CONTEMPT

In the gym yesterday, watching CNN, it finally occurred to me, what was wrong with Everything.


Christine Romans, reporting on the inexorable, record-setting gasoline price rises, expelled with casual, surly disdain the phrase “the paycheck-to-paycheck crowd” when describing  those who would be most severely affected.

It was a queer, unsettling, but entirely predictable limousine liberal tube moment in Nowville.


Creepy Soledad O'Brien's “One-Percenter” Breakfast Roundtable of pundits and former and future public office-holders audited Roman’s dismissal of two-thirds of America without comment or even a single raised eyebrow.  


That’s Contempt for you.


The anti-answer to everything.

Note:   

(1) All images from the motion picture “Contempt” (“Le Mépris"), 1963, dir. Jean-Luc Godard. 

(2) I assume those having no paychecks at all are Beneath Contempt.

George Delerue, "Thème de Camille," from "Contempt" (Link) 

The Psychic Who Advises On All Problems

Along my Baldwin School route through Bryn Mawr this morning, Jane and I noticed that the Psychic Who Advises On All Problems had closed her shop and the storefront was now being offered for re-rental.


Sensibly, Jane asked whether a psychic should be expected to anticipate a failing business?  Her tone clearly implied that she knew the answer was “of course.”


The psychic’s business only lasted about 18 months.  Before her, a good dressmaker and a tailor, Korean immigrants who altered Jane’s 8^th grade semi-formal dress, a ravishing rosy Betsy Johnson, occupied the space, but ultimately they couldn’t survive the Obama economy. 

"From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall" to Swarthmore, and all along PA Routes 30, 1, 252 up to infinity, businesses falter, fail, and multitudes struggle unsuccessfully to find employment in the Grievance Culture sector of Vanity Fair.  Every single day I check off job application boxes stating that I have no disability, and by doing so create one (an additional one, actually; anyone familiar with online application self-identification protocol will know what I mean), a virtual LED flashing, warning HR robots and trolls of personal fatal impediments preventing me from ever getting hired in Nowville.  


For all the value I have tried to afford others throughout my career, I myself am currently accorded no value whatsoever. A record falling off the charts (or one that never made them), I'm "over."


At least I’ve had my career.  Post-college job seekers, it seems, are truly the Walking Dead.


Here it comes; here it comes.  My 19^th Nervous Breakdown. Four more years like the last four years.  Fucking brilliant.

Youngbloods -- Darkness, Darkness (Link)