Category: Life

I chopped all the meat off the Thanksgiving turkey on Saturday.

I always end up with this job, and I have to admit that once I get going on it, it’s kind of enjoyable. It has to be done anyway: Only rarely have I seen an entire turkey consumed down to the skeleton in a single meal, and this means that the carcass has to go into the refrigerator, and each time you want a turkey sandwich you have to get it out and hack away at it for a while, then put it back.

There’s just no efficient way to store a turkey in a refrigerator, what with the odd shape of the platter and the bulges here and there, and each time you make a sandwich it gets harder to find the meat, and you are tempted to take the whole mess and chuck it into the garbage can, but you hate to waste anything in these hard economic times, so eventually the time comes when you have to strip all the edible stuff from the bones, put it in some kind of tidy airtight container and discard the fat, the skin, the gristle and the sad, sad bones.

And so I did.

I started out with a carving knife, which I tried to hone to a razor’s edge but which nonetheless cut sort of like a butter knife. It was good enough for the larger pieces of meat that I could see, but soon it was too big and unwieldy to be of much use. There’s a lot of meat on a turkey that is not immediately apparent to the naked eye.

Tossing the knife in the sink, I flipped the bird over and began clawing at it with my bare hands. This part of the task is the most satisfying, in a primal sort of way. For about ten minutes it was just me and the turkey, a man and his prey, as I tore off the dimpled skin, exposing pockets of flesh and adding to my tasty Tupperware stash. At first, with the knife, I salvaged some pretty good sandwich-style slabs of white meat. As I delved deeper I got a lot of turkey soup kind of stuff, or maybe turkey a la king pieces, those things that are too small and would just fall right out of a sandwich.

I ate a lot of turkey during this, but I still ended up with a good-sized pile of Just the Good Stuff. And then, in the spirit of sharing and giving thanks, both Molly the Cat and Tigger, who had watched the whole process like junkies waiting for their man, each got their own special turkey platter.

Happy Thanksgiving, cool cats.

Here we all are so many years down the road,

all those burned up dreams and daydreams and nightmares past my blurred windows, pale faces entreating us. What was behind that door? I never tried the knob, did you? We live in Dallas and Las Vegas and Seattle and Minneapolis, but mostly in the South because it’s easier on the bones and the sinuses. We’ve been so young so long, so smug we think it’s the Natural Order and we haven’t noticed how everything has changed. That old sport coat, the grey and black checkered one that was too big when I got it for a high school dance — my first sport coat not counting the blue blazer for First Communion, and my first dance or was it the last? I went with my mother and Leon to pick it out at Robert Hall on the traffic circle. That coat still fits, or I should say it fits now for the first time. I must have looked stupid in it. Thank you, Irene, for not laughing. You didn’t think I was as hip as I thought I was, but you let me believe it, and that got me through high school. It wasn’t until years later, when you were fucking your professor in Italy that I saw myself as I really looked in that jacket, stumbling through the clumsy dance steps my friend John taught me in the days before that dance, the magical dance, where I learned my place. I must have known it somewhere deep inside even then, but how Youth blinds us! Now here we all are, at our jobs, with our kids, on our vacations, in our Chinese shoes and our clothes from Target and Nordstrom and Macy’s, all of it fitting pretty good, no more getting things a little big to allow for growth spurts, and most of us still think we are pretty hip, pretty cool. We drop obscure references to the Easybeats and the dbs as if anybody cares, and some of us are still wearing that jacket, only now it actually fits for real, so Mom was right, I did grow into it, and I think I look pretty sharp just like I thought back then. It fits good enough I could wear it to my funeral.

I’ve been posting in this space for four years now.

Sometime last month was the anniversary. I meant to make a big deal of it, but, like all the other years, I forgot. I suppose it’s actually not such a big deal, anyway.

I must be a lonely guy, to do this blogging thing. I mean, I don’t have a lot to say of great import, and I can’t scoop the real news organizations or even the Big Blogs, so in the end the whole endeavor is inconsequential, and what the heck am I doing? I started out just hoping to hook up — virtually — with people I didn’t already know. That part has worked out pretty well, and I’m grateful to the Precious Few who are my bloggin’ buddies. I read your blogs more than I write my own. I know you think I don’t, because your hit trackers aren’t tracking me, but that’s because I read your RSS feeds instead of logging on to your actual blogs. That way I get all of you in the same place, and it’s more like a party.

