This is a personal story. Some humor, some violence – but most of all, it contains a thread of nostalgia for people no longer walking the earth with us.
My brother Mike is no longer here to add the details to the story. He was older and larger than me. He reminded me of this easily observable fact quite often. For some reason, he was at the bar with Dad. I’m 92% sure it was the Red Door. During a relatively short stretch of time, Mike often accompanied Dad to the bar during one of our several residencies in Tontitown. Mike was trying to do his homework. Mike used to like to tell the story of how the barfly would hit on him. His account of her appearance was hilarious. Whenever he brought up the story I would ask him, “Yeah, but if she had been good-looking, you would have acted differently.” Sometimes he would punch me in the arm and sometimes he’d say, “Duh. I’m dumb but not stupid. But there’s no way I’d engage with someone who might have been with Dad.” Mike often told a repertoire of versions of this story, full of detail and exaggeration. The bones of the story are true, though.
Dad was drinking too much, which is like saying don’t wash your dishes in the washing machine. I don’t know Tiny’s real name. His nickname derived from the allegedly hilarious observation that he was the exact opposite of diminutive. He probably weighed 350 lb and was about 6 ft tall. Tiny was at the bar, which was a rarity. He preferred to drink an entire case of beer at home. Mike surmised that he and Dad undoubtedly had been working on a truck at some point in the day. And ran out of liquor. In Dad’s world, that was as serious as skipping seven consecutive dialysis visits.
A couple of rednecks came into the bar. They weren’t regulars. Their faces were anything but regular too. Mike liked to quip that both of them could have been a carnival attraction based solely on their faces. Dad was playing pool and acting like a fool to amuse himself. The rednecks wanted the pool table. Back then, we didn’t have Appleby’s, where you could drink too much and pick on an urbanite for amusement. Dad called them his favorite word: “++++suckers.” One of the rednecks came up behind him and knocked him down with a pool cue. When my brother Mike turned around to take another look, he saw Tiny pissed off and getting up from the bar. Tiny was probably more pissed off that he had to leave his beer unattended than he was about my dad BobbyDean getting clobbered. The redneck swung the pool cue at Tiny. Tiny raised an arm and took the blow across his forearm. In a move regarded as one of the most foolish in human history, the rednecks did not take the opportunity to run out of the bar. Tiny walked towards them both. They both started swinging at him. Tiny pushed one of them so hard that it looked like an invisible tether yanked him backward. He grabbed the other redneck by the arm and swirled him around. Despite Tiny’s size, he grabbed the raucous redneck by the belt and picked him up, and threw him in the general direction of the other redneck. He bent down and helped my Dad get back to his feet. Mike did add that Tiny was breathing really hard but otherwise hadn’t changed expression during the entire altercation.
The rednecks took their time getting up. Nobody had anything broken. Dad was bleeding a bit but since it wasn’t gushing, the old rule of “If you can stand up, it ain’t that bad” applied. It’s a version of “Walk it off” that parents told people of our generation – even if an arrow protruded from our thigh.
When the two interlopers had regained the ability to understand English, Dad told them if they would stop acting like Mississippi refugees, he’d buy them both a shot. It’s anybody’s guess whether they accepted the offer for fear of another round with Tiny, or they understood that that was the way these things were supposed to be handled.
My brother Mike ended up sitting at the bar, surrounded by two redneck strangers, Tiny, and Dad. They acted like old friends who just finished trying to kill each other. Mike noted that the barfly was still making geriatric eyes at him. I’m sure that on some nights, Mike probably had a drink, whether he’d easily admit it or not. Knowing Dad, he probably insisted on it. It was a violation of his code of conduct for anyone claiming to be a man to decline a drink in the presence of other men. Later in life, Mike adopted the same outlook, for better or worse. Dad often required me or Mike to drive us all home if he was particularly drunk. We never understood what gauge determined this, as Dad drove even when his breath was flammable.
I’m sure Mike learned more from observance that night than he ever could by staring at his textbook. Mike was brilliant but also brutal in his approach to certain situations. If you doubted him, he’d bend your thumb backward or hit you precisely in the neck in such a way that you were immobilized long enough to regret it.
