From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume V

Introduction

This is the fifth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, and Volume IV is here. I got the idea for this series from all the published writers who, when they run out of new material, basically print their own money by publishing old letters or diaries that had just been gathering dust. Surely they edit and polish the stuff though, and choose only the best bits, which is what I’ve also done with the following passages, from letters I wrote to my friends or brothers. I’ve provided, for each snippet, the locale I was writing from. Enjoy please enjoy.

(Below is a fairly representative photo from those days. You can tell from my grin that I either had no idea how foolish I looked, or just didn’t care.)

July 17, 1991 - Berkeley

Remember all the hoopla surrounding the solar eclipse? Well that was barely noticeable here in the Bay Area. We’ve had a dark sky for weeks: nothing but cloud cover. I have had the blahs for days, real bad. I can’t seem to focus on anything but the negative. I try to count my blessings, but when the sky is this grey for this long, nothing seems to satisfy. It’s like the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (1:2) and “The eye is not satisfied with seeing,/ Nor the ear filled with hearing” (1:8). Of course, that narrator had it easy, because he was talking about all things “under the sun” and there is no sun to be had here. I just get so glum, I end up with songs like Pink Floyd’s “Dogs” in my head:

       So have a good drown
       As you go down
       All alone
       Dragged down by the stone

That was my feeling this morning when I looked outside and found another dreary day facing me. Even rain would be a nice change, but the sky outside is one of thick formless cloud cover, far too high up to break the monotony with rainfall. A day should ideally begin with a lovely dawn, breaking into a sunny yet cool morning, followed by a hot sun burning directly overhead at noon. This accomplished, the heat should taper off into a lazy sunny afternoon, ideally broken up by a short thundershower to set the scene for a slightly cooler evening and finally dusk. But for the last few days, nothing like this has transpired. Ten in the morning has been identical to noon, to 2 p.m., and to the evening. It’s been bland nothingness.

But then I looked out our sliding glass doors and was struck by something out toward the horizon. Out of a background of stony grey, I saw the island of Alcatraz, framed perfectly by the only structure that wears fog well: the Golden Gate bridge. I have seen Alcatraz countless times before, and never with so much as a second thought. But now it was the only brightly lit thing I had seen in days. Somehow the sun had found a loophole in the cloud cover and aimed itself right at the former prison, lighting it brilliantly. The scene looked like something out of The Wizard of Oz, with its emerald buildings shining as if lit from within. I grabbed the binoculars Dad gave me last Christmas and got the best look of Alcatraz I’ve ever had, as if the bridge and island were right in my backyard. That was the whole morning—only a few minutes long, and only out there on that island—but we had a morning nonetheless, and while it lasted “Dogs” evaporated and was replaced in my head with another Pink Floyd song, “A Pillow of Winds”:

        Green fields,
        A cold rain is falling
        In a golden dawn
        …
        And I rise like a bird
        In the haze
        When the first rays
        Touch the sky
        And the night winds die

The appearance of this oddly localized shaft of sun was so brief, I thought I might sink all the way back down into my earlier despondency, but I didn’t. Somehow, that little taste of sunshine seems like enough to sustain me for a while. After all, this is California. The sun is bound to come out soon. Right?

August 17, 1992 - Berkeley

School starts in about a week. The realization that this is my final semester is slowly sinking in. Last night I had a dream I went to interview for a job with a former employer. I wore this light blue cotton suit with white vertical stripes that was totally inappropriate, and in fact looked pretty ridiculous. Some receptionist kept trying to turn me away because of my suit, and due to my lack of ability with the new word processing software, and the fact that I didn’t even have an appointment. I kept trying to convince her that I could learn the new software quickly, but she wouldn’t believe me. Finally the office manager recognized me from when I’d worked there, and told me someone would talk to me in a few minutes.

While I was waiting in the lobby, I realized my suit was stretched really tightly over my body. Unbuttoning the jacket (which had buttons all the way to the collar, making it even less appropriate for the business world), I was horrified to find I was wearing another suit jacket underneath it. Unbuttoning this jacket, I found not one but two dress shirts, one beneath the other. I even had two pairs of shoes: some giant white Nike Air Super Solo Magnum Team Force Court Flight basketball shoes, and underneath those, some more conservative black Reebok tennis shoes. I began to strip off all my clothing and sort it by appropriateness so that I could end up with one decent outfit. Just as I was down to my underwear behind the two piles, the president of the company walked out to meet me. Glancing at my watch, I realized I was ten minutes late for my first class, and since this was the first day of the semester, I would be disenrolled from college if I didn’t get my ass over there. I fled from the building, leaving behind all the clothes.

