Oh I’ve been looking at my last few entry’s and I have to admit I appear a little angry. I hope the word curmudgeon isn’t on the tip of your tongue. Don’t paint me with that brush; I’m too young and too pretty to be an angry old man. Am I in denial?

The Simple Green for our times, denial, the all purpose cleaner; The economy isn’t so bad; look at Wall Street. Things will get better in the new year. We’re all in this together. Compromise is the ticket. I won’t rock the boat; I shall become the next millionaire. And last but not least, I’m just going through a ‘dry spell.’

So I’m not a curmudgeon, I’m a hopeful young man just going through a bit of a social/economic dip. And in this minor swale I’m learning. I’m a product of excess and by falling behind in consumerism I’ve angered god. I now as penance for my dwindling income I’ve proved that I don’t deserve health care and unemployment and a steady income or new socks. Hell if you were on the right side of god you’d be healthy and if you’re not, eschew muni and walk up them hills. About work and money; my ex-fatherinlaw used to advise, “Get a job ya bum ya.” And in getting back to basics, I’m learning to damn/darn my most holy socks.

Joyfully, I’m getting into our twenty-first century zeitgeist. I’m enjoying my apartment watching DVD’s and eating popcorn five nights a week. Who needs to look for work when there is Facething waiting to ambush and smother the productive impulse in it’s fuzzy, warm embrace. “Oh look at all the fun my countless friends have had over the holiday….” As product of the twentieth century I can’t in good conscience do Netflix when the Film Yard is six blocks away. Crazy as this sounds, I buy local and walk to the shop. I may never finish my ablutions if I keep on like this but I’m skeptical about a two ton SUV for twenty pounds of groceries; I ride my bike and carry the produce in the basket. I buy books from Green Apple (I’ll give up restaurants rather than books). Local eliminates stores based either in ether or in hell. If I don’t buy from stores connected to a satellite the less I have to buy. Sort of a win/win thing for a grumpy guy. If I were grumpy. I’m not grumpy. My frown is upside down. Oh my goodness, my giggle pin has worked loose at the prospect of a Happy New Year. Curmudgeon my ass.

How's that working for ya?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/business/23prichard.html

Prichard, Alabama. Failed town, gutted pensions.

Here is the deal. The bosses, those who hire and fire and make the big money, are more familiar with contracts than workers. The bosses agree to and sign work and pension agreements. They know full well what they are signing, even if they don’t intend to fulfill their end of the contract. The bosses want your labor.

Another part of the deal is this; the bosses get your labor first. Afterward the worker is paid. Benefits are paid months later. Now, who is taking the risk? But labor is always portrayed as the bully, the thugs, the union bosses. When businesses fail because of mismanagement, or municipalities renege for the same reason, you can't take back your labor. Under the guise of suspicion, a worker is seems, needs her good faith enforced under the hammer of dismissal; she can be fired. There is no equal lever to hold the corporate and municipal bosses to their bargain, the workers only recourse is to withhold labor by striking in mass or, not as effective, to quit alone. Sometimes, maybe more than we want to believe, the bosses sign these contracts knowing that they will not honor it. As a union bricklayer I remember many pay and benefit “give backs” starting from Reagan’s era of anti- labor, anti-unionism. The first I recall was the San Francisco Bricklayers returned one dollar an hour that had been signed for less than a year earlier; we gave our wages and benefits to the contractors. The contractors maintained their profit margins. A vindictive labor force could have struck, this was breach of contract. But we were fed the line from our union that helping the contractors was helping ourselves. The mason contractors don’t view things the same way. The refrain from brick contractors is, “Anyone can be a bricklayer…” Though we’ve made some of these men rich, we’re expendable.

2010 would seem the perfect time to organize a disgruntled and demoralized workforce. But a lot of our work has been off shored or automated out of existence. And the Reagan Babies, who have come into the workforce since the eighties, with the non stop drum roll of market economics and anti-laborism, were raised essentially non-union. Reagan/Bush/Chaney era distortions of labor leaders is similar to Nazi era characterizations of Jews. Labor has become the other, and by extension; enemy. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” No matter what color your collar everyone who works for a paycheck is labor; a fact that high tech Americans tend to forget. Yahoo laid off seven thousand individuals last week.

