A.V. Club comment inspired by Gateways to Geekery-Beat Generation

My 11th grade English teacher got us all interested (maybe only me) in poetry by telling us that Howl had been banned for obscenity before rolling it out for us read, unabridged.
I thanked him with a fire of desire and a longing for meaning in the shallow halls of my teenage despair.
I became his student and found myself watchful of his moves across the street through a classroom window smoking off campus to appease even his masters.
Who was I to call into question his hypocrisy when I spent my time hoping to be liked when I still hated myself?
I drank from his well of knowledge like a whore gulps for money all the while hoping that my pornographic knowledge would set me free.
Instead I accumulated a mental sickness that kept me riveted to the broken lives of so many hipsters whose music would lull me to sleep and allow them to steal my change.
Alas, I came and aimed for a better life and I found it with the help of Peyotyl my god with the cramps in my stom-ache I held my hands to the floor and felt my connection and sang the praise of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac...help me Jack.

And then I decided that my shit ran too long so I gave up.  I did read the "Portable Beat Reader" on the recommendation that teacher though and I loved Peyote Poem by Michael McClure and many others.  So there is that.

Father's Day

Since I became a father almost four years ago I have had a new perspective on the issues that faced my parents while I was growing up.  Sometimes it casts a favorable light on the actions I recall from my youth and at other times I ask myself how I can ensure that I will not repeat what I see as mistakes.  I have also had to reevaluate my conception of family.  Years ago, before I was a father myself, my dad pulled me aside in one of those moments of stern wisdom (at least he thought so) and told me that family is what matters most-that friends will abandon you or move on, but family remains family.  I agreed at the time having been close enough in age to the times when I had terrible friends who were more interested in me as a toy or means to some end, but I have since been more selective of those with whom I associate and also started a family of my own.

What stands out about this now is that even at the time of this lecture he was not particularly open or close with his family.  I recall visits with his family as an adolescent as being marked by tension, church, and little else, save for the smell of an elderly person here or there.  Nothing horrible like molestation at the hands of an uncle or anything like that, but there never seemed to be anything there beyond what I was told I was supposed to feel for these people.  I could tell that they cared about me, much like I know that my dad cares about me, but the whole concept of a loving warmth seems lost on that side of the family.  At this point in my life, I don't really care one way or another save for the difficulty I have speaking to anyone from that side of the family about anything beyond the weather.  The irritating thing is the hypocrisy of the statement about the importance of family now feeling like a call to pick sides in differences of opinion between the mother of my children and the purveyor of family wisdom.  My family is now my children and their mother, with my sister and parents coming in as slightly less important than those members with whom I share my home.

I don't feel like I should have to apologize for this, or listen to my father belittle me because he is pissed off about a mistake he made while early in his "early" retirement that has resulted in the IRS asking for a fair amount of money.  The reason goes back to the idea of me having friends who wanted me as a toy or a punching bag, well that counts for you too dad.  And furthermore, it sucks that you may have to sell one of the three cars you own, but I happen to be unemployed and making ends meet with two forms of government assistance that make me the bane of a sizable portion of the body politic in this country, and my 1997 car is the newest car I have ever owned, and I'm really not fucking up as much as you say I am since the only difference between where I am at this stage in my life with two young children and where you were is that I waiting until I graduated from college to have kids so I am older at this point and in the middle of a shitty economy created largely by the kinds of banking transactions and insititutions that you bought into and caused your tax bill.

Returning to a routine...

One of the biggest challenges with being unemployed, one I also faced back in 2009, is keeping a routine in place in order to prevent malaise and apathy from creeping into the job hunt.  I have tried to keep myself engaged in projects that allow me to be creative, but I find myself struggling to stay motivated as much as I should.  It started about two weeks ago when Bertie came down with a cold, which then made its way to my respiratory system.  It was not the kind of illness that makes you bed-ridden by any stretch, more like the kind that you would complain about having while you were at work thinking about how much better it would be if you were at home on the couch with a cup of hot tea and pharmaceutically clouded head.  Well, without a job to keep it in perspective, I just lost motivation and found myself lounging about for a few days. 

Of course, I kept checking my email and maintaining the job board searches that prevent me from feeling like an unemployed leach, but anything beyond what I could justify as the minimum amount of effort was simply more than I was willing to do.  Which brings me to today...I have felt better for almost a whole week now, but I have yet to actually return to the routine of creative output that was keeping me sane.  I have three very simple reviews to write for Examiner.com and yet I cannot get more than a paragraph or two into them without succumbing to the urge to wander the interwebs for something that requires less effort and provides more instant gratification. 

I can also cop-out and blame the weather that has been so fickle this year.  I cannot remember the month of May bringing so much rain to the central valley in all the years that I have lived here.  Alas, I will only hate myself to mention how little I have done on my fiction, so I'll leave it at that.  At least this has allowed me an opportunity to get the fingers flexed so I can hope to be prepared for the next creative urge to come over me.

