The Hamster and the Wheel
Oh, sons of Sisyphus, heroes of the meaningless!
Hello Readers, it’s been a while.
I have a weird relationship with grace. I blame my jazz origins. It arrives with strange bebop timing, like a full cart but no horse, or flowers that bloom only after firestorms. My grace is a trickster. It gets me through, but just to a new dilemma, yinyang style.
I’m settling in after a move during an extreme weather event that paused just long enough to accommodate the timing. The new digs are subsidized, but the desperately needed rent relief comes as my main source of income ends. This is the rollercoaster comedy of my everlasting trial of frying pans and fire. It’s the meat of this post, but first a throat-clearing note:
I’ve been struggling with the evolution of Substack. It’s become another weird social media thing, doing the regular shitty things that social media does…but tailored for writers! Sweet baby Christ-opher Walken, is the act of writing not tortuous enough?
Substack’s leadership openly romances the alt-right sphere and hides behind insincere interpretations of free speech while conducting behind-the-scenes fuckery to minimize and deflect legitimate concerns about hate speech on the platform, not to mention the monetized mis/disinformation highlighted regularly via its algorithms.
They say the bad stuff is regrettable, but not that big of a deal. Stop being spoilers, it’s minuscule, they say. Maaaybe it violates our TOS, but Freedom of Speech must prevail against the Tyrants of Slippyslope Mountain. The spectral hand of the fabled marketplace of ideas is what will ultimately sort it all out without fretting and meddling.
In other words, a hands-off dance-off beep-boop auto-corrective trickle-down morality is how we get better collectively.
Their obvious actions say otherwise, and are self-destructively stupid, marking them as just more poster children of the myth of meritocracy. Besides, tech bros aren’t interested in improving the world. They have heavy, busy hands that hunger for power via a Fountainhead fever dream.
You know, the kind of freedom and liberty that grants absolution and impunity for any communal ill effects of their ambition and vision.
Of course there were waves of problems before I arrived (ask the Trans community), but things really started to stink to me with the introduction of their alt-Twitter fishhook, Notes. Much of what was unseen became visible.
Then there’s the shiny finger traps: checkmarks and badges and leaderboards and recommendations and followers and followings and likes and restacks and the dreaded infinite scroll. Hustle marketing bleats its endless promises and celebrates the accumulation of empty victories, the theatric culture wars froth on, and hate’s ecosystem insistently leverages for legitimacy.
Say the things! Any things! Say them often and be free of question and consequence! Profit and thrive, for Substack is a rising (red) tide that lifts all boats!
My writing has suffered as a result.
If our writing is gamified and algorithmically siloed and laced with addictions, what does it become? Where goes the cardinal? Where goes responsibility, reciprocity? And why, exactly, does everything related to the internet become exponentially fucky?
Substack’s siren call to engage and produce and perform and compete and collect and consume and monetize, monetize, monetize, is not nurturing. It’s vampiric. Cannibalistic. The moral dilemmas and injuries are relentless.
We are well beyond the fear of slippery slopes, man. We’re hogtied to an algorithmic black box toboggan hurtling down a double diamond rated ski run as we scream “FREEDOM!”
I’m trying to find a balance, a way to sift the shit from the shine, but it’s like trying to find a balance with methamphetamine. There’s no balance, only Zuul.
The shitshow goes on, all of us somewhere between perpetrator and pawn.
Waywardly Yours,
—C.
The future's so bright, I gotta poke my eyes out
Running up my credit cards
Sellin' lemonade by the side of the road
You see it all from where you are
—Weezer, Can't Knock the Hustle
I’ve worked and hustled from a young age.
I sold toys and other possessions that I’d grown tired of to other kids, and then bought new stuff with the cash, just like a good little entrepreneur. Later I would do gardening for neighbors. When you come from a large family that perpetually struggles financially, you go on the search for money yourself once you’re able.
And there was always thieving as an option. It was an affinity that began while my age was still in the single digits. Sticky fingers was my emotional coping skill. More efficient, but high risk.
My first official job was as a recreational aid for a children’s summer program. I rode my janky 10-speed bike nearly 30 miles round trip just to make some cash. One day on my commute home in the delirious triple digit heat of August, I was ambushed by someone hiding behind the trunk of an old oak tree. I only remember coming to while lying in tall dry grass and finding my bike missing. My jaw hurt. I was fifteen years old.
I got a job at a small mom and pop grocery store after that. The ownership had passed to the children by the time I started working there. They were good people, but they took full advantage of my status as a minor. Minimum wage in California back in the mid 80’s was $3.35 per hour. I started at $2.50. Taxes were deducted, too. The wage laws allowed all of it.
