Pigeon Politics

When one hears the word pigeon, we naturally think of stout birds, wiggling their way from bread crumb to bread crumb waiting for the sudden stagger of a stranger’s leg so they can break and take flight. The word pigeon also refers to an adaptation, an evolution and a breaking of a chrysalis as in pigeon language. To watch a pigeon is to understand the process of being a hungry lion lying in wait, sifting through tall dried grass, inching your way closer to a breathing meal. Pigeons are naturally distrustful of other living things, though quick to eat your discarded bagel or nibble on forgotten fruit, they remain wary of the possibility that one day, we may stand up and eat them. There are places in the world where pigeon is part of the everyday diet, I wonder if pigeons there are as docile. The cautious, guarded, yet evolutionary nature of the word pigeon brings me to an interesting question; are we witnessing the end of pigeon poltics?

The nature of pigeon culture dictate that the fattest pigeons usually eat the most, they usurp most of the surplus food, they intimidate smaller pigeons and scare them from their bounty, in the roost they take up the most room and chase out underlings with their bilious stature. Sound familiar? AIG was built on pigeon policy, they exacted change around the globe simply by gobbling up as much as they could and forcing the small folk out of their roosts. They waddled their fat, expensive asses all over the backs of the working class and cackled or tweeted, twittered or whatever when they were bailed out. The fat pigeons feeding themselves when the smallest birds are starving to death.

However, it is in the tradition of adapted language and the recontextualization of words, phrases and specific pieces of policy that pigeon interpretation will eventually reform the twisted system to which we have been shackled for so long. Our cooing and cawing had silent screams for fifty years and finally, it seems, our day of being fed may come again. A day when the largest pigeons can wait their turn and watch the tiniest bird eat first. Tiny birds, wherever you are, I know you’re starving now, I know you’re without a roost, many without jobs, without hope, but rest assured, this is not the fault of the current administration, it won’t be resolved without this administration and if it weren’t for the pigeons exacting change, evolution and revision at this moment, this great nation would starve indefinitely; without a crumb, without a coo, with broken wings and pigeon toes.

A Quieter Life

I’ve taken on a life of solitude. Not in the traditional sense, I do speak to people occasionally and I haven’t taken any vows or signed any pacts, but as it stands much of my human interaction as of recent has been over the phone or telling people which line to sign their names on. Between bouts of office banter and friendly service well-wishes, I do a great deal of waiting. Waiting for jobs to come up, waiting to feel hungry, thirsty and waiting for an opportunity to have a short-lived conversation with a total stranger looking for a coffee shop, the post office, a public restroom or spare change. These consist of most of the human interaction I experience Monday through Friday. Now, you’d think that this kind of cold-turkey silence would evoke more outbursts of random conversation with those immediately available, however, in my case, it has caused the opposite effect and I have little interest in small-talk for banter’s sake. Instead I do plenty of thinking, pondering attempting to interpret and understand physical attitudes and their meanings. I try to read people’s gestures and walks, I read their shoes, their clothes and their passing odors. I read their eyes, their accessories, their urgency and their immediate companionship. I watch and I learn.

Now, you may see this as being unfair, I’m on the outside, I never speak to most of these people, I don’t know much about psychology, I don’t know much about philosophy, I don’t know much about biology, I don’t have any business doing this at all and it makes me an jackass for admitting to it. However, bare in mind that my intuition is rational, my investigations are based in scientific fact and previous years of study. How do I know you’re upset? Because you look upset, because your voice is labored and broken, because you look disheveled and beaten, because you’re upset. That kind of thinking has helped me develop a scientific method for understanding people and the more I watch, the more I learn, the more I can begin to hone the process to which I understand all things.

