A tortured hour

It's 3:34 AM....

The house is dark but then the house is always dark to me even in the middle of the day.

It's hot, too hot.  The thermometer says it's 88 degrees outside but in here it's closer to 100.  Why? I can't afford to turn the AC on.  Such luxuries are for other people.

Madness! a Phoenix summer where the weatherman cheerily announces weeks of 110 degree plus days. No escape, no money for a reprieve from the heat.  No comforts...

Things haven't been so good.  The refrigerator's almost  always empty and what little is there provides meager nourishment for body or soul.  Everything around me seems somehow broken.  Things that should have long since been discarded forced past their prime, patched together and pressed back to service until they can finally give no more.

Broken...

For five years it's been a tough row to hoe.  It's never been easy but this time it's harder.  I know, it's been that way for many but I'm most familiar with my own tribulations.  

Excuse the pain if you've heard it before...

It's the kind of thing that makes you hate television, especially the commercials.  Constant nagging about things nobody really cares about all with the promise of taking your woes away...for a price.

A price I can no longer afford which makes me hate them even more.  It's like being mocked, the proverbial carrot inevitably followed by the stick.  I don't hate them for selling their wares; I hate them for the assumption that I don't know any better.

Buy this car and save money on gas, Enroll in that diploma mill and have a brighter future.  Neither is true and I've got close to 100K of debt to prove it with nothing to show but the collection letters.  The worst part, they sell a lifestyle with expensive trappings but little meaning.

When did becoming a member of the middle class become a lifelong aspiration?  When did simple civilized survival become a goal?

It's 3:44 AM...

Something's rattling on the car, I know what it is, I know every sound it can make but all I can do is hope that it remains little more than an audible annoyance...

Comfort is a luxury.  There is no peace in my surroundings or my soul. 

Middle aged, underestimated, dismissed, hopeless but still defiant!

Pull myself up by the bootstraps!  But I have no boots...

Never cared for that analogy anyway.  It's a fallacy perpetrated by those who never knew the predicament.

Opportunity is made not found but opportunity doesn't happen in a vacuum but lately it seems I do.

Whose fault?  Mine I suppose.  But then far more worthy than I have a similar tale.  We can't all be wrong.

What can I do?  For myself, I'll try anything that doesn't risk the little that remains.  Is it enough?

Time will tell, but do I have the time? 

It's 4:00AM

Do something, do anything.  Unbridled ambition thwarted by petty finances.  Do I believe in myself? Am I all that I thought I once was?

Not a high bar, humility or more appropriately the edge of self-loathing has always been a companion.  Ego and hubris have no place.  But neither did confidence.  I rarely win so I refuse the gamble.

This isn't the life I planned or should I say any of the lives I've planned.  I've started over so many times but always end up in the same place. 

Here...

Keep trying, keep striving all the time fearful of losing the little bit I have left even if I hate the prison it creates.

Do I have time to try again?

It's 4:16AM

Damn! it's hot in here.  The winters are better but I still can't afford the heat.  I sit in the remains of my chair, it too is broken, drenched in my own filthy perspiration the only comfort being the memory of it that will come when I can see my breath waking on some January morning.

Not defeated, not giving up but lost.

How do I move forward?  What's the key? 

4:23 AM

Recruiters, agencies, headhunters.  Hardly better than TV commercials.  Promises not kept, selling a bill of goods only for their own ends.  The product doesn't match the consumer, no sale.

Still I try, find the needle, ignore the haystack...

My own pursuits?  On virtue success, on paper, failure. 

I never wanted to do anything that didn't matter to someone.  It seems that's a dying...virtue.

It's 4:24 AM

Everything still seems broken.  I look around me and see so much that could be done.  I want to fix it, I want to fix me...

I'm not in a vacuum. Others suffer for my affliction.  I want to fix that too.

Keep trying, keep looking, deny the doubt...

Fix it...

It's 4:34AM

The Pros and Cons of Phoenix... if you believe in stereotypes

I posted the following response to a YouTube video someone had put up about the "Pros and Cons of Phoenix."  I found it somewhat misleading and typical of the stereotypes you hear from people who really haven't spent much time here.  That the video was a glorified PowerPoint presentation with a voiceover didn't add to its credibility.

I'm the last person to defend the place and truth be told if finances allowed I'd rip up stakes in a heartbeat.  This state has been no friend to me but when I hear deliberate misinformation it annoys me to no end.  I've provided the video in question and my response to it.  If you really want to know what it's like to live in Phoenix, read the post that follows it.

My response:

"As someone who's lived in the Phoenix area since I was dragged here as a kid in 1971 I can say with authority that this video is somewhat lacking in content.

Let's start with all those great jobs she was talking about...I suppose if low wage jobs are your thing then jobs around Phoenix would seem plentiful.  I can tell you that for anything above flipping burgers the wages are absolute crap and so are the corporations that came here for just that reason.  Where do you think Michigan got it's ideas for union busting anyway?   

