Being Poor in America: the NPR Version

Pichforkz & Speling Bes

So a couple of weeks ago, I responded on the comments page on a story about poor people, and the “entitlements” they so luxuriously receive.  There was this guy named Scott Wilderman who was doing his pious churchly duty and dropping off some food to the church pantry.  He made the incredibly insensitive comment that “you know, food stamps are socialism”, suggesting that his charity-dispersing church was not socialist and entirely preferable to the food distribution our centralized government of our wealthy country has developed after years of experience.

I wrote a long response which I’ll attach to this post, mostly commenting on the wonderful freedom you get with the debit card-like EBT card to purchase your government granted food, the truly horrid quality of what was essentially bags of junk food handed out by my local Baptist church pantry that I used in an emergency (and the glum, sad line of shockingly fat adults and children waiting for their boxes of processed crap), and the ironic lack of freedom that church pantries force upon their users by curtailing any choice of what their customers might choose to eat, whereas EBT allows someone who cooks, like me, to make excellent use of my $200 monthly EBT dollars without making me feel like a down-at-the-heels charity receiving poor loser-which I have to admit I did feel whilst waiting in line for my food pantry box.

So the reporter noticed my comment and contacted me, and now, today, I’m going down to KQED to be interviewed as part of the Marketplace series on poverty.  I must admit that I’m a little nervous at having my very recognizable name out there for everyone to hear, and thus hear about my current lifestyle of poverty and disability which I’m not ashamed of, but also don’t like to shout out to the rooftops.  (Plus, my mum and dad, though they are very proud of what I’m doing, may be getting more than they bargained for.)  I’ll let y’all know when this story will be aired, and here’s a link to the original story, and if you scroll down to the comments, you’ll find my rather long response under the name of “moderniste”, with the familiar picture of Mr. Siegfried Oswald Kittycat as my avatar.  Tell me what you think!!

(Here’s my letter if you’re too lazy to link)

moderniste – Sep 13, 2012

I agree with everything Jesse Austin said above ^^. I thank my lucky stars that the ‘dreaded’ “Big Government” put into place during the Great Depression to successfully and spectacularly revive our economy is still an integral part of American society, though it’s been picked apart, misrepresented and mutilated by the trickle-down mafia like the ghouls at the Heritage Foundation.

Scott Wilderman’s flippant statement about the ‘socialism’ of food stamps boggles the mind. He appears to be that special type of conservative who wants to off-load complex and sensitive social welfare administration to well-meaning but often criminally inexperienced and incapable/unqualified church groups; the sort of “faith-based” agencies that our last president, George W, ideally wanted to entrust with about 95% of all government functions.

Mr. Wilderman, let me tell you about what it’s really like to receive those “socialist” food stamps and how sadly inadequate, though well-meaning, your church pantries are, as I am a current recipient of California’s EBT (Scott, they don’t call them ‘food stamps’ anymore) which is administered by the USDA, and I’ve also once had to reach out to my neighborhood Baptist church’s twice-monthly food boxes in a time of personal crisis.

I am completely and permanently disabled, and I’m pending in the application process for my SSDI benefits, but currently have absolutely zero income coming in. I receive $200 every month in EBT and I have no dependents. I’m able to use my EBT, which is an ATM-like card that eliminates having everyone in your checkout line know that you are using ‘food stamps’, at every supermarket, Farmer’s Market, health food store, Trader Joe’s and many smaller mom’n'pop stores to purchase whatever food I choose. I am an avid cook, and I buy next to zero processed foods, or pricey frozen meals, stretching my $$ by cooking everything from scratch. I eat very well because I’m able to plan my own very healthy and epicurian menus and then shop accordingly. I even have enough EBT $$ to occasionally have friends over for dinner and to bake my famous pies to share with my flatmates.

Last year, after my refrigerator broke and most of my food spoiled before my landlord installed a new one, I found myself at the end of the month totally out of EBT money and with very little to eat other than pantry staples like sugar and flour, spices and etc. I went to the neighborhood Baptist church which distributes boxes of free food twice a month. I was incredibly grateful for their charity in that emergency time of need–so much so that I felt like a real twat for essentially looking a gift horse in the mouth when I got home and saw what was in my box. My bounty included a box of generic brand Apple Jacks cereal, generic Pop Tarts, chocolate pudding cups, two loaves of Wonder-style white bread, a large jar of generic Jif-style sweetened/processed peanut butter, a large jar of grape jelly, 3 cans of beef raviolis in sauce, 5 boxes of mac’n'cheese, some fruit roll-ups, a block of Velveeta-style processed cheese, Uncle Ben’s style minute rice, 3 cans of tuna, a box of Tuna Helper, a jar of off-brand Miracle Whip, instant mashed potatoes, packets of gravy mix, spaghetti noodles, jarred marinara sauce and a package of hot dogs. Many would call me an ungrateful foodie snob, but with the exception of the tuna, every single item was highly processed, and exceedingly high in salt, sugar, high glycemic carbs and fat: an express train to obesity and Type II diabetes. And I remember looking at the line of glum people waiting for their food boxes and seeing an unusually high number of very overweight adults and children–we’re talking over 75%, and there were 2 morbidly obese diabetes sufferers who had to use a scooter/wheelchair due to the leg and foot circulation issues that plague people of that size.

