bushmeister0

For some reason Blogger.com has been unavailable for the past few days so I haven't had a chance to post there, but Tripod is still working.

Today I posted about the death of Abu Musabd al-Zarqawi:

"Wow, they finally got him, Zarqawi is dead! Boy, I haven't been this excited since they got Uday and Qusay. We've really reached a turning point now.

Last April there was a story in the WaPo that began:

"The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

read more with links at:

http://bushmeister0.tripod.com/bushmeister0/index.blog?from=20060608

Here are a few more posts that you all might have missed this week:

At Let's Talk About Democracy:

http://bushmeister0.tripod.com/bushmeister0

Will wonders never cease? The US is now offering to talk to Iran about its nuclear program, and even more shocking than that, Condi Rice told NPR yesterday that she could even envision sitting down with Iran's foreign minister at some point in the future. This is pretty monumental shift in US policy considering that just a few weeks ago the administration was still hinting at military options being on the table and adamantly insisting that direct talks were "impossible," and that "bad behavior" wouldn't be rewarded. That sort of unequivocal, obstinate rhetoric ---mainly the expression of the Cheney/Rumsfled cabal's influence on the policy debate within the administration --- has given way to the more pragmatic State Department position of engagement, or so it appears.

go to LTAD for the rest...

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At Non Sum Dignus:

http://imnotoworthy.blogspot.com

Yesterday the WaPo reported:

"North Carolina should provide economic and social compensation to victims of Wilmington's 1898 racial violence, said a panel that also concluded the attack was not a riot but rather this country's only recorded coup d'etat."

On November 9th 1898 whites in Wilmington, (populated by 9,000 whites and 11,000 blacks at the time) rampaged through the black sections of town buring, looting and lynching. The next morning the 1898 Foundation reports:

"Literally at gunpoint, Mayor Wright and all of the members of the city council who were presented were forced to resign, and a new city government was formed. Captain John Melton of the city police had also been arrested and he and all of the other members of the city police department were also forced to resign, and Edgar Parmele was made chief of police. There was no resistance. Wright, Melton, and the others were happy to escape with their lives. In addition to the white Fusionist leadership in the city, many African American leaders were also arrested and/or driven into exile."

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As I watched Taylor Hicks become the new American Idol last Wednesday night, the thought suddenly occurred that the Democrats winning back the Congress might be a sure thing after all. It was the weirdest thing; I don't know whether it was Prince unexpectedly swooping in out of nowhere just before Ryan Seacrest announced the winner, or the fact that a gray haired, 29-year old --- who'd actually heard of Buddy Holly before he did one of his songs on Idol ---had actually gotten some 45 million votes from a bunch of Bush babies.

I really got the impression, though, that this is some sort of bellwether, some kind of sea change. I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who has been wondering when the tipping point was finally going to come, and it's really seemed that it would never come, but the moment Hicks won I thought this might actually be it. People are sick and tired of the fear mongering, the lies, the rampant corruption and the seemingly enless blunders this administration is responsible for. 'Enough is enough,' is what a vote for Taylor Hicks says!
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On this Memorial Day weekend I thought it might be appropriate to mention some of the brave soldiers that have served their country with distinction despite the shoddy treatment some of them have received over the years from their own government. In addition to the day to day travails of being a soldier on the battle line, long hours of monotony punctuated by a few seconds of sheer terror, there have been men who have had to endure discrimination and ill treatment by their superior officers in some cases and the complete abandonment of their leaders in Washington. The fact that such adversity never caused them to leave their post and to keep fighting is a testament to all American fighting men and women and should never be forgotten because this is what has made our fighting people the best in the world.

Such a case is the story of the 54th Massachusetts, the colored regiment made again famous a few years ago in the movie "Glory." The Boston regiment fought with bravery and distinction in the Deep South from 1863 to the end of the war in 1865. They are most remembered for their legendary failed storming of Battery Wagner on Morris Island, South Carolina, on July 18, 1863 that caused the death of their white commanding officer Col. Robert Gould Shaw along with eleven other officers, 135 men wounded and almost a hundred missing or captured.

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That's it for now, you're basically all caught up, just go to the blogs to see the rest.

