I Read the News Today, Oh Boy!

Guess what?  Georgetown University has announced another statistic that I’ve achieved.

Whoo-Hoo!

At first the whole great white caboose thing was kinda cool. I mean, I wasn’t chic or popular, but when it came to the American norm, I was the man. Divorce, foreclosure, laid off, if Grant Wood and Norman Rockwell had a paint fight over the American dream, I would be the drippings.

Now Georgetown is throwing out new statistics at the American Rob, and smacking him right in the face. Now I’m sort of like that Thrift Shop song that’s hitting the radio: fun at first, but after a while it’s just tired and worn out. I know. You still think it’s cute. Give it time. Trust me.

“I wear your granddad’s clothes, I look incredible…”

So what other American dream have I achieved now? According to a new Georgetown study, students who earn a two-year AA degree are making better money than students who earn a four-year bachelor’s degree.

Yup.

My Mass Comm BA and I can attest to that. Then again, in my unemployed state, there are high school graduates making more money than I am.  They didn’t spend a dime on their degree. I’m waiting for that statistic next.

On the other hand, I am off the graph areas: my student loan is paid off. Who else can say that? Yeah, who’s the dummy now!  Now watch this:

paycheck – loan payment = income.

Where paycheck = 0 and loan payment = 0…

Oh.

Holy Econ 101, Batman!

Well at least four years of school taught me how to work that kind of higher math. Maybe I should have gone for my master’s degree; then I could have learned to deal with the resulting depression from my results of mathematics.

Georgetown did offer one hopeful caveat. Their study furthered that in the long term and fine print, a bachelor’s degree earner would earn more than an associates degree earner.

Now that’s more like it. I now have something to work for. I still have a lot of long term left. That’s why I spent the longer term in college. I can win the long game. I have the extra education. I have the tools. I have the technology.

“We can rebuild him…”

I just need to play for the future. In the end I’ll come out ahead. Just like all those other artists whose work became famous after they died.

After they died…

Wha…?

Ok, so my plan needs work. Still, I’m a long-term white caboose, and my game isn’t over and I’ve got time to figure out how to play that game out.

Or time to be the best greeter Wal Mart has ever seen.

Time

Lost Gatherations

So you’re standing at the water cooler.  Theo, from accounting, the dude with the bad breath, but a really sweet fire-orange Vette steps up and grabs a cup. In fact, if it weren’t for the Vette or the fact that Theo supplies the office donuts, you might not talk to him. I mean he did hit on your sister at the office party last Christmas…

But anyway, I digress. You, Theo, water cooler: It’s Monday, what do you discuss?

The Superbowl?

The Commercials?

Intense Beyonce Barbie, with the kung-fu action grip?

Jenny McCarthy’s new foot tattoo?

The recent discovery of Richard III’s bones?

Ahhh, the water cooler. The time honored opinion hub of the office space.  It’s like the coffee room, but cooler people are less jittery and don’t jump topics like derailed trains, because the caffeine has hypercharge their ADD.

“Farmers…Ram Trucks…Clydsdale…Flacco…Harbaughs…touchdown…Squirrels!”

I know! Add some hashtags and you might as well be reading a blog. Not my blog: I’m not coffee topical.  I’m highly untopical, unless you’re talking ointment, then yah, rub a little on the rashy spots. I am an irritant, but I too avoid the coffee corner.

Especially when that pseudo-intellectual goth-girl, Kat, is there. She’s the temple of conversational doom, because she knows so much more than everybody else, except her musician boyfriend. He’s a freakin’ genius. He’s so indy he’ll never succumb signing with a record label, even if they did ask…

Yeah, you talk a lot about Kat at the cooler. She’s never there. The worst irritant at the water cooler, other than Theo, who never leaves (making him a close second), is Cal.  He’s a slosher.  He can’t seem to talk without his hands. Learned that the hard way, right? Last time you’ll wear silk to the office again, huh? Still, Theo, Cal, and even Barb, from HR, are good people. They know a lot about the world around them, and talking to them is much better than anti-social living through Twitter.

Water people are cooler people. They’re local. Their concerns are your concerns, and yeah, sometimes Cal breaks into Goo Goo Dolls’ classics like he’s wailing bar anthems, but that’s just cuz it takes him back to college. Cal was also the one who got you to understand the “fiscal cliff” using sugar packets and Dixie Cups impaled on stirrer straws. And Barb says so long as he stays away from the feminine hygiene closet this time, corporate will allow him try to explain Obama Care again. 

“I just want you to know who I am!”

“Damnit, Cal! You sloshed me again!”

The best thing about water coolers over Anti-social Media? Nobody at the water cooler, including Nina, the self-proclaimed grammarian, uses the word “trending.”

Nothing trends at the cooler. It’s life. It happens. Conversations flow. They don’t follow pre-forged rails designed by marketing analysts, and anti-social media experts. The water cooler never burbles with the meh, unless the topic is meh.

