road 4x4 clubs in China.

There is very little information on particulate matter -- its sources or where it ultimately ends up. This is not a coincidence. Just as Googling the torque or engine size for a Dodge Ram or a Toyota Tundra readily yields answers, try searching for the mpg or weight of these vehicles and the stats become mysteriously difficult to find.

As populations in desert cities grow, particulate matter accumulates in the air above them.

We inhale this PM10. And all animals (birds, dogs, cats, beef cattle, etc.) inhale it. It drifts down into creeks, rivers and lakes when it rains or snows. Children inhale it.

Air pollution in China

It's ironic that in the arena of global climate change debate, the issue of particulate matter generated by cars and trucks almost never comes up. Apparently CO2 levels, mercury and withering ice caps are such depressing and huge problems, there's no room left to talk about the most visible form of atmospheric pollution.


Sources:
Badwaterjournal.com

Wikipedia - particulate matter

Particulate matter map

Farewell Detroit in the Desert

I was barely in my old hometown five months and now, because of economic necessity, I'm heading back to the Pacific Northwest (at the start of monsoon season).

It's bittersweet. On the one hand, I felt socially and culturally stifled here. What with all the 'SAVE AMERICA, KILL OBAMA' bumper stickers and the bizarre, enraged disposition of about 35-percent of the white-male population. On the other hand, I kept bumping into transplants from the PNW, from SoCal, etc., who always defended Reno, Nevada the same way: "It's so much better HERE, than where I'm from." So much less traffic or so much more sunshine.

Secret Cove, Lake Tahoe, NV Sept. 2013

What an odd way to decide on a community. I'm pretty sure Indiana and maybe even St. Louis are a step up from Los Angeles. I think Nebraska might be too. Tampa and Los Alamos are surely held in higher regard. One has tropical weather and beaches, the other some of the prettiest desert in all the American Southwest. So pretty one of our greatest living writers, Cormac McCarthy lives in Los Alamos.

Past and present Renoites touchy about my criticism of northern Nevada would be surprised to know I spent 15 years living here. I originally moved here in August 1988 at age 22 after finally breaking free of the comfortable shackles of Elko. I stayed here until 1995, that's seven years; an eon when you're in your twenties. I moved back in late '95, then left again, for another job in summer '96. Moved back in spring '97 and stayed here until early 2003 when, spurred on by my first trips overseas (England and then Australia), I got the hell out of Dodge.

A lot of stuff happened to me in this dusty, blusterous town on the edge of the Great Basin. Some of it was good. I had genuine friends like Louie and Angela and Cody. I had sworn enemies too. But a lot of super bad stuff happened to me here too.

I buried my mother here in September 1993. I buried a failed relationship-slash-engagement here too. That's almost a cliche as so many women came here in the 1950s and 60s to pitch their wedding rings into the Truckee River.

In the end, I think this place is too rough for me, too raw. It's all glassy-eyed tweakers and gasping yuppies gunning their enormous pickups for the next stop light, the next party, the next sale at Walmart.

Nevada, especially Reno, is a place that even after a century of existence, still can't define itself, still can't pick the right things and say "these are important, these matter."

It's too much like the rest of middle America. This is why I'm leaving and going back to the self-analysis and geeky introspection of the cloudy Northwest. There's time to think under all those big trees.

Detroit in the Desert

Haven't had time to blog in ages. I'm back in the Detroit in the Desert. It's car culture, just like SoCal for sure. Walking across a MallWort parking lot can get you killed. So can the weather which imitates Vegas these days. Heat and sun and sun and heat and only sometimes is it fun.

I feel like a middle-aged transplant in a vague Central Valley 'burb. At least the shopping's good. Can't say the same for the yoga studios.

Movin', movin', movin'

An older friend on FBook recently bemoaned the time she moved from eastern California to a house in Nevada just north of Reno. She did this move in the 1980s when her kids were in grade school. They're all adults now and she's retired.

(No idea who this person is but she looks way too happy to be moving)

It got me reminiscing about my gypsy-footed life with my own Mom when I was a kid. Our mobility was something I detested and tried to hide because I couldn't offer a valid explanation for why we moved. The summer I turned nine, it was because Mom's spirit guides told her there was going to be an earthquake in Reno, so we had to leave post haste to avoid the impending disaster. That summer in 1974, when I laid eyes on Battle Mountain, Nevada for the first time, I burst into tears. It was the ugliest town I've ever seen, still is.

Then I passed the mythical age of 18 and wild, desperate years of couch surfing and moving in and out of undesirable rentals in the crap side of town became my New Normal. It never occurred to me that part of my incessant migrating had something to do with the fact I was penniless and that many of these hurried relocations had to do with jobs, the offer of jobs or even the hope of work. Often in my twenties, my father held the tempting carrot of "help with the rent" out before me and I lunged. The help never lasted and neither did the jobs.

