The Weekend in Foolish Attention
Bits and bytes of the week
Who we are in this democracy. In 2020, Bloomberg found that truckers, plumbers, machinists, painters, corrections officers, and maintenance employees were among the occupations most likely to donate to Trump (Biden got the lion’s share of writers and authors, editors, therapists, business analysts, HR department staff, and bankers.)
An oversimplification, certainly, but that sort of breaks it down. Blue collar workers versus white collar workers. Why do the working class dig Trump so much? They don’t. They just hate the collegiate class so much that he’s a cudgel against those who feel superior to them.
George W. Bush was the same. So was Ronald Reagan. And Richard Nixon. Maybe we educated folk aren’t nearly as smart as we’d like to think because we keep shitting on the workers and they just shit on us right back. Which leaves us all covered in shit.
When something cracks me up, I gotta share. I Think You Should Leave Now with Tim Robinson on Netflix is fall down, snot pouring out your nose, weeping openly hysterical. It’s a sketch comedy show with parts Pee Wee, DADA, Kids in the Hall, and Mr. Show but completely, utterly original and stupidly funny.
A new dating app idea. Maybe divorced people should only date other divorced people? Sort of like an app for people with herpes or syphillis. I mean, the experience of divorce is profound and those first dates could be both parties shitting on their exes while enjoying some pizza and beer. An app that promotes the worst possible matches out of the gate might be worth exploring, amiright?
An excerpt from The Ape. I wrote a piece for Literate Ape that I’m pleased with so here’s a bit of it. I think it paints a certain kind of picture.
I rang the buzzer and waited. It was my first day on the job and I showed up about fifteen minutes early cuz that’s what you do, right? I rang it again. Still nothing. On the third buzz, one of the sales execs came out and let me in. She was the only person in the building and gave me a brief tour. The basement that had two abandoned radio studios and a hodgepodge of exercise equipment from the eighties (including an Inversion table and a Shake Weight®). The attic with piles of crap from random promotions past, hand-made signs of contests, boxes filled with branded stuff long past it’s sell-by date, and a huge bookcase with original country LPs from fifty years of music, their covers rotting from water damage and age.
The building was built in the seventies out in a field across from railroad tracks. Brown. Lots of shades of brown and in the fall, it becomes almost camouflaged in the swatch of dead grass and leafless trees. It’s brown on the inside as well. Brown chairs in the lobby. Fake wood paneling. The carpet is beige and is very likely the original carpeting from 1972. Thread bare and marked with the spills of a thousand cups of coffee.
As the stories go, the building once was filled with sixty or seventy employees, all in service of the top five radio stations in Central Kansas but these days there are twenty employees and a host of empty offices and cubicles. The cubicles are like strange archeological digs with the remnants of crap from those who worked at them, moved on, and left a few items behind. A rolodex, unused in years. A calculator from the days before Dell. Pens with ink so old one has to use an ancient branded lighter to heat up the tip only to squeeze enough out to make three letters before going dry again. A plastic troll doll possibly won at the state fair when it was fun and inexpensive.
The work room, where most places keep office supplies, has a dozen cabinets filled with the sort of stuff that hasn’t been used in offices for decades. It’s a mini-museum of how things used to work. Like an apartment you rent because it’s cheap, there are odd dents and holes in the wall in random places. There’s a cork board in one hallway across from the bathrooms. It has a piece of yellowing paper with “KUDOs Board” typed in Comic Sans and a mix of mismatched pushpins. No kudos are ever put up on the board.
Five radio studios, one for each of the stations, are located on the east side of the building. The equipment is at least a decade too old but functions and each has a spot or two of water damage on the ceiling. The rock station has decals, awards, records in cases, all from at least twenty years past. Branded matches complete with branded ashtrays from when smoking was normal. The country stations have next to nothing on the walls but the hallways have framed albums that serve to remind anyone caught there that here once was a powerhouse country music machine.
For the rest of it, go here.
Heading to Chicago next week. Lots to do. Lots to eat. We’ll see if I encounter anything worth writing about (I will.)
Have a spectacular week of slightly warmer weather!
There's always something worth writing about. (And you do it so well!) Enjoy Chicago, Amigo.
Excellent writing, good story.