“Barb, what’s up with the new co-ed bathrooms?”

“Nothing. It’s just PC meh.”

“Meh, isn’t used like that, Barb.”

“Carful Nina, or she’ll ‘meh’ on your performance review.”

…

Nina’s a good know-it-all.  She knows when to shut up.  That’s the other thing about the water cooler.  Everybody knows when to talk, and when to listen.  Yah, Theo’s a little wordy, but you all know that about him, and you know when to avoid him.

“Did you see how they ruined the new Star Trek?”

Sometimes I’m jealous.  I don’t hang out with your get-along-gang.  I’m a loner. I get my news from the media, without the personal touch.  I translate how it affects my life, but I don’t get Cal’s extra special insight, or Nina’s intense corrections.

That’s why I worry about those who came behind the great white caboose. On the caboose, we were still part of something, a collective. When it derailed, it left many of us looking to make something of ourselves. The only element of capitalism we pulled into our hobo sack before disembarking was the bundle of “me.”

We took that we were all special stars and turned that into enterprise. Facebook, Twitter, they’re all about the “me.” It’s no longer about the give and take at the water cooler, it’s about me saying what I have to say, whether you’re listening or not.  It’s the great wall of “me.”

On the one hand, it’s good. It removed the gatekeepers, like Kat and her friends, who blockaded the doors, and never let any of us play their reindeers games, because they’re still bitter about what happened in high school. 

What happened to “what happened in high school stays in high school?”

Why did my generation carry the cross of being unpopular only to plant it in everybody else’s front yard with a placard saying, “None shall pass”?

So Hooray! The next generation broke through, but only to lose themselves in the Social Media mirror. 

I Tweet, therefore I am.

Where is the age of the ensemble?  The choir singing together? Where is the community? Where are the relationships that forge us like sharpening swords? Now we can’t revolt, because we can’t even figure out what revolt over.

“We have met the enemy, and he is revolting.”

Until we come back together, it’s gone. And if it continues this way, we may even lose the cooler, and I think we’ll all be a little lesser for that. Except, Kat.  She’ll get by.

Friends of the Caboose

Check that out!  A friend of mine sent it to me. The picture, not a real caboose—that would have been way awesome! Most friends send gifts or money. My friends send gifs, no money. Hey, at least my friends read my blog.

What are friends for?

I hope more than reading blogs. We write emails too. We used to write letters when we were kids, but that was before stamps cost more than a weekly allowance.

“Dude! How are you? I am totally fine!”

Stick that in the mail, draw some freehand monster artwork, add a dash of big hand-drawn spotted-font “HOWDY”s, and a compliment of “I saw the coolest girl…” angst and your up to date with our teen correspondence.

There was the time I included the smattering of hand-squeezed Minnesota mosquitoes, but let’s keep that one on the down low.  Minnesota has some harsh wildlife transportation laws.

“Sorry officer, I was young. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse, son.”

That’s what friends are for. Introducing you to the local law enforcement. That and 3:00 am games of “You know what sounds like fun?” Those usually end in introductions to the local law enforcement, or calls from the hospital.

“Yah, greasing the shopping cart wheels was probably overkill, but icing the ramp was an awesome idea!”

Friends are the people who help decorate your skeleton closet. They’re also the ones who crash your pity party and teabag you until you get your crap together.

Okay, we were never that close, but I would have hired a stranger to teabag him. That’s the least I could do: we’ve known each other forever. And that’s why he sent me a white caboose.  He was too poor to afford a teabag surrogate.

They’re expeinsive in Detroit.  Who knew?

My friend knew how to make me laugh. Isn’t that enough?  He thought I was down about the Great White Caboose.  When I said somebody else had written about that, he thought I was down about that too.

I wasn’t down, but it was so cool that he asked about my caboose. I told him that I’ve accepted the Great White Caboose. I own it.  Somebody else writing about it? That’s fine too. I’d rather someone else whined about it than me. Let their publisher throw them a tea bag party.

I’ve got a better party. A party of friends and family, who care enough to check in, and nothing is better than that.

Okay, maybe owning a real white caboose.  That would be way cool.

The Great White Caboose

Today’s blog, begins with an excerpt:

I am the caboose of the great white American locomotive.

Whoo! Whoo!

Here, take my hand. Climb aboard. I’ll give you the tour.

Let’s start with engine.  That’s where the power is. You’re looking at history’s generator. Feel your thighs rattle like you’re straddling a jackhammer set to “thrill?” That’s 200 years plus of phallic power thrusting this sleek beast into greatness. George Washington, Tom Edison, Bill Gates, they’re the coal and steam, the insatiable hunger and the lust lunging the great white head toward the Eve of manifest destiny.

That’s one monster dynamo of locomotion! It has to be! That’s what it takes; hauling all these bloated white cargo cars at immeasurable speeds.  Don’t stand in its way! The full weight of white wrath will knock you back like a tribe of Indians—but that’s another history stop along the way.