As someone who really enjoys cooking, I would sorely miss the freedom of being able to plan and prepare my own menus and shop at my own favorite stores for quality healthy ingredients. It seems rather ironic that the anti-socialism church pantry crowd actually quite curtails my freedom to make my own consumer choices as they make the executive decisions of what their clients will consume. And though I was exceedingly grateful for the church getting me out of a very tight situation, I was keenly aware of my charity status as I stood in the rather sad, glum line. I actually love shopping for food, and when I slide my EBT card whilst paying at the supermarket checkout, I often forget that I’m a welfare-using, disability-having poor person–and now a dreaded socialist as well. The current slash and burn climate in regards to our federal government is producing too many Scott Wildermans who just aren’t thinking things through. There are certain things that centralized governments of wealthy industrialized countries do much better than the private sector, and administering food programs is definitely one of them.

We Put the FUN in FUNDAMENTALIST!

Jesus H. Christ!

Of all people, it was Albert Einstein whom inspired this post on Why I Despise Organized Religion.  Today, a letter of his went up for sale on ebay, and while the amount it’s selling for is impressive, (opening bid of $3M) it’s what’s in the letter that really grabbed me:

“…The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

“No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.”

I’ve always like Einstein’s cool rationalism, especially given the timeframe in which he was expressing himself.  Here’s a guy who did not come from the privileged and favoured classes that existed in the scientific and academic worlds of that time.  He was essentially a working-class Swiss tinkerer/fix-it guy who was utterly unafraid to totally go for it; Damn! the torpedos and the hidebound rules of academia with its hoary intellectual paralysis called “tenure”.  Proud secularism isn’t quite so revolutionary today, given the evolved state of Europe, Japan and bits of Oceania.  However, there’s always America and the Middle East to drag rational thought backwards, kicking and screaming, into its dripping, stinking Fundamentalist maw.

Fundamentalism has become the chief scourge upon rational humanity, and a powerful source of devolution everywhere.  Judaism started it all with the idea of Yahweh as a supreme being who existed in a nebulous form somewhere up in the skies, divorced entirely from all humanity and Nature.  We should have seen that one coming.  I mean, how unbalanced must one be to decide that there is only One God, and he has nothing at all to do with the funkiness of Being Human and the chaotic beauty of Nature.  Then, the Christians took it one further, giving him a son who had to be borne of a virgin to get the stink of Woman and sexuality/Nature off of him.  The Christians practically invented Don’t Look Behind the Curtain, with the “awww cute” image of a Baby Jesus and winged white angels on Heavenly clouds that would later inspire an entire aesthetic of cutesy big-eyed babies and angel porcelain doll series for overweight, crazy lady greedy hoarders in the flyover states who then get to feel that much better than everyone around them.  That’s what Christianity really wrought:  the I’m Better Than Youism that sprouted from the idea of a xenophobic heaven, no Others allowed.  Muslims came along 800 years later and upped the intolerance and violent militancy.   They also gave the men unlimited power over the women, a move that guaranteed the evolution  of a particularly hateful, power-mad group of assholes that would really run with it.

So what all happened to those boastful sky god conquerors, who took the name of Nature in vain and made a big chunk of cheddar in the process?  (And we’re referring to the Fundamentalists among them.) First we have the Fundie Jews in their Israeli catbird seat, whom after 2000+ years of some admittedly horrid treatment, not just decided they’re over it, but then opted to go All In,  acting like the supreme asshole bullies that handed it to them for so long; not a very spiritual improvement, if you ask me.  Then you have Fundie Islam, inspiring the male half of its population to incredibly nasty violence on a global scale by making them King Shit locally of everything that moves; chiefly, “their” women and children.  And lastly, we have Fundie Christianity, the World Champions of taking intolerance and greed and insisting to the everyone else that they are the most pious of little lambs.  Sure, they’ll bomb a few abortion clinics or Federal buildings and snipe a few OB/GYNs, and there’s that wonderful millenia of pogroms, Inquisitions, and Prod v Cath in any number of iterations.  But what Christians are really good at, in the Free World they supposedly created, is slowly poisoning and killing people from the inside, a la the Westboro Church’s irrational and kinda perverse obsession with “The Gays”, or hating and fearing human sexuality so much that they make their priests celibate and unmarried, and then try to sweep the resulting sickness and abuse under the rug.  (I think that covers Fundie Prods and Caths pretty evenly.)

If I’m ever to become a devotedly spiritual type, it will be through some return to the Nature-based animistic tradiTIons of past, a la Wiccans, Druids, Wotanism, or some slice of modern Buddhism.  Those guys told all kinds of what seem to be ridiculous stories in order to “explain’ natural phenomena, something that seems to put them at odds with rationalism.  But look a bit closer.  Those stories are highly metaphoric, and were always understood to be that way.  Just look at the often humorous trials and tribulations the gods and goddesses of that world get up to, and the pie-in-the-sky “fantastic-ness” of so many of their creation myths.  They knew that their traditions weren’t the literal “TRUTH”, but rather a compelling manner of passing on an oral tradition that gets the listener to really think about what is being said.  Contrast that intellectual and spiritual freedom to the trio of Sky God Assholes who sternly insist that only their way is correct, and that you’d better damn well write your shit down and then toe the line EXACTLY as written, no deviations or original thought allowed.  Every time a form of spirituality gets entrenched and starts down the road of power-mad intolerance and greed, we need to put our collective foot down and shout, “KNOCK IT OFF!!“

