The message came in from the White House, which, of course, had fully begun living up to Frank Zappa’s label of “The entertainment sector of the military-industrial complex.” Funding was being cut to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the non-profit assigned with funding PBS and NPR. The budget cuts, which came by of a mid-fiscal-year executive order, rather than a systematic non-allocation, were so bulbous that the two networks’ dooms were ushered, with all of the employees for both networks to be laid off within six months.
I, alarmingly, despite being a total music dweeb and social media rat, didn’t get the news until two weeks after the announcement. It seemed like the end of the world, more or less. It was an obvious move of censorship, of disempowering the quantity of the population other than ruling elite in realms of culture and communication. Theoretically, it gave corporations unilateral power over the arts.
I sat there in my car, on my break from work, and thought of Steve Earle and his line “With an uneasy feeling in my chest / I’m wonderin’ what it means”. And, I thought, I suppose, this song would be appropriate to propagate right now, but there’s only so long you can keep repeating “Christmas in Washington” and keep things fresh.
Well, I was working about my 12th day in a row, and was a little short on sleep, so I didn’t really give a flying fu**, anyway. Usually my most immediate objectives were getting back to my apartment, napping, drinking and watching sports. And, sure, we were living under the baseball martial law of Rob Manfred. That’s another story for another time.
There was plenty to worry about, in general. My blood pressure was up around 150, for instance, the last time I had it checked, and I had to work around people all day, who, usually, could be fairly spiteful. And the fact that I knew that it was a defense mechanism helped sometimes but not all the time.
Usually, idle time in my apartment was a fairly enjoyable experience, despite the fact that it was a veritable earwig colony, and could get up to 90 degrees in the winter, with the radiator heating. Part of this, I once reasoned, could have to do with offshoots of certain economic laws which had been taking force of our nation. These laws, roughly, lended themselves to an extreme housing shortage, which was driving rent rates to the point even of inaccessibility, for some.
One interesting effect of this was the increased amount of people I’d meet from out west, living in Indiana. One guy, a bartender named Steven, said that, even as a the beer buyer at a Whole Foods and with five roommates, in tow, he wasn’t making enough to live in the Twin Peaks neighborhood of San Francisco. I asked him how he liked living in Southern Michigan and he just sort of issued a little bit of gibberish, meant apparently to sidestep the question.
But I had my own place, which had begun more than ever to seem like a sort of novelty luxury, rather than a necessity. It was like buying a huge supply of gelato, in a sense.
A couple times, on Hulu, I’d seen their airing of “Lollapalooza 2025.” Actually, this was something I’d considered a couple of times as a cool idea, and I’d never seen a festival broadcast on cable TV before. Still, for some reason, I was never in the mood for turning it on, part of which, of course, might be accounted for by the fact that I was 41, and considered most of the new music that came out to resemble autotuned fast food jingles.
All the time, it seemed, people gravely disappointed me. I wanted the best for them but it was like they wouldn’t accept my friendliness — they were on some strange motive quest. Other times, they’d give me homicidal glares, if I got a smile from a woman. It was like there was a special strain from seeing me incur anything of any value in life, as compared to other people.
Other times were subsumed in complete brilliance, like the local band, City Sun, I’d seen at the festival the summer before. City Sun was a jam band (actually the singer looked like the bassist from Umphrey’s McGee, and would be about his son’s age, but I don’t know that there was any connection), played cool grooves, tight, good bassist, the singer played a wicked guitar, and they covered “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, which surprised me and actually slayed, I have to admit.
But life, in general, was full of struggle, whether it was one of those douche bags wearing a polo shirt in Hooters and glaring at me, or just some chick who seemed lonely, started hitting on me, and had unattractive vein pronouncement in her face. Beer was selling like hotcakes, thanks in part to me. I stocked beer on the weekends for United Beverage and Wal-Mart actually reset their beer aisle, so that they could hold about 40 cases of Modelo bottles, plus about 30 cases of cans, or so. They also had an end cap of cases of Modelo cans, which held about 25 or so. The Mexicans flooded that Wal-Mart in droves, yes, in case you were wondering.
If PBS and NPR were sitting on the beer aisle, can you honestly say you’d buy one of them?
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