NOTE: This post is
rated R for pervasive mild strong language and disturbing themes.
Introduction
Since I started this blog seven years ago, I’ve posted 346
times (generally four posts per month). It’s not easy to write that often, so I sometimes don’t.
That’s what these “from the archives” posts are for.
Lately I’ve been doing a hybrid version of this: I post an old poem, then provide all-new footnotes
and commentary on it. (Pretend you found
this in your Norton Anthology of American
Teen Poetry.) Today I go back to a
poem written under extreme duress: I’d
just turned 18, moved away from home, and then hit the doldrums after entering
my third month of unemployment.
I DON’T
CARE ABOUT YOU
I sit here letting time roll slowly by
My [word redacted] has become a bore. 2
I cannot find a job, although I try;
And while I sit here, I’m becoming poor.
I buy the paper each and every day
And scan the ads for work I’d like to do. 6
But each employer seems to always say
My years of working are, fuck you, too few.
Unless somebody takes a chance on me,
And signs me up with hope that I will learn, 10
A dumbshit’s all I’ll ever get to be;
Experience I’ll never get to earn.
This vicious
circle simply has to end
fuck hopes and
dreams 14
Footnotes &
commentary
Title: I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU
The title should not be construed as anything aimed at the
reader. I assumed when writing this poem
that nobody would ever read it. I knew
back then (though I’ve evidently since forgotten) that nobody wants to read
amateur poetry. I’d read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and
surely took note of the Vogon captain’s threat that he’ll not only fling the
heroes into space to die, but that “if you’re very lucky, I might read you some
of my poetry first.”
Frankly, I’m posting this poem here largely for archival
purposes: until now, it has existed only
in the original hardcopy, on paper that’s gradually disintegrating. If you’re reading this on April 15, 2006, or
in the days (or perhaps even weeks) following that date, you’re in a race
against my mom and might very well be the first
living human to lay eyes on this poem.
(Dead humans, down in hell, may see it constantly; it may be posted in
every corridor down there.) If you think
you may be the lucky first reader, feel free to e-mail me and see!
So why “I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU”? Well, it was a dark time, and I was an angry
youth, and had soured on soft rock around then.
I distinctly remember turning against Simon and Garfunkel (more on this
later), and railing at the Peter Gabriel song “Don’t Give Up,” mainly due to
guest singer Kate Bush’s contribution to the song, which (in my angry youth
mode) I might have described as “menstrual.”
So I turned to punk rock, notably Fear, which I had on cassette. This album had
a very memorable song titled “I don’t care about you.” (Sample lines: “I seen an old man have a heart attack in
Manhattan/ Well he died while we sat there lookin’ at him/ Ain’t he
cute?”) When I finished this poem (as
you can see it was only very lightly edited) I realized it needed a title, and
“I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU” seemed as good as any.
(A final note: my
favorite song on the Fear album in those days, due to my depression and
frustration, was called “Getting the Brush,” which I’ve explored at length in
an exegesis in these pages … click here.)
Line 1: letting time roll slowly by
This may well be an unconscious tribute to the Simon and
Garfunkel song “The Boxer,” which was probably on my mind, as it includes the
lyrics “When I left my home and my family….”
My line “letting time roll slowly by” possibly alludes to “Now the years
are rolling by me/ They are rockin’ evenly” (which you’ll find in the concert
version of this song).
Line 2: [word redacted]
The first version of this line read, “Relaxing has become a
total bore.” This line wasn’t exactly
honest. I mean, relaxing was a bore, but I later revised this bit
to be more specific, and edgier, and more to the point. That was all well and good for a poem that
just moldered away in a 3-ring binder, but not for the Internet. It’s a happy coincidence that “word redacted”
fits nicely into a line of iambic pentameter.
Line 4: I’m becoming poor
This is probably my least favorite phrase of the whole poem
(and/or any poem ever written by anybody).
It seems somehow incorrect to say a person “becomes” poor. I’m not at all sure poverty works like that. Many people are born into poverty; some
transcend it; some lose everything; but “becoming poor” … it just sounds wrong. Besides, a middle class kid who knows he’ll
one day go to college may be penniless, but doesn’t actually have to face the
prospect of real poverty. This is a sad
example of the amateur poet picking words because they meet the rhythm and rhyme requirements of the sonnet. Pretty lazy on my part.
Line 6: scan the ads
Over time, fewer and fewer people will remember that, before
the Internet, when you were looking for work you actually had to buy a
newspaper and look through the classified ads.
These printed ads were billed per word per day, so they tended to be very
brief and thus often cryptic; e.g., “Admin asst type 70 wpm WordStar filing
phones $1200/mo neg/ xlnt benefits 3 yrs exp req’d.” The name of the prospective employer was
often not given. You’d just dial a phone
number, tell whoever answered “I’m, um, calling about the help wanted ad?” and hope
for the best. I wonder how many times I
was rebuffed by some receptionist who didn’t even know her company was
hiring. (Probably never: I’m just rewriting history to let myself off
the hook for interviewing poorly.)