Until then, “SCIENCE!“

The Heart of the City Farmer’s Market: Stand Aside and Let the Pros Work

Best Lil’ Farmer’s Market in San Francisco

This Wednesday was a special day  in my weekly ritual of going to the Heart of the City Farmer’s Market:  it was the top of the glorious summer months in which every summer goodie is present and in gorgeous abundance.  And since this is HotC, CHEAP!!!  I was like a stealth bomber, smooth, quiet and dead on target as I made my rounds and decided on what to purchase.  There was so much to choose from and I only had so much space and so much brute strength for the MUNI ride home, so only the genetic and aesthetic superstar elite of the fruit and vegetable races were allowed a resting place in my re-usable cloth shopping bags.  Farmer’s Markets are one rare instance in which eugenics, practiced with a cold, hard Machiavellian intensity, are A-OK.  What follows is a little travelogue from the HotC Shopping Ninja.

“one bag one dollah one bag one dollah”

Ahh, the tomatoes.  And the Armenian cucumbers.  What summer would be complete without some good old-fashioned ripe tomatoes trucked up from most likely just outside my hometown of Sacratomato, I ask you.  If you are anywhere close to Sacto when the tomatoes are ripe, you’ll experience the fun, uniquely Sacramentan experience of encountering the chock-full tomato truck hurtling down the freeway at top speed on it’s way to the cannery.  Tomato trucks are just trucks with some rickety railings there to purportedly keep the tomatoes inside the truck bed.  But at 70 mph, some of those tomatoes are going to want to learn how to fly.  SPLAT!! they hit your windshield, allowing you admission to the tomato pock-marked windshield club; you’ll see legions of your fellow members driving along with glorious red splats all over their automobiles.  Since these tomatoes are destined for the cannery, they are picked ripe (what a concept!), something that never happens to the supermarket’s selection of hard green baseballs that get gassed with CO2 for fake but red ‘ripeness’.  And because they are ripe, they really explode with juiciness when they hit your car.  It’s disturbingly fleshy sounding; it’s a sight and sound this valley girl will never forget.

Tomatoes are one of those foods with passionate, devoted fans.   Every tomato fan has their favorite varietal and method of preparation, and they will defend these to the point of death.  My favorite are the deep purple varietal of beefstakes called Brandywines, and I like to make a smooth, olive oil-rich gazpacho to highlight their greatness.  These are best if you grow them yourself, as they can really only handle transport from your garden to your kitchen when they are truly and perfectly ripe.  I’ve found Brandywines at HotC as well as Green Zebras, golden Kellogg’s Breakfast and many other esoteric heirlooms.  but the largely Asian tomato growers at HotC favor the thin-skinned round, intensely red golf-ball-sized Early Girls, which have a nicely balanced acid level along with a sock-it-to-me hit of umami–the “yummy” savory taste.  Around 2:00 or so, each tomato vendor will begin to bag their goods up in 2 pound or so bags and start loudly hawking their wares for “one bag one dollah one bag one dollah”.  Compare this to the freaking $6/lb that the sucker yuppies pay at the Ferry Building’s Farmers Market–you’ll get that warm, tingly feeling of Schadenfreude every time.

Cucumbers are in abundance at HotC; nubbly yellow-skinned and round Armenian cucumbers with their firm, almost sweet flesh and lack of excess seeds are a bit harder to suss out.  It seems that a good amount of HotC customers make pickles, because  most of the cukes available are the small, green pickling variety.  I like these too; in fact, I’ll take pretty much any cuke that is not the standard waxy green, mushy and seedy-as-hell American supermarket type.  Why this particular varietal was annointed as the mass production queen escapes me as there is nothing good about these cucumbers except that they are blandly pretty–in a boring stock-photo kind of way.  They must be easy to ship; this is the sad, capitalist reason that Americans have been trained to eat truly repulsive tomatoes, cucumbers, and stone fruits.

I like to chop my Armenian cukes in a fine dice, and stir them into thick whole milk Greek yogurt along with a paste made from minced garlic and salt mashed with the side of your knife, and handfuls of finely chopped mint and parsley to make a yummy dip.  I like to eat “dip meals”, and this dip is great with crudites, especially julienned raw fennel and sweet peppers, and whole wheat pita chips.  And it’s so good for you…

Freakin’ ABBONDANZA!!

