Category Archives: demographics

FaceBook friends

I saw the movie about the invention of, and legal battles over, faceBook when it came out.  I believed the portrait of a smart, angry, now billionaire Harvard nerd initially motivated by revenge on a girl who turned him down.  I left the movie house feeling confirmed in my mostly queasy insights into the heart of the alienating thing called Social Media.  

There are excellent and handy uses for social media, it can’t be denied.  But having pages where we post things about ourselves (he said silently, writing the words on a page where he posts things about himself) with the aim of becoming the coolest and most popular kid in virtual high school by amassing the most disembodied avatar friends?  An invitation to the illusion of intimacy and friendship with virtually none of the risks or rewards.

I know a tortured soul, a brilliant guy who has survived untreated bulimia for decades, with literally thousands of friends on faceBook.  When he leaves his computer and walks on the street, you can see loneliness radiating off him like spokes of despair around a downtrodden comic book character.  He’s a classic case, no doubt.   I’m sure there are many otherwise well-adjusted, self-loving people with robust social lives, friends they talk to, have dinner with, laugh and cry with in person, friends they’d leap into traffic to help out of a tight spot, who casually maintain faceBook pages and have many faceBook friends who are not bravely posing portraits of alienated desperation.

Here’s what got me thinking about faceBook today.  I was forced by the marketing arm of fezBook, now energetically monetizing itself as all great things in our society must, to create a personal page in order to continue maintaining my wehearyou.net student-run animation page.  Reluctantly, seeing that they’d made good on their threats not to allow me to post things to the business site I’d created, I set up a personal page.  

I put up one recent photo of two goats kissing a demurely smiling young man and left my own avatar a dashing grey silhouette with a shock of Conan-like hair coming to a jaunty soft-serve ice cream cone point at the top. At least that’s my memory of my avatar.  Good to have my hair back, I thought idly.

Literally one minute after I put up the page I had my first friend request.  Within hours a small flurry of friend requests from people I’d be glad to be friends with: in real life.  There were several from people I’d never heard of, faceBook friends of the two actual people I’d friended at first.  

I wrote a personal email to each person I otherwise knew explaining that I wouldn’t be active on facebook, had set up the personal page as a requirement for continuing to run my business page.  I asked each how they were, hoped they were doing well.  Told each one that I’d be happy to be in contact.  I noted that my “likes” on the kids’ animation page had oddly fallen from 92 to 87 in recent months and that I was trying to get to 100.  I asked them to please click the link and “like” the animation page.  You can do that here, if you like, dear reader, and afterwards, for a more fun experience, pop over here.

Alas, though predicable, of the dozen or so who asked me to become fezBag friends, only one clicked the link and liked the page.  She also sent me an email saying “Done.  Like these links, if you like,” and sent me two links to her pages to like.  Quid pro quo, fair is fair, like and like, done, and it took me about 15 seconds.   None of the others I’d emailed wrote back.   Perhaps I’d violated the first rule of Social Media– nothing personal!   So much for being friends on faceBarf, I thought, folding one half of my face into a Popeye-like smirk.

Truly, I prefer to talk to Siri.  At least you can have something like a conversation with that adorable robot.  She actually tries to respond to what you say; when she’s stumped she’ll say “wait, I don’t understand.”   That statement is one of the most intelligent and currently under used replies in human interaction.   It shows, in very short order, that you are trying to understand.  No small feat.  

It’s not hard to imagine from Siri’s enthusiastic, sometimes whimsical replies, that she has a cute little personality and, if not smart as an actual whip, is smart as a virtual whip and a better friend than people who reach out to be friends with no strings attached and can’t be troubled to click a link to perform the smallest of kindnesses to a potential facebook pal.

Different Styles

Given the leisure to do what they most want to do in life, a privilege few get in any case, many people would be at a loss.  I’ve received the sometimes sarcastic blessing of knowing what I’d most like to do.   Absurd as it no doubt seems, I’d like to give otherwise doomed children a creative workshop to do their stuff in.

I walked into a beautiful suburban kitchen the morning of Joe’s funeral.  Joe, a gentle and universally beloved man, fought lung cancer to his last breath, and when his last breath was too weak to let him fight, his wife continued the fight on his behalf.  In the end, as after every battle against an implacable foe on a steeply tilted battle field, the good guy lost. Arrangements were made for Joe’s funeral.  An hour before the drive to the funeral home, the smell of coffee came from the kitchen.  Two men, one around 60, the other 70, were talking about the older man’s recent retirement.