Alex says I should copy my posts from my two blogs here to let my friends, who don't go them too often, know what I'm up to. Since I can't spend the time redoing all the links here, I'll just paste the first pargraph of my posts here until we can figure out how to "syndicate" them. (whatever that means)

Today's post at Non Sum Dignus:

http://imnotworthy.blogspot.com

The next skandal: Robert McCallum and other administration malfeasance.

On Friday the WaPo reported:

"A federal judge ruled yesterday that Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum Jr. must undergo questioning in a lawsuit by a nonprofit group seeking records about the Justice Department's conduct in a landmark case against the tobacco industry." [see smokey history]

The nonprofit group in question, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) explains:

"Last June, CREW submitted a Freedom of Information Act {FOIA) request to DOJ asking for records relating to the proposed penalty in United States v. Philip Morris, Inc. As a penalty for the tobacco industry's violations of racketeering laws, DOJ had initially sought $130 billion, at a rate of $5.2 billion per year over 24 years, to fund a smoking cessation program. Suddenly and without explanation, in June 2005 DOJ drastically dropped the amount to only $10 billion, at a rate of $2 billion per year for five years."

Well, it seems like it's been a while since I wrote something for this damn live journal thingie, but I figure Caitlin, at least , tunes in occasionally to see what I'm up to; so I'll just go over some things that have been going on.

First thing is that, Caitlin and Alex came up to visit a few weeks ago and we had a good time having them here (Sorry about the floor and our cats!), especially Brooke who is missing all her friends down in DC. Alex and I had some good conversation, over what was seemingly endless pitchers of what I think was PBRs at Johnny Brenda's about writing and politics and stuff.

In other news, I got a new job, which I don't hate---for a change---at the oldest independent book store in Philly (Founded in 1936) which is right down in Center City and is, just coincidentally, almost right across the street from Brookie's eye store. The perfect situation you might think, but my hours prevent me from posting to my blogs most of the week, except for Monday's and Wednesdays, which is a major impediment to my main passion. I have to figure out a way to get around this conundrum soon, because I'm getting hundreds of hits at both my blogs, of late, and I can't write anymore!

A new wrinkle in this mix is that Brookie's Nona is coming to Philly to live with us and our cats for 11 days and I don't know when I'm going to be able to write while entertaining, working and sleeping. Oh, this sucks; the Bush administration is falling to pieces and can't gloat!

More importantly, another concern for me is that my parents are living in a blown out "manufactured home," which to the rest of us is called a trailer, in Martin County Florida; victims of hurricane Wilma, a very destructive storm that has left about 400,000 Floridians homeless. You don't hear too much about what has gone on in Florida since the latest hurricane---especially about Martin County----because everybody is pretty much overwhelmed and disaster fatigued from Katrina and Rita and the earthquake in Pakistan; but my poor retiree parents are stuck in their trailer with half a roof and all their furniture and belongings are ruined by a deluge of water that came raining down when the roof went and to add insult to injury, they're still waiting for an insurance adjuster to come out and give them a big check, which three weeks after Wilma struck, has yet to happen. They're really freaked out and have yet to get over the violence of the actual storm, never mind the aftermath. My dad had to hold on to the front door to keep it from blowing off, and he got all cut and bruised in the process.

Over the past few weeks we've also been dealing with the SEPTA strike, which shut down the public transportation system for about a week. From where we live, you really can get to work without a car or the bus, truly or El. Likely, my friend George was able to get Brookie to work during the strike and right as the whole thing ended I got two jobs; at the book store and cleaning rich people's homes. Unfortunately, right as I started my very low paying book seller gig the house cleaning job went out the window. So, as usual, one step forward and two steps back.

That's about all the news I can write at the moment as I have only a few hours to get my blogs updated. So, until next month, see ya' later.

More on I hate job, or I should say, my former job. Ingvar, our Dear Leader, writes that "You can do much in 10 minutes. 10 Minutes gone are irretrievably lost. You can never get them back. 10 Minutes are not only the hourly wage divided by 6. 10 minutes are a part of yourself. Split your life into 10 minute units and scarifice as few as possible to futalities."

