You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Even before many folks switched to unlisted numbers, in part to evade obnoxious ding-a-ling solicitations, the annual telephone book began shrinking. The migration from landline to cell phones was apparently the final straw, along with Yellow Pages regulars who turned instead to website searches or FaceBook.
What was long a standard reference volume for local communities is now long gone.
When’s the last time you saw a phone book?
Decades have passed since I’ve been in any part of New York City. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, though, most of my buds were from there or nearby, so I wound up staying in all five boroughs. And I was reintroduced in the mid-80s as well.
I became fascinated with the transit rails and even imagined what I cast as Subway Hitchhikers, their psychedelic underground adventures now available in my novel Subway Visions.
Oh, the history! The city has certainly undergone a wild ride in the years since, some of them admittedly terrifying.
As improbable as my hitchhikers seemed at the time, reality has since produced several parallel developments.
The first was the Mole People, the homeless who created villages in the tunnels starting in the Reagan era.
The second was the Subway Surfers, daredevil youths who would ride the tops of the trains or more recently, hang from the sides.
I thought they had faded from the scene, but a spate of recent fatalities is proving otherwise.
As for the adrenaline rush? Or is it testosterone?
Maybe someone will be able to describe it to the rest of us. I’m not sure I’d want to see the movie version, sedate as I’ve become now.
You know, the changing photo that keeps appearing when you log in. The calculations have no idea, really, of what I like or don’t. My sensibilities are far more complicated than its simple “mountains” or “seashores” calculus.
In one photo, for instance, a single bright-colored backpack at the bottom of the scene threw off the entire wilderness message. It looked like trash. That sort of thing. I didn’t like the particular photo for that reason, but I loved the bigger landscape.
It’s like living with a painting and one day you finally observe something that becomes a flaw. You loved it up to that point. And then?
It’s a binary switch rather than a scale of one-to-ten.
For now, I’m finding some comfort in that, sensing they still aren’t outsmarting me.
The so-called “worker shortage” needs to have a new label, along with a clearer perspective. In too many ways, that “explanation” often comes down to blaming the victim, with its sense that people who are unemployed are lazy.
Not that those bandying the charge would accept the conditions of those “help wanted” positions. You know, the “entry-level” openings that are really no-respect, dead-end drudgery and require “reliable transportation” on late nights and weekends at minimum wage. Sorry, it doesn’t add up.
Or the plight of the long-haul independent truckers who are burdened by the costs of their rigs and the long hours away from their homes and families. As many of them age, they’re hanging it up and nobody’s stepping into the trap. Well, that’s one aspect of the “supply-chain problems” we’re encountering.
And then we should also admit the number of people who are simply unemployable today, sometimes for medical, mental, or emotional conditions.
What we’re seeing is a confluence of long-simmering problems finally erupting in the aftermath of Covid.
The health-care system is a prime example, far more complicated than we dare get into here. But Europe seems to train its doctors at less cost and in less time than we do in the USA, and there are arguments that primary-care physicians are capable of delivering much that we’re turning over to costly specialists. Much of the staff, meanwhile, has minimal health benefits, if any.
Wages adjusted for inflation have been declining for decades.
Breaking the unions has been a factor, along with company expectations of 24/7 availability plus worker loyalty without extending reciprocal security.
Keeping stores open seven days a week, by the way, is a relatively new custom. It does add to the low-pay “help wanted” slots.
At the core, what workers are selling is their time is exchange for something, not all of it money. They’re finding that many jobs aren’t worth the cost to them once child care, transportation, clothing, and the like are factored in.
There’s also the trap of being pitted against lower paid labor elsewhere (not just China) without reaping any of the profits from higher productivity here, which has been ballooning in the wealth of the superrich but definitely not trickling down.
One of the surprises has been the number of workers in their 50s who have been dropping out, especially males. Perhaps they’re working on their own “under the table,” but many have simply “had it” with the drag. Work, from what I’ve too often seen, no longer earns any respect. And the traditional work ethic carries an unwritten requirement of being paid a livable wage in exchange. Again, it’s not adding up.
