You're Still Wrong: Mykel's September Blog... Toxic
You’re STILL Wrong
or
Mykel's
September 2021 Blog/Column
A Toxic Environment!
by Mykel Board
“I’m
not perverted, I’m just Italian.” --Andrew
Cuomo
“No one should ever work.” --Bob
Black
“Capitalism
is slavery where the slaves have to pay their own room and board”
–Mykel Board
“I
had complained to friends that the Governor would go out of his way
to touch me on my lower back, arms and legs”
--Lindsey
Boylan
=======================
“I can’t breathe!”
“Quick,
clean out his nose… I can see it... filled with coal dust. He’ll
smother!”
Cough… answer, “I’m not putting my
fingers in another man’s nose! That’s disgusting.”
“He’ll
die! Get it? He’ll die!”
Virgil knees on the filthy mine floor. Tentatively, he puts an index finger into Homer’s left nostril… scrapes it around… pulls it out… black with snot and coal dust.
“Now the other one, fast!”
Virgil pushes his finger into the right nostril of the man under him… twists… then back… and again loosens a pile of black dust. The tip of his finger is coated when he pulls it out of the man’s nostril.
“Now push on his chest… hard… make him breathe.”
Virgil
puts a hand on either side of Homer’s chest… pushes hard…
again… a thin stream of black drool oozes
out of the
corner of Homer’s mouth. Another chest press… another black
drool down the side of the man’s face…
then a cough… then another cough. Tears run from
the corners of
his eyes
to the black ground beneath his head.
“He’s gonna make it. We’ll fix up a side-tipper
and get him out of here on
the tracks.
The fresh air will bring him back.”
“Can’t we get him a doctor?”
“Are
you kidding? The boss’d kill
us!
That’s just what we need... a safety-hazard report at some fuckin’
hospital. Joe
Biden already wants to shut us down.”
FLASH TO a huge farm... hundreds of acres... somewhere in the West...strawberries. Bare-handed and bare-headed... dozens of workers bent over… stooped,,, to pick the berries. They too cough.
“Ay, madre-mia,” says a 22-year old Maria, just starting to show her pregnancy. She coughs.
“No puedo hacerlo mas. Voy a morir,” she coughs again. It’s the Round-up… pesticide...carcinogenic… dangerous to a fetus as well as to the mother.
No time to worry about cancer now... earn that $7500 for a year’s work. Bend and pick… bend and pick… bend and pick.
Ay,
me duele la espalda,” she says.
“Shhh!” says the
next worker. “Screw your back pain. You want to pay for that baby?
You want to get pushed back to Mexico? Don’t complain! At least you
have a job.”
She doesn’t know it yet, but she also has
cancer. Her
baby will be stillborn.
And
there’s
this,
directly
from the internet
Amazon
delivery drivers are reporting working ten to fourteen hours in a
shift. This is in part because drivers are not allowed to return any
packages from their routes, meaning drivers can make over 160 stops
per shift.
With
the Mentor app constantly monitoring drivers, every stop has to be
accounted for. That leaves most drivers with no time to use the
restroom on their ten hour shifts. Drivers need to use public
restrooms such as ones inside grocery stores, so if their route does
not include an area that has such a location, drivers have to make a
long detour that could cost them their job. Because of these strict
measures, drivers report using empty water bottles in their vehicles
instead of stopping to use the restroom
LeRoy Jackson’s truckseat has molded itself to his ass. He spends nearly 14 hours a day there. On the floor, in front of the passenger seat… in a basket… half-filled with piss… is a jar. It’s that time again.
Pull over… hate to waste a minute or so… but if you gotta go… Could do with a shit too… but this rig’s got spyware up the ass. Too long stopped… not making deliveries… and you’re outta there.
Just
a quickie… pull over… pull it out… just over the lip of the
jar. Aaahh
aaaahhh, shit. Filled the jar, spilled all over the place… and I
got a delivery… 17 minutes to make it… computer checked. ..
Better pull out... haul ass… Now!
Off the shoulder...
into traffic… fuck!!! Nooo! Nooo!!!! BLLLLANNNNG!
Ellen’s face hurts from smiling. Bad jokes… send it back to the kitchen… too cold… too hot… “Miss… excuse me Miss!” She smiles. On her feet all day… rushing from table to table… balancing enough dishes to compete with a circus juggler… She smiles. $2.13 an hour, the U.S. minimum wage for tipped workers. (Look it up) plus what the cheapskates leave on the tables… That’s it. She smiles.
On her feet all day, Ellen comes home beat… ready to go to sleep… to hit the hay. She’s working six days a week to pay the $2000 a month she needs for her one-room NYC apartment. On the seventh day, she barely moves.
She puts up with the tugs on her skirt… the food complaints… the no tips for bad food as if she were personally responsible for the cooking. Sometimes she can wiggle her ass for a few extra dollars… or wink at a regular who stands so close to her when he speaks that she feels the saliva spray on her face. His handlebar mustache and affected cape make him look like a magician. If only he’d disappear. He’s there every day and she wants to kill him.
