HG: What they all working out for? We’re all gonna die!
SC: Maybe some later than others!
HG: Maybe so. We’re all gonna die soon, though!
SC: You think so?
HG: That Obama. He’s gonna ruin everything!
SC: You think so?
HG: He’s a crook!
SC: They’re all crooks!
HG: Yeah, but he’s the worst! He’s the Antichrist!
SC: I don’t agree with you there!
HG: You’ll see!
SC: We’ll all see soon enough!
HG: You got that right!

It is probably worth noting, though I do so cringing, that “Homeless Guy” quoted above is African-American/Black. Though I think that such observations make me slightly racist, they at least reassure the reader that his raving about Obama as Antichrist is not racism. Or at least not simple outsider-based racism with which such overt opposition to Obama is generally associated.

Out from my window, the people are passing on by
I hear them complain but I know that they don’t even try
And the lights down on Main Street don’t shine like they used to

At several’s request, I went to my old sub-employer’s Thanksgiving event last night. It was like walking through a prism to one’s own workplace funeral. I mean, it was all kinds of things. It was great to see the kids and the families and everyone celebrating in a bigger venue and a larger context than last year, which was in turn larger than the year before. Great to see things pulled off and successful and happy and hopeful amidst all that 2008 has been. It had a remarkable ability to pull back former people from the same sub-workplace. The department with the kids where so many of us have worked, so many of us have left.

And it had that same rhythm of all “programs” involving a series of kids, stair-stepping in age, taking way too long to perform on a stage for bemused/proud parents and disinterested/hyper kids. Younger kids taking three times as long to set up and stand in order and arrange themselves for a three-minute presentation. Something so real and heartwarming in a society where Hollywood has set a polished standard for the smooth way things should be communicated.

At the same time, there were slick video presentations including a year’s worth of effort on stop-motion animation. The proliferation of computers and cameras and the need for televised everything has changed even the politics of the classic (after-)school program. And watching the distinction in people’s attentiveness between cheesy kindergarten songs and a well-edited video of the first and second grade classroom was chilling. I could’ve written a lifetime’s worth of Sociology on the difference in ambient crowd volume alone.

But like so many things, the largest impact of the event for me was mired in my own perspective. It was a combination of so many things, but most prevalently that life goes on without me at places where I’ve been. What a stupid, selfish reaction to a joyful holiday event, but it hit me harder than I anticipated. Maybe it comes because I’m so close to contemplating the edge of my newest position, reaching that break point of productivity and usefulness. The answers to Brandzel’s self-regulatory question are getting thinner and thinner and my faith that people are nimble enough to react to what’s really going on is diminishing. We’re back on metaphors with runaway trains and quad-smokestacked ships and other forms of transportation gone amok. You can lead people to reason, but you can’t make them think. Not if they want to plug their ears and sing about times when things were easier.

And so I’m reminded that while one’s world at work may seem so significant and all-consuming and influential at the time, it is so easily released. People won’t miss you at your work any more than you’ll miss working. It’s just too “negative” or “inefficient” or focused on that which we cannot change. Which seems like a disappointment at first, but is really the greatest relief of all. It grants a sweet solace to all the fears one has of how important one may be in the context of their own self-constructed prison. All work is fundamentally prostitution - it provides a forum and a context for us breaking ourselves into pieces so we can feed ourselves or buy something useless. Your hooking, my hooking, isn’t making the world turn.

And I see through the windows like I see through the lies
Like I see through every useless disguise that
Everyone wears but everyone swears that they don’t

How can people lose so much and pretend it doesn’t matter? Pretend that everything will bounce back and be fine again? And soon? The admissions people are willing to make almost make me blush. Their naivete despite ages that run circles around mine just makes me want to cradle my head. For all our trappings of cynicism and jaded postmodernism in this country, we’re really all just babyish dolts. We’re all expecting things to grow permanently, forever and ever Amen. We’re blind to how long the odds have been stacked in our favor, feeling somehow privileged enough to be immune to basic fundamental rules of reality that everyone everywhere else faces at all times. And clinging to our solipsistic jingoism as a reinforcement for why things will never change. As though the greatest sports stars never got older and injured and quietly retired. As though people never died or moved on. As though the one thing infinite and eternal and undousable were the myopic gasoline-fed flame of America.

But four in the morning and I just can’t sleep
The pills ain’t workin’ and I can’t get no relief
And I feel like a hound dog moaning along with the rain
Any day now, the jukebox could drive me insane
There’s an old man in the corner that nobody knows
He says: “laugh while you can cause someday you’ll be wearing my clothes”

And so I’m awake, writing and raving, feeling like I’m having less impact than I ever let myself fear. Not even here, in this context, for who knows if anyone reads this blog except my little choir of one and two halves. No, impact in the sense of why it was (theoretically, not really) worth it to hang on to such a carcinogenic routine for so long. Impact in some sort of measurable way as far as making people see the world differently. This would, ironically, all be different if I were sixty. People would listen, people would care. People would at least have an archetype for thinking I had something to say and contribute. They may still not listen enough, I guess, grass and green. I am deluding myself even now. All I would see then is the potential, the upside, the other archetypes, the hope and exuberance of youth. I am me now staring back and you there in the future and shaking my head and admitting I’m wrong. You’re right, there is no perfect time, no perfect position to be heard. People will hear and do what they want, fundamentally. How else would things have gotten the way they are?

And when I’m depressed I sleep and when I sleep I awake at all the wrong times and when I awake I despair and shuffle about, hydrating and clearing passages and feeling driven to drivel my consciousness on a board in case I die today and someone wonders how did he get there? How did he make so many mistakes and ignore so many signs? What kind of idiocy defines this useless species, anyway?