Here's the best I can recollect,

With Mom (or my Dad):
Born: July 1965 Monterey, California

Moved into house in Carmel Valley, Calif. 1967

Mom divorced Dad, we moved to Sacramento 1969

Mom moved us to L.A. to stay with Aunt/Uncle while she was in a psychiatric facility 1971

Moved in with Dad/Step-mother 1972 in Carmel Valley

Moved with Mom to Reno early 1973

Lived in Reno near Virginia Lake

Moved with Mom and her friend to Boise, Idaho 1973

Moved back to Reno 1973

Lived in rental house in Sparks off Rock Blvd/G St in 1973(?)

Moved into condo near Gentry Wy in Reno, Nev. 1974 (?)

Moved to Battle Mtn., NV  fall 1974 and lived in trailer from 1974- spring 1979

Moved to Elko, NV in summer 1979 and lived in basement apt until late 1979

Moved into crappy trailer rental in Elko in Dec 1979

Moved into “low-income” apartment in Elko in spring 1980 and lived there from 1980-1983

Moved to Hollister, California  in July 1983 and lived there until Dec 1983

On my own:

Rented room from weird chick in Salinas, CA in Dec 1983

Lost job in Moss Landing in Feb 1984, moved with Mom back to Battle Mtn.

Moved from B.M. to Elko for community college April 1984-June 1985

Moved to Sacramento June 1985 (at Dad insistence)

Lived with Sacto roommates from June 1985-Oct 1985

Moved back to Battle Mtn and Mom Oct 1985

Moved to Elko Jan 1986 and lived in a studio apt off Ash St.

Left Elko Sept 1986, stayed with oldest brother in Ellensburg, WA for one month

Moved back to Sacramento in Nov 1986 (at Dad’s insistence) and rented room

Moved into different rental share off Marconi Ave, in Sacto, Dec 1986

Moved into studio apt in downtown Sacramento in Jan 1987

Lost crap job via Kelley Temps, moved back to Elko March 1987

Stayed with Elko friend for a couple months

Moved into rental trailer in Elko in May 1987-Aug 1988

Moved to Reno to go to college late August 1988

Lived in crap studio near Rancho San Rafael Park Aug 1988-June 1989

Moved into basement apt off Plumas St from June 1989-May 1991

Stayed with psycho hippie in north Reno from June 1991-Aug 1991

Moved into 1bdrm off Mt Rose St from Aug 1991-Jan 1992

Moved to Carson City for welding job Jan 1992-May 1992 (homeless)

Stayed with friend(s) in Sparks May 1992-July 1992

Moved into studio off Keystone/W 4th from July 1992-Jan 1994

Lived in rental share in Cold Springs from Jan 1994-Sept 1994

Moved into studio behind frat house near UNR Sept 1994-May 1995

Moved to Ridgecrest, CA for reporter job May 1995-July 1995

Moved to Lake Crowley, CA for new reporter job July 1995-Oct 1995

Took road trip to Santa Fe, NM Oct 1995 for job interview at newspaper

Moved back to Reno and into condo w/ friend Nov 1995-April 1996

Moved to USFS barracks April 1996-June 1996

Moved into engine crew barracks Frenchman Lake June 1996-Oct 1996

Stayed with friend in Battle Mtn Oct 1996

Moved into slum studio near Wells Ave in Reno Oct 1996-Jan 1997

Moved to friend’s in San Andreas, CA after New Year’s Flood Jan 1997

Moved to ranch outside Ely, NV for one month Mar 1997

Moved back to friend’s in California April 1997

Moved into converted garage in Reno May 1997-June 1998

Moved into studio apt off Bell St west of UNR June 1998-May 2001

Moved into house in “old” Reno May 2001-Dec 2001

Jan 2002 tried to move to L.A., didn’t work

Moved into rental off S. Wells in Reno in March 2002-Dec 2002

Went to England for a month in Jan 2003

Moved into shitty cluster apt east of UNR Feb 2003-April 2003

Moved to Colorado for US Forest Service job April 2003-Sept 2003

Went to Australia for 3 months

Stayed with friend in Sparks for one month fall 2003 while car was fixed

Moved into rental room in Seattle Nov 2003-Mar 2004

Moved into current apartment Mar 2004-Present, 9 years this month

Moving is one of the most stressful experiences in life, comparable to divorce, job loss or a cancer. I'm not proud or ashamed of these 60-plus moves. I did what I had to and I'm typical of the American population.

Forget the racist yellow face makeup for a second

(I tried to get this essay op/ed piece published with a number of online sites back in November 2012 and everybody blew me off. Sooo, since I do have a blog ...)

Asian film critics have been in a furor over the use of yellow face in the Wachowski/Tykwer epic CloudAtlas since it premiered in the US in October 2012. They rightly argue that it’s so hard for Asian actors to get work in Hollywood, having the likes of Brits Jim Sturgess and James D’Arcy don prosthetic epicanthic folds to play Asian characters is salt on an old wound. Several critics have pointed out that no Caucasian actor was put in black face to play the part of Autua, the runaway slave. Instead, the Wachowskis used David Gyasi. Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer have argued creative license, they were trying to show a myth arc and idea of reincarnation that ‘transcends race’, which is fine. But it’s still salt and the way Asians are portrayed in Hollywood is still an old wound.