Labor strikes are reckoned by conservatives as treasonable, media doesn’t dispel this. And American workers look on the general strikes in France and Greece with longing and bemused horror. When push comes to shove, we know too well who has the upper hand; we can be disappeared from the workforce as quietly as the stroke of a pen.

The gloves are off, anti-worker sentiment in the form of obfuscation on the health care debate, the continued push to privatize Social Security, the Citizens United gift to corporations, and the unrepentant anti-government, anti-regulation mythology rains down on workers unabated. And the Supreme Court is five-four in the corporate pocket. Meanwhile, workers pension funds which through mutual funds buoyed wall street and the bubble economy, are going broke. Real people, working people who have already given their labor are hurting bad.

Sarah Palin might say in her chirpy nasty voice, "How's that workin for ya?"

We Are All Workers

I have no axe to grind with other working people. Lately I’ve been hearing that we need to pay freeze the workers in the public sector, that they make too much money, that they are protected by unions and their “bosses” and those protections are not fair.

What isn’t fair is that the rhetoric has devolved so that union members; bus drivers, teachers, civil servants of all stripe, what’s left of the auto workers, and anyone fortunate enough to have a collective bargaining agreement with attendant benefits, are the target of animosity by those in the private sector. Those still working in the private sector are getting steamrollered into longer hours, less pay, loss of benefits and the constant fear of lay off’s. Unemployed workers are targeted by those barely hanging on for their ‘free money’ instead of the puppet masters pulling the strings. In doing a google search for union advocacy I found a web page called “Union Facts” whose purpose is to destroy unions. Union Facts talks with authority about how union non secret certification ballots aren’t fair never mentioning that secret ballots have been discounted by the corporations as fraudulent. Unfortunately the unions have found open ballots as the only recourse.

Union Facts is located in suite 800 on 1090 Vermont Ave. in Washington, DC. as is the “Center for Consumer Freedom” which is in the same suite as “Berman and Company.” Berman is fond of discrediting the “liberal agenda.” Of course he fails to say who pays for the very slick web sites and the claimed thirty staff members. His web site touts, “The Power to Change the Debate.” Richard Berman and his ilk have done that. Instead of working people demanding from those who gained the most from our bubble capitalism to release George Bush’s governmental welfare, we hear from conservative Capital Hill that it isn’t fair that one sector (those making more than $200,000) lose their tax refund and while others ( the vast majority of Americans) get a break. We hear that union elections are not fair. When the barista in my local cafe asks, “How are we going to pay the national debt” or “I guess we needed to step away and recalibrate” instead of asking about who screwed us in the first place, something is wrong. That anyone could link the out of work masses to the incompetence of the wealthy seems a contortion of the most nimble yogi.

We now have a vast sea of labor talent to be used by the powers that be to tamp down wages and benefits. And slowly this is beginning to dawn on all whose income is based on income rather than interest. Forget the term, middle class, NPR did a survey asking American if they were and what constitutes middle class, everyone considered themselves middle class; the range fell between $30,000 to $250,000. What does this mean? As Americans we fall prey to the myth of rugged individualism we all yearn for the company of the middle. But there is no safety in the middle. Yahoo just laid off seven thousand employees. Workers of all stripes are look over their shoulders see their out of work brethren, desperate enough to take a job, any job, for less. Worker’s misguided reflective anger stems from exhaustion and the fear that the organized workers may be gaming workers slicked into believing that they are ‘associates’ in a corporation or ‘contractors’ free to do what ever they want. That workers now talk with anguished concern about budget deficits they didn’t create, wars they didn’t start instead of the grand bonus’s and stock options they didn’t and will never receive is a result of spin misters like Berman. The advantaged tout unctuous lobbying assistance and dictate the terms of the ultimatum; no extended unemployment unless the rich continue to gut the government. With their tax rewards the few of great wealth hire the likes of Berman and Company to further “Change the Debate.”