This glorious bowl of vegetable loveliness and perfection, along with the tomatoes discussed above, are going into a free-form vaguely North African stew called “Vegetable CousCous”.  What have we here?  Well…starting at the top:  baby yellow zukes, round gray-green Mexican squash, Romano beans, kolhrabi, deep yellow cauliflower, tiny elfin purple and white/purple striped Japanese eggplants, and in the center, deep orange heirloom carrots.  To make the Vegetable CousCous, first slice the eggplants in half, salt and let them weep for about 15 minutes, then brush with olive oil and grill on a grill pan, and cut the tomatoes in half, and roast in a slow oven for a couple of hours to intensify flavour and texture.  Then, cut the rest of the veggies in large chunks.  Sweat a mirepoix of very finely diced celery, onion, carrot and fennel, then add your veggies, the eggplant and tomato, chicken stock (or veggie stock if you are meat-avoidant), tomato paste, orange zest and about 1/2 cup of freshly squoze OJ, and spice it up with Ras el Hanout (Moroccan spice mix with coriander, cinnamon, cumin, lavender, fennel, cayenne, cloves and cardomon) and a zing of red chili flakes.  Cook until just fork tender, and serve in a bowl on top of couscous made with stock, not water.  Garnish with a dollop of Greek yogurt, a splash of olive oil and chopped mint and parsley.  Summertime perfection.  And it’s so good for you…

That rarest of rare beasts, the Orange Honeydew

This is a picture of some chunks of melon in a bowl and not the melon in its entirety because I could not keep my greedy paws off of the ethereal perfection that is the elusive Orange Honeydew.  I stumbled across this Queen of All Melons last summer, at precisely the same time, as I walked past an orchard vendor who always has really enthusiastic young girls and guys hawking their peaches, nectarines, plums, almonds and etc with plates of free samples.  For about a month during the summer, they have tables of melons:  yellow ridged Crenshaws and creamy light yellow round melons that look like your normal green-fleshed honeydew, but are actually the satori of melon perfection:  the Orange Honeydew.  I remember a girl handing me a chunk of the sweetest, juiciest, ripest heavenly tasting melon as I was walking by, and I literally stopped in my tracks, grabbed another sample, and immediately purchased two of the rather heavy melons.  Some advice:  save your melon buying until the very end of your HotC spree.  But I was in a fructose trance, so my actions can be forgiven.

When I got those babies home, I put them in the fridge to chill the still-warm-from-the-fields orbs of melon majesty.  When thoroughly chilled, I cut them into bite-sized chunks free of rind or anything else to get between you and your melon.  What I had was (sadly or awesomely) a day’s supply of greedy melon orgy, with enough for a bowl of melon and cottage cheese for breakfast the next day. Regular green honeydews had never really hooked me; they tended to be a bit dilute and one-note.  There was something magical about this orange varietal.  Alas, I happened upon these on the last week of their existence and when I came back the next Wednesday, the vendor informed me that they’d harvested the last of their Orange Honeydew, and that they really only come into perfect ripeness during a very short and precise window, requiring an expert hand with planting schedules.  I cruised other Farmers Markets in search of the elusive melon, but to no avail.

I’ve spent the last month or so in greedy anticipation of Orange Honeydew’s arrival, pestering the vendor until they recognized me on sight, and this last week was it!  I’m eating the last of the melon as I type this very blog, and I’m both sad and enraptured at once.  And it’s so good for you…

She wore a Raaaaspberry Beret

As a rule, the raspberries I buy at HotC are about a third again as large and sweet as the best organic berries I can find at, say, Whole Foods.  We’re talking raspberries so yummy that I have to always buy one more basket than I need because I will eat the whole thing on the way home.  It will be gone sometimes even before I board the train at the Civic Center MUNI station.

I am not a chocolate fan.  I realize that this is heresy in 95% of the population’s books, but instead I am drawn to vanilla and then fruit-flavoured sweet things.  These raspberries will be part of a Raspberry and Lemon Dacquoise.  Dacquoise are one of my all-time favorite desserts; layers of crisp meringues, pastry cream or buttercream, whipped cream and fruit or ganache depending on what kind you’re making.  I love meringue desserts like œufs á la neige and Baked Alaska because of the contrast of textures of crispy, chewy meringues and creamy stuff.

A Dacquoise is kind of the crowning glory of all meringue desserts. My Dacquoise replaces the pastry cream with a tart Meyer lemon curd lightened by folding in whipped cream; the whipped cream layer features whole raspberries stirred into vanilla whipped cream.  The whole shebang is garnished with an artfully strewn handful of fresh berries.  That, my friends, is the shizz-nitt.

Paul Ryan vs. Rage Against the Machine

FUCK YOU!  I Won’t Do What They Tell Me!

HuffPost had a great article about Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine’s peeved response to smarmy Ree-Pub Veep candidate Paul Ryan gushing that RATM was “his favorite band”.  I mean, sheeeeet:  can a dude be more clueless??

Paul, here’s the deal.  Rock-n-roll just ain’t for you.  And neither is hip hop or pretty much any black music.  As far as popular culture goes, this does leave you Country & Western–specifically the “Western” part of the equation, so as not to confuse the likes of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willy Nelson, Buck Owens, etc with your ilk.  But hey, it does mean that you get to blast all the Toby Keith you want; you know Toby–he does that, umm, really wicked cool “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue (Angry Amurrican)” song that is making me cringe even as I type these words.

Why is it that Ree-pubs insist on chasing after rock-n-roll when rock-n-roll clearly wants no part of them?  In the past, there was always Lawrence Welk and Pat Boone to take up musical campaign duties, and like I previously mentioned, they now have the entire genre of mainstream modern-day C&W (not the good old stuff!! not the good old stuff!!).  But you still have these upright, rigid tighty whitey Ree-pubs trying to Get Down and Dirrty with that rock-n-roll business that the kids like.  Give me a Ree-pub campaign and I’ll show you an awkward clip of the tighty whitey candidate trying desperately to look “cool” and “with it” as he “dances” and air-guitars to whatever music clip his advisors/PR hacks have deemed “hip and now” enough to blare at a rally.   Then, as RATM’s Morello so eloquently did, cue the really pissed off musician cease-and-desisting the motherfucker out of the dumbass Ree-pub.