PS The picture is a composite of their approximate appearance at the time.
One disadvantage of trying to sleep not long after 7 p.m. is that my body begins to stir by midnight. I was up at 1 a.m. It was fortuitous, as I witnessed the light rain sweep the parking lot shortly after. Not wanting to miss it, I crept down the landing stairs wearing only swim shorts. The rain pelted me with drops much cooler than I anticipated. I walked out by the road as my skin begged me to retreat to the protection of the landing or inside the apartment. Knowing I was in a moment that would be impossible to recapture, I remained there, smelling the singular scent of rain stirring the dirt and foliage. It was another stolen moment, one owing to sleeplessness, adventure, and pictures. My computer was on, with six or seven folders open, ones mostly mausoleum now, smiling and posed faces, many filled with people now moved on. I was attempting to both commemorate the past and repay a debt of shared pictures from years ago.
The problem with opening these windows is that they are often literal windows into nostalgia, penitence, and even happiness. “I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them.” Andy from The Office quipped those words. Nostalgia often warps the sense of reality. We simultaneously fondly remember what we experienced while also catching slivers of memories that camouflage the chaos and pain that often characterize our lives.
It all started a couple of days ago when I revived an old photo of my sister. My cousin, who was older than my cousin Jimmy and I, commented, and our orbits intersected because of him. She commented that a man named Frenchie was her first love. I knew I had a picture of them, standing on Ann Street (Peaceful Valley) where I spent so many days, nights, and weekends. My Uncle Buck and Aunt Ardith were my refuge other than the Hignites’ trailer. I don’t remember much about Frenchie. When I think of Diane, I think of her husband Bob, who was a witty, kind person to me. I enhanced the picture of Diane and Frenchie. In the background, you can see what was once open fields and emptiness in that part of Springdale. I’ll put it in the comments. Strange how a picture taken for the purpose of celebrating people can also drag us into a memory of how the places around us used to be.
I love the video. Not because I’m in it. The video exists because of a long, circuitous technology trip, one which required conversion, editing, and keeping on my part. Aunt Barbara recorded us with a large camcorder, the kind that once rendered even strong shoulders a bit fatigued. I do laugh because, at one point, I used one of my favorite phrases at the time: “Hi, honey.” Later, at the very end of the video, you can hear me ask Aunt Barbara, “Who did you say, Aunt Barbara?” She called me “Little Bobby.” As people passed, the frequency of hearing my old name being used precipitously dropped. The joke was that if you threw a rock anywhere near the families, you’d hit six people named Bobby, Robert, or some variation. My birth name was supposed to be BobbyDean, like a mumbled run-on of a moniker.
When I watch the video now, I think that there should have been another sister in attendance, one who was kept secret. She would have been in her early-20s at the time. Lord, the fun we would have had scandalizing our older kinfolk.
At any rate, heading toward three decades later, I’m lucky to still be able to wake up too early, walk in the rain, drink the bitterest of coffee, and open windows into the past. I work to remember to avoid looking back out of those windows too long. It was bittersweet to live those moments. Dwelling on them too long robs me of remembering that the good old days are still here and that it just takes a large dose of time to render today’s moments as amber.
The premise of the STFU method is sound: not every thought needs to be expressed and many feelings are transitory and not necessarily real. Keeping the lid on is an effective strategy most of the time. At some point though, you’re going to have to open the lid or haul it away. A wiser person once said, “It stays buried only if it’s dead.”
It’s bizarre seeing my name everywhere now. It’s bad enough that every school-aged child must learn my name as part of the alphabet, followed by the agony of solving for X when they stumble into “math.” And most maps tell me where I am by noting, “You are here,” accompanied by an X on the diagram. Dang it – I know where I am. Most of the time, anyway.
Years ago, the NWA Mall opened a store geared toward memorabilia for the Malcolm X movie. They invited me to come and take a bounty of X-related merchandise. When the radio station The X changed its name, I wrote them a letter, which they amusingly read on the air.