“Jesus, what do you do all day?” asked the younger man.

“Well, I work out on my treadmill.  I’ve started to play golf, I do that a few days a week in the nice weather.  I watch a lot of TV.  I even read a book once in a while, believe it or not.  It’s not bad,” he said with a weak smile.

“I’d shoot myself within a week,” said the younger man, shaking his head “I gotta go to work.  I’d go crazy if I wasn’t working.”

Not me, I thought.  It could be because I am already crazy, of course.  I don’t rule that out.  It could be because I have things I love to do that I do whether I get paid for them or not and at the moment am eking by without having to get paid.  It could be because I believe in something bigger than myself that I am working towards.  It could be because I am already crazy.  It could be I am repeating myself.   It could be many other things.  The world could be wrong in its cyclops-like focus on the  material “bottom line” and I could be right.  I could be wrong and the world could be right.  We could both be wrong, but in the end the world wins anyway.

One thing I will say, and it should be clear enough to go even without my saying it:  work is the most universally practiced form of therapy in the world.   Without work to give focus and identity, not to mention a livelihood, life can seem meaningless, a rudderless float in a thirsty ocean.   Go to work and you will mostly not be thinking about the hundred things that might drive you insane.  At work you earn money, sometimes get thanks, recognition or respect, feel productive (at least sometimes), have colleagues to talk with, spend the bulk of each day in purposeful activity of some kind.  Those who do not work, can’t work, can’t find work, are prone to depression, anger, hopelessness, violence even.  

L. Paul Bremer’s biggest boner as unqualified ruler of Iraq after Shock and Awe was firing everyone in the Iraqi army instead of keeping them employed and on the payroll.   Bremer sent these unemployed men home with their guns and told them sternly to fuck off.   Bremer and his bosses didn’t expect them to react like such enraged assholes, not after they’d been liberated from the tyranny of a modern-day Hitler.   No good deed goes unpunished, they say.

I am not knocking work, though my attitude toward it may deviate from the prevailing Calvinist ethic.  We live in a work and profit-driven society and it has long been thus.  Go fight City Hall, Bremer-breath, one may well tell me.  Work liberates, work is a good in and of itself, doesn’t matter what the work is — it’s better to work than to day dream.  That much every school child is taught.   Better to be productive than think about being productive in some weirdly personal, non-monetary way.  

Better to do work that doesn’t mean much in the larger scheme, or work that arguably does harm, but pays you decently.  In fact, meaningless work that pays well is preferable to most people to meaningful work that doesn’t pay much.  Doesn’t take a highly paid quant to crunch those numbers and arrive at the correct answer.  Certainly meaningless work that pays decently is infinitely better than meaningful work that not only doesn’t pay, but sucks the life out of you.  Pursue that kind of unpaid work long enough and hardworking people will begin to resent your insistence on your right to meaningful work, curse you as the unredeemed prick you no doubt are.

Different styles, that’s all I’m saying.

Good Friday

When they originally named this day, ‘good’ must have had a different meaning.

Hard to think of the day otherwise as ‘good’ if it commemorates the brutal torture and slow, excruciating execution of a gentle teacher of empathy and peace.

The faithful believe that this atrocious Friday was followed by a Sunday when this good soul rose from the grave, alive again, to show everybody the Way.   So in the sense that a miracle was revealed on Sunday the terrible events of Good Friday could be seen as a necessary precursor.  

Still, ‘good’ as in Good Friday must have originally meant something other than what we usually think of as good.

“Good. This is what you’re doing now, instead of getting ready?” I can hear a voice getting ready to say.

So, peace everybody, and a very Good Friday to those who celebrate it.

How It Made Me Feel Today

Hitting the “publish” button here completes the illusion of instant connection to everybody, and I can see from the world map on my wordpress stats page that someone in Taiwan read my latest post, two people in India clicked by, or one person there, twice.  I can see when my friend in Poland has had a chance to visit and I nod, anticipating  the intelligent comment my note will sometimes inspire.  When I saw I’d had a visitor from Yemen a few weeks ago I involuntarily pictured the face of that little Yemeni girl, confronted by the camera, after the rest of her family was blown apart by an American missile launched from a menacing American robot plane.   Hearts and minds, Brother O, way to go, sir.   But if we look at this phenomenon of maintaining a blahg for what it actually is, what causes the fingers to tap and one of them to press “publish” at the end, it’s hard to say what it actually is.  