Peet’s Coffee in Pacific Heights. Three of San Francisco’s finest are talking with a slim, tall, fashionably close bearded, obviously well heeled man somewhere in his prime. From my distance the conversation is amiable; all parties grinning with ease and comfort. On the periphery a GREAT DANE roamed leashless and with impunity. As I walked into the café for a coffee I’m followed by the sole female cop. I turn to her, “Isn’t there a leash law in San Francisco?”
She gave me a curious grin, “Yes. Yes indeed there is.”
“So what gives? Three of you talking with the dog owner didn’t notice the abundance of dog and lack of leash.”
“You want to make a complaint?”
“What? You can’t enforce the law unless someone asks you to?”
“Well…”
“So I have to be the asshole for that guy to put his dog on a leash?”
“We won’t give your identity.”
“I’m not too keen on dogs. I’m really not keen on dogs off leash.”
“I understand.”
“After all, that there is one big goddamn dog. I live by Alamo Square, I don’t walk through the park anymore. ”
“Isn’t there an off leash area?”
“Sure, but the entitled use the entire park, they remove the leashes as soon as they enter the park, I’m tired of being chased, harassed, growled at, and feeling unsafe.”
“Huh, this is the first time I’ve heard of this.”
“Are you serious? I’ve talked to the head of the parks, he knows there’s a problem.”
“I usually hear from the other side.”
“Other side? Aren’t we all citizens? Are dog people special because they are the side that doesn’t get bit? I’ve been attacked, I don’t like it. Dog owners always like to imagine that they know what their dogs are thinking, hell, dogs go off on one another all the time and the owners never have an answer for that behavior… shit. They’ll tell you their dogs love kids, or they’re good with women, or that they adore the elderly; how the hell can they know. How can they know? I’ll tell you this, they don’t know.” She’s stirring cream into her coffee but glances up from her preparations. I’d better turn down the volume, after all, she’s got a gun.
“Sir, I understand dog bites, I’ve got Pit Bulls.”
Gulping, “Pit Bulls?”
She puffs out her chest in a non-sexual, more copish sort of way, “Yes, Pit Bulls.”
I mull this over for a moment. “Okay, I’m making a complaint.”
By the time we exit the café the dog and it’s feeder are gone. I sip my coffee. A skateboarder clatters by and is stopped by the three cops. Within minutes the skater kid is being jacked-up. “Do you have any priors… you sure?” The kid, a typical dopy looking skater dude shakes his head no his wind whipped hair wags back and forth. The verbal response to the suddenly officious Police is incomprehensible, “If I call you in we’re not going to find any priors are we?”
Pale and nonplused, “I donno, I had this thing…” The cop holding the kids ID looks up, “Months ago… weed.”
Down the block the giant GREAT DANE still without a leash meanders up California its owner forty feet behind is engrossed in a cell phone conversation.