All I’m asking of Elon Musk is that he gives all of us named X a little compensation. I think 50K would be nice. There aren’t that many legally-named X people in the United States. More publicity. I saw that the account that has the X name on “Twitter” might indeed get quite a bit of money for the name.
It’s a strange coincidence that I came to the name X with a flip of a coin; otherwise, my name would be Q.
If I had a way to tell every young person in the world one of the best ways to be ahead of most people, it would be to be able to stay calm when everything is going to hell around you. Not in a trauma-response way. When I was growing up, I didn’t realize that I was often reacting to the violence and craziness In such a way that it would imprint a foolish cycle onto my adult life. It’s difficult to remain calm and fearless because we are biologically wired to be adrenaline filled. Our endocrine system is our enemy in this modern world. Much of our anxiety stems from a lack of control, both for the things that swirl around us and our response to it. Letting it flow around us without internalizing it is a superpower. If you’re observant and prone to introspection and overthinking, you will have a bad time. Anyone living in this modern mess has ample fodder to wonder if we’ve all lost our minds. We are supposed to be spirits, yet it’s more likely we’re collectors, feathering our own nests at the expense of whatever passes for the greater whole.
My friend Marjay might tell us to “look for the helpers” when things go to hell. It’s good advice as far as it goes. It also belies the fact that we need to be helpers. When you’re on a plane and trained to use the oxygen masks that fall during an emergency, you’re also told to ensure that your own mask is on first. Otherwise, you’re useless. And so it goes with the mundane yet herculean task of navigating your own day. Be your own helper. It’s not a reassuring feeling to know that after decades of witnessing the casual avalanche of surprises in life, that I’ve failed to be my own helper. I’m not being glib; I’m being honest in the acknowledgment and nod toward my own deficiency. It was easier to look back to my childhood and shift the blame to the people masquerading as adults. It’s not their fault. They were broken. Using them as a template for either blame or guidance is stupidity. I might stretch the comparison to include how we collectively manage our society.
Every few years, I watch the 1993 movie “Fearless.” I watched it Sunday. It always triggers a wild parade of ideas and emotions in me. It used to do so because of my own plane encounter a couple of years prior to the movie. As my life progresses, it increasingly morphs into an analogy about how I’ve responded to crisis as it comes along. The main character survives a plane crash, during which he experiences a zen-like moment of clarity that detaches him from worry. The obverse side of his coin is that while it gives him an almost supernatural ability to detach and help other people, it damn near destroys him in the process. Enlightenment is personal; living is a task that requires immersion into the craziness.
“If you are what you do, when you don’t, you aren’t.” A convoluted way for Wayne Dyer to remind us that we are what we do and think. He also said, “How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.”
The “Try That In A Small Town” controversy is fascinating. It seems like people are using it to defend their identities with it, on both sides of the spectrum. That such a song can be true for both polar opposites should remind us of the danger of ideology and certainty. On a side note, I laughed my ass off looking at all the memes on both sides of the argument. People are clever, and many used it to satirically make their point. Satire and snark are two of my favorite nutrients to deal with the world. For me, the song also brought back my childhood and one of my harshest criticisms of it. A small town or parochial lifeview can be a comfort. That same circumstance can also hide a lot of violence and misbehavior. Families, like communities, often rubberstamp things that would be better served with a dose of sunlight and scrutiny. A lot of children walk around in a world where God doesn’t rescue them from senselessness – and family members turn a blind eye or don’t get involved.
How you react to what’s around you is your decision. You either float peacefully on the river, or it sweeps you downstream. It’s the same river regardless. As with the protagonist of “Fearless,” you might find yourself on the edge of the roof, looking a mile below you. The danger remains, whether you’re on the high roof’s edge or standing on the street below. You are your own biggest danger.
Complaining is easy, much like opening a two-lb bag of Doritos and finding yourself licking the empty bottom corners of the bag.
