Category: Daily Grind

I started right after Thanksgiving listening 24/7 to KOST 103.5 FM in Los Angeles.

They call this “KOST-ing” (pronounced “coasting”). They are playing nothing but Christmas music 24 hours a day until December 26th. I can’t believe I actually missed a couple days of this at the beginning, but I am on the Christmas train big time now, at work, in the car and during those otherwise introspective moments at home. I am Father Christmas, awash in good cheer.

But a byproduct of this total immersion is that one begins to realize how many Christmas songs have been remade by new, ever-younger performers, and each new generation seems (to me) to have gotten a little farther away from the original meaning of the song, until you end up with something like Whitney Houston’s hideous, overwrought version of A Christmas Song. Hey, Whitney: Christmas is supposed to be a time of hope and joy. You don’t have to torture every note until it cries for mercy.

Don’t get me wrong – I think Whitney is a gifted artist, and once we get a little distance on the substance abuse and the general flakiness we’ll no doubt begin to see her as a latter-day Billie Holliday, but I mean, I grew up with straight Christmas carols sung straight: Jingle Bells, Gene Autry singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, choirs doing Silent Night, 101 Strings with classics like God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. Oh, sure, over the years there have been some less-than-antique songs that have squirmed into the lexicon of classics: Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, Bobby Helms’ Jingle Bell Rock, Mel Torme’s original The Christmas Song.

Still, it always jars me when a new one comes along, and my natural inclination is to resist adding any new songs of the season. Like, I remember the first year I started hearing The Little Drummer Boy. It was by The Harry Simeone Chorale, and it arrived for Christmas, 1958. I was just a kid, but this song rubbed me the wrong way on several levels:

• The bible makes no mention of a drummer boy. So they are making up stuff that didn’t happen. And don’t throw Santa at me. This is my indignation. Go get your own.
• My own mother would have smacked me if I had beat on a drum around a newborn infant. I assumed the mother of God would do no less for her little savior.
• “The ox and lamb kept time?” Give me a break. Oxen and sheep have no rhythm.
• Who were those guys singing “Parumpa pum pum?” Couldn’t they find a real drum? Grown men making funny noises = just embarrassing, for everybody.
• Finally, it is not a gift to play a drum for a baby. A gift would involve giving something. He could have given the drum, for example. Then there would have been no song. Fine with me.

But the song hung in there, in spite of my scorn. Soon there were 150 covers of it, and 25 million recordings sold. Twenty-five million. How could it not be a classic? I mean, Christmas is all about the bling. Twenty-five million sales brings a lot of bling. So, long story short, I hated it for about five years, but now The Little Drummer Boy is one of my beloved Christmas favorites, heavy with the emotional freight of many holiday seasons. Eventually David Bowie got on board, and I saw him singing it on television with Bing Crosby! Talk about cognitive dissonance. But we’re not talking about that, are we?

But, in general, what do you think makes a young singer or band want to do a Christmas record (CD)? Is it because they just love Christmas, and want to share their excitement with the world? Or maybe they want to show the parents of their fans that they are not bad people, even though they have shaved their heads, injected pints of ink under their skin and wear safety pins as jewelry?

There’s probably a commercial reason (ya think?). Many of these recordings sound like throwaways, and yet there is an automatic audience for them, and KOST will play them for sure. When you’re looking for hundreds of hours of holiday programming you can’t afford to leave any stone unturned. But, even this early in the season, and as full of holiday spirit as I am, there are a few I wish I didn’t have to hear again:

