[231] Screed City
[231]
02/28/2023 Tuesday. Cardboard Box. Hampshire House. Portland, Maine.
Portland, shit, still only in Portland. You know what I really don't understand about that movie is that the guy is like not really looking forward to going to look for the bald dude, but the first line of the damn film is him being impatient about how slowly things are moving forward. Did I miss something? Does the redux spell it out? Like maybe he was hoping to catch up with the French people to get their Bahn mi baguette recipe?
I don’t know, I am in Portland. Professor Curly is in Berlin again. It's snowing here and my teeth suck. Well, my gums. But I did make an appointment for April 6th and I got insurance, so yippy for me. Finally, FINALLY can afford insurance to get my teeth looked at and cleaned and ready for more chomping and my guess is that, I don't know, I don't even want to say it, but the best part of being working class impoverished is when you finally have enough money to deal with something the thing is too ruined to bother dealing with.
On a lighter note, Professor Curly's movie got bought up by HBO, which, I mean, I don't know how much I can talk about shit, but that was in the Daily Mail the other day, so I can at least mention that part. Meanwhile I am doing tantric demolition at the Brewery in Portland, worrying about my teeth falling out. This scenario sounds like a dream where I would wake up and realize I need to get laid.
I mean, the tantric demolition is kind of rough. I am tearing down a bathroom, which, I don't know if you have ever done demolition work, but bathrooms are particularly gross. The mold, ancient piss soaked into the walls and floorboards, I don't know, there is the ghost of a thousand shits floating in the air, and like all things that get demolished, there is mice nests everywhere. Mice shit. Empty acorns. But it's funny, funny because I am doing it alone. I don't remember the last demo job I did by myself. Like 16 years ago? 17? Before G was born, I know that. But it's funny doing it alone because you have to do all of it alone. Like usually you got one guy with a screw gun, one guy with a pry bar, one guy with a sawzall, one guy gathering the garbage and taking it to the dumpster. But I can't do that. The place is a business and it is also operating at the same time. I am a little like that Shawshank dude with his pants full of dirt. One spoonful at time. I don't really mind it at all. Aside from the dust and the loud noises. I am working alone, so there is no constant yackity yack. I can listen to my stories uninterrupted. Instead of just Donkey Konging the whole thing, I can take it real slow and sensual. And instead of feeling exploited and abused by an employer who only cares about efficiency, I can just do the job and not worry if I am, um, not speedy enough.
I still remember that damn photo shoot where I wasn't painting fast enough and the boss said, I mean, I understand where she was coming from, it was a photo shoot and you have to be stressed out on a photo shoot, and I was not stressed out, and it showed, and I was painting, and I hate to tell you, you can only paint so fast, unless you are painting a barn or something where it doesn't matter where the excess paint goes, but once again, I was on a photo shoot, so something tells me I shouldn't be dumping globs of paint on the floor while I was painting, but she said: "Joe, could you be more, uh, speedy?" And guess what I did after that? I made look like I was really stressed out and harried. And it worked, I didn't paint any faster, but I also didn't get harassed about it. Which, you know, was also a Seinfeld plot when George gets a job with the Yankees and needs to pretend that he is working so he walks around looking annoyed all day because: "When you look annoyed, everyone assumes you are busy." Which, once again, the construct of work and working and jobs and society and merit and the supposed meritocracy, showing up is literally 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of everything.