I’ve had my apartment for two years today. I miss the two known drug dealers who once graced us with their presence. They don’t even send me Xmas cards anymore. If you have 14% of your apartments occupied by those, leaving your box of Barbie dolls unattended in the car is difficult. People who sell drugs aren’t dangerous by themselves; they do, however, often attract people you’d see on the Washington County detention roster. (You know the ones. They often look like they’ve spent the entire night in a carnival porta-potty.) I miss my huge mismatched art project that once dominated the fences outside. I took it down a year ago. Earlier this week, I pulled the commemorative purple tile I’d made to remember it. I’ve occupied myself otherwise by leaving strategically placed items in a LOT of different places over the last year. Somewhere, my large tile with a secret message on the back still towers above the ground, high up in a tree that I probably should not have climbed.
One such secret prank I did still amuses me, though I’m not proud of it. A particularly angry person at some point walked out of their residence to discover a gift certificate to Shakes, in hopes that it might lessen their angry, aggressive attitude. I left a note encouraging them to be silent if they couldn’t ever say anything nice. But I also wrote that there is hope for everyone if they’ll just slow down long enough to see that there are blessings and people around them worthy of appreciation. I doubt my attempt helped them. I would call it catharsis, but fancy words like that violate standards in the South.
The last two years seem tenuously stretched to accommodate five times as many days as they contained. That’s a good thing. Time flies, but it also distorts, like bargain-bin yoga pants.
Back to complaining. Complaining serves us in small doses. It allows us to vent and release pressure. It works until we find ourselves beyond the wall of negativity. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Or altitude. (Go lie down for an hour.) Continuing to spew negativity past that point infects the people around you. Do what normal people do: drink excessively or dive into capitalism by collecting penguin trinkets to fill your walls. It’s easier to cure alcoholism than negativity. You can hide the alcohol, but there’s always going to be a reason to bitch and moan. Or moanbitch, if you need another invented word. As you read this, I’m sure you have such a person in mind. If it’s me, I will take the news better if you write it on a $100 bill and hand it to me.
It seems like I started with a unifying point. But I’ve been listening to political speeches and can’t seem to conclude anything. I noted that it gave me the urge to tell many other people what to do and how to live their lives while simultaneously becoming wealthy at taxpayer expense.
People have noticed how dark my skin has become. There’s no secret. The fascinating part is how much people talk about it. No matter what you do, people talk. When I lost 100 lbs, people convinced themselves that I was doing something crazy to achieve it; whether it was stimulants or starving myself, there ‘had’ to be something other than dedicating myself to my goal through radically changing my diet. While I started doing push-ups months into my weight loss, I lost 70-80 lbs without adding any exercise. I joked that I couldn’t write a book to capitalize on my weight loss. A book that said, “Eat differently,” wasn’t going to sell a million copies. People still fight the idea that most of us can lose weight only by eating fewer calories than we consume. After all, there m-u-s-t be some secret that I’d tapped into. It couldn’t be that straightforward. I still walk around and listen to people talk about wanting to lose weight. Even though they have me to convince them that they can do it without up-ending their lives, most don’t want to hear that it’s the foods you choose that keep your weight up, regardless of how much exercise you attempt. People are largely unaware of how many calories they eat versus how much they burn. If you upend the equation on a long enough timeline, you will lose weight if you’re not suffering from a medical condition that impedes it. I’m still in my target range for my weight. Which should be all I need to demonstrate that I’m doing something right. It is all summed up by the word “consistency.”
Genetics plays a huge role in weight loss, body mass, skin color, and a variety of other things. The trick is to find a way to capitalize on whatever you’re working with.
When I went to Pennsylvania in early June, I was often outside in the pool. I started getting darker. When I was young and spent summers with my grandma and grandpa, I was like a wild native, spending a lot of time outside in the intense summer sun. I got darker, running barefoot and wild.
When I returned from the trip early last month, I started taking Vitamin D and beta carotene. I was also eating a lot of dark, leafy vegetables. Even the protein-rich casserole I eat most nights contains a huge amount of tomatoes, spinach, and kale. Guess what? Those foods coincidentally contribute to melanin production. I’d read that a diet rich in such things rapidly contributes to darker skin.
