Here's an honest assessment

I have never had a "real" job. Sure, I've worked in plenty of places. I was in the army for a bit. Bartended. Waited tables. Shelved books. Now I zap the zits off rich kids' digital faces in Adobe Photoshop. I don't get paid shit to do it. But I did go to grad school, so maybe I am a late bloomer. That big, bad-ass $28,000 a year and relatively affordable health insurance is just around the corner. I can feel it.

Today I read that some Chicago aldermen want to the city government to guarantee O'Hare foodservice workers an hourly wage of $11.03. I'm all for it, being a working man myself. I think everybody deserves a living wage. Of course, this is just a little bit more than I actually earn per hour. And by little bit, I'm talking about more than the three cents. So, any day now.

Because I earn such a small wage, I don't pay my creditors. See, it was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin on the porch with my family, singin and dancin down in Mississippi. I come from a low point in the middle class--or the "working class," really. My mom wasn't addicted to crack or anything, my parents are still married, and they even made me read books when I was growing up. And not just any books. I had to read Gulliver's Travels and shit like that. That's a real serious book, for those of you not in the know. I did not have a troubled or poverty-stricken childhood. But I did learn to do without.

Until... I got to college where I learned to use student loan money and credit cards to pay for rent, groceries, gas, beer, scotch, tattoos, and motorcycle shit, among other things. And forget about the army. My GI Bill cash went down the same hole.

I did this, like many, under the naive assumption that I would immediately enter the workforce after college and be blessed with a nice, comfortable $40,000 or so per year job. Even with my English degree from a mid-tier state school.

So I applied to graduate schools. And I got into one. A damn fine one, actually, with a name you'd recognize. My expectations grew, maybe I'd get a $60K job right after school. That's what everybody else does coming out of this place, right? Even with an MFA in creative writing? Still, I took on more debt.

And here I am: nearly two years out of graduate school and quickly approaching 30 years old. I make ten bucks an hour at a job I hate at a level inversely proportional to the level at which I feel underpaid and underemployed. And I get a dozen phone calls a day regarding my various defaults and past-dues and other nonsense. Naturally, I don't answer the phone if I don't have the number programmed in my contacts. And recently, I got the Google Voice. It's nice, I guess, though I don't make many calls with my computer. What I do use is the visual voicemail. And boy, does it produce some winners. Unfortunately, I don't save them.

Tonight's is the best I've ever seen though:

This message is for the call with Pioneer credit recovery and it's about your past due, Death

And really, that's all there is to it. This is the end, my friend. We've gone beyond debtor's prison. We're to the point of death squads marching down the street, taking out anyone in default. Which doesn't surprise me really. At any rate, I should probably seek out some parasitic credit consolidation company to help me out.

What harm could it do? After all, my death is past due.

At work

Yesterday, we all came back to work. Usually after a snowstorm, the tiny parking lot here is cleared.

This is the machine that the mysterious snow-clearing guy uses to plow the drive.

And from another angle:

If you can't tell, the machine that the mysterious guy uses to clear the snow from our drive is presently stuck in the snow. And it has been since the blizzard ended on Wednesday. I might be irritated by a situation like this, if I were driving to work, but I have been taking the L. So I can simply sit back and enjoy the irony. Plus I got a solid half-page of writing done on the train this morning, which is nice. Now to the task of syncing it across the various cloud apps I use at work and at home. And speaking of the train, I didn't get a picture, but I will reproduce for you the sleeping asshole I saw this morning:

I think, at least this morning, that CTA works best as a goofy internet acronym for "See-the-Ass." I draw pretty good, eh?

Update: I guess the email w/images thing didn't work out for me. I'll figure it out some other time.

Snow day

Last night it took me about two and a quarter hours to get home from work:

This dude was having a real hard time riding his bike in the 40 mph winds and blowing snow. Still, it took me so long to get my camera phone to take a picture that he was almost past the car I was in by the time the shutter snapped.

kv

This White Castle sign said something really funny about a sack or something. But it got blown out, so we'll never know exactly what the puerile joke was.

Today I am pretty hungover, tired, sore, and somewhat inspired. I just shoveled a metric shit-ton of snow around our building, and I think I left my lower back somewhere outside in the snow, because right now there is only pain where it used to be. But it was a great community experience. Dozens of people were out helping each other shovel snow in the alley and on the street. A guy with a snowblower came through and removed a ton of the shit from behind my building. It was an inspiring neighborly experience. Not often do people around here get together and help each other out like this. A guy who said he'd lived on this block for ten years suggested that he'd never seen anything like this, the cooperation. It was an impressive effort, and I'm grateful, since it was a lot of damn snow.

Speaking of good neighbors, there's these dipshits on my street who own this busted-up early 90s Honda Civic that looks as though it was culled together at Pull-a-Part. These assholes, for some stupid fucked-up reason, think they have something worth stealing. So they have the most sensitive car alarm in the world. The thing goes off every time a car with a busted muffler drives by or whenever a pigeon shits on the hood. Usually it's going off all night long. Today my wife and I watched them try to drive this three-and-a-half foot tall car through two feet of snow. And let me tell you, it was funny as hell. They had to get five of their buddies out in the street to push it because it kept getting stuck. Justice for those tools.

But now it's nearly 7 pm and I still haven't gotten the writing done that I meant to do today. Same story as usual, I suppose. I have plenty of time left to work tonight on it anyway.

First, this:

This makes me laugh a bit.

Admittedly

I am a little drunk right now. But I do want to say that this storm going on is pretty awesome because: THUNDERBLIZZARD.

There was actual thunder and lightning in this storm. Snow and lightning? Most metal thing I've ever seen. And snow "inside" my apartment. That is also metal:

This is a shitty picture from my phone. You may not see or understand what is happening here. But the point is that the fucking snow is actually almost inside my apartment now. That is how cheaply I live. More tomorrow. SNOW DAY!