Month: November 2018

I found the work agreement from my first post-college job yesterday. A full-time professional position, $6/hr. That works out to roughly $1K a month. My first post-college apartment was $365/mo IIRC. Education debt was about four bills. I’m an old, sure, but this was during the Clinton administration. The more things change, etc. I used to have a physical ledger I used to track expenses (look the 90s weren’t a Dickens novel – there was some affect to the decision). I’ve discarded it, but last I saw it, several years ago, I stared uncomprehendingly at entries detailing weekends at the bar where somehow I got stupendously drunk off a $20 ATM withdrawal. 

I wasn’t looking for it – I was looking for a recipe I had picked up at an awards dinner attended at said job (lest you think I have some bizarrely precise filing system, it was pure coincidence I located it, inside a plain white catalog envelope with the entirely anodyne descriptor ‘PERSONAL AFFAIRS’ inked on the upper right corner, sharing space with a 1994 tax return and the cover of a New York Post edition that covered the night police invaded my block — and apartment building — in the process of evicting squatters), one I used to make every year for Thanksgiving. 

I remember the first time I celebrated Thanksgiving out of school. I was likely lamenting to friends about the unpleasant Hobbesian options of increasing already untenable credit card debt (see job, first post-college) or driving 800 miles twice in five days when they looked at me with the full force of adults in the world for the unimaginable period of three or four years and declared that Thanksgiving was not a family holiday anymore. 

It was simple: no one foresaw the likelihood of escaping a family trip at Christmas until at least having their own kids (an option that seemed even more alien that not going home for Christmas), and the commitment meant one could take a hard line and make Thanksgiving about what, honestly, was more your family now anyway. 

The scales, reader, they fell far and fast. It’s secretly brilliant. Thanksgiving is a much better holiday all around – the scheduling is always good, the weather better, and politics with be a drunken orgy of preaching to the converted like it should be. 

I won’t pretend to have disrupted holidays or innovated in any way. For all I know, I was simply gifted knowledge that any decent adult would present to their newish peers. The point being: we figured this shit out. There is no need to go and complicate it. Save yourself the airfare, the TSA drams, and the racist uncle tropes. Don’t get all wound up and make a slightly less satisfying version of something that is already there and good. That’s what Netflix is for.  

One could argue that Bill Clinton’s preferred method for mitigating exposure of his philandering, rapey tendencies was harming black people. Recognizing that using the implacable power of the state to further hundreds of years of violence against our most vulnerable was good optics, before he even ascended to the most lusted after seat of power, he took time out of his busy schedule of dodging accusations of infidelity and sexual assault to pull the lever on Ricky Ray Rector, a man so impaired that he declined to finish his final meal, uttering the infamous phrase that is the genesis for this post title. 

Emboldened by the popular response to this act of callous cruelty, we were treated to a decade of truly abhorrent, finely tuned racist proclamations from our ‘first black preznit’ and his lovely wife, the highlights of which included demonizing black children as ‘superpredators’, ignoring the ravages of the crack epidemic (regardless of how you feel about the CIA on this point), a crime bill that will take literally decades to undo the damage of provided we get our shit together enough to acknowledge how awful it was, destroying welfare and unfairly castigating a whole generation of working single mothers as reprobates, and possibly causing the death of thousands of Sudanese children by an eminently preventable disease. 

We aren’t talking about feverish Gingrichian Vince Foster fantasies here. We are talking about acts of the United States codified by law, all i’s dotted and tees crossed. Bill Clinton banged an intern, and then bombed a factory making malaria pills to distract the country and he still won’t apologize for either. So next time you feel the need to climb on your high horse about how Bernie Sanders doesn’t deliver the perfect soundbite for your Twitter consumption, maybe take a longer look at how two shitty, opportunistic Yale graduates have spent their entire adult lives shredding whatever institutionalized progressive values we’ve managed to establish so they could fucking look good at a state dinner. 

The raison detra of this brand has always been discussing things in too much detail that not even all the people reading cared that much about. If we give the keys to Foster at any point, he would probably breathlessly describe this mode of writing as some variant of a ‘high wire act’ because bloggers love nothing more than investing unearned drama into literally the most insipid and lazy form of journalism ever invented. Anyhoo, this is has been a pretty stock opening (give us some slack, it’s been years) so let’s get to the thing: earlier this week, we were graced with a deep dive on the D.

[We also specialized in the parenthetical aside – I’m pleased to know that even though Ozone Park probably has an axe throwing goat’s milk chocolatier, somehow Avenue D still hasn’t come up enough in the world to be worthy of a pithy Lockhart Steele web presence noted gastropub. For years, I had been yammering on about how I wanted to open the first hipster bar on Ave D — back when the idea of going to Williamsburg was still acceptably absurd — and name it ‘D-List’. One night I mentioned this to John Carney, who literally took out his phone and called Sasha Petraske to share this clearly brilliant idea. Note that very little of this aside has aged well, but you can’t really ask drinking acquaintances if they intend to turn out to be fascists or gropers now can you?]

The dive is fine for what it is, aside from the horror of realizing that so much of it is devoted to explaining, you know, 2008. And it contained this observation: “This was the late 2000s, remember, not a time of deep self-reflection in which we were collectively interrogating a historically patriarchal discourse. Most of us just kind of went along with it; Perez Hilton was our pop cultural id.” For the life of me I cannot tell if this is ironic or not.

I’m sure there is some kind of yells at cloud sort of scale I am placing myself on by both: 1. being honestly confused, and 2. investing energy in trying to determine what the various poles represent, yells at cloud wise. I mean, I was out of short pants in 2008 and I don’t remember that much ‘boys will be boys’ shrugging at Perez Hilton (though any survey of the YM archives pretty much indicts us as swimming in the sea of arch, snarky detachment that excused a lot of tendentious stylings). 

I do profess ignorance to the gradations in gossip blogging. I readily admit to dismissing the whole enterprise as grubby — or more finely, not of my particulars, since I think the overall project of gossip blogging creates a pretty big venn overlaps with haus style — and that pretty much is because of the sploogy diccs Perez was so fond of. That’s an underbaked justification for a wholesale GIGO stance, but whatever complex or interesting sociological arguments you can make for gossip, I’m just going to be honest and say I personally discount most of them filtered through the lens of celebrity journalism.

As this not take wends inevitably to a mushy big picture conclusion (and some struggling yells at clouds wise trying to sort out if glib iconoclasm is still a viable sosh medians stance), I’m mostly mulling over things like generational rifts at appearing at ever tightening intervals, and the kids doing their own thing is just fine, but along with every other ignominy that mortality visits upon us, trying to re-calibrate the intervals at which I need to adjust my sight lines is another invitation to crawl deeper into a shell girded by a collection of 70s vinyl. Man, this just really limped home.