I also started doing intense cardio each day. I wrap my hands and throw punches. I still have “V Minutes” on my chalkboard in the living room. It reminds me that while I can’t do everything if I trick myself into doing something for five minutes, I usually can keep doing it. I started with small mitts for my hands but didn’t like their soft feeling. Blue painter’s tape and cloth worked much better. Do I look crazy doing it? Probably. My hands, if you look closely, are significantly harder than they were. I like experimenting. It’s been over a year now, but when the idea of trying to run a mile in under 6 minutes got stuck in my head, I kept trying to see if I could do it. I did the same when I wondered if I could do 100 push-ups a day. Or 500. Or a 1,000.
Well over a month into the effort to see if foods could also make me darker, in combination with consistent sun exposure, the obvious answer is yes. I’d been asked if I used tanning lotion to artificially look bronzed. Yesterday, I read a version of this post I had written to post at some point. Because I knew, at some point, it was going to be like my weight loss journey; people would want to know the secret. And when I told them, they’d want to know more, as if the simplest explanation couldn’t be true.
People talk. And instead of listening to me about weight loss or darker skin, they want a magic solution. There isn’t one. It’s equal parts experimenting and dedication. I’ll write a book with a kinky, expensive secret revelation about how to do the things you want. I’ll autograph a copy if you want to buy it.
Love, X
The above isn’t unusual for me, especially during the week.
This is a long post. It’s not funny. A few people might read it and take offense or exception to it. Such a defensive response only happens when someone is speaking the truth, usually one that isn’t favorable. I have hundreds of stories.
Last December, a woman was basically decapitated while cleaning pizza-making machinery. She was doing so without being able to lock out the machinery. It seems preposterous to most of us. But not to me. She had less protection than most because she was working as a temporary employee. Many of these facilities are operated and cleaned by employees who don’t have a lot of options, much less training. Even with both things being true, the financial pressure exerted to be efficient tends to overwhelm even common safety measures. This happens all across the United States every single day of the year. People are expected or required to work faster and to cut corners. Companies tend to say the right things when it comes to safety, but so many employees go to work every day knowing that they will have to cut corners to get the job done with the staffing and time allotted. It’s no secret that most companies cut labor costs. Fewer people are expected to do more while maintaining the quality of whatever they’re producing while simultaneously building a house of cards in regard to safety.
When I was very young, I was involved in an absolutely astounding case involving food safety that also dovetailed with personal safety. It had such a huge impact on my attitude. Working in a dairy removed any doubt as to the process of what goes into milk.
Later, although years ago, when I worked at a food manufacturing facility, I watched a lot of this happen. I had several near misses, a couple of which I still sometimes dream about. One of them could have easily ripped my head off, and only luck kept it from happening. The machine was a huge rapid cooling machine with interconnected mobile shelves connected to a dual elevator. It was -40° and 40 plus feet tall. A huge bank of powerful motors constantly roared to feed the gigantic cooling coils.
Prior to my introduction to the machinery, a maintenance person had almost been cut in half by the moving elevator portion of the apparatus. It was interesting hearing management’s perspective on this. The maintenance person survived but was severely impacted by the injuries for the rest of his life. It wasn’t until I became responsible for the machine on my shift that I realized just how pernicious the demands of efficiency were and how they constantly violated safety protocols.
I had subcutaneous frostbite on both knees from working on the incredibly cold surfaces. Getting shots behind one’s kneecaps is not something I recommend. When I’m about to do push-ups, I go through long periods where I have to use one knee to kneel. Otherwise, there’s a strange pain that has lingered through the years. I’m sure some of my hearing loss is attributable to those roaring fan systems.
Working in negative 40° environments required very specific and expensive protective footwear. Many employees, especially those from staffing agencies, were not given proper footwear and often had to work in this environment with rubber boots. I know it sounds like I’m exaggerating. There was more than one occasion when I took the employee and bought him boots, using my own money, that would protect him. And even those weren’t up to the expected standard demanded of the machine. On one occasion, my middle manager threatened to write me up or fire me if I bought boots for another employee again. He was angry that it made him look bad. Shame would have been a better response. Had Jesus been in the room, someone would have been smitten.