Like everything in the world we have multiple explanations, theories, half-assed (or full-assed) opinions, proposed answers.   Each of these illuminates the matter from a slightly different angle, each contains some bit of truth, each convinces us a bit more or a little less according to our tastes.  In the case of why people post things to the internet, Occam’s Razor doesn’t quite cut it.

Zora Neale Hurston’s oldest human longing: making oneself known to another, strikes me as a huge reason people post things they create on the internet.   The impulse to connect with others in our increasingly connected, increasingly isolated culture is no doubt part of the heart of any complete explanation.  Sharing information, trying to unite with others, giving a take on news that seems vital to understanding but does not seem to get reported, except by the brilliant author of a book that sells well, wins an award, ignites a small discussion that is quickly spun into oblivion as the news media churns the cycle.   Celebrity culture and 24/7 media blaring and flashing in infinite forms makes almost everyone who partakes of it just a little bit thirsty for  Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fabulousness.  In our narcissistic age, why not tell everybody how that makes us feel?   And we have the technology now, and talent or no talent is no longer such an important distinction, we say fuck the corporate gatekeepers.  Everyone is a star, no?  Or if not a star, everyone is someone with something to say. Or with nothing to say, but a cool place to say it and WTF, LOL, ROTFLMAO.  My new boobs are nice, admit it.

I try to write well, and I write about things that get to me one way or another.   That puts me in the same boat with millions of other bloggers.   Democracy at work, yo.  “What is it you want from people?” my sister once asked me pointedly during a calm period in an argument that would soon turn ugly.   I told her I want a conversation, a back and forth where people speak openly about things they care about.  Ideally it’s like a catch, throwing the thing gently back and forth.  They listen carefully to each other, interrupt only for clarification and respond intelligently to what the other person is trying to communicate.  

My sister and I grew up in a war zone and my answer wearied her considerably at the time.   She and I have good talks these days, but back then my answer really annoyed her.   It seemed so much to want, I think, like someone insisting on clean water to drink every time they are thirsty in a land where people are keeling over from dehydration all around.  We had little experience of respectful conversation as kids, though both of our parents were otherwise quite intelligent.  Being funny was something we were used to, and my sister has a quick wit, as did the rest of the war party around our dinner table.  

“A joke is the epitaph on the tombstone of a feeling,” said a dime store philosopher named Nietzsche.  True dat, Fredrich, as was “without music, life would be a mistake”, which goes without saying, and really, except for its indisputable truth, has no place here.   

I am not one to be coy about my feelings or opinions here, or anywhere, really, but this post is going to be a bit more personal than usual because it’s about how something made me feel about my own life today.  I was surprised at how acutely I felt it, under my skin, in my blood and cells.  

Which, by way of semi-amusing digression, calls to mind this email I had blind cc’d to me recently from a guy I was friends with years back, a great improviser on trumpet who really listened, as all great improvisers must, a brilliant photographer, a man of many talents:

Probably one of the most “in-depth” interviews I ever have given to anyone.

Talking about my photography, my movie documentary work, but also about aspects of my personal life and experiences I never shared with anyone before, not even my close friends.
Possibly an interesting read, especially if you are, like me, here in NYC, stuck indoors due to bad weather !
He provided a link, and a recent photo of himself looking darkly pensive, and the charming rascal signed it Much Love, which gave me a dry little chuckle.   I sent this email on to a few others who had known this chap, likely with a cynical comment in the subject line I couldn’t quite resist.  Epitaph on the tombstone, you know.  None of us were going to click on that shit, though we all enjoyed the Much Love.
Having set the table a little too fastidiously, and with that last digression, my strength to continue with what I intended to write tonight drains away.  I will be back at it again soon, because this experience today, at the final of three pre-interviews before I begin what I like to think of as my ECT, was not like the first two, which I enjoyed, and it brought up some deeper things than I was expecting, beginning with the inexperienced nurse smiling and greeting me, a little too solicitously,  “how are you today?  Uhm, you’re not squeamish about the sight of your own viscera, right?”
I was surprised at how prudish my readiness to be nauseated actually turned out to be.

