The Interview

Everybody does things right but me

Tomatoes bright and bawdy shine
Through plush foliage 'long the vine
While at my feet prick yellowed sticks
That birth green maggots dry as bricks
In company with stunted cukes
ugly, bitter, resolute
"No worries, we have TONS to share!"

Everyone knows just what to wear

Rumpled jacket frayed and teared
At the interview I'm made aware
thick patches strewn with feline hairs
Stringy, weak as I compare
her springtime fashion a timely match
Mine so autumn and decades past
Neat bundles bound in solid holders
Mine unwound and toppling over
Accessorized in coffee stains

Everyone knows just what to say

Kiss and hug without dismay
Well handled jokes hardly crack
Words that break like an attack
Spill from my lips like molten clay and
Chase these titans well away
I should pretend to be a mute

Everyone knows just what to do

Plan vacations, renovations
Buying houses landscaped yards
While I'm still baflled by sending cards and making beds
and opening lids
They're buying stock and raising kids

To what curse do I owe this legacy?
Everyone does things right but me.

Christmas, 2017

Alive not summarized
towering charts
constructed of hearts
Dead not deconstructed
meandering lines
composed of minds and
Decomposed life mean
during time and after
the uncharted tower
deposed all the hours
of summer
the flowers
alive
not summarized

Christmas 2016

The lies I tell are convenient lies
The drive too long
The screen too present
I don't know where I belong
But if I could unwind the lies
the drive, the screen
I would find nature's nut
patient sustenance stuck
in between
the uteri
and the lies, the drive, the screen.

Poor Trait

I saw a picture of a painting on the library wall
I remember when you made it, I was very small
And I remember berating
The time it was taking
For a picture of a painting

But this place meant a lot to you
And I'm just passing through

DEATH? That's just plain rude.

I want to tell the whole world about Gig in a way that would suit him and I'm finding it difficult. I mean, there really is just too much to say about this complex individual and I only knew him for this brief period of what turned out to be the last years of his life. I know he had many lifetimes and manifestations way before that and that others may see him differently than I do. We became fast, close friends through a lot of conversation, walking, creativity and music.

I see him in many flashes of memory, sometimes strolling along in his beloved Maplewood neighborhood on a late grey December, examining the slick sidewalk with deep study. Naturally, it is raining and a flock of blackbirds is pirouetting from a stark tree behind his bald head. He appears gangly yet graceful, sporting a heavy deep green corduroy jacket of good quality and a dignified beard. His solemn face is folded and furrowed in thought over piercing, deep set eyes. Probably superior and harshly judgmental, was my very first impression of him, but it didn´t take long to discover that this opinion was way off base. Humble, supportive, funny and confused: continuously grappling with inconsequential subjects like truth beauty love death nature or the human condition: tying his thoughts in sailor`s knots and hanging them from the ceiling. Combing through the ashes for discarded reasons. Bragging incessantly that he didn´t know a thing.

 Sometimes I see him leaning back in a crooked chair with a cup a coffee and a few days stubble on his face, cutoffs, tee shirt, his face in the morning sun looks fuller, masculine and warm. He is in the midst of composing something or fixing something but he is attentive to our conversation never the less.  Scholarly classics on the floor in a pile by his feet. Without ever going to a proper school, but instead spending most of his time stealing cars, designing doors, raising a family, hanging drywall, fighting in wars, driving cement mixers, fooling around with electric guitars and outdated recording equipment, through his own reading he still had extensive knowledge of the abstract. Sports, for one, but also history, politics, philosophy, art, music theory, geology.

But these are the serious things but Gig was not often very serious. Imaginative, playful, self deprecating always, Sometimes I see him as the person in his song lyrics, playing cards with Pascal, bumming around with Henry Ford and some mad Archangel on the borderland under a crazy moon. His love life in his songs was global yet also a perplexing mess. Once he danced with a curvaceous Aphrodite in a Cuban barrio. Of course she turned out to be an angiosperm, not a real person so who knows what was really in that glass of gin he was drinking. Another time he was beaten with a brassiere in Appalachia by a rowdy woman with advanced physical prowess and an advanced degree. Naturally he was dumped in Paris on several occasions which for him was the city of getting his fragile heart trampled upon, not necessarily the city of love. Or maybe that was Seattle. Anyway, love was another modality that, much like truth, seemed to be something he searched for but never quite believed was there. His best company, it seems, were flocks of birds, hungry dogs and demons and always the rain. 