Has anyone connected crackdowns on undocumented residents and their being deported with the shortages? These were the invisible workforce that was sustaining so much of the economy. As I was saying about respect?
Posts on my Chicken Farmer blog examine work and jobs in much more detail from a personal level.
From that perspective, I’d say we’re encountering a free-market reaction to low pay and unrewarding employment situations. This one-by-one, “disorganized labor” job action will be much more difficult to address than the traditional sitting down at a negotiating table and emerging with a new contract.
Is anybody even talking about the big picture here? I’d like to know.
I’m sorry, but I have real difficulty in using a plural pronoun to refer to just one person. I don’t want to get into the political ramifications here or gender limitations of our language or other arguments. To call one person “they” has me looking for the rest of the group. And when that “they” is being discussed at the same as “their” family or coworkers, I’m left with no idea who’s really being discussed. Life’s already confusing enough.
How about a whole new set of pronouns?
Let me offer “vey,” “vem,” “veir” for consideration. (I actually misheard “they” as “vey,” which got the ball rolling.)
It’s a way we can tell vem apart from veir family, household, even team.
Yes, I know the gender identity objections, especially when all (collectively) are placed under a masculine pronoun. I can even object to that practice by noting the confusion at times of ambiguity when trying to apply it specifically to males-only.
What can we do to gain greater all-around clarity rather than muddy the language further?
Hard to believe this blog is now in its second decade.
With the Barn, a new year usually signals a slight shift in focus and content.
2023, for instance, will see a series excerpting dreams I’ve had over the years. Mine can be surreal and inexplicable and yet, I feel, illuminating. They’ll likely give you unexpected glimpses into my psyche even though I’m thinking of it as literature. Meanwhile, the prose poems that have been appearing on Saturdays have run their course. Hope you’ve enjoyed their compressed impressions of my earlier life and feelings, especially when they’ve reflected your own, too.
Dover’s 400th anniversary will continue to be a major theme, including things I’ve learned since the release of my book based on the town’s Quaker heritage. And there will be announcements of presentations based on the book as they come up through the year. The ones I’ve done so far have been a blast.
Now that you’ve been introduced to Eastport and its ways, the tone of those posts will also turn, shall we say, more casual? Or at least more of the everyday experience around here rather than a record of the connections I’ve discovered. Besides, living on an island in Maine is some people’s fantasy, at least through the summer. I’m hoping to add a streak of reality to that vision.
Kinisi will continue with their off-the-wall, quirky, flash slashes. Some fall into the realm of concrete poems, a la Aram Saroyan, and others take the trippy flashes of the sort Richard Brautigan produced. Others can be seen as prompts for others to build on. These minimalist notations do reflect the way I’ve often heard and seen the world, slightly askew, even though I have to admit I don’t “understand” many of them. They’re intended to dance to their own beat, OK?
And I have to admit my Tendrils on Tuesday are great fun to investigate and offer. I never thought of top ten lists as entertaining, forget the factual dimension. They definitely have much more to dig up as we go.
One big shift will likely be in photography, from my Olympus camera to my S-22 Ultra cell phone. We’ll see what you think. Eastport and the surrounding environment are certainly visually rich subjects. Click, click, everywhere you turn.
Overall, though, I’m intending to have fewer posts this time around, yet it still looks like that still means at least one posting each day. Or, as one renowned writing teacher taught his classes, “Write 300 good words a day.” Not that I’m keeping count, even as I keep hoping to cut back. Does keyboarding really become compulsive?
My life and outlook have certainly changed over the course after signing up for a WordPress blog, which then led to four related lines. Thanks for sharing so much of it here.
What are you looking forward to on your end in the new year?
Streaming? Radio is what I do in the car, while driving.
As for podcasts?