You know, our Dear Leader is correct, as usual, and I apparently sacrificed too many 10 minute units in attempting to get to work on time via the public transportation system. My attendance wasn't up to Ingvar's penny pinching standards and I am not longer part of his group of "constructive fanatics, who with unwavering obstinacy, refuse to accept the impossible, the negative."

I decided that using large blocks of my 10 minute units in an attempt to get to work on time weren't worth miniscule hourly wage I was recieving and the six day on-one-day-off--four hour-a-day-20-hour weeks were pretty much futalities that weren't worth my time.

Since I was in my 90 day probation they dispenced with talking to me about my tardys with a warning or a write up and just went for the summary termination. The LP [Leader's Police] escorted me out of the building like I was a criminal, a time thief, because I guess they were afraid I might infect their minions of conformity with my negativity.

Nice company, thanks for doing me favor by firing me assholes! Pushng a cart of abandons around for four hours, day in day out, wasn't exactly my idea of a rewarding work experience. As the Dear Leader says, " it is not always easy to give life and warmth to some of our more mundane daily tasks." I didn't really see my "development" being "progressive" and although, "a job must never be just a meal ticket" I still need to pay the rent and eat, and $150 a week really doesn't do it for me. Maybe, in the land of the midnight sun that goes a long way, but not in the US.

Speaking of negativity: the other day, another one of my former co-workers, had a little run in with a police officier who was hired by the Dear Leader to moonlight and protect his resources. He was working in the Bistro handing out coffee and $.50 hotdogs when he noticed a female officer staring at him from acroos the counter. At one point, he put a soda on the counter for another customer and she told him to take it down. He was a little puzzled by this and told her this is what he was trained to do.

She told him to "shut up." He said, 'excuse me, did you just tell me to shut up?' She said, "shut up" again. He asked her if he needed to call somebody and she told him to call whoever he wanted to. Now, we were trained to call LP if a situation got hairy with a customer, so he called LP. While he was asking for assistence from them she was on her radio telling them that anything he said was a lie and not to listen to him.

LP never came down, never investigated, never did anything. So much for protecting the employees. Now, my friend is looking for a new job because he doesn't feel safe working there anymore, because he doesn't know what this cop might do to him and he knows he can't rely on the company to protect him.

I will continue my Dear Leader blog, because I know there are a few co-workers at the store that have not drunk the kool-aid and think Ingvar's "constructive fanatics" are a bunch of cheap bastards who work us to death for very little pay and a whole lot of bullshit.

http://thedearleader.blogspot.com

So, I hear that Caitlin is still reading this mess of a live journal. I wish I could devote more time to it, but I have little time and many blogs. And then there is work, which takes up too much time and pays very little in return. I work for this really weird company that is from another country and another century.

The true believers really get into it. You just know they wake up in the morning and are all ready to go. “Oh, boy, I’m going to work!” The underlings, the one like me who haven’t drunk the Koolaid, are pretty much shunned.

I don’t participate in the parties and rallies. There is something really creepy about everybody wearing the same uniform running around with the big Stepford grin on their faces jumping up and down cheering because profits are up.

Might I venture to say their cultists? Yes, I would. In this vain, I have begun yet another blog devoted to the founder of this particular corporation called “the Dear Leader.” I’m trying to enlist other dissenters I’ve talked to there to help out. Please fell free to add your two cents.
I must run, but I’ll be back.

http://thedearleader.blogspot.com

For what its worth, here’s another exciting installment of my Live Journal. I’m afraid with all my other writing and my job, I don’t have a lot of time to devote to this. My friend Caitlin, who turned me on to this Journal crap, doesn’t even read it anymore. Maybe, some day it will be of some interest to someone.

So, the theme of last few entries has been “I hate of my job.” Things haven’t changed that much since the last time I was here, except that I told “We Don’t Care Inc.” to take their job and shove it and got myself a new job! But guess, what? I hate this job too. Initially, it seemed like it was going to be okay. The first three days went pretty well. I was in a large class with other new hires and we got what they call “training.” I was very impressed by how together they seemed to be.

We learned about all the great benefits we were eligible for, even though we were part timers, which was a lot better than WDCI, (Anything would be since they didn’t provide any;) but the rub, we later found out, was that we had to wait 6 months for them to kick in and when they did, there wasn’t any way we’d have any kind of check left after all those great benefits were deducted.