But I guess I can’t tell you what you don’t already know
And I ain’t no prophet, my landlord he told me so

As a postscript to yesterday’s post, the sign got fixed yesterday, if you can believe it. Maybe the universe wants(ed?) to make me believe there was hope or everything was going to be different. Nevertheless, the same person who came to fix the sign left a note on our car threatening us for leaving it six inches overlapping into the “driveway” that hasn’t seen a vehicle on it in about three decades. Beautifully, it was signed “The Owner” even though I know darn well Prudential hasn’t bought the building from the people we keep sending rent checks to. And the note was on a scrap of Prudential paper. It’s all the energy I can muster to not plot against the sign in ways that look like more continual decay in bitter demonstration of why it’s a bad idea for realtors trying to unload houses to be so cavalier about the feelings of the inhabitants of said house. In the end, though, it’s just another straw for the spine of a camel that long ago burrowed itself in the sand and waited, interminably, for dehydration to set in.

Ah but don’t mind me baby, I’m only dying slow

Buddy, can you spare three-quarter mil?

I am gradually coming to terms with the fact that our house may never sell. This is not the worry that most people saying that sentence have - we of course don’t own our house, but just live here. Still, it does seem at least somewhat disconcerting to be in this kind of flux.

Berkeley’s renter-protection laws are perhaps the best (strongest) in the nation. We have strict rent control that only accelerates with cost of living (so I guess we’re in for a 25% hike this year). We are mandated to receive an annual interest payment on our deposit. We cannot be evicted for much of anything, certainly not for the sale of the house where we reside.

(I say “house” by the way, because the building is a house. But there are four one-bedroom apartments herein. Lest you get the idea that we somehow occupy a whole house.)

I don’t even remember exactly when the house went on the market, but it was sometime in late spring or early summer. It was before the Winnebago showed up and thus well before it disappeared. It was long enough ago to feel like a lifetime, or at least like life was comprised of different time. Like a house priced so cheaply in such a neighborhood might sell quickly and easily and there would still be markets for such things.

There are liabilities, to be sure. While two of the apartments have been vacant since a month or so after our arrival here (March ‘06), one has been occupied since the mid-1970’s. The rent controlled rates on that kind of longevity are not exactly commensurate with the current market rates. And then we’re in decently below market as well, since the same factors keeping the other two apartments vacant almost kept us from renting the place. Let’s not spend a lot of time on this, but suffice it to say that our landlord crew (it’s a whole family and its patriarch’s passage is the catalyst for the sale) is “eccentric” and “interesting”.

All this crew wants is to be rid of this house. One can’t divide a house amongst bickering parties (or one could, but that’s generally best left to reality television). One can’t eat a house (with dental work intact). One can’t turn a house into cool, liquid cash, thus applying it to whatever one’s personal vices (or virtues) or taste.

All over America, people are facing this issue. And not just people who would be eligible to play Family Feud against themselves. People are wrestling with the permanence and stability of owning a house when all they want is a little flexibility and freedom. People are dealing with the finality of equity in a world where there are more diverse financial concepts than leverage. People are crying foul in every direction, talking about how they only did what they were told, what they assumed, what every knucklehead was doing because it was free money.

It’s unclear to me whether the sign out front (pictured up top) will be fixed or not. And while it may seem obvious what I’m talking about fixing, it’s noteworthy to mention that the sign lacks any reference to the word sale. It is, in the best postmodern spirit, a “for sale” sign without the words “for” or “sale”. I’m still struggling with the implications here, but they seem multitudinous. We have come to a point in society where such signs are so ubiquitous and self-evident that they need no label or declaration. They are transcendent of their own intentions. Or, perhaps contrarily, maybe there was never any hope of sale in the first place. It’s just a marking of territory, a notice of whose responsibility it is to fix the sign. Goodness knows the landlord crew forsook their already paltry commitment to fixing things as soon as the sign went up.

It may be a little early to predict the universal presence of these signs at every domicile or piece of property in North America. For one thing, the budget for upkeep would need some work. But what happens when we get to a point where 50% of the population is unhappy with where they live? 60%? 75%? Americans take freedom of movement as their birthright and interest in moving as their unique proud tradition. When this is compromised, what will make people feel American? Certainly not the lack of credit cards and shopping malls.

This occupant is starting to feel a little disturbed.

Lest you somehow think that I have completely wasted this weekend, I am conflictedly proud to announce the availability of Duck and Cover merchandise!

Here’s an example of the kind of unparalleled quality and homespun handwritten charm you can expect from said products:

Or, if you prefer more overt puns:

This is the completion of a long-ago resolved (but undone) task of mine, at the request of a couple of regular D&C readers who aren’t even personally known to me. Also, it’s fun. Also, it’s just in time for the holidays and remarkably BP Merch sales haven’t slacked year-over-year from last year. Good thing it’s not available in malls.

Also, your money won’t be worth anything this time next year, so would you rather have money or your favorite political cartoon characters on a shirt? I mean, really.

It’s been five and a half years.

I don’t have a past graphics archive for StoreyTelling yet, but I should have one. I should make one soon. I should do a lot of things… small productive things or big productive things or just things in general. But I don’t want to. I’m miserable most of the time, it seems, set off by the smallest and the largest. It’s easy to be intractably busy and intractably miserable these days (it seems, for me). One would think these things might somehow rotate against each other, but they truly feed each other in some sort of ever-descending spiral. Even in the middle of Saturday afternoon, the threat of busy and the truly deep-seeded misery is rattling my cage. And hey, how did I get in this cage?

People in food lines are both busy and miserable. How can you be busy when you have that long to wait? It’s kind of like being busy in a job in America in the first decade of the third millennium. Everything is waiting and watching and shoving off for later, sandbagging and timing out. And yet it feels so busy.

How can you be busy when you have that long to wait? You’ll find out.