• Barry Manilow, For All the Children. The children thank you, Barry. Now please go sit down.
• Rod Stewart and Dolly Parton, Baby It’s Cold Outside. This may be the only version in which a conclusion to the seduction is tacked on. Of course Rod wins Dolly over. She stays, he chuckles, creepily. In my dream about this, he can’t get it up, even to fuck her tits.
• The aforementioned Christmas Song, by Whitney Houston. This is done in the style of Mariah Carey, and Whitney should know better. Every note is drawn out with dips and trills until even a marathoner would be out of breath, and still the phrases go on and on. Just stop it!
• Barry Manilow again, for his almost-exact ripoff of an arrangement of Jingle Bells released in the 1940’s by Bing Crosby with the Andrews Sisters. Did he think he wouldn’t get caught at this?
• Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Bruce applies his own tortured growl to this happy little children’s song. At least they try to have a little fun with it, but really all I get from this is “Gosh, maybe Phil Spector really is a genius after all.” (Note: Springsteen’s version is a direct rip of The Crystals’ 1963 version on Phil Spector’s “Christmas Gift” LP. Can’t these guys think up their own arrangements?)
• Burl Ives, Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas. When this hayseed holiday classic hit the streets in 1965 I thought Burl Ives had been dead for at least ten years. Now it looks as if he’ll never go away. (Composer Johnny Marks also wrote Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and, incredibly, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree. I think if you are vocally flexible, you could sing Holly Jolly and Rockin’ Around to the same accompaniment. But really, why would you want to?)

However, I am Jones, not Scrooge, and I like stuff, too:

• Judy Garland’s lush, heartbreaking Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
• Please Come Home For Christmas, by Aaron Neville, The Eagles, B.B. King, and more.
• Elvis’ Blue Christmas. The King. ‘Nuff said.
• I’ll Be Home for Christmas by The Beach Boys. Has any boy’s choir sounded more angelic?
• John Lennon, Happy Christmas (War is Over). Hopeful and useless. My kind of song.
• Eurythmics, Winter Wonderland. Take me with you, Annie.
• Oh, Holy Night, Al Green. Absolutely spine-tingling. Tell it, Reverend.

You’ve got more, of course. What are they? Come on: ‘Tis the season for making lists.

So, Merry Christmas, everybody.

We’ve started to receive anonymous telephoned death threats at my office. The first calls came in the weekend before Thanksgiving. On Monday of that week I arrived to find my usual entrance was locked, and there was a typed sign on the door that read “Please Use Front Door.” I dutifully went to the front door and was confronted by uniformed cops. Not confronted, actually, but they gave me the once-over as I entered. Later I discovered that all the doors except that one were locked, so the police could see everyone who entered, and presumably trap the crazed gunman or booby-trapped terrorist inside the building. Personally I’d rather unlock the doors and get him outside the building and way down the street, pretty much as soon as possible. Cops will be cops, I guess.

When this first started one of the managers of my company went home, and he hasn’t been back to work for over a week. In the beginning I was told that the death threats were directed at him, and he was concerned for his safety and for his family. This made sense to me, as he is a miserable tyrant who attempts to demand respect without earning it. Nobody likes him – not his staff nor his customers. I’ve never met his family but I imagine they are not too pleased that he is now home with them 24/7. He has few discernible job skills and no tact or social grace. So yeah, who wouldn’t want to blow him away?

But now I hear from someone who spoke to the wannabe killer on the phone that the threats were somewhat generic, and any one of us could be in for it. (Disclaimer: I do not take this seriously in any way, despite the locked doors, police presence and now undercover security guards. You shouldn’t worry about me any more than I am worrying, which is not at all.) In the interest of not further compromising my already sketchy anonymity and losing my crummy job, I can’t utter the exact nature of our business here, but let it suffice to say that most people would like nothing better than to unleash a violent, bloody attack on our kind.

So where does this one guy get off taking the threat personally, and taking a whole bunch of time off to boot? The only positive thing I can see here is that maybe his fear has made him aware that he is a turd who needs to mend his ways a la Scrooge before it’s too late. But even that shining light is dimmed by the fact that he is getting a lot of free time while I have to stay here and work!

Well, I have a “real” office (closet-sized, but real) with a locking solid-core door and walls that go all the way up to the ceiling (eat your hearts out, cubicle workers). I have brought my pile of cheap supermarket Christmas CD’s to keep up my spirits and my adoring wife packs a lunch for me every day, so I could hold out in here for a couple of days in the event of a siege-slash-hostage-situation.