But still. Today I did something quite special when I showed up to work. Well, hold on, let's go back to this morning. Portland. Portland is an odd little town. They pretend to be a city, but they are sub-burbs with a collective center that sometimes has good bands and decent food. I mean, it is a great place to raise kids. The town is quite diverse, mostly because they have a very progressive refugee policy. Is policy the word I want to use? I don't know, but what can you do? And the people in town seem generally progressive. The radio would maybe tell you different, but who listens to the radio anymore? Right wing nut jobs and religious zealots are who. Plus those amongst us that want to hear the new Bruno Mars tune, or even the old Bruno Mars tune. I mean, even NPR is muted up here. Unlike Boston or NYC. But the people seem nice enough. The city is small but not Billings, Montana small, more like Reno, Nevada maybe? Austin, Texas? But it is on the ocean. So like ocean city/towns in the North East, the weather in the winter is kind of a crap-shoot. One day it is pouring rain and the next day will be a snow storm and the next day it will be sunshine and kite weather. I mean, you don't like the weather, wait a minute, am I right? But today it was a snow storm that I woke up to. And I left for work early knowing it was going to be a slow commute. I cleaned all the snow off Junior Mint and started driving into work. But here is the thing, the city/town only salts the roads, it doesn't plow them, well, not in any concerted way. So the roads are just slush. Pure slush. And the longer it snows, the more slushy the roads become. And instead of plowing the roads they just add more salt. I suppose the idea is that as long as the air doesn't get too cold, things will be fine? I don't know, but I was lucky to make it to work, because not only do these maniacs not know how to deal with snow, they also don't know how to drive in snow and none of them are prepared for snow. Every time I stopped at a light I assumed I was about to be rear ended. Every time I started driving after stopping, I assumed I would peel out and be stuck where I was. And then what? Junior Mint has good winter tires, but you can only do so much with a front wheel drive vehicle in six inches of half frozen slush. And there are hills.
I suppose that is kind of a long introduction just to say that person or persons that had installed the walls for the bathroom I was tantric demolishing, used a Ramset to anchor the walls into the concrete floor. I think. Or maybe not. There were not the tell-tale signs of such a tool. The nails didn't have washers, which doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't a powder actuated tool, but there were no orange plastic collar remanences or whatever. And the walls had been put together with a framing nailor. So maybe they just shot the nails into the concrete? If so, it worked pretty damn good. And I had to use a pry bar to get them loose. And because of how the pry bar was angled with respect to the nail heads after I had removed the two by fours, I mean, I could just stand on the lever part and shoot the nails up into the air. And the release of tension that came along with it created quite the missel. After the first one nearly poked my eye out, I made a point of crouching away and covering my face when I launched the things. Which, sure, I should have just used a grinder, but I didn't. And this happened:
[Insert Nail In Ceiling Photo]
[Insert Perspective Photo]
I launched a nail 30 feet into the air and it stuck in the ceiling! One in a million chance, doc! To quote another Seinfeld episode. I wonder. Do you think that Seinfeld will hold up 20 years from now? Some of it is already a little icky, but there is something about the "Scenarios" that seems universal and time-less. But is that because we all grew up with it? Or whatever. I mean, Friends to me, I don't know why that is making a come-back. I feel like it is kind of a ironic come-back. Like, look how fucking White these people are. Seinfeld seems different. And I only ask because of this Roald Dahl nonsense that is happening. It is not a free speech or censorship issue, it is money only, money and the monopoly of certain art in the conversational society that we live in. No, we shouldn't censor books, of course, but that is not what is happening, what is happening is that Netflix or whoever bought the dude's library for $500 million dollars and the guy was an anti-Semitic racist who wrote some damn good children’s books that people love. And if I have to hear one more well established asshole tell me that sometimes people are complicated, he treated me well, or he treated me like shit, and I still don't think he should be censored, I mean, fuck you. I say try it. Try and make his books conform to modern norms. It will be like an equally racist and anti-Semitic asshole who had a whole system to bring truth out of text. Who used the "Cut-up" method. Who said: "When you cut up the text, the truth comes out." William Burroughs much? And it's true. Because it is the "Separate the Artist from the Art" argument all over again. To get mad at "Censors" for making New Coke is a load of horse shit. And it makes people like Salmon Rushdie and Keith Olbermann look so absolutely desperate for continued relevancy that they become instantly outdated. What next? Whinnie the Pooh getting fat shamed for eating all the honey and not being to get out of Rabbit's house? Yes, it is coming, and no, it changes nothing.
And naturally there is a lesson to be learned. That lesson is not the one you would think though. I mean, I will tell you the thing that all the doctors don't want to tell you that will change your life forever, this one weird trick: Works of art are their own truth. Everything that surrounds them is just noise. All the commentary, the calls for free speech, the condemning of censorship, it is all just people like me blathering on about an issue that is pure nonsense. Society changes, and with that change, art changes as well. The fact that we hold onto these ancient texts is not because they are so relevant and groundbreaking, that nobody will ever write things like Huckleberry Finn [Italics] because all art died in 1912, I mean, fuck you. You could write a entire book right now that was just the N-word written one million times, over and over and over again and publish and so what? Just because nobody would want to read it is not censorship or a free speech issue. And people defending Roald Dahl as a "Complicated Man" fuck you too. Anecdotal evidence means nothing.
