Pete had written me last week with some very nice words and promised to send me a meal or two by an antique transportation vehicle called The US Postal Service. Yes, they've all but shut the big office down here in New York with plans to turn it into a train station, and that's good for train lovers, but leaves us wondering whatever will become of snail mail - yet it worked wonderfully this week and I received another quaint vestige of the American system - a check. Yes, a piece of paper one can write almost any number they choose on, sign it, and it will be treated just like ordinary cash when deposited in a commercial bank. This one was for $100, and signed by Pete. Another signature on the back by me and it's worth exactly $100. Until you get mugged.
Yes, mugged. One more quaint Americanism, not yet of days gone by. In my case, it's what happens when a guy punches you in the face and thrusts his hand into your pocket to steal your wallet. Designed originally to take money from the rich and redistribute it to the poor, this new post-bank-bailout-still-crisis-economy style of mugging is simply taking money from the more well dressed poor and distributing it to the less well dressed poor - and what happens when you live and shop too near to the Port Authority Bus Terminal too late at night. Luckily, checks can be replaced.
And so that brings me to the iPhone. And you might ask, "Why in the fuck does a homeless guy need an iPhone?" And my answer might be, "because he doesn't want to be a fucking homeless guy any more", but that doesn't answer the question so totally as it needs to be answered. In today's world, things are a whole lot more complicated than that - a whole lot more complicated - like why we live in a country that spends 49% of the world's entire military budget blowing up stuff in third world countries whilst 58.5% of our fellow Americans will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75.[6] and
15.1% (46.2 million) will just flat stay there.
But facts like that don't mean anything to anybody. They don't even mean anything to people who actually study things like that. Those are just big round numbers and they don't have any faces attached to them. So I've come to use the Apple index in relation to one's relative poverty compared to what the average college student needs to attend class these days. A few weeks ago I was sitting with a professor friend of mine who was explaining a job to me that would pay $100 for an evening's work when I exclaimed, "Jesus, I don't need $100, I need $500, a thousand, three thousand", I cried. "Look at that girl over there", as I motioned to a student, one of many with similar electronics in this Upper West Side cafe, "That's my competition and she's working with $3000 more equipment than I am, coming out of the gate", I said, scanning her Macbook Pro, iPhone and iPad. And it's not like you can walk in with a Dell and a Nokia and beat that. You can't. You just can't.
If I walk into an interview and pull out a shitty phone, it's game over. If any potential employer finds out I write this blog, it's game over. And if I can't answer an email on the fly or operate a simple calendar app in setting up another appointment in someone's office, it's game over. Game over. That's what the world is telling me right now - and I don't like it one damn bit. So I'm going to fight the hell out of it until someone tells me I'm not allowed to fight any more - or until I'm just too damn old to give a shit.
Last week I participated in a panel for a university on Occupy Wall Street, and for all anyone knew I was just like the other panelists - taking time off from my day job to do a little teaching at night. But I wasn't just like the other panelists at all. They all had jobs to go to the next morning and I didn't. They all had rent to pay at the beginning of the month and I didn't. The only other thing that they had that I didn't have was debt, and I could have some small solace in that. At the end of the class we were all invited out to dinner with the professor and a few chosen students. It was the only pay expected by all for their time expended at a university that didn't seem to have ever had any trouble with money at all.
But in the walk from the school to a restaurant just down the street, things got crossed. I stayed a few minutes behind to talk to one of the other participants and the main crowd, once arriving at the specified restaurant, found the wait line to have been forty five minutes, and so the venue was changed. But I had no phone, with which for anyone to call me to tell me of the venue change. Yes, it would have just been easiest to have planted a student at the old place to tell me about the new place, but that didn't happen. Instead, I looked for them and they looked for me but never did we find each other. Besides, a student couldn't possibly have understood that a man didn't have a phone.
As I walked home in a cold rain I did think that others were enjoying a nice dinner and conversation and all the things that I remember normal people doing - normal people in at least those who had gone to good schools, gotten decent grades and lived in houses reasonably above the poverty line. But I wasn't one of those people anymore. I, instead, was in some sort of societal limbo that chided me for using public funds but refused to equip me properly for finding a job paying anything above minimum wage. I was simply extra.
"You (I hasten to tell you) are a curiousity, a monkey of sorts that they can study or for their entertainment. They go back to their nice homes and restaurants...think about this." I was told this tonight by another professor friend who teaches business. Unfortunately, I've thought about that before - this business of studying things - and I like to study as well, but only with the idea that I can use it to effect real change when the study is over. And for that, I'll need that phone.