When I started, it was just weeks before the 2004 presidential election. Holy shit, did that turn out badly! I thought the aberration of George Bush in the White House would end that year, now that people had a chance to see what a dimwit he is. I won’t comment here on the technical validity of that election, but because of what transpired, the life of revision99 closely tracks Bush’s second term.

Thank God that’s almost over now, and let’s hope I’ll be able to continue writing here without paying so much attention to politics (or politix, as it’s categorized in my sidebar).

I think of a lot of things I’d like to write about here, but I can’t seem to get up the energy to do it. If you could all just come and sit in my kitchen I could tell you my thoughts as they occur, without having to get them organized and spell everything correctly. I could also interrupt you when you object to some faulty logic in my rant. That way I wouldn’t have to do any fact checking before I post. Let me know when you want to stop by, and who takes cream or sugar.

Seriously, I want to post less political stuff and more personal stuff, and I want to try to express true, honest thoughts, the better to look back some day and see what I was thinking when I was a young impetuous blogger. I’ll have to walk a careful line, because I know there are some readers who know me in meatspace, and I don’t want to alarm or offend anyone. I probably should have remained totally anonymous right from the start, but I guess it’s too late for that now.

Unless I start a new, totally anonymous blog someplace else. That would free me to be more honest about things, but at the cost of losing all my current bloggin’ buddies. Let me think about that.

I guess the thing that has depressed me the most about my blog has been the gradual realization that I’m not much of a writer. Seriously, there are such good writers out there, unpublished bloggers who are smart, inventive, funny, touching, insightful and compelling. You expect that level of professionalism in a book or a magazine, because there are editors and because the writers are getting paid to do a good job. But it still boggles me how many really great writers there are “out there,” just tossing off post after post after dynamite post, while I struggle just to make sense. I want so much to be good like that, but I’m just not.

I have thought about what I might be really good at, and I believe I can say with some assurance that I am great at driving on the Los Angeles freeway system. This may seem like a small thing to others, but I’m quite proud of it. I rarely bump into anyone, and I am never panicked into getting off at the wrong exit, or getting on in the wrong direction. In the 1960’s, back before Steve Allen became a pompous stuffed shirt, which was a few years before he died, he used to take questions from his studio audience. One tourist asked him what you should do if you miss your exit from a Los Angeles freeway, and without missing a beat his deadpan answer was “Find a girl, get married and settle down, because you’ll never get back to where you were going.”

He was right, and that is totally not me, because I got these freeways wired.

People are standing in line to vote in Los Angeles.

Here in the most nonchalant of states, there is a sense of history in the air, and the coolest kids in school are doing their dorky civic duty. Never mind that California is the bluest of the blue states, the House of Blues, and the presidential outcome here is foregone. People want to be counted.

The place where I work is a polling place, and I have seen three presidential elections here, not counting this one, and numerous state, local and congressionals, and I have never seen crowds like this. When I arrived today there was a line out the door and across the parking lot. One of the poll workers told me that there was already a line when they arrived to set up for the 8:00 AM opening. The polling area remains busy still, in midafternoon.

I’ve received calls from friends around town, reporting the same thing everywhere. On the news they’ve been talking about a record turnout, 130 million voters nationwide, but I didn’t really consider what that would look like on the ground. What it looks like is little “D” democracy.

I’ll be excercising my California right to take time off to vote by leaving here an hour early. I wouldn’t do it except that I have it on good authority that my own polling place has been swamped with voters most of the day already.

I harbor no illusions. This is a historic moment. This election, and the man we are electing, will change this nation forever. At the same time, we face greater challenges than ever before, both as a nation and as a world. After this long, strange, hopeful campaign it feels as if we are at the end of something, and we can finally exhale.

But we’re really at a new beginning. There is a lot of work to do. The problems we all face — the financial collapse, climate change, tribal hatred and war around the world — are bigger than at any time in my life, and make no mistake: we all face them, and there can be no solutions without the work, sacrifice and cooperation of every one of us, regardless of how we vote today.