I gave fast food a try after that. I don’t think I lasted a month at McDonalds. That’s a job for robots, not humans. Pure evil. There were other jobs, all of them retail sales except for a brief stint working at a car dealership as a detailer.
In the late 80’s/early 90’s I flirted with death for a while. It escalated to heavy petting. I got to experience our incarceration system, too. In the aftermath I decided I needed to get my shit together.
Another Way of Failing
I dabbled in community college but I had no immediate family that had college educations for guidance, to emulate, or to fuel inspiration. Word was that a supermarket job paid well, and the benefits were good. It was a unionized blue-collar pathway. Most of my previous experience was directly related, so it seemed like a good direction.
Any direction than the one I’d been forging was probably better.
I applied at a local supermarket chain that emphasized gourmet foods and a high standard of customer service. They wore ties! It became my job for the next 25 years.
What I didn’t understand at the time I started was that the industry had begun a decline as a viable blue-collared job. My “career” was always one of attrition.
Within the first couple of years the chain sold to another local, Raley’s Supermarkets, the pioneer of the supermarket model we know today. Instead of changing everything to match their brand, Raley’s kept the original banner name and store design/operations intact. It wasn’t much of a disruption for workers or customers beyond the initial surprise. And Sacramento liked that it remained locally owned.
What did change was the labor budget. It slowly tightened over time. The opportunity for full-time status disappeared, even for workers who had been with the company for decades. Overtime was verboten. You might get more hours because of seniority, but per a long-standing provision of the union contract, all non-management positions could be scheduled down to a minimum of 24 hours a week, if the company chose.
After ten years I made my way to a ground-level management position to get full-time hours. The company frowned upon that as a reason to seek the position, but I was trying to make a living. Even with a partner, less than 40 hours a week is just adventures in poverty. Just like everyone else I was striving to attain and maintain the American (fever) Dream.
By the time I got that management position, I hated my job, and by extension, myself. But I’d previously fucked up in life so much I didn’t want to be a quitter. Maybe it was some twisted self-imposed penance, too. It would get better, I told myself. Besides, it was too late to jump ship to a new career path if I wanted to maintain my gains. I was married. We were fighting to have a child (the pricey IVF treatment wasn’t covered by medical insurance). We had a mortgage and car payments. Credit card bills.
Bad Moons
2003 brought a tide-shifting grocers strike to Southern California that threatened to spread to us up north. An agreement was reached before a strike count, and it mostly aligned with the union concessions given at the end of the strike in SoCal.
Contract negotiations in following years were antagonistic, and labor hours were cut more towards the bare minimum. The company continually cried that increasing non-union competition was threatening their business and they needed to adapt.
Some of Raley’s stores were non-union already.
In 2007, right after our son turned three, he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. I needed my excellent medical coverage now more than ever. My then-wife quit her job as a child care center director so she could care for our son. She could generate income doing child daycare out of the house, so it made the most sense. It was still less, but manageable.
Then the 2007-2008 financial meltdown began a cascade of disillusion.
I confessed that I wanted a divorce after at least a few of years of avoiding the truth that my “fake it before you make it” strategy of living extended to love as well. My estranged father suddenly died. The daycare enrollees faded away. My constant companion, depression, worsened. By 2010, we’d filed for divorce, foreclosed on our home, and declared bankruptcy.
Neither of us could maintain alone what we’d built together. And even a peaceful divorce is especially mournful when you have children.
In the spring of 2011, my mother died.
I cracked and shattered in so many ways. I don’t know how I functioned through it all. The pain of guilt and loss and grief was relentless.
Nevertheless, I carried on. My siblings and I amicably split mom’s meager assets and one bought mom’s house from the rest of us. It wasn’t much, but now I had enough for a nice down payment on new home. The banks and investment groups gorging on all the foreclosed and distressed properties outbid me every time.
I gave up.
Meanwhile, my employer started draconian measures to cut back on labor. It did not matter how much seniority anyone had. Even the most senior of us were lucky to get anything above 30 hours a week. The strategy to reduce labor costs had turned to income starvation.
If someone called in sick we were told not to fill the shift. We just had to suck it up. Employees were “cross-trained” so they could be used as cashiers on demand, which meant regular interruptions of outer department responsibilities. Self-checkout machines were soon to follow.
What a clever crime it is to convince customers to do free labor.
Raley’s hired a high-profile union buster consultant during 2012 contract negotiations, and the associated fuckery spilled bad blood everywhere. Now there wasn’t even the pretense that our employer gave a shit about us. The company was determined to replace our loyalty and experience with non-union labor.
They were unsuccessful, but they’d done permanent damage to their employee relations.