So, this is one of those jobs for people who already have two or three jobs but none of the others have benefits. See, for you all in the world of academia or those of you who only work in retail for extra CD money, most people have to actually work for a living and the way things are nowadays is, you are not going to get a full time job any where and one part time job will not pay the rent or anything else.

This job really sucks!

So, right at the moment I’m stuck with this crappy new job. And boy is it crappy! On my first day, the store had 10,000 customers go though it (This is a really big store I’m not exaggerating.) They put me out on the sales floor with absolutely no training, so predictably I was completely steamrollered.

When I finally saw my boss on Tuesday, he took four days off in a row including the entire weekend; he looked surprised that I was there. It was as if he didn’t expect me to make it through the weekend.

Now I understand why: other than me, there were two other people and most of the time they were either gone or busy, so I had no one to go to when a customer asked a question that I couldn’t answer, which was every question. We were told we wouldn’t see the sales floor until we were fully trained, but that was a lie.

People think retail employees are stupid or something, but they wouldn’t do any better if they suddenly had to answer a million questions about a section they’d never been in or a product they’d never seen. Just try it. Go into a store you’ve never been in and pretend to be an employee. See how the customers treat you!

Cattle calls:

This is the thing new thing companies do: They hire a bunch of people, way more than they’re actually going to need, and they see who sinks or swims. No need to waste time and money training someone who is going to quit in a week when they find out what a scam the whole thing is, right?

Apparently, the calculation is that the lost sales from customers not finding what they want or just pushing their cart away and walking out in frustration because they can’t find anyone to help them is an expectable business expense when weighed against the higher expense of paying an adequate amount of staff to actually serve them.

People don’t want to pay for anything, but when they go into a store they expect to be served on hand and foot. Most retailers talk a good game about customer service, but they don’t really mean it. If the service sucks because the two people that are doing the work of five are either not trained or too disgruntled to care anymore, they just replace them with two others and hope the propaganda works on a few of them. If not, they just they just push them through the great retail meat grinder.

Note to customers: We don’t give a shit about whether you find what you’re looking for or not. We get our crappy pittance regardless of whether you buy anything or not. Instead of relying on someone making $7 an hour to make your shopping decisions for you, how about doing a little homework before you come in? Now, there’s an idea. Have a nice day!

Oh dear, another bad day at work. Very bad! Before I bitch, I should put this whole thing into some kind of context:

Our GM just left. Part of the problem I’m having with the work thing is that the GM I started with just got “transferred.” This is normal for staff members, I guess, there’s always an adjustment period. What I find odd is that no one knows where she went. The usual thing in these situations is, there’s an announcement, and then the former GM is lauded for her good work and there is lots of BS about the lucky store that’s going to get her etc. No so much this time. All I know is that I found out about the move the day before she left and I heard she cried when she did. That’s all!

This is what I’m trying to say about this company, they don’t care. They don’t even pretend to communicate with the staff. They don’t care! (Their motto.) I found out about our new GM from reading a printout of an email posted on the schedule billboard, a message from our glorious DM saying the new boss, who was previously a simple manger at our store, was the new GM and cited her years of retail experience, “mostly at Home Depot,” as proof this was the right decision. And that is all. End of message!

I’ve worked at a lot of places, and from what I remember, normally the big guy comes in and there’s a big employee meeting with him, and in a perfect world he already has some sort of rapport with the staff, and then he introduces the new GM and gives his blessing…Nope, not at ‘We Don’t Care Inc.’

Speaking of ‘We Don’t Care Inc.,’ there are no posters on the break room wall, of the most basic corporate bullshit variety, proclaiming their love for their employees or anything! There’s never any mention of all the great benefits they offer, the great opportunities for advancement, etc., nothing.

More significantly, the DM comes in and ignores everyone. He doesn’t deal with the staff. There are phone numbers to call for HR, but it’s only to report theft by other employees or other malfeasance connected with people you work with. Another poster encourages employees to contribute money to employees at other stores who have had bad breaks, and supposedly, the corporation throws in a few bucks, but I think it’s mainly us paying.