When management would decide it was time to defrost the system, the engineers who developed it indicated it needed at least 3 days without use simply to defrost it to the correct temperature. Of course, management allotted less than a day. Even though it cost millions of dollars to construct the immense machine on an insulated pad, It was no surprise that huge cracks formed in the foundation constantly. The powerful drive shafts constantly failed as the junction boxes warped. Metal shelves weighing hundreds of pounds fell or got hung constantly.
At one point, I fell about 20 ft from the elevator platform. My padded freezer suit helped lessen the fall. I didn’t break anything but was impossibly sore for several weeks. A co-worker was on the platform with me at the time. He later said he was certain that he was witnessing a death. In some ways, I was a much different person back then. Had the wrong thing been said to me about this incident or ignorant questions about safety protocols implemented at the time, I would have handed them a list of several hundred contributing factors that had not been addressed. Everyone knew we were running the operation under the “wink” system. Just remember the Manhattan Project and the first nuclear bomb if you’re not sure what the “wink” system is. While the scientists were certain that the first nuclear bomb would not ignite the entire planet, the people authorizing the project would have proceeded anyway. They wanted a bomb and a test to prove its viability. The infinitesimally small risk of setting the entire planet ablaze wasn’t much of a concern.
Despite the fact that there were very rigid protocols on paper for correcting mechanical issues, the truth is that there was enormous pressure from management to do whatever had to be done to keep the machine operating. Half of the plant’s food production required the use of the machine for chilling or freezing. Some of this is also why I shake my head at our alleged USDA inspection system. The truth is that companies producing food are given too much leeway to monitor their processes. Time and time again, food-borne illnesses prove that processes can’t be trusted. Trust God but keep your powder dry.
When I read restaurant inspections, all of the swirls in my head. The people who own restaurants have a complete list of requirements. They are a part of doing business. Yet, when inspected, a wild variety of problems get noted. And most of these have been going on for a while when they are caught. Again, some of it is due to improper behavior by employees. Noting that, however, never negates the obligation of the people in charge of the restaurant to ensure that things are done correctly. It is their job to hire, train, and keep people functioning safely. The blame always falls on the people whose job is to ensure standards adherence.
When I worked at the food facility, I wasn’t proud that I ducked participating in the alleged defrosting and cleaning of the system. There were a lot of accidents during these shenanigans. I’m not sure how to characterize what we were supposed to be doing versus the objective. There was no correlation in reality. I can say that most of the motivation for doing it was to satisfy the perception that we were cleaning and maintaining the machine properly. A couple of times, I probably should have been fired for not participating. I expected to come back to the immense department to a vertical crack in the machine platform, similar to after an earthquake.
Everything about it was handled improperly. Both from a food safety perspective and its mechanical operation. People who had no knowledge of the apparatus were constantly making outrageous decisions about every facet of its operation. Were the department and machine mine, I would have required lengthy training for everyone associated with the machine. But we were constantly tasked with doing whatever we had to to keep it running, with people walking in off the street or from staffing agencies. The language barrier wasn’t a problem for me because I speak Spanish. But none of the operational or safety literature was provided in other languages. Even if it were, we were never going to be allotted sufficient personnel or time to train people. Most days, we felt exactly like Lucy as she attempted to eat all the chocolates as they went past her.
There were a couple of other operators whom I trusted with my life with that machine. (Because I was trusting them with my life.) We were often in the machine while it was operational. It was during one of those occasions when I was inside, and one of the operators I trusted was attempting to keep the machine operational in order to keep the plant moving. The sweep arm moving product was behind me as I observed the mechanical arms in conjunction with the photo sensors. It hung up and dropped just as I stepped away. It caught me across the back of the neck and shoulders and began pulling me. I realized immediately that I had to act fast. So I fell to the floor a couple feet ahead of the horizontal shelving. Had I not done so, I would have lost my head.