My point is that I have had a break through because of the conversation about this load of horse shit. And it's a little like when Louis CK told us it was time to: "Listen, just listen." Yes, sometimes it is best to just shut the fuck up. Your art will not suffer because you don't diarrhea all the time. But being a piece of shit is something you have to own. And I am not saying I am a piece of shit that needs to own things, all I am saying is that I have ventured off into a meaningless wilderness of function over form. And luckily I don't publish everything I write. Not because it is problematic, but because sometimes I make things that are not very good. That don't need to be out in the world. And, lucky or not, nobody is demanding that every single thought that goes through my juicy wet mind reaches everyone else's juicy wet eyes. I mean, I am probably lucky about this. I happen to be part of the generation of people that were alive when the internet started, but also didn't know what to do about it, so even if I did want to capitalize on my ability to mouth off, I just don't have the ability to do so. I am bad at, and I miss the mark, and I am not grandfathered in because somehow the system jumped over me and now I am playing catch-up. Which, as annoying as it is that I can't seem to make any progress financially with the honing of my skills, it doesn't matter. I am under no obligation to be a jack ass. Financially speaking.
Full disclosure, I have been writing a novel lately that I love the idea of, but it is hard to write and last night I really went off the rails. Once again, not in some problematic way, I mean, I think it is funny I have to say that, it is like a trigger warning, which, I mean, say what you will about trigger warnings, I really think that there is a very natural and toxic way that Society moves forward where we kind of beat people to death, tie them up on fences in Laramie, Wyoming, and only then, then and only then, do we maybe do something about how we treat each other, I mean, just a heads up, or, look, I am about to give you some bad news, maybe sit down, I mean, humans are not sensitive as the media would pretend they are, life sucks and shit is hard, but a trigger warning does not hurt my feelings, especially when there is something very dark being discussed. My first book, Postal Child [Italics,] doesn't need a trigger warning before you read it, but say, if you were somebody that taught that book in class, either in high school or college, I mean, the book is really fucked up. You wouldn't just show somebody a picture of a child being raped without giving them a warning first, would you? I wouldn't, and I wrote the thing. It has nothing really to do with the content, it is only about respecting someone else's boundaries. I mean, trigger warning, I was throttled by my seventh grade history teacher in the hallway of the middle school I went to, and frankly, had I had a heads up that someone was going to strangle me for being an obnoxious kid, I mean, I would have been quite thankful about it. Like, Hey Joe, maybe don't fuck around in class because you are going to not like being choked in the hallway. And maybe I would have not mouthed off. Or not. I mean, all I really did was harass Jay Mocco to the point that I disrupted class, and the teacher was dying of bowel cancer at the time so he would whack his ruler on his desk every time he farted. And sometimes his farts would stink up the room. And guess what? Maybe we should have had a conversation about cancer and dying and life and emotions instead of him taking me into the hallway and choking me, I mean, whatever, I am victim blaming myself at this point, but my point still stands; Life is rough, people suck, and a little heads-up would be nice.
I mean, a trigger warning at work would be a fantastic thing. Imagine showing up to work and then being warned about it, like, hey, take it or leave it, but today is going to suck. I mean, it is good to have options. The idea that life is miserable and you just have to suck it up and take it? That is how we got here in the first place. Where a dude like me has horrible gums because he was too poor to go to the dentist for 20 years and guy like Keith Olbermann can erase a lifetime of human garbage because he once received a letter from a racist anti-Semite. I mean, I once saw Harvey Weinstein in a car on 59th street in Manhattan talking on his phone and I felt bad for him because he must be on his phone all day long, every single hour from the second he woke up until he went to bed. I mean, that must mean he didn't do all the bad things he did, right? Horrible men are complicated. I have heard it way too many times at this point. And I DO NOT believe it for one second. There are billions of people alive on this earth right now. I couldn't give two shits about your Netflix deal.
There is good art out there, and it doesn't need to be tied to money.
[Insert Traffic Cone Water Delivery]