Guys.  Ree-pubs.  Do I really have to explain rock’s legacy of rebellion, Dionysian fury and all-around iconoclastic coolness that simply is not available to you all now that you’ve gone to the Dark Side?  Every once and awhile, you’ll score one for the home team when a really cool rocker like Johnny Ramone turns out to be scorchingly conservative.  And you can have Ted Nugent; he’s all yours.  But one of the benefits of not being a conservative hate-bound Ree-pub arsehole is that all of the cool rock, blues, soul, r&b, reggae and hip hop artists are on “our” side.  

So guys; Ree-pubs; here’s “your boy” Toby Keith:  

This big dog will fight 
When you rattle his cage 
And you’ll be sorry that you messed with 
The U.S. of A. 
‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass 
It’s the American way

 Git down wid yo bad selves!

That Aurora, CO Batman Shooting

Another proud American assault rifle owner

Nothing else need be said.

Ugh.  Another one.  Huffington Post is going nuts, with a minority of NRA/gun rights fanatics trying to sound “reasonable”.  It’s chilling how ultra-violent the gun rights crowd always sounds when they try to defend one of their own letting loose with an assault weapon.

One of the comments suggested that things would have been more like an action movie in which all the Bad Guys die and the Good Guys get a fade out scene with triumphant music and the Amurrikan flag waving in the background–if a bunch of armed dudes were in the packed-full, darkened theater in which a fully body-armoured madman had released a smoky pepper gas grenade.  Uh huh.  Right-o.

So I couldn’t resist replying.  Here’s the thread:

James Holmes Identified As Alleged Aurora, Colorado Theater Shooter That Left 12 Dead (PHOTOS, LIVEBLOG)

Julius Penny

1 hour ago ( 2:09 PM)

So after reading the hysterical posts by you libs, I am to believe if any of you were in this theater you wouldn’t want 5 armed citizens watching the movie with you.

You would rather no one be armed. And drop the point about him having guns, because we already established he had them.

Would you want 5 armed and proficient citizens in the theater with you?

moderniste

34 minutes ago ( 2:30 PM)

No, I certainly would not. Because no matter how “proficient” these 5 armed citizens might be, when the adrenalin is rushing and the fear reaction is flooding the brain, things don’t go down like they do at the shooting range or like the action movie you’ve played and replayed in your head. 5 more gunman would likely have caused even more chaos and “friendly fire”–I don’t care how “proficient” they might be. I think too many gun rights folk think of themselves as the protagonists of a very dramatic action thriller, just itching for a situation in which they can pull out their arsenal and let fire rain, ignoring the sad fact that life does not go down like it does in the movies.

Ask any policeman or SWAT team member if THEY would want “5 armed and proficient citizens in the theater”?

UPDATE:  23 July, 2012

The NRA and gun industry folk have been going nutso bonkers puffing up their chests claiming that more armed non-professional citizens is the sure cure for mass shootings, and they’re saying this without the least bit of shame!  For shame.  For shame, you cretins.  I will admit that the NRA is very skilled at avoiding any responsibility for atrocious acts of violence in the very midst of the time of horrific tragedy for the victims of those wonderful gun owners.  Their lack of civility is astounding.

KQED’s radio call-in show, Forum, hosted by the awesome Michael Krasny, had a show today about the shooting in Aurora, with a representative of the GOA–Gun Owners Association–spouting the official NRA party line that all of the gun assholes seem to know by heart.  There were lots of comments on their website, and I really loved this one:

“Forget killing Hitler; if I get access to a time machine, I’m going back to demonstrate an AK on semi-auto to the Founders, getting their reaction, and making sure that Scalia saw it clearly (he must have been there and known them all very well, otherwise his rulings would be partisan boiler-plate dressed-up as their will).

I’d wait until after Shays’ Rebellion convinced them that militia must be well-regulated, and after the Whisky Rebellion as well.”    –Adolophus Brown

And yours truly just had to chime in:

“There is a fundamental problem with arming citizens and expecting them to be able to hold down the law on the streets with their guns, and that problem is that no matter how much experience they may think they have, they simply do not have the training of a professional law officer.  The adrenalin that courses  through the veins during a crime produces unpredictable reactions in the non-professional producing the problem of friendly fire or fatally bad judgement.  I suspect that too many gun enthusiasts of the type who would carry guns on their person have too many action movie reels running through their heads a la George Zimmerman, just waiting for the “right” situation to present itself for them to be a hero.”

The NRA needs to grow a conscience, but I somehow doubt that will ever happen.  So, the Official siegfrieddarling Solution is to arm the entire citizenry minus current gun owners who are ‘overly enthusiastic’; stick up all of those NRA gun nutsos and take all of their guns–even the ones buried in the survivalist shelter in the back 40, then have everybody burn all of the damn firearms at big gun burning parties all across the nation, complete with some nice legalized herbal products and some Really Good DJs.   For those gun owners feeling particularly put out, we’ll make easily available loads of free ice cream cones, and for the severely bereft, a gift certificate for a fee-free kitty or doggy from the local SPCA.  Now, wouldn’t that make things a whole lot better?