Dirty Pick-up Trucks

Labor Day 2009

I’m never far from labor. I am labor. The only real distinction between my work life today and when I was paying dues is that I’ve eliminated a few overlays of people telling me what to do. And on this score I’m beginning to understand, just a little what my father was up to.
My father loved his autonomy, he followed the rules; paid taxes, contributed to unemployment and benefits for his workers, he worked longer hours than any two men, and neglected a family life that didn’t coincide with his labors. He just did what he needed to do to have a little breathing space. I never once recall him bitching about paying taxes or benefits. Never. Although he was a boss with an eye to finishing his jobs, his motivation was more for some personal control than economic profit. Another thing I never heard him utter was the oft used term, “bottom line.” He would say that a job turned out well or they did well or not. Sometimes he made some money but over time I realized that money was just a byproduct of jobs that went well. Some of his jobs were “stinkers” but he’d keep at it. I heard from someone that that first big job in Ogdensburg lost $10,000. Not a great start. But the stories he told of that job had nothing to do with money. His stories were about the saloons in the town, and about Uncle Ray and Grandpa’s drinking and about the aggrieved nuns out on the porch. I never heard that the job was a stinker. I’ve seen a black and white photograph of a brick arch that they had built and though the image is very grainy in my head the archway is some sort of a connection between the old church and the addition that Pa and the Murray Bros. crew were building. The picture was taken before the mortar had set up, the joints are still dark, and probably just after the arch support was removed. In the picture you see, bricks, mortar, the rubble of new construction, the amazing connections between a previous mason and Pa but there is no reference to money. A few years ago, I asked Uncle Dick about the business, about Murray Bros in particular and he told me something that I’d never heard, he said, “Oh, you mean the time we went broke?”
“Went broke?” I asked.
“Sure, a few years after we started, we went broke. Had to go down to Lincoln Bank to borrow money.”
Apparently, and I remember this, there was some connection between the bank and the Murrays. It may be that the loan officer was a classmate of Pa or Uncle Dick or Grandpa but there was some connection. They got the loan and continued for another twenty years. Funny part about that is in his catalogue of stories the going broke part never came up. The term ‘bottom line’ never made it into Pa’s lexicon. He was a working class boss – a very odd duck.
So where am I going with this little ramble? I recall one Labor Day many years ago, back in Syracuse, Pa had a job, I don’t recall where the job was but this is in my/our era you may have been in school by then. Anyway, he’d rousted me up from sleep to go to work. I said, “Pa, it’s Labor Day.”
He had that grin of his, the mischief grin, “That means we’re supposed to labor. Get up.”
Most likely he followed that up with his favorite lie, “It’s only a half a day.” Which to my ears meant we’d work till noon and I’d be home by one in the afternoon and could still have a life. Uncle Dick later decoded the term for me, “For your old man, half a day is twelve hours.” Dick version was usually closer to the mark.
I can’t think about Labor Day without connecting the day to our family’s brand of labor. Most of the Syracuse version of my past is either the grainy black and white or faded color tones of old photographs. My memory has no well defined edges. Work and Labor can sometimes be the same. To me work means the fine grey dust of mortar, the sandy sharp edges of brick, a truck windshield silvery with dust, the smell of fresh concrete and old truck exhaust, how weirdly natural a ‘Rose’ trowel feels in the hand, being out in a cool fall breeze with nothing above you but the blowing clouds. I love being outside in the time of year when the air is crisp and leaves fly. I guess I’m a romantic sucker for all the years that have passed without a single thought to the reality of today. When I’d attempted to get my teaching credential I told a friend that I was quitting the trade for once and for all, “It’s like being in a bad relationship. I’m sick of getting my feelings hurt [by masonry].” I realized after a semester of school that teaching high school would require me to serve a multitude of bosses and that I’d be more miserable than I am already. I’d be walking on eggshells every minute of every day in fear of, cursing, saying something insensitive, of showing my volcanic anger in fear of, you name it – everything.
What kind of a person talks about his work as a relationship? I guess a person who still loves dirty pick-up trucks and jobsites and the feel of brick in the hand. I have to admit that I’m about as crazy as anyone you may ever meet and my craziness at least part of it, comes from my relationship with bricks, and work, and jobs, and Labor.

Does anyone need a used Bricklayer?

8/30/09
I tried, no, really, I tried. I tried to be good. I tried to put a new kink in the misshapen arc of my life and be part of the solution. Upon inspection, the solution dissolved my resolve. Casting aside vagaries, I quit the credential program therefore not become a high school teacher. I ascertained that there is no way for me to sink root and flower in the layers of administrative pavement of any high school system. I can’t blame the California school system.
In the first credential class of the fall ‘09 semester, after one full semester learning pedagogy, I discovered that I needed two years of a foreign language, I fact sidestepped repeatedly by the credentialing program director. In the first credential class of the fall ’09 semester, I was hollered at by the instructor (a former San Francisco Unified School principal) for attempting to remove a copy of the syllabus from his desk; a thing that hasn’t happened to me since I was in high school (class of ’72). Unpleasantly shocked at being made an example, I recovered and forced a chuckle as my classmates nervously laughed. Ha, ha, ha, the teacher is making fun of the oldest person in class.
His rudeness set me to thinking about years of insults from false gods; ego maniacal persons in positions of authority in school and at work and how over time I’d renounced these gods. Long ago I began fighting back; this does not lend to career building. Later I learned to pick my battles. In class this night I saw quite clearly that if I were teaching it would be a matter of time before a battle presented itself; snarky insults beg retort. I could not remain mum under false civility and the impending threat posed by all administrators; then there are the politics involving, principals, parents, and finally, students. And then there is me, a rookie teacher with a bad attitude at, if my math is correct, 57/ 58 years old. The insanity of the situation came brutally into focus.
Check this out:
I’m a poor speller, the first of my earned F’s was in third grade spelling; rules with a whole lot of exceptions don’t seem rules, suggestions maybe. I never got the ‘hang’ of spelling. In class that night I could see myself as teacher, I’m writing on the board, I’ve misspelled “arachnid”, there is a titter of glee from the young scholars’, embarrassment flushes my face, with no success on repeated retries, with a quarry full of chalk dust, with the class laughing like mad with frustration hitting me like a black-jack I’d say the magic word, “Fuck.” Magic because I’d disappear. Or like in Latin America I’d be ‘disappeared.’
So I’m out $2,600 and change and I’ve learned a lesson. I learned that teaching isn’t a passion in me that crowds out all other considerations. I learned what I’ve always known; ignoring prickly things it is to my detriment; if the thorn is sharp now, time won’t wear it dull. Sure, I’m passionate about reading and writing, I’m oddly passionate about art, truth, citizenship, and civility. There might have been a time, long ago, when I could have shucked off the thorns rudeness and administrative pricks for some perceived greater good; that time has passed, the greater good is to avoid the briar patch in the first place and in being honest and true to the self.
Experiment over. Does anyone need a used bricklayer?