Now excuse me while I check the employee manual to see about hazardous duty pay.

I had a migraine a few days ago.

Not the kind I used to get when I was young, a blinding, debillitating pain that wracked my cortex for a day and a half and made me throw up, or want to, and took me out of commission for days afterward. I don’t get those anymore, but I still get migraines.

At least I think that’s what they are. It’s in my head, so no one can see what I see, and no one can tell me what I have. But I had a swirling, shifting, writhing, silvery blind spot in the middle of my field of vision, which over the course of forty minutes moved out to the edges and eventually went away, leaving my eyes unwilling to look at anything bright, my ears unwilling to listen to anything loud and my head full of gravelly cement.

These vestiges are still with me three days later. Everything is difficult. I walk the halls with my eyelids drooping, almost closed. My job, which is child’s play, seems impossible. Driving on the freeway I find my car rushing up to the back of other cars who aren’t going the right speed. In the mirror, my face is haggard and colorless. I wonder who I am, who is this man who can’t do anything, who can’t stay awake and can’t sleep. There’s a piece missing from the middle, an empty place where my identity should be.

I’ve been through this before, once or twice a year, and each time I am grateful that it isn’t worse, like when I was twenty-five, and I had to go to bed and hope for sleep because no amount of aspirin would help. I always wondered what brought these things on, and I never found out. I’m just glad that I no longer wake up disoriented, dirty and disheveled, in an alley behind a cantina in Juarez.

Fellow sufferers, tell me of your pain, as misery loves company.

One-Year Anniversary.

I just realized that today is exactly one year since my first post on this blog. I thought about it a couple of months ago, and decided I wouldn’t mark it with a nostalgic entry reminiscing about the things I’ve learned, the people I’ve met here and in real life, the blogs I read, the blogs that have come and gone and all the history that has taken place in the real world, blah, blah, blah. But then I forgot about it until just now.

Weirdly, it has been a rollercoaster ride for me. I wouldn’t have expected it to be, but there you go.

As always, my heart longs to fly to you.

White bread. Bad for me. But my weakness.

Today I found a half-loaf of white bread in the lunchroom. I was walking past when I saw a brown paper bag on one of the tables. Curious as always, I went in and took a peek. In the bag was the half-loaf. A round, bakery-style loaf of heavily processed bleached white flour, gluten and yeast, the kind of bread that has no nutritional value and starts turning into paste as soon as you put it in your mouth, then goes in and sticks to various parts of your insides, possibly forever.

I turned and quickly headed for the door, but the bread started calling my name. One little taste won’t be missed, I thought. So I went back and took a little bite.

My whole addictive system throbbed with pleasure. It was moist and soft, slightly chewy. Not a gourmet experience. More of a pig-in-mud experience. There was no butter, no cheese, no spread, and none was needed. There was also no bread knife.

I ripped off another piece of it with my bare hand, this one about the size of a small eggplant, and began stuffing it in my mouth. I held the remnants behind my back in shame and stuck my head out the door. No one was in the hall in either direction, so I hot-footed to my office, still pushing more of the glorious gluten into my face.

I got crumbs all over the floor in my office, but I didn’t care. I haven’t had bread like this in years. Get behind me, Worthless Loaf! Cease your siren song! Luckily I only had an hour of work to go before I could get the hell out of there, and back to my home, where I keep plenty of emergency celery.

Yum.

People seem to agree that we need pain.

We all say we are striving for happiness, but we keep doing things that keep happiness at bay. Theoretically, the commenters on my previous post say that pain is necessary so that we may feel happiness. At least the majority of the comments seemed to contain that thought. (To be fair, there are a few who seem ready to rise above this vale of tears.)

It sounds a little like the intellectual equivalent of hitting yourself on the head with a hammer, because it feels good when you stop. Implied in that old gag is the ironic reality that if you hit yourself on the head with a hammer, you will likely never feel good again, even if you do stop. May I suggest that if you go looking for trouble, you will get more than just a nice contrast to happiness?