Some Hero: the Creepy Violent Murderous Pedophile Pimp STILL the Muni Shooting Activists’ Darling

No, no, FUCKING NO!!!!

While I’m sensitive to police relations with SF’s black community, activists picked THE WORST POSSIBLE martyr to put on a pedestal in Kenneth Harding Jr. This “man” was simply not a good guy. He was convicted for armed robbery, and during his period of home detention, forced a 13 year old girl–that’s 13 years old folks, to have oral sex with him, then forced her to drive out with him to Seattle’s prostitution strip where he ordered her to prostitute herself. She contacted the police and he was arrested and convicted for this, not his first pimp conviction.

When he jumped the MUNI faregate in Bayview, he was on the lam from murdering a 19 year-old girl in a shootout that killed four others–he was the central “person of interest” His brother, arrested for also participating in that violent shootout, confirmed Harding’s involvement. This Seattle shooting had occurred less than a week before Harding, when confronted by SF transit cops, drew the SAME gun that was used in the Seattle shooting, so it’s pretty simple to deduce Harding’s state of mind:  he saw the police after him, figured that if detained, his warrants would come up, guaranteeing a return to prison for a likely lifetime term, and decided to go down shooting, and so drew down on the officers.  I’m no fan of macho cop gun violence, but given the extreme amounts of civilian gun violence that does go down on the streets, policemen are entirely justified in shooting to kill a subject who is drawing a lethal weapon on them.

The activist community was all over the racial profiling element. When this was all going down, I Googled my way to the Indymedia site and found a raging discussion about the injustice, with some commentors even saying that this was the event they’d been waiting for to kick off a summer of protest.  I foolishly made a few comments questioning the activist view that put forth that Kenneth Harding was a completely innocent soul not at all in the throes of running across state lines from the law, and that he had no weapon–he was mysteriously shot out of the blue for the crime of jumping a faregate.  I brought up his violent, sexually predatory background, the timing of the crime from which he was fleeing, and the discovery of ballistics that tied bullets shot from his gun to the bullets that slew four people in Seattle.  The unified, pat response from like 100 angry activists was that the police lie about everything, if Harding had been a white guy drawing a gun while running from the cops he would have been left to escape with a hearty fare-thee-well, and absolutely nothing negative about Kenneth Harding could possibly be true.  Predictably, I was called a racist, Nazi, and many other inflammatory assumptions about both my race and my politics.

When Kenneth Harding was held up as an angel–they actually circulated a stencil (above) of a grinning Harding with angel wings–angel wings! for guerilla street art–thousands of progressive people like myself lost all faith in the activist community.  It made me wonder what was really behind all the outrage, who was steering this train, and for what reason.

Where is the black community’s outrage for the scores of young black girls’ lives he ruined and the 19 year-old black girl he killed? Too many times, when young black men commit unspeakable crimes, often with ultra-violent sexual predation on black women, the black community refuses to hang their villain out to dry, and show up en masse at their darling’s trial with crocodile tears for their dear little sociopath while the unspoken message to black women is “you don’t matter”.  There is often pressure from within the black community on women victims to not testify or press charges, and there is a disturbing number of cases in which witnesses have been removed from the land of the living right before a trial.  The whole “Don’t Snitch” culture victimizes the huge numbers of black victims of black-on-black crime while it lionizes the gangster thugs and their disgusting lifestyles of violence and sexual predation.

This creep is absolutely NOT the right guy to lionize, and his intensely violent and sexually predatory history puts the MUNI shooting in a entirely different light. I find myself quoting the once-radical Public Enemy, whose members have largely since descended into the underworld of thuglife:  “Don’t believe the hype!”

The Worst Roommate Ever: The Troika: MD

Milquetoast Doormat; the Smelly One

And so we return to the saga of The Worst Roommate Ever, where I, your gentle yet vengeful narrator introduces you to MD, Milquetoast Doormat, friend of B3 (Blonde Bitch Bomber), master of the passive aggressive “nicey nice”, keeper of a dismally smelly room right next to mine, and the masochist to GS’s (Gay Sadist) sadist.

MD came to our lovely flat through the sketchy ministrations of B3, who had finally decided to move in with her boyfriend and then subleted her room.  Since B3 had moved in, we’d had three separate vacancies in our four-bedroom abode.  Each time, B3, with her huge web of casual scenester/hipster acquaintances, would almost instantaneously come up with a person in need of shelter and would simply offer them the room without consulting the rest of the house–so typical of her Mean Girl BS.  These potential roommates tended to be very much like her in that they were of that strata of the hipster “Nightworld” that were the consumers, not the creators of the music, clubs, art and fashion that defined their hipsterdom.  They also tended to be the sort that extended their teenagerhood long into their late 20s–but not in a good way.  These were the self-professed “kids” who were perennially in their first or second semester of community college, the Art Institute, beauty school, or no school at all.  They just floated from party to party, expertly looking the part and heartily partaking of the drugs, hook-ups and late nights like nobody’s business, but completely without any interest in music, art, or the work that went into promoting and running the club nights they attended.  Many of them didn’t work–this was the domain of a great number of trustafarians and student loan abusers always one failed class away from loan repayment, and those that did work could be found almost exclusively in retail, salon reception, and spectacularly inept cocaine dealing.