Cost of living may be lower than other places but so are the wages so it's not like everyone here can afford to just jump in the car and head to their luxurious cabin in Pinetop then take a jaunt over to the Canyon for some lunch.   The state's biggest employer is Wal-Mart so that should tell you something.  We used to have big companies here but most of them pulled out or scaled down in the 80's.  This state is only high tech if you think Best Buy is an indicator. 

 The majority of jobs are either retail or healthcare to take care of all those "snow birds."  Those wages are depressed compared to other places as well.  Want to be a teacher?  Try 35K a year to start and maybe you'll get to 45K if you stay for 10 years.   35K a year doesn't buy much of a house when median prices are 250K for anything but a shack in a bad neighborhood that's a bloody 2 hour commute with gas prices anywhere from $2.50 to $5.00 a gallon depending on who farted in Iraq today.  

Let's also not forget about our beloved Sheriff Joe whose corrupt administration has the feds and the ACLU setting up permanent offices just to keep an eye on him.  Socially and politically Arizona is the Mississippi of the Southwest.  We make Texas look progressive by comparison.  Nothing gets done around here unless there's a greased palm and plenty of photo ops for someone's coffee table book.  

But I digress...

The weather is what it is, it's a freaking desert you know.  You completely forgot to mention the monsoons which make it more humid but it does cool us off from July to September.  Late May through mid July are usually the hottest months.  What really irritates me though is that this city including all the other satellite cities that surround it has done absolutely nothing to combat sprawl.  The people with money here are the developers and they'll put up a 15 story office building just for the hell of it.  Then we got all of the refuges from California in the 90's and doubled the population.  

Now we have freeways that look like the 405 6 hours a day and even more competition for the few good paying jobs available. 

Traffic is bloody awful and the combination of Midwest and California drivers makes any trip an adventure.  Either they're going too fast, too slow or both while they babble on endlessly on their cellphones.  Traffic is bad everywhere but it's doubly so here because you never know what to expect depending on what part of the valley you're in.  It can take over an hour to get from Mesa to NW Phoenix on a Saturday evening.  

A trip of less than 50 miles on freeways with a 65MPH speed limit on a weekend day because of the equivalent of an early morning weekday rush hour at 5PM on a Saturday!  Let's not even talk about the elephant in the room.  The fact that 4 million people depend on a water source fought over by 4 states and the western half of the country is in a severe drought!  Are you people freaking nuts?  It's only a matter of time before the chamber of commerce has to admit that there's not enough water to sustain this many people. 

As for the people, yeah Scottsdale and the Biltmore area have their noses in the air like any wealthy zip code but there's far more zip codes that average less than 25K a year in wages meaning there's lots of places you don't walk to dog at night.  Most people are friendly enough on a superficial level but don't expect  much more than that.  People are usually very transient only sticking around a few years before bouncing off to the next new subdivision.  Everyone works very hard to keep up appearances even if they can't afford it.  That's what Phoenix is.  I don't know where this lady was living."

Social Media is a lie

Social Media is a lie

There, I said it and you know damned well that it's true.  Popular culture has adopted the premise of social media being the new normal.  That's what people mean when they overuse the term "ubiquitous" by the way.

We're told to carefully curate our Facebook pages and polish our LinkedIn profiles to ensure that we're giving the "right" impression to any drive-by onlookers who may take a passing interest.  I mean we wouldn't want to send the wrong message would we?

Prospective employers love social media.  It's a quick and dirty way to get the goods on candidates without ever having to meet them.  In other words your social media persona might as well be another copy of your resume, dating profile and background report all in one neat multimedia package.

So best be sure it's showing you in your best light...Which defeats the purpose.

Knowing that almost everyone engaged in social media is either lying or too naive to realize the ramifications of that video from your last trip to Vegas means none of it has value.

The only people who are honest are the ones with nothing to lose which is exactly .000000001%.  Good luck finding that needle in the haystack and when you do try not to be disappointed when you find out those people aren't that interesting.

Social media is less about connecting than providing a mechanism for personal advertisement.  Which means it's about as useful as a commercial for a feminine hygiene product. 

Social media is just an outgrowth of a society built on lies.  We choose political candidates based on which one's empty promises we're most aligned with.  We associate with people that otherwise would never get the  time of day if we think they can be of use to us.  We go along with the popular groupthink for fear of repercussion should we speak our own minds.

Keep social media in the context of a public facing mask and you'll stay out of trouble.  Ignore the starry eyed optimists proclaiming how connected the world is because of it.  It's not, if you live in Nebraska the chances that you actually care about anything going on in Uzbekistan are negligible.  So long as there's that strong "media" component in social media (meaning it's fake) it's nothing more than personal marketing of a false image.

In short, keeping it real does not include being a social media maven.  Reality has nothing to do with it at all.