Watching a PRon

Sorry for the gap, friends. I haven't had internet access for the past few days, so I wrote these out in word and will cute and paste them here.

It’s the eve of the election. I won’t be able to post this entry until tomorrow, or even the day after that, because of a complex situation with our internet. We subscribe to Verizon, but we can’t get it to work in the house. For complicated reasons, I was able to set up a Comcast box so we could at least get a signal, but we knew it would go away and it did. Now the trick is going to be to get Verizon to find some way to get us a signal without having to pay extra, unfair fees.

The only election talk in the w came from an impassioned owner on the phone with a friend. He yelled at the friend and went through a litany of problems with Obama: he idolizes Farrakhan, he wants everyone to be paid thirty dollars an hour so that we’ll lose the incentive to work, and he wants to increase the estate tax.

I listened, and said nothing.

*

It was a particularly awful day. We’re getting ready for inventory in two weeks, so I was kept in the w counting items and checking locations. For eight interminable hours. Sheet to shelf. Taking out my tape measure. Measure. Going through boxes, making sure a stray six inch take-off hadn’t fallen into the seven.

One of the critical problems I have with the w is this.

It’s a pretty rotten job. I know there are worse out there, and that from certain perspectives, I have it good. So I sometimes second guess myself and think, well, someone has to run the warehouse. Who am I to think I’m somehow better than this? If I don’t work this tedious, low paying job, someone else will have to.

There are tough jobs that people feel sentimental about upon leaving. I find it hard to imagine there will ever be a time when I look back fondly at my days in the w. I might appreciate it because of my friendship with Billy, and the ways the experienced toughened me in ways that I likely needed.

So what is so rotten about it? That it prevents me from realizing some precious sense of self? The shitty wages and meager benefits? The co-workers who stand around whistling and telling stupid jokes while you’re trying to count?

Of course, I exaggerate here. It’s not all that bad. But to explain, with clarity, why it’s that bad for me is a thornier issue.

How to advance? The universe owes me nothing, but what I want remains unclear. I’m fighting shadows!

*

Or at times, I am. Tonight I’m already looking forward to cracking open a winter ale and watching the elections with Jess, this same time tomorrow.

Day two of internet-less life continues and it causes unexpected problems.
Because I can’t connect to itunes, I can’t import cd song data. I brought a big stack of cds downstairs to rip while I write, but I’m going to have to leave off working through the pile.
The kittens are with me. Either they’ve stopped wanting to stand on the keyboard or they’ve picked up, finally, that it is off limits. One stands on either side of the keyboard, still, like lions at a library. They are writer’s cats.

*

When I got home earlier today, Dufflebag turned up the volume of the tv while I was trying to talk to Jess. I didn’t want to be outdone by Judge Judy, so I said, “In our house, people come before tv.”

“It was my house first,” Dufflebag said.

“No, it’s ours,” Jess said.

I was happy she came to my defence, but the war of humanity against television was lost long ago and I realized I was only in the way. So I climbed into the attic and started working out.
I’ve made the attic nicer yet by hauling up push-up bars, strength cabes, a medicine ball, and, today, speakers for my ipod and a space heater. The music was a nice addition: I did a pushup routine, mixed with yoga and shadow rolling (bjj done without a partner) to the soundtrack of Mission of Burma – music apt for both activity and the atmosphere of the attic.

Who knows? Maybe there is hope for the human yet.

*

While studying in England, the literature prof pulled a trick on us that I later found out was made famous by some poet or another.

He gave us lines from various poems and had us rate them by preferences.

After writing the results on the board, the results were clear: Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and Byron were at the bottom. Larkin and Owens were at the top. I can’t remember who I chose as number one, but later found out he was as minor English poet of the mid-twentieth century.
It wasn’t an exercise to show us how poor our taste was – rather, the opposite. The more literary the student, the more likely to choose unknown writers, without mystique. Much in writing, art, jiu-jitsu – is about this nimbus that surrounds major figures. We are taught to mistrust our own judgments, for better or worse. Our early judgments ought to be second guessed: they can be naïve, ill-formed, and uneducated in the real sense. It seems to take some vast effort, coupled with life experience, to get to the point where we can trust our quick judgments to be other than snap.

*

I am wearing noise cancelling headphones, but there’s still an odd buzz at the periphery, perhaps illusory, of some distraction, something to remind me that this is something other than a quiet house, with those quiet spaces where an odd, but for me, welcome, sense of ahistory, might creep in. Or a ghost. Or, a sense of history or something beyond history, but not what we normally get: purgatory, stasis, static and hum.

None of this means I don’t watch tv. Only that I also like to have time when it isn’t on.
It reminds me, I guess, of my mother, who sits in front of the tv all day, in a near stupor, ringed with a vague anxiety. Nature of the beast.

*

Funny thing about my reporting is the lack of immediacy. Like a nineteenth century newspaper, these entries might not meet with a reader’s eyes for days or a week after events have occurred.

“What’s a substitute for bread and beans?
Do engines get rewarded for their steam?”
-“John Henry,” the Johnny Cash version

*

The political commentary on both sides of the divide was so heated today that it quickly became tiresome. All I really wanted to hear was rumors, not analysis. I wanted to know who might be Secretary of State and if Palin went back to Alaska and stayed in all day eating Ben and Jerrys. That's all! Just rumors and personalities.

There was some good analysis -- Moyers went on NPR yesterday and showed himself to be one of the few people both historically insightful and honest about present conditions.

I worked overtime today, logging nearly ten hours of driving. My mind is numb.

I can never remember the ideas I get for writing, so I keep a piece of cardboard in my pocket and jot them down. Even the most obvious ideas for entries seem lost when all you want is a burger.

So I did have an entry update tonight, but I lost the idea because I lost the cardboard. It's out there, somewhere.