There was the terrible case of an employee at another store who was recently in a car accident and lost her two children, very tragically, in this case, infants. The company’s answer was to say each of us working a weekend shift, could show up in “causal wear” if we paid $2 for one day or $3 for the whole weekend. Our store generated $98, I think. That’s it? Why is it up to us to help this person out? I hate to sound insensitive, but why not explain the situation and ask everybody to help out as they can? (And I still haven’t heard what the corporate contribution was, by the way.) It seems to me, offering an opportunity for the staff not to have to wear the stupid clothes they usually make us wear, is sort of insulting to us and to the poor woman who lost her family.


Cheap, cheap, cheap, bastards! I’ve worked for Winn Dixie, Toys R Us, Kay-Bee, Borders, and Olsson’s, to name a few, and I’ve never seen such miserly behavior by a corporation. And that’s saying something if you look at this rogue’s gallery!


In any case, to the point: We had a very bad day. I don’t blame our new GM so much, right at the moment she is very overwhelmed with her new position and she is lashing out! We have this thing called “Showtime,” which has nothing to do with ‘All that Jazz’ and is massively boring. Every morning, we learn all about the great new deals for the “guests” and hammer out the important issues of the day. Like, for instance, ‘sell more corporate credit cards and win a $15 gift certificate!’

This morning we got a barrage of abuse; from our low “meet and greet rating” (From 100 to 14 to 40 in two weeks) to a very stern lecture on not talking while working; to not gossiping; to not mentioning the outrageous thievery that goes on, etc. This, I think, is the first time in my entire retail career (Ha!) that I’ve ever heard a manager, let alone a GM, tell an employee to stop complaining about shrink! “I don’t want to hear this anymore, just drop it!”

Everybody is very unhappy right now at WDC. Inc. Now, we’re in the throes of a store make over and they’re having a cattle call, getting all kinds of new bodies in. How much do you want to bet some of us will be getting the heave-oh when this is all over? The $15 an hour lady says she’s becoming a manger soon but we’re getting a new manager in from another store next week, so which present manager is going to get the pink slip? I think I’m on the list to go because I have been making my displeasure known and I’m not seen by them to be groveling sufficiently when I deal with customers.

I’ll let you know what happens next week in another exciting edition of “I hate my job!”

I don’t know what this means, but this morning I woke up from a dream in which I saw George Bush walking the cavemen guy from those Geico ads on a leash and W was wearing one of those big fur coats that frat boys used to wear in Ivy league schools in the twenties. I also dreamed I lived next door to an apartment building called “next generation condominiums” designed by Jean Luc Picard. Go figure.

Again, I’m sorry to all my reader (not a typo) that I haven’t been keeping up with this journal and that when I do I just ramble and misspell things and make no sense at all.

I’ll try to do better.

The person whose name cannot be used got laid off again two weeks ago, this time from Hamburger Mary’s, which went out of business two weeks after she started working there. I keep reading how great the economy is going these days and the unemployment rate is down to 5%, but from way down here I see a different picture. No one is hiring and the places that are start at $6 an hour. I was laid off a year and a half ago because the company I was working for had to shut down a store and fire three managers, which also included the one who cannot be named. It took us almost a year to find new jobs and now we’re back to square one.

I’m back working at the same company I worked at in April, which I’ve already written about earlier on. I thought I was done with them but I guess not. It’s a different store but the same old shit. The main thing about the company I work for is that they are really, really cheap. I make two hundred dollars a week and get no benefits. (It costs me $80 a month just to get to work on the bus.) I’ve been told I’ll get a performance review after six months, in September, but won’t get a raise until next year. Next year? Who ever heard of such a thing? I hear from the scuttlebutt that goes around that they favor certain people and fuck the ones they don’t like. I don’t know what I could have done to make them hate me, I work my ass off, I haven’t missed a day since I’ve been there. I don’t get it

I was offered a “lead” position soon after I started, which is just a glorified slave, and a whopping raise of .80 cents. ‘Oh, we love you and want you to stay, but this is all we can do.’ Right! A person who started a week after I did at this store, which in actuality is a month and week after I started, immediately got a lead position and $15 an hour. The GM didn’t know that I knew that, but my manager did. I never got back to the big cheese on the offer, because I was so insulted by it, and strangely she never brought it up again. That’s what this company is like. You’d think if they were serious about promoting me they get around to asking me if I wanted the position sooner or later, wouldn’t you? No, they’ll just work me like a lead but won’t pay me.