January 10, 1994 – San Francisco

I almost got shot. E— and I had driven all the way to Ventura to visit friends and arrived at like 2 a.m. Our friend D— lives on a little street called Bath which is in a fairly nice area, near the beach. Bath Street isn’t all that wide—parking along it is illegal—so it’s kind of like a little alley. We were parked temporarily while unloading and I was taking the bikes off the back of the car when a car drove by us really slow. D—, being new to the neighborhood, thought it was either a neighbor or somebody looking for directions, but the guy didn’t stop. He just drove on, down the dead-end street, and D— said, “Wow, that guy looked at me really funny.” I hadn’t actually looked; I was busy unhooking bungee cords (if you aren’t paying attention and one snaps you, it’s quite painful, you know). Well, after turning around the car drove by again, really slowly, and again I didn’t look. D— was curious, though, and looked in at the guy. A short distance later, the guy stopped and got out of the car.

I didn’t want any trouble, and have adopted a big-city policy of minding my own business, so I just continued with the bikes, unlocking them and juggling the Straight-Jacket and Bad Bones (which sound like handy ghetto weapons but are actually U-lock accessories). I could hear the guy saying to D—, “What’s a mattah, man, you ain’t useta seein’ dudes like me ‘round heah?” D— said no, and the guy came back, “Man, you lookin’ at me funny, man, like ya got a problem wit me or sumpin.’” At this point D— came back with a response which he will never live down: “I think you’re paranoid.”

I glared at D— at this point, but I still didn’t look at the stranger (perhaps out of fear of his thinking that I, too, was looking at him funny). Had I looked, I would have seen him pull a handgun out from his jacket as he yelled, “Paranoid? I’ll show you paranoid!” At this point, E—, who clearly possessed the most presence of mind of us all, rabbited. D— quickly backed up towards the garage door, and I continued to mess with the lock. Not having seen the gun, I simply locked the lock and tested its weight in my hand, evaluating its effectiveness in bashing in a human skull. I mean, hell, I’d never scrapped with a gun-toting lunatic before so it never occurred to me the guy was armed. I figured we had a minor altercation on our hands and we had him outnumbered. I was puzzled by D—’s obvious terror as he smeared himself up against the garage door with his arms up, saying, “No problem, man, no problem!”

I looked over, finally, at this point, and the man was bending over. Not having seen the gun, I thought he was picking up something off the ground to throw at us. I was just standing there, like a great big dopy-looking target, trying to remember if I’d packed my mace in my bag. (It’s actually this new jalapeno pepper spray, which has now been made illegal in the state of California. Ironic, isn’t it, that handguns and automatic weapons are legal here, but harmless self-defense sprays are not?) Anyway, I finally realized what was going on: the guy was bending over to get a clip out of his sock. He loaded his gun and pointed it right at D—, and by this time there was nowhere for me to go. You don’t want to move too quickly, you know, when a lunatic is pointing a loaded gun.

Oddly enough, in the moment I didn’t feel that scared. I was thinking to myself that if the guy really wanted to go out and shoot someone, he’d have loaded his gun before leaving the house. Keeping the clip in his sock and reaching down to get it seemed kind of theatrical. Of course this was probably pure rationalization—my brain’s desperate effort to keep panic at bay by pretending the situation wasn’t that dire. Meanwhile D— just kept saying, “No problem, man, no problem!” until finally the guy got back in his car, where his woman had been waiting (I now noticed), and they drove off.

At that moment, I realized the gravity of the situation, and my teeth began chattering uncontrollably. We ran into the house, where E— had scared the daylights out of D—’s wife and her friend who hadn’t recognized her and wondered why this strange woman had suddenly burst through the door. E— had looked for a phone but failed to find once since the only one in sight was a crazy transparent terminator-style phone that look like a science project. It was at least five minutes before we were able to actually think straight, fetch the phone, and dial 911. An officer arrived within minutes, and we gave him a description of the man. (Interestingly, I had somehow remembered the car as a white ‘70s boxy thing, whereas D— was saying it was a dark, modern one—but I kept my mouth shut. I mean, the man had had a gun and I didn’t even realize it: I was clearly not star witness material.)

The cop said, “You’ll be interested to know that a man of the same description robbed a Motel 6 a few blocks away from here about two minutes before you called. We had four officers in the area but nobody got him.” I guess if we’d called earlier, they might have caught him in the act. On the other hand, people might have been shot.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Unemployment Poetry

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.

Unemployment poetry – August, 1987

           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.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--
For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.