We may think we need to have some suffering in order to know and appreciate joy, but I don’t believe that any of us intentionally tries to experience misery, like, for our own good. I think we blunder into it when we think we are going to make ourselves happy.

Specifically we hook up with the wrong people. People who will hurt us, take us away from ouselves, distract us from doing what we really want to do with our lives. Sometimes we do this same foolish thing over and over, until our lives are spent, we have no more time, and we have known only this dark, self-inflicted sadness.

Maybe the world is just made like that. Maybe the possibilities that are available to any of us are distributed so that out of every thousand random options, 999 of them will lead to suffering of some sort.

Strangely, I feel fine. I’m just worried about everybody else. I guess it’s my way of tasting the pain that will make my joy so much more intense.
_________________________________________
I’m buried at work, and The Corporation has found a new way to prevent me from getting anything done. I think of this as the ritual Tightening of the Screws. Every month they launch an initiative that makes no sense and causes us all to have to figure out a new way to accomplish the tasks they ostensibly require of us. I think their goal is to drive out all the real workers and replace us with fresh-faced, stupid MBA’s who will play precisely by the book. This time they have really outdone themselves, and I find myself a week behind in certain critical areas, because I have generated – and been the victim of – an avalanche of emails, as I try to get the launchers of this latest initiative to get on board with the idea of taking care of the customers and, oh yeah, making money. Sorry I can’t explain exactly what I’m talking about as I have given up my anonymity here and I could get fired if I get too specific, but rest assured it is Joseph Hellerian in scope.

And that’s why I’m writing this sophomoric stuff, cuz my brain is fogged up. Hey, at least I’m not putting up memes and quizzes. Who is your Victorian sex doppelganger? Hmm. Maybe I’ll do a quiz later.

I can take a hint.

Careful readers will recall that I broke into the empty towel and toilet paper dispensers at my office a few weeks ago and illegally refilled them. I did this because it was looking like no one else was going to do it, and they were empty, and I couldn’t stand wondering how folks around here were managing to wipe their butts.

So today I found this in my mailbox at work:

So this is sort of a warning to you all, a corollary to the military axiom “Never volunteer for anything.” Never step up and do anything that needs to be done, even if no one knows you did it, or you will find yourself shopping for toilet bowl cleaning supplies.

A quick update, so no one has to worry about me.

So far, no one has noticed my maintenance work in the bathrooms at my office. I thought I was going to be in trouble for fixing the towel and toilet paper dispensers, but my meeting with The Boss turned out to be work-related (who could have guessed?). To wit, I now have approximately twice as much responsibility, spread across two locations, and no more money than ever.

As Emma Goldman has told me, I am exploited. But I’m voting Republican anyway, because I know I’m on my way to the top!

As always, my heart sways in the gentle breeze of your sweet, sweet gaze.

It’s the small details that tip you off when things are starting to go to hell.

You think Bernie Ebbers woke up one morning and said “I think I’ll cook the books about eleven billion dollars’ worth today”? That’s not how it happens. Little things go wrong, and get covered up. An investment that looked like a sure thing suddenly turns into a big loser. What’s wrong with hiding that loss from Wall Street? After all, everyone is making money. Who cares if some of it disappears down a hole?

But when greed and arrogance and stupidity and corruption all get in the tub with you, get ready to take the bath of your life.

Every coverup involves someone else, a “friend,” an accomplice, and then another and another, and pretty soon there are so many employees spinning plates in the air, trying to keep the show going and the plates from crashing to the floor that no one is there to take care of the details, like putting toilet paper in the rest rooms.

I got a copy of the email when The Corporation fired the maintenance company for our building. It was crude, blunt, almost cruel. It listed at least a dozen locations where The Corporation was “making a change,” bringing in a new janitorial service, including at the place where I work. They must have found someone who’d do it cheaper. Just like that, 20 or 30 janitors are out of work, maybe their whole company is out of business.