One afternoon, I was lying on the conveyor system, attempting to keep the output window functional. I’d been in there several minutes, and my nose was running freely. It’s important to remember that the huge banks of fans were blowing hundreds of horsepower of wind through the machine while I was in it. You learn to ignore a runny nose or wait until it freezes on your face. Once it freezes, you forget about it. My face mask had hardened too much, so I pulled it up to be able to breathe. Since the system was running, I rolled over to avoid getting pushed out of the narrow output window. On each side was a stainless steel gear case encompassing the conveyor system gears. As I rolled over, my face made contact with the stainless steel that was around -40°. My face stuck instantly to the metal. Because the product was coming out at my feet, I rolled again, and as I did so, the mucus from my nose that had instantly froze stuck to the metal gearbox. It took me several minutes to realize I lost the skin across the side of my nose and above my lip. That’s what that kind of extreme cold will do.
I don’t dream about that machine much anymore. I tend to have them if I have a fever. Most involve injury or metal platforms falling off the elevator system from 40 feet in the air.
When I see news stories, especially ones that have marked similarities to what I experienced, I get irritated again. Because I know that more people will get injured or die. It’s true that some of these cases are a result of the employee being negligent through their own fault. Is it a secret that we can be stupid? It’s equally true that another portion of these are the consequence of employees being required to do things unsafely or too quickly in order to get the job done. People who are not familiar with such industries or jobs object and say that the solution is for the employees to simply refuse. The work world does not work that way for most of us. Most of the things you enjoy, from your chicken sandwich to your phone, get produced through the efforts of countless people who are risking their safety constantly.
If you’ve never stood on a production line needing to go to the bathroom but can’t, or you’ve realized that the only reason your job exists is because that machine can’t do it, you’re lucky. You can say that a particular person can get another job. That’s true. But our production machinery requires someone to do these jobs. If it’s not you, it must be someone. A lot of ‘someones.’ Not that it’s related to this post, but in part, this is why I get so annoyed at those who object to the idea of a living wage. If we expect people to be in those jobs, those jobs exist because we expect the result to be available to us. Whether it’s a hamburger or our car washed. Anyone performing a job that we require through our choices should be able to pay their bills based on that exchange of time for money. As for whether someone who unclogs a toilet deserves to make as much as someone providing healthcare, the answer is that it’s complicated. I certainly expect my sewage to disappear and don’t need to wonder too long about what happens if it doesn’t. That result is valuable. We need brain surgeons. But go a week without a working toilet and see how quickly you dream of working pipes.
There’s a whole hidden world of production and service around us. If you’ve never seen it, you might see the story I mentioned at the beginning of this post and easily shake your head at the stupidity of the person who was injured or killed. I have the opposite perspective. I know that in most cases, that employee was put into a position most of the time where reality imposed a different set of rules. She came to a job with minimal training, a language barrier and quickly saw how other employees got the job done. She did not have a lot of options regarding work. I am certain she was glad to be employed in order to live and provide for her family.
We need our world of workers. It’s easy to fall into the trap of failing to respect that they are assuming a risk each day they work. The very people who need our support the most often get scorn for the jobs they’re doing.
There’s much more I could say, even though you might look at the length of this post and wonder how that’s possible. I’m pragmatic about work. Most of us are. Even when I’m loving my job, I often think of the hundreds of thousands of people doing more with less for less money. I might not be at risk of literally losing my head while doing my job, but somewhere, someone is. X
One song which gets my feet tapping is “Dedication To Me Ex” by Lloyd. It’s infectious and gets stuck in my head like a badly-thrown ax. There’s something about the funky old-school feel of the song that’s never aged for me.
Years ago, I was blasting it on the work computer, filling the warehouse with the vibe of the song. I downloaded a mess of songs, most of which I’d never heard before. I still play it at high volume at 3-4 a.m.
A co-worker came running up to say, “X, you can’t play THAT song in here. You’re gonna get in trouble.” I looked at him like he was crazy.
“Why? It’s a cool song!”
My coworker looked at ME like I was crazy. “Yeah, it is a great song, but it’s dirtier than Grandma’s Sunday dish towel.”
He walked toward the back where I keep the computer loaded with music. He listened for about a minute and returned.
“Huh! I’ve never heard that version before, X.”
“What other version is there?” My coworker still thought I might be joking with him.
“Well, he isn’t talking about love in the version I know. Look it up, and you’ll see why.” He laughed about almost running to the back to shut it off when he heard it begin playing.