I was speaking with a friend about driving habits, about how we know how to navigate around other drivers, pedestrians, roads and such. It brought us to a conversation about instinct, about how we come to be able to assess certain situations and read the atmosphere, navigate. He chose the example of bicycling in urban areas. Now, this isn’t to marginalize mountain-biking which has it’s own follies and pitfalls of living danger, but this is the example he chose. The more you ride through urban areas, the more you become accustomed to the habits and actions of cars and pedestrians. (Pedestrians are impossible to read by the way, it may take the gentle breeze of a set of handle bars between their thighs to wake them out of their office slumber) You can read the gestures and intentions of cars, I can’t explain how, or why this is possible, but you can. Get into enough accidents, have enough close calls and your subconscious mind instinctually tells you when to put your risk to the wayside and push forward or when to slow down and see the situation from a distance, study what the possibilities were and the ramifications of your rushing into them. The same applies to social interactions and stations, I know people, I’ve known people my entire life, the more people I know and get to know, the wider my knowledge of people grows. I’m not psychic, and I’m not some great neurological scientist, I’m just someone who knows people and often times understands them, we all do, through sheer experience and instinct.

So how far is the gap between being able to understand and read the people you know and understand, and people you see passing on the street. Well, it’s vast, the truth is, you could attach archetypes of such and such type to each person you meet based on people you already know, but their paths to being themselves are ultimately different and thus they do not fit into existing archetypes that you create. (PS I effing hate Karl Jung and his own self-righteous categorizing of people so I refuse to take part in his pseudo-scientific, self-indulgent, masterbatory tripe) The only method you can hold true to are what you can see. The obvious that can be rationalized by sight and mind, it’s real because you saw it, not because you heard it, because many times people in public will tell stories or prostrate themselves for attention or to present a certain air of what sort of person they are. What you can see; are their shoes worn? They may spend a great deal of time on their feet. Are they dirty? Maybe they are shoes reserved for leisure activity and we worn in the mud, possibly for a run on a rainy day, maybe the dirty look is a fashionable alternative to clean, maybe they’re on their way to buy a brand new pair, maybe they can’t afford a new pair, maybe they’ve had the same pair since law school and are superstitious about discarding them. These are questions you ask, so what’s the right answer? They’re all right answers, and, they’re all wrong answers.

It is not my intention to explain how to read people’s minds, or to understand complete strangers with a simple glance. Rather, it’s to understand other people’s lives to some degree in order to navigate through your own. If you see a man who looks suspiciously nervous looking around, hugging himself occasionally and eyeing passersby cautiously, you know that meeting eyes with him would not be prudent or wise, as the likelihood of his taking offence or being suspicious to your stares would provoke a confrontation and possibly and altercation. If you see a couple holding hands down the street in the dead of night laughing raucously and making loud, inappropriate commentary about the end of their evening, you know that warning them about the atmosphere of slumbering folk and gentle ears would only serve to create a moment of dismissal and annoyance or simply a few feet of silence between your intercedence and their state of mind. And if you see an expensive-looking car barreling down the street with reckless abandon and a badge of battered fender nearly changing the landscape and aerodynamic design, be sure it’ll peel out, barrel ahead and hit something else, so make sure it isn’t you.

It's a New Day For Old Jobs

I used to have a saying for the direction my life was heading in, ‘Apparently I’m on a destructive path, so get out of my way.’ I was working as a bicycle messenger and every turn presented some kind of danger, risk of death and worst of all the prospect of being out of work. Every time you embark on a new job, your brain is plotting a path, navigating around known obstacles and preventatively planning around the possibility of new obstacles. Every package is a fresh start, a new dawn, an instant of starting over and improving on your last endeavor.