Standing on the edge of the ditch

In a sense, my father, who once cried about the murders of our family but always denied its relevance to our lives, was right.   I never stood, nor did anyone I ever knew, on the edge of a ditch waiting for a murderer’s bullet.  Not when I was an eight year-old with a terrifying imagination and first learned of it did I actually stand on the edge of a ditch with the rest of the family waiting for the order to lie down and be shot.   Much less fifty years later when I am that much closer to my own natural end, after standing beside the open graves of loved ones many times now.  

To be truthful, these things happened thirteen years before I was even born.  I’ve never been machine gunned, or shot with even a small caliber gun, never been tied up with ropes or even been hungry for more than a few hours.  For crying out loud, I’ve never even been whipped in the face or beaten bloody.  My father took the manly stance that his dramatic young son was just sniveling, looking for pity in the echoes of the murder of our family back in some far away Ukrainian hellhole more than twenty years earlier.   Some of us never get over anything, it would seem.    

If I’d been a Black kid it would have been the fucking slave ships I’d have been whining about, the millions crowded below decks in airless holds, chained, driven insane, thrown to sharks if they grew too indignant.   Then I’d have been worked up about the hundreds of years when I could have been sold, whipped, sodomized like any flesh robot you could own.  It wouldn’t have soothed me to hear that life here for the former slaves was better after the Civil War, or that not millions, only thousands, of former slaves were ever beaten, raped or killed for being indignant.  And probably less than ten thousand, total, who were ever burned to death or hung from trees while crowds laughed and whooped and had picnics, sold body parts and photos as souvenirs.

My father would have said “for Christ’s sake, son, they put those Klansmen on trial in Mississippi for what they done to those boys down in Meriden.  The country is changing, for the better, it has changed a lot in your lifetime.”  It would have been peevish to tell him only one of the murderers of those Civil Rights workers would ever see the inside of a jail cell.  Or that sixty years after the Supreme Court ordered an end to segregation, schools would be as segregated as at the height of Jim Crow.  Hindsight, you know what they say about it.

“Is this really what you are thinking about at 4:36 a.m.?” asks a concerned voice.

“No, not at all.  I was thinking about this hours ago, but couldn’t shut off that great documentary about how they did the animated life of Graham Chapman I’d seen earlier…”

“Drawing again, I heard the scratching of your pens….”

“Yes, Sekhnet wandered in like a zombie, saw the animation on TV, looked at the drawings on the couch and said ‘Oh, God, he’s generating more papers…'”

“You can see her point.”

“Yes, I can certainly see her point.  These twenty thousand fucking drawings are a plague.  I do myself no favor drawing them.  But listen, do you mind if I get back to what I was thinking about?”

“Who are you asking?”

“Good point,” I say.

It was an accident of birth, and dumb good timing, to be born in a place and era when I was not forced to lie face down on top of dead bodies and wait for a bullet to end my life, as all of my grandparents’ families were.   Pure luck not to be living in a 2014 slum without sewers or any kind of toilets, where babies die by the truckloads from ragingly contagious excrement borne diseases that basic sanitation prevents.  Good fortune not be born in a place where children are dragged from their homes and forced to kill, or are ‘collateral damage’ statistics in drone attacks, or fated to live in neighborhoods where human predators attack, or if the criminals don’t get you the cops will.  A blessed accident of birth to be born wearing this face instead of one that invites real kicks and blows.   The kicks and blows I receive are gentle indeed compared to real ones.

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.” [1]  The pains we are given to deal with are painful enough for each of us, unbearable sometimes, though they’re not as painful as many more terrible things countless people are enduring at this very moment.  It doesn’t give us perspective, sadly, not to be standing on the edge of a ditch waiting for the order to fall in and be executed.  In a sense we are all standing on the edge of a ditch in a world where ditches for mass graves are dug all the time.

“Take this shovel, dig a hole deep as you want to be buried and stop crying and farting about it,” is about the worst thing any of us can hear.  In that childhood nightmare where Nazis in storm trooper uniforms were slicing through the screen of the back porch of our house to get at us I remember thinking “a lot of good those screens did” a second before I woke up with my heart pounding in terror.