Up until MD, every single one of B3′s hipster wonders, all of them early 20s gay fashion bois that B3 had found to move in, had failed financially in one way or another, and we were left to pick up the wreckage of unpaid bills, partially paid rents, and horribly messy rooms that were abruptly vacated without warning.  I was the sole remaining leaseholder left from the dude-house days before B3 and her retinue of unreliable renters–B3 was renting month-to-month from me, the master renter, the only tenant with a relationship with our landlord.  Although I collected the rent and bills each month and administered the various deposits and last months’ rents, (there was no way in hell I was going to leave any of those tasks to B3 or any of the bois that she moved in to our flat), B3 had the annoying and usually financially ruinous habit of arranging under-the-table deals without my consent for her buddies to pay the security deposits and last-months rents in payments “over time”.  This resulted in ridiculously irresponsible terms for supposed adults like paying $50 a month towards the due deposit and last months rent that was the very reasonable sum of around $1,000, an amount that any adult should have on hand anyways after they move out of their previous situation.

As the master renter, I put my foot down many times, insisting that if B3 was going to choose the new roommates without any of the rest of the flat’s input, she had to leave the finances to me and only me, and I provided standard credit check forms and renter’s contracts.  But B3, again with that with typical Mean Girl “forgetfulness” simply ignored me and the rest of the flat and steamrolled her buddies into each vacancy, “informing” me as to whatever inane terms she’d worked out for payment of move-in costs.  It wasn’t uncommon to wake up to the sounds of someone known only to B3 moving in, and then professing ignorance about the rent and deposits, mumbling that B3 said they could pay it “whenever”.  Our flat is amazingly inexpensive for how nice it is and it’s amazing location in the heart of the Lower Haight and none of the rooms rented for over $675, so the financial wonders disasters that B3 miraculously unearthed time after time were truly bottom of the barrel, and MD unfortunately proved to be no exception.

MD, at 23, was one of those “kids” who worked in retail, downtown at a faux-upscale women’s apparel and lifestyle store that targeted the same faux-sophisticated ladies who shopped at Pottery Barn, Bebe, Crate and Barrel and Barney’s.  He didn’t have any particular passion for fashion, but like almost every other hipster retail worker I’ve encountered, he did have the larcenous knack for employee-based shrinkage.  He and GS had both been given their marching orders multiple times at various previous establishments and had relied on their hipster network connections and the laziness of hiring managers to secure yet another opportunity to fatten up their ebay accounts.

MD was gay, but a new kind of gay I’d not encountered before:  the best I can categorize MD is a twee indie-rock bear cub.  Weird, right?  If you asked MD, and I did, he called himself a “bear cub”, and affected the look with a kind of icky and bushy/pubic long beard, unkempt mustache and sideburns coupled with a crop-1 shaved head that only partially hid his prematurely receding hairline, along with plaid flannels, jeans and boots.

But MD’s bear”skins” were far more trendy than your average bear:  his flannels were of the tapered and fitted vintage-y style plaids favoured by hipsters; his jeans of the skinny variety and his boots decidedly not bearish work boots.  MD was also extremely thin, unlike the typical bear tub-o-lard manly-men, and he affected a fey manner of speech and posture that was much more in keeping with the twee indie-boy flavour of hipster.  Of course, like so many of his type of hipster comrades, he didn’t actually listen to twee music–or really any music for that matter, but he and twee Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian shared the same uniquely gay/twee lilt to their voices; MD’s minus the Scottish burr.

MD was not a particularly attractive man, with a narrow, pointy head that did not take its buzzcut well, small, close-set eyes, a weak chin and a too-long nose that, together with his cringy poor posture defined the “M” in “Milquetoast”.   I was always reminded of Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener character–that should resonate to all you American Lit majors.  Also in the milquetoast mode was MD’s personality.  Upon first meeting MD, I actually quite liked his quiet, seemingly polite twee manner, and he had what at first resembled a dry sense of humour about the superficial topics that were of interest to him and B3; chiefly fashion, going out, and gossip gossip gossip.

MD occupied B3′s sublet room, and she had left her gothy black-painted furniture and blood red walls clean enough, and since she didn’t smoke in the room and left the three huge bay windows open, the room was clean-smelling.  Alas, this cleanliness did not last.  For MD smelled.  I’ve read that it is part of bear culture to bathe irregularly in order to celebrate the male odor au naturel.  Perhaps in a house full of bears this might be a wonderful thing.  But it was anything but wonderful living in the room that shared a wall with Mr. Stinky.  Just passing him in the hall or sharing the kitchen with MD filled your sinuses with a musty combination of old sweat, scalpy smell and that unique odor of unwashed crotch.  This funk was strong enough to penetrate his clothing and follow him around like a hipster version of Pig-Pen from Peanuts.  Imagine then, the concentrated power of stink that emanated  from his door, which he, of course, would leave wide open.  I surreptitiously snuck a Febreze plug-in behind a dresser only to have him discover it, remove it and wordlessly put it outside of his door.  Curious about his hygiene, I would sometimes clock his handwashing after using the toilet and–you guessed it–he never even once did the deed during all the times I monitored.  (And yes, I’ll admit that checking up on your roommate’s handwashing habits is kind of OCD, but I’d never encountered someone with such vile hygiene, and Enquiring Minds Want To Know!!!)

