What in the hell …

As for me, I am a Chuckist. Chuckism may not have all the answers, I don’t know either way, but Chuckism has critical lessons for building a meaningful radical left and a powerful working class movement. If there are other questions after we succeed at that, we’ll worry about them then.

We went to see Alkaline Trio and Rise Against the other night at this genormous place in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. The bands were good. Lots of rock and roll. I feel like a jerk because I felt happy that Tim from Rise Against appears to be starting to go bald. I mean, I’m way further along down that road than he is, which sucks, but watching seeing someone else start down it felt good in meanspirited kind of way. Here’s the thing, though. I liked the show but I didn’t love it. My wife loved it. She’s more rock and roll than I am. I want to chalk it up to the venue - big, uncomfortable, crappy sight lines, full of young dudes doing their young dude schtick - but I’m not sure it was. I need to go to a show in a smaller space soon and test this out. I want to be someone who still gets excited about rock shows. (Speaking of which, my friend Heather’s boyfriend goes to rock shows all the time, she’s always complaining about them. Turns out he’s an amateur geologist, going to look at agates and stuff. Seriously. That cracked me up.) Part of it’s the lifestyle. I’m tired a whole lot of the time, so staying up late to see bands doesn’t sound a lot more fun than going to be early and getting a lot of sleep. I mean, I stay up late all the time (sometimes because I have stuff to do and sometimes because I’m a creature of inertia and sometimes because I’m an insomniac) so I probably shouldn’t complain, but like … staying up late sucks. I don’t like it.

Here’s the other thing. It really is the young dudes doing their young dude schtick. I just hate it. Go work out your masculinity issues somewhere else. In a way I guess I’m asking for it, because I like loud aggressive music that’s prone to this kind of macho bullshit in the crowd and stuff. Maybe that’s why I’m so sick of it, I’ve been seeing that kind of stuff for like 15 years now. The sad part is that I think my “this stuff is getting old” feeling is actually a sign that I’m the one getting old. Oh well. At least I can be smug or something. And I have … uh … whatever the benefits of oldness are. A naturally well ventilated scalp and no worries about getting carded?

Somehow I’ve become a bit more tuned in to the news than I was for a while. As a result a few stories and tidbits struck me. For one, according to this, 1 in 6 Minneapolis public school kids will go without permanent housing at some point this year. If that’s the annual statistic, I wonder what the rate of kids in Minneapolis who have been homeless is. In other news, I heard a report this morning about the auto industry being in trouble money-wise, all this bullshit about high labor costs and so on. Fuck that. Here’s a simple answer. Nationalize health care. That shifts a cost from the companies and lowers the cost of healthcare making for more efficient use of medical dollars. Not to mention better health outcomes at least as judged in terms of health inequality. My wife pointed out that there’s already rhetoric about the economy being marshaled to limit expectations (the Democrats do this dance with the Republicans; the latter are crazy and send loads of money up in smoke - and of course into their and their cronies’ bank accounts - while the former now talk about balanced budgets and austerity; the party of the pistol-whipping vs the party of the firing squad), and that this is bullshit: healthcare is economic. Education is too. Etc etc etc.

I’d looked at this a few times before but yesterday I was prepping to teach and I looked at the 1860 New York married women’s property act (actual title = “An Act Concerning the Rights and Liabilities of Husband and Wife”) and something jumped out at me that I hadn’t seen before. (more…)

More following on from this. Trying to work out what I want to try and argue. (more…)

Hola, amigos. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I been trying to roll this giant rock up a hill and everytime it gets close to the top it rolls back down. But you know me - I keep on rolling! Roll on, it don’t mean nothing, that’s my motto. (more…)

NOTE: for some weird reason this post disappeared for a while. It’s back now. It’s actually really old. I don’t understand computers and software and all that. Obviously.

ANOTHER NOTE: As it turns out, the reappearance of this post makes it post number six hundred and sixty six. Spookier and spookier…

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