That no idea, no matter how good or well-presented, can be sold in the marketplace of ideas without properly calculated marketing?  A female mosquito landing on your shoulder for a drink.  That unscripted candor has no place in a salesman’s pitch?  Please.  That’s as self-evident as the fact that all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights that may vary, according to circumstance, history and financial situation.    The world is just the world, although it is not always easy to keep perspective when the world is chanting something loudly and continuously enough to drown out all other thought.  

They were apparently banging drums and making a racket on the hill by the ravine to the north of Vishnevets those days in August 1943, to mask the cries and other sounds of the massacre.  The noise of the drums and lusty screaming, as you can imagine, was a fearful sound to the remaining ragged, starving citizens of Vishnevets, waiting their turn at the lip of the ravine.  

The world of competitive commerce and war constantly and insistently beats the drums, to drown out the silence that might lead to forgetting about the drumbeat of commerce and war and allowing people to recall matters of a deeper nature, to gain a more humane perspective.  

It’s possible, I suppose, that these two lusty drummings are only comparable in the mind of a madman.   Then again, many things in our world are the work of madmen.

 

 

[1] Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Welcome to our virtual world

Some kind of spambots, which are now ubiquitous, diverse and ingeniously specialized, land on my website from time to time and leave me comments, designed to get me to click on links they send me.   Posing as appreciative comments about my writing, the kind of comment most people are tickled to receive, they’re sent to generate hits on the sites they are promoting.   Many of the rare “likes” I get for these posts lead me back to enterprising web entrepreneurs who describe how wonderful it is to write from Bali, Copenhagen, Goa, Prague, Florence as they make excellent money working when and where they want, writing for the internet.  

All you need to do is create a blahg, a squeeze page, I think they call it, with affiliate links, backlinks, sidewinder links, they write using a jargon alien to me, but apparently very simple to master.  They will teach you everything you need to know.  Master this surprisingly simple craft and you can sit on a beach, or hotel room or in a cafe, anywhere in the world, and spend a few hours a day writing and watching substantial amounts of money flow into your electronic bank account.  A few changes of underwear, your laptop and international chargers and power cords and you’re on your way.  You will also find yourself losing weight, flab turning to muscle, meeting cool people, having tons more sex, laughing more, eating better, sleeping better, waking refreshed to have breathtaking adventures every day. 

Funny or not, I get almost no direct comments on this blahg but several every week on the blahg for the upstart nonprofit I am trying to start up.  The spambots for some reason home in on that mission driven nonprofit site rather than this gratuitous one.  Many of their comments are in laughably machine-translated non-English advertising some very weird and specific products involving commercial concrete removal, aluminum, real-estate, diet pills.  But I’ve had variations on this one a few times now, usually in response to posts of pictures or videos that have virtually no written content on them:

Comment:

I read a lot of interesting content here.

(Actual interesting content on this one was:  

If he doesn’t start long jumping right away, click on him.   

This neat leap was animated on 3-10-14  by a ten year-old at the Ella Baker School in NYC, using the amazing reference photos of Eadweard Muybridge taken in the 1880s.)

Probably you  spend a lot of time writing, i know how to save you a lot of time, there is an online tool that creates high quality, google friendly posts in minutes, just search in google  – k2seotips unlimited content

Think of the hours I could save!   I could use those hours to learn about and master affiliate marketing and try my program, untroubled by any funding concerns, two or three weeks at a time, in Africa, Asia, Iceland, spend the hours every day learning languages, mastering new musical instruments, collaborating with local musicians on every continent, working on my six pack abs.  While high quality google friendly content is generated for me to maximize my audience and lead to my almost instant success in anything I try.  What an increasingly wonderful world it is!

Perhaps my favorite recent comment is one I saw on the site of a business woman who occasionally has a spambot send me a message letting me know that she thought my thoughtful post was awesome and that I should check out what she’s up to.   Clue number one on her site is her description of how the free site had been taken down once because she had violated the terms of use by promoting her businesses on the site, and that she had figured out a beautiful workaround she was generously sharing for others who wish to use the free platform for free, and powerful, advertising.

A commenter on that post referred to her, perhaps not entirely unfairly, as a “cunt”.  The next commenter took that first one to task for saying something so harsh about someone who was trying to do something good.   The first commenter wrote back, not without a certain hard humor.  Other commenters joined, but after a while it was only the first guy, the one who’d called the scheming businesswoman a “cunt”, who was answering everybody.  

