Employment Considerations

There are advantages to unemployment.

Last Friday a man filed suit against a Florida temp agency because he lost his penis and testicles on the job.  Not “lost” as in, “So, this is the big Bermuda Triangle warehouse…hey, where did my penis go?” No, this “lost” was the “Ow! Your machine just cut off my penis!” variety.  Although I’m sure his version sounded more like, “AHHH! AH! AH! AH! AH!” 

Few words properly encompass the emotion behind, “I’ve lost my penis.” Trust me.  I’m speechless, and I know right where mine is.

“There, there, little batman. It’s ok…you’re still attached. Go back to sleep…”

And this Florida guy didn’t screw around with his castration. He let the machine take his testicles too. I don’t know how temp agencies work in Florida, but I usually make the employer pay me, not the other way around.

This guy didn’t know how Florida temp agencies worked either. He was new to our country. He’s a Puerto Rican national. According to his soprano claim, Edgardo Toucet was sent to a machine shop, where he was shown a peeler.

No, bigger.

Right idea, bigger still.

There we go. Yes. Edgardo was told to work the foam peeler without any proper training. Adding to his difficulty, Edgardo doesn’t speak or read any English either, explaining why he didn’t know to keep his penis clear of the spinning razors.

I thought penis preservation was a universal concept, but it just goes to show how insensitive we Americans are to other cultures. To each their own. To Edgardo, he got his in a bag to go.

Now I’m not blaming Edgardo. Oh at first I was. At first, I was looking at the picture of the peeler going, “How did he get it there…” I even stood at bar pretending it was a peeler, trying to understand how he could get it caught...

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave, your disturbing the other patrons.”

I’m sorry; I mean the bar at my house.

“Honey, I’m going to have to ask you to leave, you’re disturbing the cats. Oh, and here’s a Clorox wipe for the bar. Take care of that.”

I still don’t get it, but according to the Orlando Sentinel, Edgardo isn’t the first victim of this particular peeler. That’s right, this has happened before.

“Oh… “

Now this makes sense to me on so many levels. I’m still a little confused about the how, but obviously it’s a pattern. Maybe the machine’s possessed. I’ve read about that in Stephen King books.  It could happen. The point is, the machine is collecting penes. Men shouldn’t work it. The regular workers know it. They won’t touch the peeler with a twelve-inch—never mind. They won’t touch it. So when a temp comes in they send him to the official temporary work station.

“Uhm, why are there candles, a pentagram and is that blood on the machine?”

“I thought you didn’t speak English?”

“I don’t, but I found this important enough to try.”

“Oh, right. Good effort. The candles are for light, the pentagram shows you where to stand.”

“And the blood?”

“You’ll figure it out.  It’s perfectly safe. Remember to pull down your pants.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I said ‘there might be ants...’”

 Ants or no, that seals it. I’m a writer not a worker.  The worst thing that can happen to me now is a scalding coffee burn.

All things considered, I’m okay with that.

“Back to sleep. It was just a bad dream, little batman…”

And the Winner Is?

Next week is the Grammy Awards.  You and your Water Cooler Club watching?

I might.  I’m undecided.  I haven’t watched for the last few years. Some say it’s because I’m bitter ever since I lost my music industry job. Some also say that Pete Rose was bitter after they kicked him out of hockey, and he was a lot closer to the puck than I ever was to a Grammy, or the music industry, really. Trust me.

No, my “music industry” gig was playing “name that tune” for the radio machine, and selling playlists to the highest bidder. I was a sort of a radio & record James Bond, without the Martinis, the guns, or the women. Still, a pretty good gig while it lasted. It lasted till the same technology that brought you Shazam (the song identifier, not the super hero.) started naming all the music for me.

“Shazam! Shazam! Shazam!”

Yah, still wrong Shazam, Gomer Pyle.

And I, like Charlie Bucket’s father and the toothpaste factory, was out of a job. In a way I was bitter, but more like, “wow, that was a waste of time,” and not like “I’m with you Pete Rose! I hate music!”

Still, over the last few years, I’ve have kinda hated music, but that had nothing to do with my old job, Pete Rose or Gomer Pyle.  Okay, maybe Jim Nabors did freak me out a bit, but that was different.

“Well Sergeant Carter, have the lambs stopped screaming?”

Don’t remember that one? It’s a lost episode. Just like my music. 

Music has been on the downbeat for a few years.  There’s nothing new. That’s not to say there’s nothing good. I do like all the artists up for album of the year. Jack White, Mumford & Sons, Black Keys, Frank Ocean, and Fun.? All great. I don’t care who wins. They deserve it, but are they new? Not really. Not even Frank & Fun., who are up for the Best New Artist Award, don’t sound that new.  They sound like every other song on every other radio stations.

Good, but not new, and now it’s good and stale.

The good news is music is cyclical. For every down, there’s an up, and with every beat, there’s hope that things will get funky again and meet on the one. I’ve seen it happen before. When I was a kid, I was lolled into a stupor by disco, but shaken awake by punk and funk. That was the late 70’s early 80’s. The new music came as a backbeat to the gas crunch, high inflation, unemployment, and hostages in Iran. It came as a way to cope, and voice of dissatisfaction.

Then life got softer, and so did the music. Yuppies ruled, and money flowed. By the end of the 80’s a faceless army of hair-bands partied and rappers lost street cred. Paychecks written by mall rats paid for music’s soul and every musician danced to the same lifeless tune.

We didn’t worry, we were happy.

Then we went to Iraq, and woke up next to Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. A new high jobless rate drew us out of the mall in an early morning walk of shame.

“I hope I can get home before anybody sees me wearing Lycra.”

That’s not to say we sobered up, we just needed a new drug, different from the one Huey Lewis had sold us. Some found it the industrial haven of Nine Inch Nails, who built up a sonic wall, and preached the evils of God money. We were all game, until Trent told us what he wanted to do to us like an animal. Then we were really into him.

Nirvana came out sounding like a noise we’d never heard before. Something harmonious and brash and wailing, but always new, even compared to the grunge-clones we tried tying them to.

“He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs…”

“Shazam! Shazam! Shazam!”

Tupac gave us California Love, and we only felt a little dirty for accepting it, and Oasis built us a Wonderwall. It was nice a gift.  Then life got better and the music suffered again, and it has been nothing but the same ever since.

Now, we’re enduring the worst recession, the mortgage industry has failed us, and jobs are harder to find than a long term Taylor Swift relationship.

“Shaza—“ It ain’t happening, Gomer. Give it up.

I’ve gone through the old pain and suffering, again. Now where the heck is my new music? Where’s my “Hell yah, that’s how I feel!”?  Where is my frackin’ consolation prize? Something is horribly wrong when so many American’s are unemployed for so long that we have to give them a name (the 99ers), and the only consolation that they get is Carly Rae Jepsen patting them gently on the back and saying, “Call Me, Maybe.” At least with Trent we got a reach around.

“I lost my home in 08 and all my banker got me was this Justin Bieber T-shirt.”

Now it’s Grammy time. I just don’t know if I have the heart to watch, because I don’t know if they’ve got the heart to make new music.

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.