One thing a lot of critics and fans alike missed is the overt sexist stereotype in the film. I’ve never read the book and am only dissecting the film but I know author David Mitchell is English, definitely white and male. And it’s worth noting: his wife is Japanese.

Before there was a Male Gaze, there was a White Male Gaze. Especially in the Victorian Era, whether they admitted it or not, European white males stood at the top of the social ladder. Even if they were dirt poor, uneducated, they were raised for centuries to believe they were at least better than Those People or Those (equally poor and uneducated) Women Over There. The white male embodied colonialism and empire. Foreign lands (India, Japan, South Africa) were viewed only in terms of exploitation. And the women who lived in these far off places were only valued for their potential sexual exploitation. The fuckability of foreign women was probably mulled over by many European sailors and explorers from Captain James Cook onward. Even today, sex tours to southeast Asia cater almost exclusively to white men.

That’s the thing about sexism. It always goes hand in hand with racism kind of like peanut butter and jelly. 

 How do we solve a problem like Sonmi?

And Asian women have been perceived by the dominant paradigm (white male heterosexual) for hundreds of years as sexually exploitable because of the stereotype of their passivity and subservience. Asian women are seen by white men as non-complaining, non-judgmental, sexually available, undiscriminating, eternally youthful and eager to please; essentially everything the Caucasian female stereotype is not. The stereotype of Asian women has more in common with blow-up dolls than any real racial demographic. Asian women are stereotyped as perpetual teenage girls: always nubile, always hyper-eroticized, always a sexual possibility if you are white, male and heterosexual.

I liked Cloud Atlas, the overall film was a fun ride. The Wachowkis were aiming for a flowing dream-like feel to the film and they achieve it. But anyone who’s ever picked up a book on Carl Jung knows that dreams are about symbolism, sometimes in its crudest form.

One of the key characters in Cloud Atlas is a young, nubile genetic clone named Sonmi-451. She is a genetically fabricated human living in a dystopian Seoul, Korea in 2144 AD. Sonmi lives only to serve futuristic junk food to rude customers in a nightmare version of McDonalds. In the Wachowski’s vision of Cloud Atlas, Sonmi and her fellow clone slaves are dressed in strip club frocks that stop one inch below their asses. And what is up with her name? 451 makes me think of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Was the author subconsciously saying Sonmi was hot? That’s unsettling, but so is the other imagery.

Somni is an Asian clone and she and all her sister clone slaves look nearly identical. Or maybe the film’s creepy message is: all Asian women look alike to white males. Again, the weaving together of racism and sexism by the dominant paradigm is obvious. But it gets weirder.

In the climax of the film, Sonmi is rescued (you didn’t think she’d rescue herself did you?) by an Asian male character played by a white British actor in yellow face. The character, Hae-Joo Chang educates naïve-bordering-on-stupid Sonmi about her oppression, how wrong it is to enslave people and so ultimately Sonmi will hop into bed with him. Around this time, Hae-Joo Chang also fills Sonmi in on the uglier side of her oppression. When clones like her reach their expiration date, they’re killed and slaughtered like cows in an abattoir. Their flesh is converted to futuristic food and fed to the next crop of clones, a blunt reference to Soylent Green. In other words, not only do all Asian women look alike in the film’s viewpoint, they’re recyclable. They are literally all the same. That’s a lot of shitty sexist icing on a giant racist cake.

Sonmi isn’t the only female character who flounders under the white male gaze. Halle Berry’s Meronym in the 2321 AD plot line is forever being rescued by Tom Hanks’ creepy Zachry, a mumbling post-apocalyptic hero who keeps forgetting to kill the bad guys. Berry’s other characters fare about the same. Whether she’s in white face or not, Berry’s usually just window dressing such as a beautiful Jewish wife for a withered, ugly Jim Broadbent.

While Cloud Atlas certainly takes the prize for most ambitious makeup and swashbuckling plot, the female characters still plod through the scenes caught up in the same net of sexism that has plagued film and literary characters for a lot longer than Hollywood has been outraging Asian Americans with white actors in yellow face.

Finally, it’s interesting that the overall theme in the film (and I’m assuming the book) is freedom. No matter how grandiose or well-produced sci-fi dreams like Cloud Atlas are, when they originate from a position that won’t acknowledge its own racism and sexism, they’re shackled. These dreams never truly fly.

Published again

One of my newer short stories was just published in an online literary site. I don't particularly like the site and the "editors" were dicks to me last year when I tried to get them to run another short story. I was expecting a standard "Thanks for submitting this but it's not for us." Instead I got a lame, mean critique from some anonymous "editor" who, among other things, had a hell of a time reading a 5,000-word story. Apparently he has ADD...? So I did this under a nom de plume and a bogus bio. Oh well, they'll survive.

Denizens of Hell

In case you can't tell from the above title, this is not a funny upbeat short story. It's depressing and it's about a character who has experienced the closest thing I can think of to hell.

Incidentally, I have a neighbor who is in her 30s who suffered a massive stroke and is now completely paralyzed. I was thinking of her when I wrote this.

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.