Since high quality google friendly content (the post you’re reading now, actually) was being generated for me by robots of my own, I had the leisure to read the entire string of comments, and eventually came to a wonderful exchange that made the entire exercise worth more than I can say.  I share it here:

A man who identified himself as a pastor wrote to the woman who’d thought his post was awesome and had invited him to visit her site.  The pastor thanked her humbly and profusely for her appreciation of his writing.  It was a wonderful thing, he said, to have one’s poetry and philosophy appreciated and she was clearly a bright and discerning woman and also, in his humble opinion, the creator and keeper of a very interesting and rewarding site that he would be visiting again soon.  And a fine writer herself, if he might say so.

The next comment was from the clever trollish commenter who was the only one answering anything directed to the site.  It is perhaps the best comment on this whole blogging business I’ve seen:

Look, “Pastor”. I’m the only one reading these comments and responding. There is no blogger here anymore. She set up an automated system that goes around and clicks LIKE on people’s wordpress posts. And, let me guess – that is how you found this blog. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but no actual people read or like your posts.

 

 

 

Duh!

Here’s a big “DUH!” for you, not intuitive, maybe, but once you hear it you’ll make that exaggeratedly stupid face and say “duh!”, if you’re inclined to such things.

If you have a website to promote your business idea, and it contains links to the product you are selling, visitors must not be able to easily see that only a dozen, rather than many thousands, have visited the links.  YouTube, for example, with its counters, is good for promoting an idea if 75,000 people, or better still, 7,500,000 people, have viewed it.  It is the kiss of death if the counter reads 14, or 106.

“Loser…” the visitor can’t help but think, perhaps also “poor bastard.”

The internet is a popularity contest.  High school has nothing on the internet in that regard.  The numbers don’t lie.  If the thing is good but nobody cares, the number reads 6, maybe 28.  If the LOL cat is funny, or the baby animal irresistible, the number quickly reaches 99,000,000.

Like everything else– or like many things, anyway–  there is a way to fix it.  A workaround, like a dozen I’ve already employed in the creation of my gerry-rigged empire.  No need to show potential customers how few people actually watch the amazing and original animation small groups of strangers are creating.   I’ll get on it tomorrow, it should take no more than a few hours to fix.  Plain foolishness is the only reason to let a prospective customer see at a glance that your most popular, most amazing piece of work has been viewed less than 200 times.

Live and learn, baby.

“Duh!”

 

Too Big Not To Bugger Thousands

“The corporate man is the man of the future.”   Heinrich Himmler

I am urged to be proactive about this, now seven week, lack of internet and phone service.  I call today on Sekhnet’s land line, browsing the internet as I  punch in my various responses on the phone’s keypad.  After a remarkably short five minute wait a human at Verizon picks up.
 
“Do you have a contact number?”  he asks and I give him the cell number they’ve already made several robocalls to, the number I was promised Tuesday, falsely but hopefully by a sympathetic young woman in Pittsburgh, would be called on Wednesday.
 
He will email the cable maintenance department, they will contact me.  He has no way of checking what is going on directly. His last record shows a service call on May 9, which is what the robot that greets me every time I call keeps asking me if I want to reschedule.
 
“Is the Cable Maintenance department part of Verizon?”
 
“Yes, sir,” he says.
 
“Would you please connect me to them, then.”
 
“We’re not able to do that.  I’m going to send them an email and they’ll contact you.”
 
I take a breath, ask the young man to put himself in my position.  I tell him the story, without snarling.  Then I ask, if he was me, would he thank him for the help and wait for Verizon to contact me?  Especially if multiple promises to contact him had already not been kept, and a bill for undelivered services sent to him five weeks after the service was promised to be restored?
 
“I would not like it,” he admits.
 
“Please connect me to your supervisor,” I tell the pawn.
 
“She’ll tell you the same thing,” then he promises to walk over and get her.  Fifteen minutes of blaring muzak follows.  Can you spell GO FUCK YOURSELF ASSHOLE, I work for these Nazis, do you think I have a good life?
 
Someone who is not programmed to be a victim, I suppose, maybe someone tenacious, with legal training and great verbal and people skills, would find a way to fix this, I guess.   Seems impossible as I waited for a ‘supervisor’ (the minimum wage worker in the next cubicle, most likely) that I was forced to hear blasting, ever more maddening generic music on a speaker phone that even at the lowest volume was at an unbearable level.  I suppose I could have put it into the drawer here and closed it until the supervisor came on.
 
