PLAGUE DADDY

I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me. What interests me is being a man.
–The Plague

I’m finally done with always trying to get it right
I drink a flat Coca-Cola in the cold sunlight…
–Cory Branan

White collar work.  It’s got its charms.  Maybe the honeymoon wore off but I’m glad I made the leap.  I started there full-time on January 16.  I’d just got back from Philly and Portland the month before.  To say I was burned out is an understatement.  I’d self-published my 6th full-length and Will Stenberg‘s too.  I read on both coasts and captained parties throughout the holiday season.  Looking back I think it was the people I was working for that burned me out the most though the new clientele can take it to another level.  I’ll stand up to ’em and raise my voice but do you know what a drag it is to have to do that every time you go into work?  My second day there someone put a bullet on my desk but I’ve seen it all.  If decades in the food service industry haven’t made me fearless then they’ve made me hard to kill.  Coming up in the city taught me much, not the least of which how to size up a Somalian gangster wannabe in the office of a cinder-block building in the barrio.  I’ve had enough trouble and dysfunction to last a lifetime, certainly enough to see it coming miles away.  The way someone walks tells me everything I need to know anyway.  I either brace myself, cross the street or get out the way and let ’em pass.  These are the options on the street.  Show mercy when you can and don’t be a mark but keep in mind the truly violent hardly give warning.  The yelling and masculine sport out there is dumb and about as interesting as chickenshits -for-brains at a pecking party.  Fuck’s sake man.  How did we end up here?

I started this post writing about being white collar now, for a non-profit in the hood with a needy clientele.  In many ways I found my tribe.  It certainly wasn’t this choad and his Christmas party last December, cursing me up and down for closing the bar early.  The self-made millionaire forgot where he came from and I’d pay money to see him walk that shit in my office’s neighborhood.  Liable to get his whole body chopped off.  Point is things are copacetic, mostly, staring at a screen all morning, literally punching the keys and calling my laptop a cunt, learning a new operating system and software before lunch, taking meetings and getting paid direct deposit, same money on the 15th and 30th with bennies and a desk I haven’t sat at or seen since March 23.  I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m happy now because–well, because I’m not.  You try working 20 years in the trades only to discover you didn’t have to and could in fact make more money doing less as long’s you don’t mind burning all your patience either teaching someone how to print a doc or learning yourself–how write curriculum, copy and get it all on film and to the city before they take your funding away.  I work 30 hours for the non-profit and “come home” and get to work.  I’m not happy, who is, but I’ll gladly keep an office in the hood and rather do work at a screen and desk than ever have to step foot behind a millionaire’s coded gate in serving whites with a tight grin and a heart full of hate again.

IN ANTICIPATION OF CHARLES BUKOWSKI’S 100th BIRTHDAY THIS SUMMER,THE SCHUYLKILL VALLEY JOURNAL WILL BE HOSTING A READING THIS SUNDAY TO CELEBRATE AND PROMOTE THE RELEASE OF ITS BUKOWSKI ISSUE.  DM ME FOR THE LINK.

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…At 45 I’m not celebrating the life but glad I got one. It’s not free or perfect and it doesn’t feel as good as a bourbon at sunrise, cigarillos in the shade and anyway the complete and utter devastation that comes from fucking within an inch of your life, drenched in sweat and dead under her slow and spinning fan…
continue reading at Into The Void