MD was one of those lemming types who was so easily led by the nose that it had long ago reached the point where it had become a character flaw, and he was just waiting for a charismatic sadist like GS to come round and enslave him.  Without the influence of a controlling sadist, MD was very anodyne and practically devoid of opinion.  He wasn’t overtly rude but neither was he particularly polite; he was just kind of ‘blah’.  An example of a common behavior that he exhibited time and time again was his feigned interest in polite conversation.

For example, we’d both be in the kitchen, and I, not having an iota of anything of interest in common with MD, would attempt polite, utterly inconsequential smalltalk, the sort in which all polite adults  engage from time to time when they don’t want to experience awkward silence.  MD would paste a very stiff and exceedingly false smile on his face as he, with much intentionally obvious effort, kept up his end of the conversation with brittle, robotic sentences that quickly devolved into painful one-word answers.  We’re talking about standing in the kitchen and perhaps discussing avocado recipes, a MUNI horror story or observations about the new ice cream shop down the street–all rather shallow topics but the kind of things that two people who share a household should be able to politely discuss rather than occupying the kitchen for 20 minutes without saying one word–that would be the height of social awkwardness.

MD would develop a pained yet snarky smirk on his face, as if he would rather be doing anything else than engaging in conversation with moi, the peon.  This crappy little manœuvre shot me right back to those junior high days when the Mean Girl decreed who was and was not “OK”, and would make her pathetic harem of attending girlfriend slave-lets behave appallingly to the unlucky odd girl out.  Only I was having “it” done to me by none other than MD the lemming, with GS, who despised me with a passion I’d never before encountered, pulling the strings.

MD’s personal hygiene proved to be an excellent model for his household cleanliness–slovenly.  MD and GS shared a bathroom, as we had two in the flat.  Their bathroom was a sensory experience I hope to never encounter again in my lifetime.  Imagine the unique MD funk accented with mold, urine and turd wafting over a tableaux of a grimy room almost entirely coated with the leavings of MDs electric shaver with which he shaved his receding hair.  Toilet paper had become a luxury too dear for MD or GS to purchase, and I’d taken to hiding the TP used in my shared bathroom after nearly constant pilfering, so exactly what they used for their, um, ministrations remains a mystery to me.

MD cooked a lot, and was always frying up stuff in a too-hot pan, leaving burnt oil spattered everywhere and ruined pots and pans.  GS and B3 were also great ruiners of kitchen equipment, and cooking is one of my real passions, so I put my “good stuff” out of easy reach, and left them to a cupboard full of truly awful cookware leftover from the dude house days.  We had a dishwasher, and thank the lord for that appliance, otherwise dishes would have been a major issue.  MD would throw his greasy, burnt pots and pans directly into the dishwasher without the benefit of a rinse in the sink, and as a result, all of “their” kitchenware was in a permanent state of crusty ick.

MD also never wrapped up food before putting in the refrigerator, resulting in quickly spoiling plates and bowls (never tupperware–resulting in a constant shortage of tableware) of his fried crap in great numbers.  As an avid cook, the state of our refrigerator was important to me, and his large amounts of decaying food were unacceptable, so I would periodically make a clean sweep of things.  In classic passive/aggressive style, MD would actually remove the rotten food from the trash, put it back on a plate, and place it once again in the refrigerator, unwrapped of course.  The first time he did this little stunt, I asked him if he was really going to eat the spoiled food he’d rescued from the trash.  In his wispy, prickly voice, he replied that maybe he would–he wasn’t sure if the food was bad or not.  I was left speechless.  I should also mention that the spoiling food that made it into the refrigerator was only a fraction of the treasure trove of rotting victuals he hoarded in his smelly bedroom.

Bills and rent were another irritation.  MD worked part-time, and was fond of calling in sick after partying around the clock, further curtailing his hours.  Although he nicked a fair amount of merchandise from his retail job, he wasn’t very organized about turning his ill-gotten gains into cash, and like so many childish hipster/scenesters, he spent an inordinate amount of money on partying that he couldn’t really afford.  All three of the Troika had this little trick of paying their rent and bills well past bedtime on the day that the bill or rent was supposed to be in the hands of the account receivable.  I’d hear the swish of an envelope sliding under my door after my lights had gone out and they thought I’d gone to sleep.  And this tricky stuff actually represented a “good month”.  Bills in my name regularly went partially unpaid well into 60 days, and I had to keep scrupulous records of who paid, how much they paid, and how much each A-hole owed instead of simply having paid-up, current bills each month–like normal adults.  Rent was sometimes not paid until the 10th–and this meant that our landlord was calling ME every day dunning me for his due.  I started to corner MD each month with the specific date that I needed each bill and remind him that rent was due on the first, like it was some surprising new bit of information.  No matter–MD was horribly bad at finances and caused me no small amount of stress each month.

So this is the stinky, passive/aggressive, unsanitary, late-paying slice of milquetoast that was MD.  As I mentioned before, he was a classic masochist, just waiting for the perfect sadist to get things going.  And that, gentle reader, was where GS came in, and the whole psychological nightmare that was my household situation began.  Stay tuned for an introduction to GS…

Bartleby the Scrivener: MD’s literary doppleganger