To cheer myself during the wait I looked on the bright side.  I had printed out the actual size mock up of the label Sekhnet painstakingly designed and created.  It fits the Idea Book nicely, looks great, I’m going on-line to order a thousand as soon as Verizon gets done with me.  A very handsome piece of propaganda it is, really gorgeous– if the stickers look 70% as good as this print on matte photo paper I’ll be delighted.  I also paid for and have so far taken three CLE credits from a corrupt outfit that allows you to do an hour’s required Ethics CLE in only 15 minutes or so, if you’re prepared to be a weasel, which I might be tempted to become as I have eighteen more credits to amass in the next few days to keep the shackle lawfully attached to my leg. 
 
Then, suddenly, the muzak stops and the lovely Ms. Green introduces herself. 
 
During our conversation, making this call to Verizon a svelte forty three minutes at its end,  I learn that three to six months would be optimistic for renewed internet service, that they will in fact be replacing miles of crappy copper wire they no longer service with fiber optic cable all over northern Manhattan, eventually.  
She tells me that I will continue to get bills during that time that I must pay, but I’ll be reimbursed when and if my service is ever restored, and she’s sorry if I think that’s unreasonable, it’s just the way they do it.  The bills are generated automatically unless her office informs the business office that there’s no service, and that’s more complicated for everyone.  Just pay the bills and you will be reimbursed, and also, we will never come in your mouth or in any other orifice you may or may not have.
 She promises she’ll call me tomorrow when she hears back from the Cable Maintenance Department.  She stops me as I begin again, she promises, gives me her word again, even though she tells me she understands why I’d be skeptical to hear her say that.  She will give me the details as to what they predict as far as resumed service to tens or hundreds of thousands in my neighborhood and she suggests I call the business office if I want to complain about being billed for services they will continue to bill me for until service is restored, if ever.  There is no direct number to her, but she promises again that she will call me by noon tomorrow, and reminds me that Verizon offered me a free second cell phone that I declined.
 
To her credit she neither thanks me for being a Verizon customer nor apologizes for her employers’ treachery.  After all, I realize, they’d lose maybe a hundred thousand customers at a shot if they told them the truth or kept them informed.  Fair is fair, you know what I’m saying?
I resist urging her to ‘have a nice day’ or making any of my obligatory references to corporate psychopathy, Hitler, or anything else illustrative of the corporate culture we must endure daily, as she tells me again that she’ll talk to me tomorrow.   Under the circumstances, which must be extremely trying for her, she sounds pleasant as a spring breeze.  No wonder they pay her ten dollars an hour to supervise the other, far less skilled, telephone operators Verizon employs in that cube farm where human misery is cultivated while Verizon fosters communication while tending assiduously to the corporate bottom line.

Chill Pill

Sekhnet recommends multitasking while listening to blaring corporate hold muzak and being thanked periodically for your business, which is so important to the modern corporation that they take the trouble to play a recording of their gratitude, at the expense of their on-hold captive audience advertising time.  

This multitasking usually involves something like paying bills on-line or doing some research on-line, or playing some mindless on-line game.   Since I am using my cell phone to call Verizon about my lack of phone and internet service, these options are not available.  I decide that while I’m on hold I will grill two processed fake meat hamburgers, probably as healthy for the vegetarian as a Big Mac is for everyone else.   They are almost as tasty, when prepared right, and probably slightly less toxic than the real thing.

After only a few minutes, upon being told the wait is longer than usual to speak to a human, I’m given the option to tap in my number and a representative will gladly call me back.   Nice touch, I think, feeling slightly pleased with myself, since today I am calling the “buy new service” line, rather than “trouble with my existing line” department.

Flipping my burgers when the phone in my shirt pocket rings about two minutes later.   Total time so far under ten minutes, I note.   Excitedly I pick up and am greeted by another robot, then several minutes of loud advertisements, then too loud muzak.  I put the phone on speaker and place it on my kitchen table, volume turned down as I continue to prepare my lunch, making a kind of slaw (finely chopped scallions, red cabbage, romaine lettuce) to put on my burgers.  I am trying to remain calm and friendly so I can get help, not take my understandable (going on 7 weeks with no service) frustration out on the pawn who is talking to hundreds of angry, powerless customers today.