In addition, he also struggled with  his identity. One need only to review his history of naming himself for clues into this quandary As if the name`Gig weren`t sufficiently odd, he adopted several other monikers over the years...Hokemburg Goombah was one, a name he abandoned when the instant fame of uncovering an eerie photo that captured the human figure for the first time became too much high brow attention for this introverted proletarian to bear. Blasphemer from the Hinterland, which despite several attempts for me to comprehend its meaning, was never quite explained since inquiries were met with a scornful and unsatisfying `How am I supposed to know?`` The third that I am aware of, Gargoyle in the Corner, was a reflection of his self image which I think was wildly inaccurate but whether you agree is partially dependent on your opinion of Gargoyles.

Despite all of this dubiety, he made excellent selections regarding his attire including the coat I mentioned, whose history was explained so often that it got worn out from being discussed too much. He liked wearing hats but discreetly and not so frequently that one assumed he was hiding something. Surprisingly, he was very concerned about mussing up his hair, as he once (this is also in his song lyrics: an astonishingly accurate record of his history) declined a perfectly decent hood prior to his execution for this reason. The reason for the execution however was never quite clear, but he was a trouble maker. Did I mention he liked to gamble a lot? Mostly he put up his soul as collateral and he wasn´t very successful at games of chance so he almost always lost it. He was also very frugal once complaining to the Devil that the price of souls just wasn´t what it used to be. Anyway, he was not a good judge of prices since on the subject of economics one could only describe him as benighted, pronouncing that everything of value was worthless and everything worthless had value.

On spiritual matters he claimed to be a skeptic yet he seemed to possess many irrational beliefs. For example, though he rejected flatly the theory of taking out the trash, he embraced the medieval practice of alchemy, claiming that the sixteen neatly stacked containers of expired evaporated milk in his cupboard were bound to turn into a type of refined fuel if he left them there long enough, fuel that he would use to power his time machine. Though his quarters were festooned in a slurry of clothes, instruments, books and recording equipment thick enough to disguise a time machine, When he was sufficiently distracted, I searched thoroughly for this alleged rocket and never found it. 

Sometimes I saw him as a wise old guru with all of the answers. For example, I`d say that most all of our time for the years I knew him was spent mulling over one very significant question. It was a question posed to me at a job interview that I bombed so embarrassingly that I had to flee the interview on foot, moving with such speed that streams of tears and the swirling colors of my best business casual shirt formed a chem trail in my wake. I ran all the way to his house since I knew he`d have the answer. `Gig,` I asked, falling on my knees at his feet and feeling the sting of castaway thumb picks and as they sunk into my flesh. ``If you  had a dinner party and you could only invite three people who would they be?`` He pulled sagaciously at his beard for several long moments. I awaited his answer, bleeding, my breaths staggered and my heart pounding. 

 ``I don`t give dinner parties.`he said.

EXTRA EXTRA Gig Thurmond Is Dead!!! World Finally Stops Turning!!

The Blasphemer from the Hinterland has suddenly vanished and it wasn´t just one of his lousy moods. He actually died which makes no sense at all. A deflated balloon wrapped in moldy blankets was all that was left of him and then they threw him in the fire. I`m combing through the ashes for his soul but I´m not having much luck. Maybe I just need to spring for a better comb but it could also be because I need him to make sense of this completely unfair and inconvenient situation. Of course, he was as confused I am most of the time but at least we could chew on the problem for a while and maybe arrive at some settlement.


He was always yammering on about death but this wasn´t a public hanging with the butcher baker and candlestick maker drawing straws for the honor at hand. The hangman didn´t even show up, the unreliable bastard. He died alone and cold in front of a television set, laying there for several days before he was discovered. Not at all the dramatic demise he longed for. There wasn´t even a pack of hungry dogs looking on to see what would transpire. Not even a flock of black birds. It wasn´t even raining from what I understand.


I wonder if this is okay with him. It´s NOT okay with me.  First  because I had to throw away an entire jar of perfectly good mayonnaise, but second because death does not suit him. But then, he always wore ill fitting suits.