She’s a robot, she thinks. Same thing… day after day… no… I guess not... robots don’t collapse exhausted. Back to work… “Hey miss,” the tug on the skirt… the wrist-grab of the customer when she hands him the bill… the smile she gives in return.
Hey you! Got it? Yeah you… you Karen… you whiner who thinks that being touched on the back is toxic. People die from their jobs… lung cancer, skin cancer, exhaustion… death… That’s toxic. Having a brain-dead job just to pay the rent. That’s toxic. Working with coal, asbestos, insecticide… that’s REALLY toxic.
But for you… another person touches you?… eeeewwww cooties. Joking about boyfriends? Intolerable! The job conditions have to fit YOU rather than the other way around.
Those at the bottom… the miners, the truck drivers, the waitresses... can’t just quit and find another job like you can… They die from work or they die from hunger… or a firing squad in a nation you can’t imagine. Or they suffer for two dollars an hour or whatever else they can squeeze out of people they hate.
Let
me tell you… You
fragile little Faberge egg… YOU
are the toxic one. You are the one who has others shaking in their
Nordstroms
from fear of saying the wrong thing or touching you any more than
shaking hands… and even that… don’t you just
bump
elbows these
days?
Doing
push-ups? Oh, the horror!
Yeah
you… You know how many people WISH they could get a $20,000 raise
by fucking the boss? And
you’re complaining that
he
asked.
Andrew Cuomo is rich enough to find other things to do. But how much fear is he bringing with him anywhere he goes. How much do John and Jane Doe fear from doing or saying anything inappropriate?
All jobs are bullshit. It’s the nature of work. Yours isn’t hunky dory? Then quit and get another bullshit job. Work 60 hours a week shifting ones and zeros from one computer to the next. As long as no one speaks to you.. or (Goddess forbid) touches you… you’re okay. Then the work isn’t toxic, right?
You wear a skirt and high heels to work… and (get this!) he looks at you!! How will you ever recover?
Do me a favor. Sniff some asbestos before you go to sleep. Do it often enough and you’ll learn a bit about toxic.
See you in hell,
Mykel
Board
ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]
–>
Can’t
find a webpage dept: A
great story on the deteriorating conditions in the mining business
appears in In
These Times
the September 2021 issue. I can’t find it on-line, so try to get a
print copy. Called Dying
To Make A Living, the
coal
conditions the article reports on are just horrible.
Wait, a reader, Don Smith, has found a link to the article. Here it is: https://inthesetimes.com/article/contracted-coal-miners-illinois-injury-danger
–> Dying for a job dept: The World Economic Forum reports that more than 2.3 million workers die every year as a result of occupational accidents or work-related diseases. That’s the entire population of Houston, Texas... killed every year from WORK. The alternative? Ah, how many times have I referenced this? You should have it memorized by now.
–> Evil Governor dept: While the women of America are sticking their pins in Cuomo dolls, the former governor has used his last days in office to grant pardons to 22 immigrants who were at risk of being deported. "New York stands strong in our support for immigrant communities," Cuomo wrote in a statement.
–>
Not related dept: This one is from the Darwin
Awards… that distinguished group of intellectuals who award the
prize to those who clean up the future of the human race by offing
themselves in their stupidity. I like this one it because it
highlights another pet peeve! Cellphone fuckin’ selfies. Besides
describing the awardee’s adventures, the Darwin folks offer some
great advice:
25 March 2017, Mexico: Standing on a
truck on an airport runway, our Double-Darwin Award Winners, Nitzia
and Clarissa, chose a regrettable location for a cell phone selfie.
Ms. Corral, 18, and Ms. Miranda, 17, were attending horse races that
were held on a track adjacent to the runway. The noise of the races
and the desire for a new profile picture distracted the young women.
They did not hear the motor of the descending aircraft, and the wing
of the small plane that struck and killed them
instantly.
People, wake up to the plain hard fact that a mobile phone is a deadly distraction! Mobile devices take our awareness away from the physical world, and the Darwin Awards archives are stuffed overflowing with testimony proving the tragic truth of this.
Cell phones will kill you! Put them away and allow your senses to receive input from tangible reality. Please share this regrettable cautionary lesson, a public service announcement, #yourdeathmatters
–>Speaking
of cellphones dept: Apple
will be putting spyware in its operating system. Ostensibly to combat
kiddie porn, the spyware will be looking at your pictures and videos
and reporting any nastiness it sees
to “the proper authorities.” And what will it be doing with the
information it gleans from those non-kiddie pix? Hey, what a
coincidence, that Antifa demonstration I just filmed showed up at the
FBI. Imagine that? How did that happen?
The Electronic
Frontier’s details on this are here.
See you in hell, redux,
MB
LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:
I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.
Here's a start:
Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com
Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency
And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.
And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.
Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.
Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.
Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.
George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.
And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.
And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.
Here
are a couple video links.
This from Jon Cox
https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low
And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong.
Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.
Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both.
My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.
Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.
Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com