Starting a new job can be like going to the movies, hearing a live band play, or going to a reading by your favorite author. It’s a new experience, it’s exciting and your time is filled with wonderment. You hang on to every moment not knowing what’s going to happen next, what will be introduced, what will tickle your senses and pave the way for new things and validation. But what if you start an old job, a return to a bygone career you promised yourself you’d never return to, either to prevent ruining prior experiences or because you have been deeply soured by the first go round. Either way, your deepest instincts tell you not to go back. You can’t go home again, so why would you think you’d be able to go to work again. Similar principles apply, the you that was you then, is no more. The life you lived then is not the life you live now. For the mass populous living in the moment, it’s difficult to see yourself tuning into your favorite television show sometime in the future without any reference between what you saw last and what is happening currently. You’re lost, disinterested and worst of all, something that had a memorably lasting impression on you is now completely ineffectual and boring.

I was a bicycle messenger in college, for those of you who don’t know what that is, there are people, like myself, who ride a bicycle through busy, dangerous city streets nine hours a day five days a week carting around everything from rolls of architectural drawings to fully-potted house plants. It’s the science of finding the shortest route around the bumps in the road, the daunting hills of completion and the traffic and congestion of everyday obstacles. Any tangible item of urgency and impression that cannot be faxed, emailed, relayed, phoned or whispered, is generally carried by messengers. Think of UPS drivers who pick things up and deliver them one at a time on a bicycle, that’s what I did, and that’s what I do. I had a wonderful experience in college, splitting my time between scholastic pursuits, extracurricular endeavors and working downtown, dabbling in the corporate infrastructure. I was sure that once I finished college, I would move on to better jobs, more important positions that utilized all of my various talents. What I found instead was a workforce I was in no way prepared for, a string of jobs that possessed redeeming attributes at arm’s length, but without any actual satisfaction or fruition. So I began talking about it, musing, if I couldn’t find anything else, that would be my fallback job.

Many people have fallback jobs, for some it’s waiting tables, tending bar, others work in bookstores and movie theaters, some end up working in offices as secretaries or personal assistants while others start a career at the bottom, never to rise an inch. It is with these fallback careers that many people are fording the flood of unemployment. With a sour economy and rampant joblessness, it is natural that people will come to accept what comes their way, what is available, familiar and open. As we trickle back to our fallback careers, searching for more meaningful ones begins to seem farther and farther away, job security sounds like a distant island where everyone is perpetually on vacation and they can’t spend their money fast enough. Tough economic times call for tightening of belts, reigning in flagrant fiscal flippance and favoring flagrant frugality. Though our future appears bleak, I’m grateful to have a job to come back to, a skill that can carry me through, and a position that though insecure at times, is always in consistent demand.

Can we perform to the degree of what is demanded of us? How much compromise are we as a hollow workforce willing to make? Often it is easy to see oneself walking out the door with famous last words drying at your lips and into a search for a better life. Some say finding a job is a full-time job in itself. My grandfather always said, ‘It’s easier to find a job when you have a job.’ Who’s right? I’ve been looking for work off and on since May of 2007, I worked freelance for a short while, but the open-ended nature of work and payment scared me and I decided to pursue what I could as an employee instead. I worked for artists, making art, building structures, painting, but that too, was open-ended, had no future, and ultimately had no permanence. Should I have left? Probably not, but it was only a month later that they laid off their entire workforce, who weren’t eligible for unemployment anyway. I had an advantage of starting my job search early, before more consequential layoffs. Did that help? Not really, I was out of work for five months before I decided to go to my fall back job. So does having a job help you get a job? It might, the appearance of being in demand, an employee of value who holds the structure of a company together is far more attractive than the last person picked for a sports team. Not working presents you as the slow kid, or the kid without aptitude, or who isn’t physically fit. You become the outcast of the workforce, unwanted by any team regardless of how uncomplete or uneven the teams are, they’d rather play without you. So, does taking a step backward in your career really prepare you to enter where you left? No. It doesn’t do much more than keep you afloat, paying rent, feeding yourself, before someone even takes notice of you.

The economy has got to get better, promises were made, motions are in action, things are happening and will happen. But until then, I feel obligated to fall back on what I can, trip over jobs I said I wouldn’t do again. Make new experiences, new lives with what is available to us. Wishing and hoping and praying and dreaming is great fun and it keeps us going, but we have to mobilize what we have available and complete something, bring something to fruition, or by the time our dream jobs are being offered again, we won’t have the luster left to take it.