So please pardon me now, as I go get in line myself. I’ll see you on the other side, and we’ll push on together.

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UPDATE, the morning after: Obama’s acceptance speech — It’s almost too much. I feel as if I have been eating nothing but sticks and dirt for eight years, and I have suddenly been given a spoonful of pure maple syrup. (McCain’s speech wasn’t bad, either.)

I feel ragged and depressed today.

As I type this my friend who got fired yesterday is cleaning out her office. All morning people have been dropping by to commiserate and pay respects. Everyone wants to keep in touch, everyone wishes her the best. She has dragged the industrial-sized trash can from the kitchen down the hall, and through it all she keeps tossing stuff into it. Once it is all gone, she will be gone, too. I can’t imagine how this place will work without her.

Way back in time when the first person tried something that could not be accomplished by one person alone, he must have thought for a while, and then came up with the idea of getting a helper. Maybe they needed to take down a large animal so they would have something to eat. To get help with that project, he probably agreed to share the food. However it was arranged, it had to be understood that the goal could only be achieved through teamwork, that both sides — chief and assistant — were of equal importance in getting the job done.

Economic evolution led to more clearly defined roles between employer and employee, but I’m sure that for centuries in rural settings and small shops it was understood that the workers and the boss were doing essentially the same job, and if the farmer showed no respect for the hired hand he might not get his crops harvested before they rotted in the fields.

People being what they are — thoughtless, greedy and cruel — it eventually became necessary for workers to form unions, as a way to enforce the respect of Capital. Workers supported each other and the thinking was an injury to any of us is an injury to all of us. That era didn’t last long, and the funeral was held as Ronald Reagan busted the air traffic controllers union in the 1980’s.

Now we don’t stand up for each other. We let corporations make all the rules, and we meekly agree to them, and sign documents saying we agree to be on time, never do anything to harm the corporation, wear nice clothes, watch our language, go the extra mile, keep Company secrets and oh, by the way, we can be fired at any time with no notice, no severance, no reason and no recourse.

When the axe falls, the victim knows nothing about it until he sees his head rolling on the ground in front of him. Those who are spared, like me, express regret, but secretly breathe easier, knowing that we will get some unknown number of additional paychecks for some unknown number of future paydays.

This is what I’m doing today, standing in shit up to my neck, waiting for the boss to yell “Break’s over! Back on your knees!”

I’ve tried and tried to get my brain around the “economic crisis” we are in.

I’ve read the straight news and dipped into the financial news. Literally all network news programs on television cover it as the lead story every night. My eyes glaze over with the concepts: recapitalization, credit default swaps, toxic assets, equity stakes, mortgage-based securities. I think I have the big picture, and I can, if pressed, recite a simplified but more or less accurate description of the history, the current problem and the solutions that will now be attempted by the governments of the world.

But I didn’t really feel it until today.

Yesterday HugeCorp, the obscenely ginormous company that employs me, shut down one of their offices near mine. Ten people came in to work that morning, and went home midday without jobs. They were fired by people they didn’t know, executives from the district office, who were carrying out orders from national headquarters.

This is what it feels like on Main Street. It’s not “downsizing.” It’s going home without a job, and realizing that you have to try to find another one at a time when all the companies are firing people. It’s having to decide if you’ve got enough money to keep your health coverage, now that you have to pay the full amount out of your savings, if you have any.

The downsizing arrived today at my office. It turns out I get to keep my job, but my friend K. does not. She’s younger than me, but when I started working there she was already a fixture. Over the years at different times she did most of the jobs that we do. No one can remember a time when she wasn’t there. She was as disgusted as I was when HugeCorp took over our company despite not knowing how to run it, but she never stopped looking for ways to make things better. She always made the best of the situations we were stuck with. She became a counselor to younger employees and reference librarian to old hands. She knew our business inside and out, and if she had a “flaw” it was her insistence that her coworkers at least try to do their jobs as well as she did hers. We laughed together every day, and some days I didn’t think I could take that place if she wasn’t in the office next door.

She had been with the company for 21 years, since long before HugeCorp even existed. The HR person who fired her had not started college when K. started working there.

