x-x-x-x-x. Jersey City

Thirty/June/Eight

| | | — | | This is like a once a year diary these days. Thinking about it a few minutes ago, it might be fear of the computer that’s responsible for the latentness of attention. This thing has definitely won many nights of battle, making it’s shut-down dance in front of tired, baggy eyes and an old-looking countenance. Maybe it’s fear of the actual writing, either what will be excreted or what it takes to control the excretion. Diaper entries. Wanted to talk about a really nasty email we got from a woman, attacking Rivka for having the nerve to sing “over” Mike iLL, who it turned out was pissed that she got a personal call inviting her to the gig, but didn’t get any personal attention there. The whole borderline betweeen friend, fan, associate relationship thing. Like, are we friends, and what does that mean? Is everyone who we stay with on the road a friend? If we don’t think of them for two years or ever again are we bad friends? Invite forty people to an event and you might want to talk to each of them for at least 20 minutes if not hours.

So much fucking anger and bitterness. So fucking tired and looking around at most people so much tireder. Dying cars and unaffordable insurance and medical bills. So much medeocracy is the fucking commodity. These fucking kids in the “punk” scene that are the same damn dissappointment as in the “deadhead” scene. No different from anyone else that insists on being a member of a scene. And the actual representatives of all these self-referential scenes are usually the ones who don’t even fit into them. They actually have their own opinions and trust their own taste. They don’t co-incidentally like all the same music and food and clothing as everyone else in the scene.

Played a pool hall in Little Rock, Arkansas on Saturday. From 1:00 AM - 4:00 AM. $350.00 cash. PBR tall boys and grease burgers. Midtown Billiards. Stayed with a friend who has a record label there that releases 8-Track only albums, recorded over old copies of records from when 8-Tracks were still in use. Dead Media. Of course he sells 8-Track players too. Next night it was a house show in Fayetteville where they insist that forty people who showed up could only come up $43 to split between the bands. Rivka hears this guy who was staying there saying something about, “it’d be one thing if they were working with a real promoter at a real club”. She thinks it’s the same guy from this bar in Tulsa who was telling people he hated Mad haPPy. Nice to be hated, especially by people who are ardently unoriginal.

But it’s issues of the “buffer class” that are constantly exemplified. There is probably an aspect of our economic system, or whole sub-systems within it, that cultivates the middle class to buffer between the poor and the rich. If there’s 100 people and 98 of them are struggling and 2 are wealthy beyond measure, it behooves those two to shave off a little piece for say 20 other people. The 78 left struggling believe it’s their own fault they’re not in the group of 20, the twenty believe the 2 are responsible for their position; they are the buffer class. That’s what we’re part of. (Anyone reading this is leasured and educated enough to find it, but anyone really wealthy will be turned off by it’s simplistic, middle-class idealism.) And there’s these cycles of judgement, fear and intimidation. We’re intimidated by the wealthier, because we think they have the means to change our status, even if just temporarily like taking us to a high eschalon party or restaurant, and we’re scared of those broker than us, ‘cause of not only our guilt, but also ‘cause we know we don’t deserve to be on our end of the imbalance. We judge the poorer for not making more of themselves and the wealthier for being either materialistic or undeserving, or both.

People wishing they were black really means people wishing they were funkier, doesn’t it? |

Optimism ‘till death. Mike |

30/06/2008