Thanksgiving. Cooking turkey and fixin's, drinking absinthe, enjoying family and an extra day off from work. Time off gives me space for musing in the morning and I've been thinking of what a nomadic tribe our working class is. We go from good job to bad, from place to place. Morning is also my writing time (when I'm not on the treadmill) and this morning I wrote this:

From the jobs
that alienate and
beat us down
to the work that fosters connection
and back
then on to the ego feeding gigs --
the work that satisfies,
until exiled again to the soul crushing
jobs that kill
or leave their permanent
aching mementos we wander
like loose cogs --
assembly line to warehouse to
cubicle to shop floor
to street our
tumbleweed tribe our
struggling family each
purposefully set against
the other
a nation of nomad slaves
remanded to unsustainable hells and
deluded to powerlessness
dormant seeds
like those of the sequoia
awaiting the fire that awakens
to forge, together
a new and better world
from the ashes of the old.

Rainy Day Blues

A rainy morning and I don't have to go in to work until 2:00. Unfortunately I have to work late hours. I have a lot to do at home however including work on publishing a book and getting it together to work on another issue of the journal (see links).

One of the links on this site is for T-shirts and other items with the kind of attitude more workers should have if we're ever going to extract ourselves from the trap we find ourselves in. Check them out. Buying anything helps support other efforts.

There is a guestbook on that site specifically for suggestions. Unfortunately it is all to often used for spam but if you have a design or message you'de like to have on a shirt, post it there or use the "contact me" link to tell me what you want and I may create it for you.

Continuing rant

Listening to public radio today and people in Washington agrue about "supporting the troops" and staying some mysterious course" and other idiocies until I'm cursing and my bloodpressures on the rise. THIS is the ugly truth and any weak defense of our present administration and it's illegal barbarism is treason as far as this working stiff is concerned.

It's going to take more then electing some opportunist democrat to get save this country but at least it would be a step in the direction of sanity.

Talking about the Boss

So let's start off by getting to the nitty-gritty. The place I work sucks and there are too many bosses -- at least petty fools who strut around thinking they're bosses. Most of them are just poorly paid workers who've grabbed on to the only feeling of power they have ever had and it's limited to a box full of resentful slaves who would rather be elsewhere. It's sad. It's enough to drive you to drink and after a long shift of tedium, pettiness and idiocy, a nice glass of absinthe helps break the mood. But that's not enough. Some how we've got to get to a better place. Somehow we've got to get beyond chasing a poor-assed pittance and making this a world that feeds our spirits and makes life worth living.

Once your trade was who you were. Not anymore. Our working class is a nomadic tribe going from good to bad jobs and back; from state to state and address to address . . . and What we "do" is not often what we're paid for. I spend most of my off time publishing poetry via Partisan Press and the Blue Collar Review and it takes a LOT of time and energy. I'm wondering what sustains others out there.

Welcome

This blog is the home of the Jaded Prole. A place to discuss culture, workers issues, humor and the things that keep us disgruntled workaday slaves going. Hopefully this will be a good place to keep each other informed and amused.


J.P.