Being a bicycle messenger is very satisfying work, you work as hard as you can, you’re paid for the work you put in and you gain a sense of accomplishment every time you deliver a job. Not to mention lots of fresh air and exercise. The problems come from the same places they appear at every job, from the top. Working in hierarchical environments usually produces the trickle effect, the idea that poop rolls downhill and some days you feel less like a person and more like a freight elevator, people riding you up and down all day carrying the weight of the masses from one floor to the other and being cursed when you don’t work exactly how they please. Mostly though, you’re your own boss, you hang out with other coworkers when you’re not working, and the whole world is your office, one big, open maze of buildings, loading docks and offices where you work. But that’s not what I want to do with my life, that’s not how I want to spend my 30s, I don’t want to wake up 40 wondering what I’ll do in my old age with bad knees no retirement, health care or social security (because it’s all gone). So I’ve decided to work nights, not in a liquor store or a restaurant, not mopping floors in a research facility, but from home, writing, researching, applying for jobs that were posted the previous day, keeping my skills sharp and my mind wound, keeping my inner clock from losing it’s numbers and clouding the future I can see. If you already work nights, your days are your nights, and you’ve got the jump on those who work days. But don’t lose sight of the future, don’t lose sight of your hope and your goals.

As long as you can see yourself in motion, as long as you can perceive change in your life, you can hang on to some kind of hope. So long as you still have enough time to live your life, you’ve got time to change your life. We have many careers over our lifetimes, and it’s never to late to start a new one, it’s never too late to learn a new skill, it’s never too late to shift course, to re-route to move away, travel. It’s never so late you can’t decide, don’t wait for the bottom to hit you on the ass. I promised myself I wouldn’t go back, I said it was too late, I was too old. Maybe I am, maybe it is too late and maybe I am too old, maybe these young bucks who’ve shown up in my place are where I was and I’m just reliving a bygone moment in my life. But I’m making a new memory, a new life, as a new me with a different perspective, whether it’s a good thing, a productive thing, I can’t say. But I’m back, I’ve returned, I’ve rejoined the workforce, navigating through the toil and roadblocks, meandering through familiar surroundings that have become new and unfamiliar and I’m finding my way to put a little money in my pocket, some positivity in an uncertain future and another route around the bumps in the road, the hills of completion and the traffic and congestion of everyday life. Apparently I’m on a constructive path, pave the way.

Proverbial Jerks

An old proverb says, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” It’s fascinating to listen to other people publicly express their own political views, opinions and ramblings. For an essence of such a public conversation almost purposely overheard by passersby in a hopelessly indulgent manner, it’s purpose is seemingly to feed their rampant egomania. In specific the far leftist community of Cambridge, MA think of themselves to be particularly educated and astute being of the opinion that they are not only the shapers of their own future and the catalyst to which past indiscretions were smothered but the endless masses of past policy-changers and world-molders whose own action seemingly single-handedly quashed the conservative right until its resurface and rise. To this end they then place the blame on subsequent generations of young adults for not exacting their own brand of vengeance upon policy makers and corporate indulgence. It is with my own responsibility and action that I seek to deconstruct the casual conversations of burned out politicos, long since soured on their own soda of change and malleable governmental input. It seems strange to have so many of a single, bygone generation running the country with so few of them who have interest in public discourse and upheaval.

