It's A Jungle in There

Even my dreams are incomplete. When I am ill, as I am now, my dreams become a montage of situations past filled with metaphor and cliché. Last night I dreamt again of my brief tenure at the Board of Ed.

In full khaki dress I entered into a safari run amok. The gate had been left open and but few of the inhabitants, having been there their entire lives, had bothered to escape. The grounds were in poor shape and the groundskeepers were visibly drunk, in fact they were stinking and proud of it. They swaggered around the yards peeking in on the various activities taking place and shaking their heads in derision. As I walked deeper into the labyrinth of habitats I came upon what looked like the interior of a locker room that had been decorated to look like a part of the lion king set. Faux African motifs abounded among modern items that were covered in sheaths of spray painted straw. There was great confusion owing to the fact that no had bothered to designate male and female quarters. As in real life, I had a bladder the size of a thimble and needed to use a bath room. I also wanted to change my clothes which had become filthy and caked with mud during my journey.

In the chaos of the “locker room” all kinds of activities where in progress. There was a rudimentary marketplace, children were playing traditional games like hopscotch and double Dutch, arguments blossomed into minor skirmishes and settled back into arguments and some assorted persons where just hanging around doing nothing. To add to the dream like quality, all this happened in complete silence. Finally I was able to find what looked like the bathroom but was actually the entrance to a private hot tub room that was being prepared for some unknown elites. The black an white shiny tiled surfaces were blinding. A few attendants were testing the water and adding sanitizing chemicals while others brought in trays of champagne and canapés. Terrycloth robed figure stood waiting in the background. I was sickened by so much opulence next to relative squalor and stormed back out into the open plains.

In the distance I could see the entrance to the safari and could here the gate swinging open and shut. I began to make a beeline for the ranger’s hut near the gates when a very hungry lion caught my eye. At first I was started and then as it slowly grew closer I could make out that the lion had been shaved and was very thin. His attempts to stalk me, in this sorry condition, were nonthreatening. Still, I was not about to be caught off guard by any type of ruse concocted by a starving beast with nothing to lose, so I took to higher ground where I was confronted by a snarling leopard in great condition.

I would have to make a decision about who would eat me, lion or leopard. The lion was so sad and surely deserved a meal even though it may be his last. The leopard on the other hand, the stronger of the two, also deserved to eat and perhaps his meal would be a better investment in the future of big cats. I could choose not to make a decision and just run for and let nature decide, which would have been the same as choosing the leopard. I stood there in the grass for a long time, so long that both parties lost interest, and then I woke up. Some job experiences never leave you.

Sit Down

1010 wins is a great news source if you live in Manhattan cave and only come out of it to get in your car and get stuck on the turnpike. During the ten minutes of news, traffic reports and weather 1010 somehow manages to report, or read reports, on current news. In the 10 seconds devoted to government, I found out about a UN event that had escaped my attention even though I read at least four daily papers in addition to getting news online. Apparently, and the report was quick so I may be mocking the wrong thing but no matter, the good unelected free spending delegates at the UN have finally come up with a way to get at world poverty.

Now, simple me, I would have suggest paying people but this is not as fun or engaging as the many other ways NGO poverty organizations deal with the issue. Usually poverty orgs throw themselves into organizing an orgy of galas, parties, banquets and conferences including galas, parties and banquets where they sup on donated gourmet food from whomever wants a tax write off that fiscal quarter. After the fete, all the crumbs, if there are any (in my experience the average poverty advocate has eradicated poverty in her personal life so vigorously that the next big issue to be tackled is obesity) are distributed to homeless people lucky enough to live near Lincoln Center. The money, raised in distributed past the elusive poor, goes right on to other poverty orgs who distribute it further down the chain to smaller orgs who use it to buy stamps and stationary to send you appeals for money.

No doubt, the folly and criticism of having a party to celebrate, I mean stamp out, social ills prompted the UN to take on a new approach to rubbing out poverty by breaking the world record for the most people standing at once. Brilliant! I can hear bread being made and dough getting distributed just at the mention of such a great feat. Commentary aside, I want the names and email addresses of the interns, and I hope they are unpaid, who came up with this one. I also want to know the budget for the event and how the funds were appropriated. This is what happens when event planners fall on hard times and have a sympathetic friend who works at the UN.

When I heard that the UN was doing something called “Stand Up Against Poverty”, I was excited as I envisioned them following the lead of the popular and lucrative “Comic Relief” or Red Nose Day fund raisers. I immediately began to think about how I could participate and squeeze off a few one liners to put food on tables. 1010 told me that the event would be held in Times Square and that they would be using the New Year’s Eve falling ball to mark the event. I envisioned top comics from around the globe, but mostly from NYC, interspersing jokes with Bob Geldolf-style pleas for donations while raising millions. Eventually it would become a yearly thing and one day I would host it, of course with the eradication of poverty in mind and not for my own personally grandeur etc.