I did listen to it a little later, the explicit version. He wasn’t kidding.
The weird thing? I didn’t watch the video until a couple of months ago. There is both a clean and an explicit version of the video, too.
This song, and a few others like it, pulled me out of a funk this morning. I lit the warehouse up with booming energy. I sometimes remember my coworker’s face as he ran up to me, wondering if I might lose my job.
X
P.S. I remember the first time I heard the newer song “Favorite Song” by Toosii. I’m not a fan of his music. I heard the song without knowing the artist – a habit that I love doing. There’s something undeniably hypnotic about the chords and melody. I’m the same way about the artist Lloyd. I’m not drawn to any other songs of his I’ve heard. And that’s okay with me.
I start these kinds of posts by saying, “I’m a liberal, but…” Every person needs to be DNA profiled at birth. Not just for paternity but also for identification. We all submit fingerprints and other biometric data, as well as register for selective service. Of course, such data can be misused. Everything can be misused and often is. I still participate in GEDmatch, the service which law enforcement uses to compare DNA for crimes. My DNA allows investigators to triangulate relatives across generations and an incredible number of people. Obviously, this is a problem for people who mistakenly believe they avoid detection due to choosing to have no DNA samples taken. DNA belongs to all of us, whether we like it or not. For example, if they can guess someone’s age within a few years, they can identify almost everyone by taking a random DNA sample from anything. Anonymity is a smokescreen, just like privacy.
It’s also spectacular to see archaic/ancient DNA family members, such as the Neanderthals 49,000 years ago. What’s fascinating is that Erika and I overlap with almost all the known ancient DNA samples. It is wild to think that we have common ancestors 2000+ generations ago who moved across the continents and started new lineages that once again converged. This is true for most of us. We usually only think of the last few hundred years for ethnicity. The reality is not so short-sighted; most of us derive from the same vast gene pool hidden in the shadows of forgotten and unrecorded history.
Rarely does a day pass when I don’t think momentarily about the satisfaction of knowing my suspicions about my family were true. My relatives kept secrets for their own selfish reasons, blissfully unaware that technology would soon rip the ability to conceal truth and people from the rest of us. I missed decades of knowing a sister was out there, that my cousin Jimmy had a daughter he would have loved to get to know. I am certain there are other surprises and people on the fringes of being discovered. I waited almost a decade to find my sister.
As gigantic as my family tree is, I still have several ‘floaters’ who escape placement. When I first started, I had my grandma’s family tree back for hundreds of years. It was obvious by five or six generations that somewhere along the line, the parents attributed to them were not biologically related. I deleted dozens of generations from my family tree branches as a result. I still love family trees. The research, the triangulation, and the discovery. But none of it compares to the black magic science of DNA, the stuff that literally codes us. It also makes the inevitability of one day having a billion-person family tree a reality. With incredibly sophisticated computers, not only will everyone’s DNA be codified, but each of us will be woven into the most complex family tree ever imagined.
In theory, each of us has 128 5th-great grandparents. I have only about 1/2 in my family tree, and a portion of those are due to DNA only. Due to pedigree collapse, this is often not the case. (A fascinating concept in itself.) Going back further into history, our trees were not coned-shaped. Due to the mule rule, most marriages happened within the range of 2nd cousins or closer. Most people lived their lives in a 5-mile radius. You can’t trust family trees based on paper trails and documents. At least a 1/3 of such trees become inaccurate by the time your great-grandparents are involved. This is true even if the best researcher in the world does your family tree. DNA steps in to fill gaps you didn’t even realize were there. I don’t look at family trees like I once did thanks to this. They simply are not reliable.
Intermittently, the databases used to calculate ethnicity get updates. More people participate, and science gets increasingly more exact. It’s the perfect analogy for science; what you think you know evolves with new information. Whatever you identify as it’s usually an agreed-upon and arbitrary association when you factor in the span of modern human history.
I am in awe of the science. I’m certain that as our curiosity builds in tandem with technology we’re going to find even more striking revelations built into the tiniest components of the cells of our body. For many, this is troublesome. Not for me. It’s a revelation of discovery.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 