She wasn’t the only casualty. Tomorrow when I go to work I’ll be almost alone in my department. Those who weren’t fired got relocated, and I won’t see most of them again. I will have to face a couple of managerial types who told me today how hard they “fought for her.” It will be an emotional day, as I try to find a way to keep my own gig together, while in the office next door my old friend clears out the memories of 20 years.

K. left an hour early today, one of the very few times I’d ever seen her do that. I called her cell phone a couple of hours later and she told me she’s a big girl and she’ll be OK but she couldn’t talk right then because she was getting her nails done.

Yesterday this blog disappeared for a while.

Unbeknownst to me, my web host had locked my account. I didn’t try to look at the blog or post anything on it for most of the day, and by the time I realized something was wrong, the billing department was closed for the day. It did seem a little odd that I wasn’t getting any email, since I was expecting something important, but with working at my crummy job and the excitement over seeing Sarah Palin on the teevee, I failed to make the connection.

Apparently what happened is that my bank was swallowed by some other bank, and they canceled all the old credit cards (incliding mine) and issued new ones, and since my payment to my web host is a quarterly automatic hit on the old card, I didn’t know I was in arrears, because, you know, defunct credit card.

So, while it’s safe to say that almost nobody missed me, I apologize to any who did, especially Adorable Girlfriend, with whom I was hoping to watch Biden v. Palin while she was here in LA. She claims she wouldn’t hit on a married man, particularly a goy guy, but I assumed that would change once she met me, so I was prepared to defend my honor.

Why so chaste, Mr. Jones? I get migraines sometimes, and I read this article yesterday, indicating that I might die if I let AG into my pants:

… the strain of juggling married life and a secret lover leads to stress and tension for the cheating partner.
That can lead to migraine headaches which can cause a potentially fatal aneurysm, or ballooning in a blood vessel in the brain.

Of course it’s debatable whether I’d be able to keep our trysts secret, and in any case I may be close enough to heaven without voluntarily putting myself at any greater risk. This is the caution borne of tragic experience, and it may indicate that I am no longer a Fun Guy, but on the other hand I may represent a powerful, stoic challenge to Bad Girls everywhere. Lucky for me my email was down and Adorable Girlfriend and I didn’t connect at all while she was in my town.

AG: I hope we get to meet some day. But no funny business.

My biggest problem with the Bush Administration’s bailout plan is the Bush Administration.

I don’t want the economy to collapse. I’m pretty cranky about the greed, dishonesty and outright stupidity that got us to this point, but I do agree that something probably needs to be done. I say “probably” because I don’t really understand the problem, and the more I read and hear about it, the more I wonder if anyone understands it. Certainly there’s no one on CNN who’s been able to explain it to me in anything better than third grade terms.

So, sure, let’s do something, but here’s the problem: I don’t trust the Bush Administration. Of course, I just generally dislike them for all the usual liberal reasons — I won’t go over them again. But the real problem is that they might be lying. I mean, after the selling of the invasion of Iraq, in which the administration simply made up a bunch of shit, spread the lies vigorously through compliant and supposedly “objective” media, and acted like it was a great big emergency and we had to hand over unilateral war powers to Rove/Cheney/Bush right away and don’t be asking any questions, why should I believe them now?

I can think of various reasons why they might be lying. They might be simply continuing their policy of destroying the federal government because neocons just don’t like the federal government. They might be trying to stall the collapse just long enough for John McCain to get elected. They might already know that John McCain can’t be elected and they might be trying to hand President Obama a big steaming plate of shit sometime next Spring. Hell, George Bush might actually be thinking about his “legacy,” as if he has a chance of salvaging anything there.

But after eight years of this administration playing fast and loose with the truth, why should I swallow their latest cries of impending doom and pony up my share of seven hundred billion dollars? Somebody needs to convince me that Hank Paulson won’t just tuck it into his vest and apply for his old job at Goldman Sachs. You might think that’s pretty far-fetched, that such a thing couldn’t happen in the United States of America. I refer you to the “election” of 2000, in which a barely literate nincompoop got picked to be President despite not getting as many votes as his opponent. Things can happen, folks.