It is a fairly simple task to criticize, to lay blame and question the methods and motivation of those re-experiencing a resurgence of republican conservatism. It’s an even simpler task to do nothing, to stand idly by while the evil specters of corporate control creep over the proverbial ridge, to wipe out whatever social structures and reform that may be in place bathing itself in the plentifully available bounties and swimming in the valley of fiscal embezzlement. It exists in the current socio-political climate a questioning of motives, direction and intent with the express aid of proven flux with the annunciation and commencement of a new dawn in American politics. The election of an idealist, one of incorruptible diligence has given purchase and voice to a fallen generation of motivated activists who have taken a resurgence of interest in change and deformed an accomplishment of prolific proportions and in its most malleable form shaped something ugly, cutting directly to the source material, the very foundation upon which the ideals and ethos of this country were formed.

That said, it is with an open mind that I myself question the past political decisions and their last-minute spicing of the early boiling cauldron. A meeting of minds yet to evolve and understand the country that they created, corpses rehashing the creation of their own policies around a fallen castle of idealism. The inherent nature of born Americans is to fight back, to rise in dissent and cast off all manner of oppression. Based on the oppressive qualities on which our current political system sits, it is our nature to desire change in all forms and from all directions. However, to change every facet of our political and cultural traditions simultaneously would only achieve a level of uncertainty and turmoil that we as a country would not, could not recover from and in such a weakened state would give rise to all manner of extremist tendencies and subscription. We would line up to whole-heartedly sign up for a variety of trivial causes with assaulting aims and tumultuous ends.

Rather, we as a country must exact our changes piece-meal, in incremental ammendements of subtle, effective twists of our national fate and the future of our collective consciousness. We must address each issue as they collapse, economic system first as we have seen it’s considerable demise recently and the exposure of it’s endlessly corrupt infrastructure of capitalist ladling and double-dipping in the face of the poverty-stricken masses. The age of pulling ourselves up from our bootstraps is over, no longer do hard-working means justify the hard-living means. Ours is a life left up in the air, consumed by our own uncertainty. The system itself is designed to elevate those already in power born of privilege and opportunity so that they may take their own liberties, be they liberating the funds of our economic system or allowing their mouths to criticize events, states and elements of our shaped environment that they have no interest in changing, only to deconstruct and create an intricate web of complacency.

Voices like those of Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader, though appropriate and important for specific instances and discourse, are unwanted and unwelcome in a moment of obvious change, simply because the statements that they make are positioned specifically to criticize rather than exact any sort of correction or iterations. It motivates, though negatively seeking specifically to rile the rabble-rousers and create a mob mentality of a different demographic. Though useful if applied positively, it is seldom the initiative and aim of the commentators and becomes self-indulgent soliloquy of entertainment of network televised proportion.

Once a year hundreds of able bodies cram into an auditorium at MIT to hear Noam Chomsky deliver his own state of the union address in which he discounts any efforts of anyone in action and creates a dystopian deliverance of detrimental dissidence. Once every four years environmental advocates, nay-saying, negligible ne’erdowells haplessly cast their votes for Ralph Nader, in favor of the liberal Democratic incumbent serving only to empower the conservative hold on the American psyche. Even the past election, in which our current president was elected, Nader himself refused to remove his candidacy from the general election and had it been more of a landslide, I’m sure his stubborn, self-righteous subjugations would have come into question. However, this is not the case and record store owners and Harvard professors alike continue to soak themselves in the ocean of their own meanderings.

I suppose I should be thankful that intellectuals and academics have kept the traditions of discursive thought alive by reading endlessly dry political theory and criticism, that I haven’t the palate for. I suppose I should be thankful, for without the constant drone of nit-picking critical thought, my own inspiration of discourse could not be assuaged or pondered. I suppose I should be thankful that my own positivity and hopeful nature leads me away from similarly embittered assertions and into other stations of alternate futures and renewal. I suppose I should be thankful that I was able to overcome my own negativity and bitterness and witness a justification of upheaval and unraveling the tightly wound ball of twine in which we have trapped ourselves momentarily. Mostly I’m thankful that I can’t bring myself to feign an interest and subsequent conversation based on the shared ideals of a gaggle of old codgers with nothing nice to say, and in fact nothing to say at all.