i think

i may have to start a different blog for my political material... because i actually want people to read it.

regardless.

a working class rant:
today as i walked to my high rise office building in the embarcadero district of san francisco, surrounded by the bay itself, views of oakland and the bay bridge, expensive places to buy food and fancy florists I passed charles schwab windows emblazoned with the clever slogans of their campaigns focused on getting everyday folks to invest their money in something with charles schwab

one of these slogans reads "planning for your retirement? or hoping to?"

everytime I see that fucking slogan i think about my father. yes, he was downwardly mobile; yes, he is self-employed; yes, he hates bosses and taxes and you, if you cut in line. my daddy was hoping to plan for his retirement, but that's not how things went. instead, a series of events determined our descent from the working class to the poor, where desperation became a member of the family.

it started when a roof he repaired in palm springs leaked when it rained, of all the ironic things, and they sued the pants off of him; his truck full of tools was stolen; an economic crash leveled the real estate economy, which made work extremely difficult to find for a self-employed residential remodeler. Daddy has always, on top of these new circumstances, systematically and unabashedly undervalued his carpentry. We lost our house and almost everything we owned and moved in with his new girlfriend and my to-be forever stepmother, Alyce. Now he owns nothing, has nothing, lives from job to job, check to check.

He is 60 now. After 40+ years of heavy manual labor, not to mention a few good bone-breaking and back-snapping beatings over the course of his exciting life, his body feels every movement and shift. still and yet he shoulders rolls of tar papers and stepladders up to second and third story roofs through creaky hips and achy knees.

daddy, why don't you hire some folks and just be the head contractor guy? you're too skilled and too old to be doing this shit anymore.

i don't want to stop working. i love working, audrey. working defines me as a man, its my art. i can't imagine my life without work. i'm gonna work until i die. that's what i want to do. you're gonna have to get used to that. anyway, i can't trust anyone to produce the quality of work that i do for my clients.

but daddy, you're just going to die sooner if you do that. and that's not fair to me or zack or jay.

it's my life. i will do with it what i want. if i don't want to live without working then you should respect that. anyway, what would i do for money?

zack and jay and i would figure that out, papa. just because it's hard to think about not working doesn't mean you should do it til you die, for fuck's sake.

i don't know, babe.

Subtext: I don't have any money, i'm afraid to be a burden on my kids, and i have no idea what i would do with my time if i didn't work so hard everyday that I was exhausted.

What would you do, charles schwab? are you gonna take money that doesn't exist because of the machinations of a manipulated economy and destructive patriarchy and invest it in a market that systematically exploits people like my father? no. you'll just make it seem like its accessible, promote the possibility... and bring up feelings of resentment each day as I walk to work.