The difficulty of "Just Do It"

In between the scouring of want ads, job boards, and corporate websites trying to find a home for my talents that will simultaneously pay my bills, I am trying to stay productive and creative.  Most days I don't.  The crushing reality of being unemployed with two kids and job prospects that seem designed to either drive me insane or work me to death tend to discourage much creativity.  It is not always the case, but the creativity born of such frustration usually just reinforces a crappy mood.  I feel like I should be writing every day in an effort to practice myself closer to autonomous employment, but the actual act of getting my thoughts arranged into packets of electronic data feels so foreign in the middle of a room shared by two children under four and a wife who feels the need to speak to me while I do this. 

Obviously, it is up to me to make whatever changes I need to make in order to allow myself the opportunity to write more, if that is what I truly want to be doing.  I do not intend to make myself out as a victim here.  I'm simply venting my frustrations with the situation, and writing at the same time.  Killing multiple birds with a single stone and the like. 

The fact of the matter is that I want to work.  I want to feel like I am contributing something positive to the world.  Maybe I should give that up since I tried that with Red Cross and that put me where I am today.  It seems like the entry level jobs don't want me because they fear that I will run to the next job available, other jobs don't want me because my experience costs too much, and therefore I don't even get calls back or letters of consolation.  No amount of response letters or tailored resumes seem to make a difference.  I must persist, I will persist; I just had to take a minute to complain about it.

Where do I fit?

As I navigate the various job-boards looking at descriptions and requirements, pay and hours, I find myself even more disenfranchised than before.  I'm not against the idea of working, in fact, I rather miss certain aspects of it already.  What troubles me is how much trouble I am having trying to figure where I fit into the equation of the economy.

I am capable of being trained to do just about anything, and I thrive in environments where I can use my customer service skills to make people happy and feel like they were treated like a human being and not just a dollar sign.  The trouble is how little that seems to matter anymore.  I don't like being disingenuous, but it seems to be the one qualification that runs through every industry. 

I guess it comes down to creativity being the answer; that I must push myself in my creative endeavors such that I am afforded the opportunity to make it my livelihood.  This is frightening because I have given myself over to my internal critic for so long that I rarely get more than a page or two before I feel like I lack anything interesting to say.  I'm hoping that I can make arrangements to acquire a laptop that will allow me to extricate myself from the distractions of the house and get some time to put my mind to the keys.

New Article and Bertie's Check Up

Hell, I thought I was going to write something, but now I'm done.  Just finished an article and I'm done being in front of the computer for now.

Fringe-Nearing the Season's End

I have been enjoying this season of Fringe, possibly more than any other season thus far, and have not taken issue with some of the diversions that have spurred complaints from others.  That said, I made a comment at the end of the episode that led into the two-part finale about how I'm afraid I may not be able to watch season 4.  This would be a hard threat on which to follow through, but the similarities that are mounting between Fringe and the other, most recent, sci-fi show to earn my love and betray it so callously at the end are becoming more difficult to ignore. 

I made another comment at the conclusion of part one of the season finale, after learning that entering the machine catapulted Peter 15 years into the future, that I hope the only good thing about next week is not the introduction of another credit sequence.  As it stands, Walter having a crisis of faith was understandable, though I would have no problem abandoning the show if they made such a brilliant scientist discard all of his experience and knowledge for a favor from God regarding the fate of his son.  That did not happen this week, thankfully, but instead I get a strong fear, not that these characters that I have grown to care for are actually in danger, but that the narrative arc is about to diverge so far from what has been established thus far and try to incorporate time-travel into the mix, almost as if to cover that last sci-fi stone they have yet to turn.

I'm not against time-travel as a narrative tool.  I think Lost did a great job with the concept up until the last three or four episodes of the series.  Part of what made Lost feel like such a let-down was that many people guessed that the island was some sort of purgatory by the end of season 1, and the writers insisted that was not the case.  The finale was then a tremendous failure when that turned out to be the case.  The ride was fun getting there, but it was easy to feel cheated by a show that encouraged fan participation and theorizing to have a card that was folded show up on the river, so to speak. 

Fringe did not lend itself to theories as readily as Lost, partially because Fringe took much longer to establish the rules of the universe.  All the talk of "the pattern" in the first season is now a distant memory, but the strength of character development and the introduction of Earth-2 prevent me from caring about that.   Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I don't want some happy ending nonsense from a show that has no business trafficking in happy endings.  It would be artificial for this show to go out with a "love conquers all" message, ,and would sully the rest of the show the way that the finale of Lost did for that show.  This may be why books will always be a superior medium for storytelling, because as far as I can tell, TV (in general, specifically networks) are too afraid to conclude any story without a happy resolution.