That’s the same for the other person in my department. She does all the manager’s work while he’s off in the hospital but she’s not a lead either. Inconveniently, for them, she has two kids and can’t work certain hours, so she’s out of luck. One person who was a lead told me they demoted her and took her dollar away when she started going to school. They took her big dollar raise back! I’ve never heard of a company taking a raise back, but here they do apparently. Cheap bastards. A million dollar a year store and they can’t afford a dollar. (That’s more than they were offering me.)

Maybe, this is why their turnover is so amazingly high. They opened the store in October with 80 people. Probably 20 or 30 were temp help, but out of the remainder, 5 are left in less than a year. The week before I started, someone told me they fired six people, including a manager and four quit. (No wonder they hired me so readily!) There have been so many people in and out the past 3 months that I can’t even keep count. Now, I know why they insist on everybody wearing a nametag; so they know what our names are.

Another new wrinkle at work, which is really pissing me off, is the “new system” for unloading trucks. There’s some nonsensical acronym for it, which no one can remember; like MWLPMBP (More work for less pay means bigger profits) or something like that. The old system we were told was “bad” and wasteful, so a few weeks ago we all got dragged in at 7:30 in morning, all us “leads,” to have a meeting about all the great things that would happen when we got the new system down. Freight would be off loaded at lightning speed so we’d have plenty of time to work it all out in a day. What they didn’t tell me at least, is that they used to have a staff in the back that unloaded the truck and then the slaves out on the floor worked it out. The backroom staff even did the overstock, which we now do by ourselves. Even at the other store there was always two people to do the overstock, but not in the “new system.” So they get the same work done while paying half the number of employees. (Cheap bastards!)

The most important aspect of the “new system” is the color coding and making sure everybody is wearing a nametag. Couldn’t do it without the nametag! (And the colored pens.) I was told I had to wear my nametag or the store wouldn’t get “certified” for the “new system.” God forbid. They never have actually explained what that means. In any case, whatever it means the other day we got a plaque saying we’re “certified.” We’re so proud!

All this means to me is I have to go in at 7:30 and work a truck for an hour, then its out to the floor for 6 hours of hot, dirty, back breaking work. And when I say hot, I mean hot. The air conditioning is controlled from corporate hindquarters and is kept at a steady 75 degrees no matter how hot it is outside. The radio is controlled from there too; so all the stores around the country hear the same boring, contemporary, middle of the road crap at the same time. They extended the hours the store is open for the summer, but the computer at HQ turns off the lights at the same time as before, so we work in the dark for the last part of the night.

All this computer wizardry really costs a lot of money, I guess, so they can’t afford to pay anybody. Or maybe it’s the shrink. Just yesterday, I found over $500 of theft in my small section, alone! For some reason people like to steal food scales, which cost 59.99 each. I found three empty boxes. Last week it was four. I asked the manager if we shouldn’t perhaps put them closer to the front of the store so the cashiers could see if someone was helping them selves and he said, “What are we going to do, put everything they steal at the front of the store? There’s no room for that.” Last week, I was bitching to a manager, who is also drag queen, about these women who came in with their own bags and were loading them up as we spoke and he said the company didn’t want them to do anything about it, except “ask them if they want something matching” what they just stole. I told another manager I thought the attitude of the management staff regarding the shrink was a little puzzling and she said, they had told everybody that would listen but corporate wouldn’t do anything to stop it. She said she spoke to the LP person and it “just went through one ear and out the other.”

The GM said they were aware of the shrink, which she said was about 2%, (Bullshit, it’s got to be at least 4%) but there was nothing to be done about it except for greeting people and asking them for help. The only solution according to her was to increase sales. Yeah, that’s very realistic. Nametags everybody! Greet the guest! You’re working the green zone! Work, work, work! Next week they’re bringing in the guys from Ben Hur with the drums to keep the rhythm going.