Then in another ten minutes, still on the blasted Turnpike, I was able to hear the newscast again but this time I listened carefully. There was no stand up in the UN’s stunt, just standing up. The goal was to get as many people into Times Square (and perhaps other traffic clogged city centers) as possible and have them all stand at the same time. UGH! Perhaps they should have waited until New Years Eve when it happens naturally and they could have added another superlative to the crowd- drunkest and claimed that the event was to eradicate sobriety. Aren’t there already a lot of people standing in Times Square because there are not any seats? Whatever.


When I got home I checked the “Stand Up” website. The even was to take place that evening between 6 and 8pm under the falling ball and was to be the "centerpiece of a global day of action in over 100 countries to set a Guinness World Record for the most number of people to Stand Up against poverty in 24 “hours.” What do you mean set a record for standing? Is competitive group standing an official Guinness category and is anyone else vying for this record? Attending the event would be a celeb MC and a Senior US official, both unnamed. With the definition of celebrity being what it is, people who show up might be entertained by Sisqo of thong song fame and probably not Bono, who someone might actually want to see. Who cares about a UN official? I checked further down the page for a contact number of email but all I found was this:

Estimated Number who will Stand Up
0

I am thankful that I am fortunate enough not to have to rely on the UN to solve my problems. So, I guess in on sense their lame campaign may help the poor by alerting people to the problem that something effective needs to be done about the skirmish on the poverty. It reminds me that I need to do some community service, soon.

Weapon of Mass Instruction

In today's Metro paper you can find my opinion piece titled, PBS:Weapon of Mass Instruction. You know I am going to talk about the GOP. That is all I will say. Go check it out on page 11 (in full color PDF format). You can see an even more touched up version of my DIY headshot below an even bigger picture of John Kerry's head.
The first 30 seconds of my 15 minutes of fame...

The Fugster Cometh

I have had the misfortune to live in a few neighborhoods during their rapid gentrification which is an ugly process because of the hideous people that come first. The fugly hipster or fugster comes in masquerading as a starving artist but is really little more than a well skilled soap dodger. He is the front line of gentrification, the first defense and repellant sent in to clear the area by raising rents and bringing in stupid stores that carry non-edible non-usable items. These kind of toy stores cater to almost 30 years olds who will buy really anything as long as it is well designed, plastic and makes an ironic comment/homage to the pop culture of a slightly bygone era like the late spring of 1994. But more importantly their emaciated daddy funded proprietors can pay more upfront than a convenience store owner. The frequency of their business failures means that the landlord can keep raising the rent with each new tenant, woohoo. The fugster prefers used clothing but only if it is overpriced. After scoring the same sweater that he refused to wear in the 7th grade, which is now too tight in a hip way, he can go an eat pad thai a different Chinese converted to Thai place every night without leaving his block. He can’t leave the block anyway because his clothing and hair say “Please mock me”. Afterward when the temperature cools he will don a pair of high waters that he bought a store whose one word name is written in lower case and head over to a former neighborhood bar to hear essentially a Weezer cover band- although both the band and the audience will think that they are original. While digging the tunes he will suck back what he thinks a redneck might drink out of a can.
After a few more years on his parent dime, 1000 of which paid for an abortion and consolation tattoo and piercing, the fugster, sick of how commercial it has become and unable to afford his annually rising rent will begin bringing down local wages or outright destroying paying jobs through an internship. He will become anxious that there are too many other fugsters in his nabe- most younger than him and who are just poseurs from the Midwest- and lament over a soy chai latte “this used to be a cool –fill in the ethnic group of color or of eastern European heritage- and what is corporate star#ucks doing here?”
The appearance of chain stores and his parents’ choice to put their money behind his sister Amy, now on her third degree in navel gazing studies of people just like her, will propel him to steal an entry level job from a local college grad who needs it. On his first day he will find that not only do none of the women want to sleep with him but that no one appreciated the Beck stylings of his “vintage suit” with vents and coordinating rockabilly shirts with snaps instead of buttons. Eventually he will move either a bridge or tunnel away and wonder what happened to his rock and roll life style and dream of making that indy film. By this time the yuppies will have arrived in his old stomping grounds sweeping away the railroad apartments with lofts, and brushing aside the Thai places with high end fusion Japanese forcing the remaining fugsters to move to (gasp!) black neighborhoods uptown.