I mix the bowl of slaw, flip my burgers, grill a flatbread in the pan next to it, then hear a human voice come on the line.  In my eagerness to speak to this human being I hit not “speaker” but “talk” and somehow this connects me to a robot at Verizon asking me for my account number.  By the time I link the calls so I can speak to the human, a maneuver that takes at most four seconds, the human is gone and the robot drones on about the longer than normal waiting time to speak to the next available representative.  I see that I’ve been on hold only four additional minutes since I picked up to speak to the representative, a total of slightly less than the fifteen minutes I usually wait.  The ads and the blaring muzak made it seem longer.

Why would anyone tolerate this kind of shit?   Why would anyone not shred the bill they sent yesterday, charges due for six weeks of service not provided?   A normal person would not stand for it, would not tolerate being powerless and fucked around by some company just because it happens to have a monopoly.  But these are not normal circumstances.  Normally a person like me would live in a nice house, like virtually every other adult he knows, with several options for internet service.  The neighborhood where my rent stabilized apartment is located does not have other options for internet service, unless I buy a TV and get a cable and internet bundle from Time Warner, another highly altruistic outfit.

I wrote this yesterday in the little book I carry in my shirt pocket, and I stand by it, especially now that the chill pill I took to end my cursing tirade before I started smashing up this place is kicking in:

If you choose not to avail yourself of the privilege of a hard-working middle class life, you would do well to cultivate stoicism in the face of the thousand small, vicious indignities that are the lot of society’s losers.

We live in a society where winners are now required to brag and losers medicate themselves, or become violent, hypertensive, inordinately sarcastic or completely inert.   Mass media shows it over and over again—winners do not tolerate losing, losers do not have any idea how to win.   The game is as unfair as it’s been since the eve of the famous stock market crash at the end of the Roaring Twenties.  This is not a problem to those who are not being gamed by the game.  The question for someone like me would be:  if you had every opportunity to align yourself with the rest of the middle class, why would you choose being a powerless person at the mercy of a merciless system rigged against those at the bottom?

$300 out of pocket to have my ears cleaned?  Not anyone’s problem that I know but mine.  $280 for a urologist to spend perhaps 40 seconds palpating my prostate?   The Affordable Care Act, after all, is not responsible for the fact that my primary care doctor doesn’t consider ear cleaning, even for a patient who needs it annually, or a digital prostate exam, for the son of a man with prostate cancer, part of their overall wellness.  There are specialists for that.   He didn’t decide that there would be a $50 copay for the insured under Obamacare, or a $1,750 out-of pocket deductible before any of the insurance premiums paid by the patient every month would begin to kick in in the form of covered medical service.  Or that dental services, or eye glasses, were not deemed to be part of the average person’s health needs.

A wealthy friend suggested that I get rid of the remaining money I have in the bank and apply for Medicaid, which would cover all these things.  I pointed out that it would mean giving up my apartment, of course, and, if things went as badly as they sometimes do in our winner take all society, spending some time in a homeless shelter, assuming I could find one to suit my tastes.   He agreed that I was probably better off paying for Obamacare than going on Medicaid, but allowed that it was atrocious, the poor, expensive medical service I am getting under the Affordable Care Act.

Is it better to be comfortable than uncomfortable?  I would definitely say comfortable.  I am not poor.  If I knew now that I had five years to live, I could probably have a more or less middle class life style.  The problem is, I could live twenty more years.   I would actually like that, living a long life.

For one thing, that might give me time to have a small impact in this merciless world.  Imagine for a moment that I could show that a talented kid born in a slum was just as creative, and worthy of human rights, as a slightly less talented kid born to wealthy parents.   Imagine, in spite of the ridiculously daunting odds against it, that I was able to get funding for a program I have already designed to do this.  Imagine that program producing a thousand animated films a year, shorts that won awards all over the place and actually changed the conversation about education and the lot of thousands of children our society now regards, if at all, as future criminals, profit generators for lucrative privatized prisons.  Imagine the book I could write about that program, illustrated and illuminated by the imaginations of dozens of brilliant future inmates.

You can write that book now, one might say.  True.  But to have it published and widely sold I would have to have made the dream real in the world, monetized it, skillfully marketed it.  The talk shows don’t waste time interviewing even well-spoken losers with nice dreams.  Even I know that.