It’s been a while, but I’m back with more boring anecdotes about my life. We’ve been in Philly now for about two months and we’re not sorry we moved from DC, although I do miss its marbled majesty and the Tavern and the Lucky Bar and Los Placitas. (Really miss the margaritas at Los Placitas.) Anyway, we’re in a mixed neighborhood of Irish, Italians, and Poles and we live right above a deli, which is owned by our landlord, where you can get a fairly decent two egg, toast and potato breakfast for $2.50. Or we can go down to Girard Ave. and get a slightly more expensive breakfast, with a lot more food, with really awesome turkey bacon for $3.50 from some Russians right under the “EL” on the Frankford line.

The food here is really great, even at the Wawa! Oh, the Wawa! Not only can you get a really big sized mountain dew, but also they have the New York Times and the Financial Times! In DC it’s not difficult to get any newspaper you want, but here it’s a little more difficult. Philly seems to be a very insular type of place international publications are not such a big deal. They’re very into local issues and not so much into what goes on anywhere else. In a way, that’s good, ‘cause in a lot of places they don’t care what goes on just down the street or in Uzbekistan either.

Did I mention they’re very into their local issues? Just tonight I went down to the deli to pick up a pack of cigs and there was this informal meeting going on with people from the neighborhood talking about some sort of pet park they wanted to have or something. There are many parks around here. It’s very congested as far as the available space goes, as you can imagine in a place like Philly, but there’s a park right across the street, there’s an athletic field two blocks down, there’s a school playground one block down where kids still play stick ball, there’s a tennis court three blocks away and on and on.

Kids here have it made. Their parents don’t let them go too far but they really don’t have to worry because where the kids want to go is just down the street. When they get older is another issue. There’s lots of drug dealing going on for the older crowd. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be just pot or whatever. It’s the real serious stuff, like crystal meth and other kinds of drugs that an old fuck like me doesn’t have any conception of. Different neighborhoods deal with this problem in different ways .I don’t know how they do it on my block but my friend in Fish Town says there are neighborhood interventions that solve the problem one way or the other.

I’ve only been here for a few months so I’ll have to just see what the deal is, but overall I’d say they take care of their own here, unlike in No.VA. or South Florida where problems like these are dealt with by the police; which never ends well. The police here are from the neighborhood, so in some cases maybe they go a little easy on kids, more so than other cities. But there’s a social component, some sort of recognition of the humanity of the situation that makes Philly unusual. Well, except for the large swaths of the western part of the city, where “those” people live, where no one in their right mind would go even in daylight. If there’s a house fire, which happens a lot here, the FOX news van will be there, but otherwise, forget it, so a typical northeastern city in other words.

DC is not a northeastern city, even though it kind of looks like it in some respects. No, DC most resembles Richmond, Virginia. I always thought if the south had won the “war of northern aggression” DC would look like Richmond does nowadays. DC was pretty ragged until U.S. Grant got congress to spend the money to refurbish the place. Everybody always talks about Ulysses S. Grant’s administration being so corrupt, which it was, but Grant himself was not. There was a serious move on in congress to move the U.S. capital to St. Louis, the geographic center of the country, but Grant made sure money was spend to gussy up the city to make it look like a capital and prevent that from happening.

Well whatever, so we’re here, all of you get used to it. Did I mention there’s library right across the street? Yes, but Philly is always out of money, so the library is open just Monday through Friday and only for 8 hours a day. Budget cuts all around. The buses are $2.00 and the transit workers are threatening a strike over cuts to their medical benefits. After two years of employment with SEPTA, all medical is paid, no co-pays etc. Now, the city says they can’t afford that anymore, so there’s talk of a strike and the city apparently is hiring scabs to replace the normal bus drivers if they do. The problem for people who use public transportation is that the scabs don’t know the routes and just roll right past bus stops leaving the bus taking public waiting. Bastards!

Speaking of the Wawa and kids here, Brookie just came home and said on her way from work, right by the Wawa, some kids came out of the store and threw rocks at the cab she was in. It’s funny because the cabbie had just been telling her about all the shit that has happened to him. She said the guy was going to stop the cab and kill those kids but she was in the car so he decided not to. There are some real lunk-heads are here.

Well, got to go. I’ll write about my job next time, and thereby hangs a tale.