Let’s go to the next group of cars. Here you’ll find the robber baron boxcars. They supply fuel to the white machine. They only take up a few cars, but these are the primo luxury cabins, so slip on your white gloves, and don’t even knock without donning a day coat.

The other cars? Oh, they’re loaded with the apathetic, lazy and voyeuristic masses, yearning to be carried for free by the steam of other’s greatness.

Step quickly to the caboose! The languor here is contagious!

Woah!  

Watch your step! A history hic-up, has uncoupled my great white caboose from the great white train. Quick! Wave to the baby boomers as they hurtle into the pasty sunset.  See them smile? They made the train.

The rest of us on the caboose? Take a look over my shoulder, to the barren tracks stretching to the American wasteland. That’s my future. That’s the white train legacy: a trailing generation birthed in the last car of a runaway train and raised on the promise that the tracks of the manifest blessing of the great pale birthright would go on forever.

And so it does, even if we’ve stopped.

It’s a history that was good enough for generations before, and damn-it, it would be good enough for me. If only I had made the train. If only I wasn’t the uncoupled caboose in a generation sitting dead on the tracks. Left behind to be a white dot on a statistical map.

You are here.

            Our choice is to walk the rails and hope to catch up, or strike out on our own, setting our own destiny. We chose neither of these. We chose a different path; a road less traveled by the on-the-go generations that came before. We chose to wait for another train to come along while whining about our horrible mistreatment by fate.

———

And ends with a whimper:

That caboose ending is how a happy go lucky book I began writing a few years ago started. It was good. It was true. It was exceptionally whiney.  Nobody needs that, not even the great white caboose. We need a call to action, and when I started that book, I didn’t have one. Which, seemed to prove the point I was making by writing the book, really.

But I’m a hopeful guy. I wanted a better ending, so I shelved the effort.

I was told that somebody else has since written the book, using different words. Good for him. I hope he caught the train. Me, I eventually struck out across the wasteland forging my own path.

Funny thing is that along my path I tried becoming a cog in the great machine, and the machine has found me wanting. Not because I’m some mal-shaped malcontent Robcog, but because the machine looked at my gifted teeth and said, “No, we don’t need you.”

Luckily the machine loves MyQueen more than it loves me. Still, life would be a lot easier for us if, for my part, we didn’t have to wait for the occasional writing job that paid, like desert wanderers waiting for rain.

“Oh, look, the vultures are leading us to prosperity!”

I could go back to retail and such, but MyQueen has already said, “no,” and I breathed a sigh of relief when she said it. I hate that work, but I would do it.

The pill that gags me is the big oval one that’s supposed to relieve the angst I get from failing to use the skills and training I’ve been given. 

My skills? I’ve got a face for radio, and a voice for mime. No, that’s not true. Well, not the voice part, anyway…

Back in my high school fast food days, I worked the drive through. A simple, but high pressure task for a fast food place, because there’s one row of hungry drivers needing to get back on the road before they realize the food they’ve waited for is a flat bun beef-puck and a soft drink, sans straw.  Me, I had a great voice. I worked it. Seriously, ask the ladies, they loved me, until they drove to the window and saw Opie-boy Robby. Then they felt like dirty old ladies.

“Oh my gosh, you’re young!”

“Oh yah, baby.” I’d say in my Barry White best, flipping my mullet through the windy air. Oh, ya, those women were butter baby.

I had a gift. After high school I thought I’d use it for good, in radio. I loved music; it seemed like a perfect fit. One year of broadcasting school, and four years later to complete my BA in Mass Communications, I was a trained communicator.

Then life transmitted something else.

If one excuse is a train leaving Chicago at 150 mph, and another excuse is a super-train fast thingy leaving L.A. in one flash per second, they’ll explode into nothingness somewhere around Omaha. But the bottom line is I took a different track. I used my skills in a non-traditional sense and that train hummed along pretty good until all tracks vanished.

Which left me with ten-year-old non-traditional experience baggage filled with my traditional communication skill set. So now I’m walking a wasteland trying to MacGyver my collective media skills into a career.

“I can take this microphone, switch it through a TV mixer, and take the “CNTL” key from a computer, a Photoshop image, some HTML code, and wrap it all together with three strips of duct tape…and there ya go: a career.”

I continue my free writing, which I enjoy immensely, but my years of riding the great white rails are deeply ingrained; I feel the guilt that my skills are not providing for my family. So I continue looking to other work to pay the bills. Other work that uses the skills I’ve learned over 44 years of life experience. Except when employers see my non-traditional experience baggage, and compare it to the traditional baggage they’re looking for, it doesn’t match. Funny, the baggage and experience always worked for me.

They got me here.

Wherever here is, I’m there, with MyQueen, and my great white caboose, snuggling together in my hand woven American Dream blanket.