The corporate structure allows for one and only one goal. Like a shark that must keep swimming ahead to keep eating, The Corporation must keep improving the bottom line. All the workers want raises, the managers need to demonstrate their skills (and get raises), the officers and the board have those pesky yacht and Maserati payments to make and the stockholders want growth or else they’ll take their money and go home.

So all of them – us – spend our days cranking out more product and peddling it to whomever we can. The supplier corporations, the transportation corporations, the auditing and accounting corporations, the lawyers, the doctors, the consultants, the technicians, the advertising system – print, radio, TV, direct, web – they are all trying to beat each other and sell something to my corporation, while at the same time swimming like sharks and eating everything in their paths, making more and more money every quarter. It is a magnificent sight to behold.

Until a corner starts to crumble. Until someone hires a cheaper janitorial service and sends triumphant copies of the email to everyone who could remotely care about the cost-cutting involved. Until the old janitorial service packs up it’s vacuums, mops and brooms and walks out with the keys to all the towel and toilet paper dispensers. Until the new janitorial service thinks it’s someone else’s job to refill those dispensers. Hey, if it were their job they’d have the keys, right?

In a few days, all the dispensers were empty. I don’t know what everyone was doing with their wet hands and their stinky anuses. Maybe they were bringing stuff from home and keeping it in their desks. Wet hands you can wipe on your shirt, but the other…

I really did try to find a key. Why would you lock up toilet paper in the first place? OK, of course I know. Think of it as a Socratic question. I asked everyone on the staff, and I ransacked the storeroom and the broom closets, but the keys to the dispensers were gone. I got paper towels and toilet paper out of the storeroom myself, and placed them strategically around in the restrooms, the lunchroom, in locations where they might do some good. But the rolls kept ending up in puddles of water on the lunchroom counter, or puddles of urine on the rest room floor. Our facilities were starting to look like those of a bankrupt gas station on California State Route 99, a desolate and dilapidated stretch of highway that runs north and south through the great central valley, forgotten since the interstate went through thirty years ago. In other words they looked like the fall of civilization, the crashing of plates to the floor, the beginning of the end.

My theory, and the reason I did what I did, was that if I could stop this little detail from crumbling, if I could somehow keep up the appearance that whoever was in charge had his/her lights on, then maybe the whole place wouldn’t start down that road to hell.

So what I did was, I got a big screwdriver and, emulating the 13-year-old kid who’d stolen my car a few years ago, I jammed it in the keyhole of the nearest towel dispenser and punched out the lock. Then I pried the door open and loaded the dispenser. Then I went into the stall and did the same thing with the toilet paper dispenser. I made no effort to conceal my activities. I was proud of them. Sure, the towels and tissues were no longer secure, but, goddammit, they were available. Also, the doors to these dispensers were now a little bent and flappy.

I had a little free time, so I did all the rest of the rest rooms in my end of the building, and I fixed the towel dispenser in the lunchroom, too. I was, literally, on a roll.

But now I have a meeting with the General Manager, at which I will have to explain my actions. It turns out that my helpful team-playing might also be seen as vandalism and malicious mischief, or perhaps a precursor to going postal. I’m sure he’ll understand if I just tell him that I was trying to avoid the collapse of civilization.

I’m at the start of what promises to be a very busy week…

…what with my crummy job and writing one stinking line of my protest song every three or four days. Also, I am keeping things brief, as I stated in my previous post.

So. since you were kind enough to come here and see what I had to say, and since I have almost nothing to say, I give you this link to a very funny page of (mis)interpretations of DHS (Dep’t. of Homeland Security) signage.

The picture above is a generic hott guy whom I found on Google, using the search term “hot men.” Don’t try that at work, folks. I really meant, after my callous and beastly previous post, to find a picture of a really hot guy, someone that I myself would find attractive if I found men attractive. But I ran out of time, and thus the quick and dirty Googling. This one’s good-looking enough (perhaps a reader can let me know for sure), but he wouldn’t be my choice. For one thing, I think he’s laughing at me. Uproariously.

Click here for the humor, and remember my love goes with you, but not to the bathroom.