6/22/09

I’m in this now. I’d be insane denying fear of the future I’ve launched. I’m in evening summer school classes with a group of thoughtful, attentive, smart people. My fear is that I’m in over my head, my classmates somehow already look like teachers. I’m one of two in the entire class that has no, or very little, teaching experience. I’ve begun quizzing classmates on how they secured teaching gigs without credentials. But my point isn’t how they got the gig it’s more of an opening to find why, after teaching a little why do you want to make it permanent. They all seem to be old hands at navigating classrooms from the helm whereas my main position for over two decades has been at the oar’s.
Ahaaaa fear and feelings of inadequacy are with me always and a comfort in days of despair – with them I’m never truly alone. So it was last night as I rode my bike home from school.
The last forty-five minutes of class we watched a video on the lack of funding due to Proposition 13 with as its consequences the horrible, dare I say sinful, disrepair of the California public school system. Other than a brief portion of the tape that had accidently been recorded over showing elk swimming across a river, the video held no good news. I looked at a classmate, Math and Sciences, and asked, “So, what are we doing?” He replied with shock, “I don’t know.”
I know what all of us are thinking, at least I think I know. I know what I’m thinking, I won’t end up in a poor school without parental involvement. I won’t be reduced to baby sitter in a space without classrooms or chairs or even books. The hope is that by the time our class of hopefuls get our credentials and into the classroom we’ll all be saved by Uncle Barak. Somehow. We have to have hope. We have to. We prospective teachers have to hope against hope that some sanity will come to Sacramento in a form yet undiscovered in California politics. We hope. We have to have the blind faith and luck that sustains survivors ranging from layoffs to Auschwitz. Some of my classmates might want the challenge, they might be itching for the fight but I imagine that the Quixotic among us as with the population at large are few. We idealists have signed on for a crazy-making job that even in the most halcyon of settings is rife with challenge. My classmates and I are buying into a system that from what we saw on the screen is almost beyond resuscitation. We’re like those wrinkled brown desert people in the casino of Searchlight, Nevada, dully plunking rent money in the slot hoping for the payoff. Not the big payoff, the million dollar, end of work payoff but the, I’ll be able to pay the rent and have a little left over payoff. And maybe the other kind of payoff, the thing that makes you feel good about yourself and the world in which you live. One of the things that I’ve seen from my teacher friends that have stayed in the profession is that they seem content. They are tired but at peace with themselves. A teachers peace, I have to believe, is the result of right thought and right actions, they know, although few say this often, that they are helping the human condition if only a little.
So my fear is the same as yesterday, and the day before and the day before that, it’s a fear of the thing that hasn’t happened yet; my automatic default position trips to this, “My future is going to be hell.” But, maybe right thoughts might follow right actions and with the action taken, with the credential process in motion, maybe just maybe my fear could be nothing but smoke.