The cheapest ones still came to 27 cents apiece. Add postage to that, and paying bills can add up.
As for paying directly online?
As much as I’m a fan of the U.S. Postal Service and am trying to do my part to assure its survival, I am listening to my wife’s advice to switch over to online bill paying. Before I do anything drastic, though, I want to hear from others.
What’s your experience been?
We’re quickly approaching the longest nights of the year, which are truly long here in Eastport. Accompanied by the most truncated days of the year, when the sun barely clears the horizon. We’re just a hair shy of the 45th Parallel, the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole. These days, it can feel even further north than the map shows.
The experience can be especially harsh here, now that the Summer People are long gone and most of the stores and galleries are shut for the season while those that remain open do so largely on limited hours. You might see a stranger or two in town around sunset, looking for a place to eat, and the best you can do is tell them to go to the IGA and get there before the 7 o’clock closing. Pizza slices or deli cuts plus a six-pack lead the list.
Even more, we know big snow, escalating ice, and profound cold are still ahead, as well as a blustery nor’easter or three.
We don’t even have a retail scene to crank up the holiday hoopla. Nor do we have anything resembling a nightlife, apart from a few cultural performances. Bless ‘em, especially after the Covid shutdowns.
Needless to say, social connections are especially important. For me, that includes singing in Quoddy Voices and worshiping with Cobscook Friends Meeting.
Also anticipated is a big stack of reading, both books and magazines, and concerts streamed from the Pine Tree State and beyond.
I’m already looking forward to the invasion of family for the holidays.
How do you adjust to such seasonal change?
After discussing Maine’s unincorporated townships, I need to add that there are a lot of variants – 17, if I’m counting right. Among them are the BKP, BPP, NBKP, NBPP, and WBKP designations – translated as Bingham’s Kennebec Purchase, Bingham’s Penobscot Purchase, North of Bingham’s Kennebec Purchase, North of Bingham’s Penobscot Purchase, and West of Bingham’s Kennebec Purchase.
So just who was this Bingham guy?
In short, he was William Bingham, already a wealthy Philadelphian when he became filthy rich via privateering during the Revolutionary War. He was also a statesman and U.S. senator who parlayed his riches into vast land purchases, as noted above but also including upstate New York, where Binghamton, where I’ve also lived, was named in his honor.
Quite simply, Bingham owned two million acres in Maine, making him land rich but cash poor.
His agent in Maine, Revolutionary War Gen. David Cobb, was responsible for laying out most of the roads associated with the Airline Highway (now eastern State Route 9). And when Cobb retired in 1820, John Black, agent for Baring Brothers Bank in London, felt that lumber was the wealth that would provide his boss the needed profit. There were further complications as well as marriages, but you get an idea how Baring township in the Moosehorn wildlife preservation got its name.
Cobb did, however, build a great house at Gouldsborough and soon faced some harsh realities that he notated between 1795 and 1800.
First, the land and climate of eastern Maine were not and are not suitable for farming. He noted that “those who come to view the country … have as frequently returned almost blind by the bites of flies and mosquitoes. You have no conception of the hosts of these devils that infest the thick forest at this season.”
More critically, he found “the great body of the people of this country possess no regard to the rights of private property,” calling them ” vicious inhabitants who disfigured its landscape. Every inhabitant here is now a trespasser, a plunderer. They live by it, and therefore they will not cultivate the finest soil in the world. They’re not doing this is the chief cause why the reputation on the country has been damn’d. If the people who live by lumbering are indulged in cutting the forests wherever they please, they will have but little … appreciation of the soil.”
For the record, the soil itself wasn’t nearly that rich.
But continuing, in his estimation, “The greater part … follow lumbering and fishing … and they are very intemperate, very lazy and very poor. It may be said in truth … the majority of the inhabitants are drunkards.”
There are those, of course, who would question whether much has changed since.
Or, as is sometimes said of Eastport, it’s a drinking village with a fishing problem.
Jnana's Red Barn 