The End of Work

 

 

I remember as a teenager when the “I have to go to work” schema first invaded my mind. There was something exciting about it, then, since "going to work" meant becoming an adult and becoming an adult meant that one had some control over one's life. I never took it very seriously. Indeed, it felt like I was “playing work”:  ironing my uniform and heading off at a brisk speed to avoid the stigma of being “late”. Going off again to the nice clean plastic place to perform some mindless task. While there, I’d always do a little extra just for a “thank you” from my coworkers or a riveting pat on the back from my grumpy boss. Of course, at the time I had such a good attitude because I harbored the naïve notion that the slog was “temporary”: since it was so overtly demeaning and unsatisfying that surely no serious person would think someone could stay at it for a lifetime.

I’m now forty-eight and I’m still just “going to work”. I still iron my uniform, though not quite so meticulously.  I run off at a less brisk pace, sometimes I'm late. When I am there, I don't really do anything extra. When the phone rings and the caller ID reads "work", I ignore it and don't bother calling back. The biggest difference between then and now is that I am no longer fooling myself. I know that I will be doing this forever. I know that I will not ever have agency in my life. I go to work with a lump of resentment in my throat. 

The resentment has been building steadily over time as I gradually recognized that it doesn't matter what job one is performing: the “forty hour” work week is a great big lie. First, assuming one job is enough for a person to stay afloat in this economy, one is almost always required to work more than that just in the regular day to day operations. Second, even if one is not physically working, one is usually preparing for work, recovering from work, commuting to work, making arrangements around work, complaining about work, receiving calls from work to work “extra”; All of this adds up. Work consumes a person’s life. Work makes a big assumption: that it is the priority in your life when it most definitely is not. It forces itself upon you. When a person is at work, she gives herself up to be entirely at somebody else’s mercy. A working person is trapped in someone else’s version of how things should be, and that version is usually inhumane, inefficient or both.

 

The “job creators” are often presented as so generously providing us helpless cogs with our livelihoods that we should be on our knees thanking them that we are not starving. Forget the fact that we spend most of our precious time making them rich, surrendering our own dreams in the process.   

Don’t get me wrong: there are ways out for the lucky few, and if a working person is doing something that he loves than none of this matters. However, I argue that these options are far from ubiquitous.  There is only so much of this to go around. Most of us, out of necessity to avoid starvation, find ourselves doing  something that is at best  inconsistent with our natural talents and at worst something we utterly dread. We usually have unreasonable expectations thrust upon us in the interest of productivity, making us sacrifice quality and whatever internal reward we may get from doing a “good job”. So, derived from this is a heaping helping of stress and anxiety and the health outcomes that follow.  

Yeah, thanks for the “retirement” fantasy. Never mind the fact that I can’t save any money; I’m not going to make it out alive. 

After over thirty years of being a working class person in America I have finally arrived at a rather radical conclusion of what is required to change the system. Surprisingly, it isn’t fighting for better wages, benefits and working conditions in the traditional sense. I’m not talking about strengthening unions. Unions were born in a different time and a different economic climate. Unions, my working class friends, are as obsolete as retirement. This was when automation was not the threat that it is today and workers had some leverage. Though I am grateful that the issue of economic inequality is solidly upfront in the 2016 election, what working class people need to do to foster real change in the condition of their labor is divorce themselves completely from the “job creators”. Enter the “worker-owner”. Enter the “cooperative”.  

A working person in my generation is so used to the autocratic hierarchy that it just seems natural: the “way it is”. The assumption that the “doers” have to be dependent on the “deciders” throughout the entire process is a given. The fact that we have to “look for a job”, show up when we are told, work within the system that has been set up whether it is sensible and humane or not, and not have any real say in the very environment in which we must spend such a large chunk of our time are all artifacts of dependency.

I’m talking “Atlas Shrugged” folks, except those that are shrugging are the “doers”.  In the words of Todd Snider: hang your own dry wall. The “deciders” have set up these hierarchies for their own benefit.  We need to stop playing by their rules. It is, in fact, a matter of survival. We are entering a new era of automation and the “deciders” won’t need us anymore. Workers must take control of their own lives. We must become worker-owners: the cooperative is the only model that is going to save us.