Raley’s can hide the company’s actual performance because they are family owned. Yes, the likes of Walmart and Costco have taken some of their market share over the years, but the company was and still is a fortress. Their Wikipedia page reads like a puff piece and Forbes puts their 2023 revenue at 6 billion. They are one of the largest private employers in the Sacramento region. The company has never been on the ropes.
Politically the Raley family is quiet, but Sacramento is the political capital of the West and power begets power. They are surely in the game of king making. Their actions speak in place of their political silence.
A Chance
In the midst of this economic warfare I found an income restricted property for sale. Part of an affordable housing initiative, the city would have a claim on a portion of any future sale beyond a certain percentage of any increased value, and the property could not be used as a rental. Thanks to Raley’s scorched earth labor policies my income qualified. Big money couldn’t get their greedy hands on it, and I was the strongest offer.
I had an opportunity but it was also a high wire act.
Wells Fargo hit the breaks right before closing, claiming they just became aware that the mortgage was part of an affordable housing program. It was ridiculous and infuriating. No one took responsibility. Someone fucked up and I paid for it. What was I to do? I was at everyone’s mercy, bleeding cash out of all my holes. With no guarantees and little communication that the loan would close, it took nearly another 30 days for the funding to be finalized.
It was torture. Being poor is littered with penalties and injustices you have no choice but endure. But the payoff was that I was back to living closer to my son and I was able to have regular time with him again. He had his own room! We were both happy about it. It felt like redemption.
Kick ‘Em When They’re Up
Over the next couple of years my living expenses kept rising while my income remained slashed. I’d endured too many cuts, too much bullshit. I was bitter and burnt out. Management saw the opportunity to rid itself of my expensive labor and so began the leveraging of psychological fuckery. I didn’t put up a fight. Why would I battle to stay in hell? Hadn’t I spent a quarter century doing just that?
I’d had enough of my employer’s bad faith and quit abruptly and quietly. Everybody freaked out. Me too.
On my final day, the store director went through the bare minimum performative act, giving me a farewell cake from the bakery at the middle of my shift. It stunk of defense against any possible future claim of harassment. The district manager made a surprise appearance for the cakegiving, feeding my suspicions. The insincerity of it all was grossly awkward. The district manager asked, “so, what are you going to do now?” I chuckled and said, “I have no idea.”
There was no job waiting in the wings.
Since I kept my resignation plans quiet, my colleagues working that day were shocked. This made things even more awkward, which was kinda the point. No dog and pony show, just “bye.” As I walked out I dumped the cake in the trashcan right outside the entrance.
Fuck that job, and fuck capitalism. In all galaxies.
Burning Down the House
The crash plan was to cash out a small 401k to keep me afloat for about a year so I could explore writing—that deep nag I’d ignored since I was a teen. This also allowed me to be a parent without competing obligations. Being unemployed, the Affordable Care Act would keep my son’s medical needs met better than ever. It was a temporary bomb shelter while I liked my wounds.
I considered it a sabbatical for sanity. It probably saved my life.
It wasn’t a great plan, let alone a sustainable one. Sacrifices loomed. The house would have to be sold if I didn’t start generating appropriate income before the money ran out. I didn’t expect that I would. I knew better.
I wasn’t going to simply renew past efforts in a reinvented form. Any start somewhere else would be at the bottom, pushing a boulder up a mountain for years just to get back to what I’d just given up. I was abandoning that madness. I was trading faith for a trial by fire. Against the grain, against the flow, against the accepted, against the known.
If I was/am to fail it would/will be on my terms, not some culture’s/country’s/corporation’s inhuman race to the bottom. Yes, the house was sold. I moved in with roommates. I saw my son less. And that’s just the beginning of a whole other story starring long-distance dysfunctional love, a tiny house disaster-adventure, and fucking Texas.
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Space Monkey!
I don’t know what this essay means. Is it an essay? It’s just snapshots. Historical cobble. Maybe it’s a documentary.
I hit the eject button in 2014 and holy shit it’s lonely out in space. Maybe there’s a book to be written somewhere in the mess I’ve made. A messy story within the greater mess we all find ourselves in. I’m not sure how to write it. Do I want to write it? I don’t want it to be just a list of shit things that happened. Good things happened too. But I want it to go way deeper, past the skin and muscle, into and through the bone marrow, and on to possess the ghost.
Will I write it? Will I write anything that matters? Everything conspires towards it, and against it. Writing saves me but does feed me. It’s an insane way to try to survive. I used to feel bad about it. Stupid. Cursed. Then the world started to unravel at whiplash speed so I don’t feel bad anymore.
We’re in this together.
xo
Lord, I am so tired
How long can this go on?
—Devo, Working in the Coal Mine
Other than your writings here and your unpoetry book, which I love, I don't know you. However, I have no doubt you can hit bone marrow.