I don’t know exactly how this could be handled in such a way that we won’t have to wonder if it’s just a gigantic bank robbery, the equivalent of George Bush and cronies grabbing the silverware and the chandeliers on their way out of the halls of power. But until somebody smarter than me in Washington has an idea, I’m OK with this bailout not going forward.

A look at my personal bank account will quickly reveal that I am not a financial genius.

Still, even without a degree in economics or any investment track record, I want to go on record right now as saying that something stinks about this 700 billion dollar bailout of Wall Street companies. For starters, let’s all admit that the 700 billion is just… for starters. When has the government — no matter who’s been in charge — brought anything in within budget? Say it with me now: Never. But that’s not my real complaint. Heck, 700 billion here, 700 billion there — once you get the numbers up in that category, what’s the difference, unless they’re literally trying to see if they can spend all the money in the world?

At first I had the typical knee-jerk reaction: “Who the hell do these assholes think they are? They’re making millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses, rockin’ and rollin’ all over Wall Street, operating with no restrictions or government oversight, and all the profits are private, and now that they’re in trouble — trouble of their own making — they want me to pick up the tab for the party, and put the empty cognac bottles in the recycling bin?”

But then I admit I took a pretty big pull from the “too big to fail” kool-aid. You know the argument: These financial institutions hold so much paper, and so many homeowners and business owners and banks and corporations are interconnectedly dependent on their stability that we must save them, just this once, and then we’ll figure out some new regulations and get back to business and this will never happen again and we’ll all be part of The Ownership Society and everyone will be happy.

But now I’m back to my original “what the hell?” position. Over the weekend, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson jotted down a three-page memo that he would like to have Congress pass into law. The law would give him a metric buttload of cash (see above, 700 billion dollars) to do with as he pleases. What he says he wants to do — I think — is buy a whole bunch of bad mortgages, which — I think — will ease the “credit crunch” (sorry, don’t know what that is really), which will in turn restore stability to the economy, and then everyone will be happy. I haven’t read the whole thing, but here’s my favorite part so far:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Nice, huh? No pesky legislators or — AARGH! — judges nosing around and asking questions. Every hedge fund manager knows those guys don’t know squat about money and shit. They’d have everybody in three-piece pin-striped suits, and reading credit applications all the way through before granting loans. How can you make any money that way?

Speaking, as I am, from a position of not really knowing anything for sure about this big money meltdown, I can only say that I am freaked the fuck out.

• Bear Stearns out of business.
• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nationalized.
• Lehman Brothers out of business.
• AIG bought by the government.
• Merrill Lynch sold to Bank of America.
• 4 million homes foreclosed (no one knows how many more are at risk).
• No one seems to know which lenders are holding whose loans and whether the borrowers are willing — or even able — to pay.

That last one is another way of saying that we haven’t seen the bottom of this plunge yet and we don’t know how far we are going to fall or even how close to the bottom we are. Don’t try to argue with me on that. Anyone who says they know what’s going to happen next is bullshitting.

So if that’s true, what is Paulson going to do with the 700 billion, really? I think we can stipulate that it would only be a down payment on what is really needed. It’s probably enough to prevent total global economic failure at least until November 4, which might or might not help John McCain get elected. It seems like a lot of money, doesn’t it? I know it does to me. But if you estimate the world’s total global production at around 60 trillion dollars, which a lot of smart people do, it’s only 1.17% of that. Barely lunch money.

So who’s kidding whom? I agree that something must be done. Maybe the 700 Club is the way to go, maybe not. But not without some adults watching to make sure Paulson doesn’t just use it to help his friends on Wall Street, while stiffing everybody else. Hey, he was the CEO of Goldman Sachs before he was the Treasury Secretary, right? And guess where he’s going when he’s done with this little government job?

Bail all you want, Henry. But I hereby require that Congress amend your little memo to include some accountability to me, one of your bosses and one of the ones who’ll be paying the bills you run up. Also, I want those profligate CEO’s, hedge fund managers, investment brokers and other Wall Street ne’er-do-wells all to be given $40,000 a year jobs, and when they need a bailout, they can call their parents.

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For a nuts and bolts history of what has happened, check out this post, and thanks to Kathleen for the link.

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