Line 8: years of working are, fuck you, too few
I was living in San Luis Obispo, a college town, and there
were probably plenty of people trying to get the lucrative office jobs I sought. Likely there were even college graduates
going after those jobs. I just didn’t
know how the world worked. I also kept
holding out hope that Spirit Cycle Works, the bike shop where my brother worked, at
would eventually hire me, but I was deluding myself. It was plain to see that Spirit was slowly
dying.
In revising this poem, I was totally right to replace the
word “alas.” That might have conveyed
how a prospective employer might have tried to let me down easy, except that almost
nobody uses the word “alas.” I sure didn’t hear it from the manager at Sizzler Steakhouse where, in desperation, I applied as a dishwasher—and was denied! The guy said, “You didn’t get the job. But check back with me on Thursday because,
this guy I hired? I don’t think he’s
going to work out.” I think “fuck you”
is a very accurate, concise summary of that message. And the internal rhyme of “fuck you, too few”
is probably the strongest thing about this poem.
Line 10: signs me up
This revision makes no sense. The phrase “hires me” is better all
around. Why did I change it? Who knows.
I think I just wasn’t trying very hard—at this poem, or at getting a
job. At the time I was scared shitless about
my future and a kind of paralysis had set in.
To be honest, I wasn’t rejected that many times … I just wasn’t applying
to enough places.
Line 11: dumbshit
Changing “bum” to “dumbshit” was a fine edit. After all, nobody uses “bum” to mean
“chronically unemployed person” anymore (nor back in 1987). A bum was somebody who spent too much time on
the couch or borrowed money without paying it back. And of course “dumbshit” perfectly matched
the overall mood of the poem.
That said, the idea presented here—that getting a job will
keep you from becoming a dumbshit—is problematic. As it turned out, the first job I ended up
getting—working in a factory canning underwear—would not have prevented me from
declining into dumbshit-hood.
Canning underwear?
It’s true. I worked at a factory
that made Hot Chillys thermal underwear, which was packaged in cans. I still have one of them:
Full disclosure: I
only worked the canning machine for about a day. The company made better use of me in the
shipping department, which took more brains because the underwear wasn’t being
made nearly fast enough to keep up with orders, so we had to ship
partially-filled orders to every customer and keep track of how much product
each customer was owed. That was a
pretty good job. In fact, when Spirit
Cycleworks let my brother go, I got him a job at the factory working right
alongside me.
Line 13: vicious circle simply has to end
This line makes no sense.
My situation was a bit like a Catch-22, in that I had to have work
experience to get a job but couldn’t get that experience without a job—but
that’s in no way a vicious circle. There
was absolutely nothing cyclical going on, nor anything vicious. I certainly wasn’t going to get a job as a
poet with clunky lines like that.
Line 14: fuck hopes and dreams
This was a bold, decisive way to get out of the corner that line 13 had painted me into. You can
tell “fuck hopes and dreams” was added later, as it’s in the same blue ink as
the revisions. I must have gotten to the
end of line 13 and just given up on the poem, and then came back to it later and
hastily finished it off without worrying about meter, rhyme, or even conveying
anything meaningful.
This line, “fuck hopes and dreams,” is actually a cinematic
reference, but to a movie whose title I cannot remember. It was a really awful movie. My brother and I rented a lot of movies in
those days, most of them awful. This
line came toward the end of the movie when the main character, totally stymied
by everything in his life, melodramatically picked up a gun, put it to his
head, and uttered this line. I can’t
even remember if he pulled the trigger because at this point in the movie my
brother and I started laughing so hard we couldn’t see straight. My god that was a stupid movie.
When researching this commentary I looked up “fuck hopes and dreams” on the Internet Movie
Database but couldn’t find anything.
Probably it was such a forgettable movie that nobody bothered to mine it for
memorable quotes. My search did turn up
a movie called “Young People F---ing,” which earned a Critics’ Metascore of
39 out of 100, which is remarkably low (but not the worst I’ve seen).
So, it’s been a long time since I wrote my unemployment poem, but I’m pretty sure the last line was a way to tell myself, “You’re being silly and melodramatic, lugubrious even, like that awful movie, and it’s time to stop writing indulgent, woe-is-me poetry and go get a damn job.” Which I did. After the underwear cannery gig ended, I held down two jobs concurrently—one at a bike shop and one at a radio station, as an evening receptionist—which not only paid the bills, but helped me save up some money for college. Looking back, I’m glad I had that unemployment experience, and the depression that went with it, just to get it out of my system—hopefully once and for all.
So, it’s been a long time since I wrote my unemployment poem, but I’m pretty sure the last line was a way to tell myself, “You’re being silly and melodramatic, lugubrious even, like that awful movie, and it’s time to stop writing indulgent, woe-is-me poetry and go get a damn job.” Which I did. After the underwear cannery gig ended, I held down two jobs concurrently—one at a bike shop and one at a radio station, as an evening receptionist—which not only paid the bills, but helped me save up some money for college. Looking back, I’m glad I had that unemployment experience, and the depression that went with it, just to get it out of my system—hopefully once and for all.
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