Sunday shopping

The thought of going to town today

Makes me want to throw up.

I had the people,

Filing and rushing past,

Not a care in the world for me.

Spend,

Spend,

Spend,

Buy,

Buy,

Buy.

God, life is relentless.

The modern sabbath day.

Me amongst it all!

I’m no better.

People pounding on those cobbles, though,

Rattles in my head like a jackhammer.

They tread closer and closer until

They are walking on my throat.

If you try and gasp for air,

You’ll only cry out.

Then they’ll all turn and laugh at you.

Nope.

Best head in and buy that stuff I “need”;

That’s what they all tell me, anyway.

United, we don’t help ourselves

Christ, I’m so tired every day

and the boss won’t raise our pay.

People are falling through life

like Del Boy through a bar;

they think that they’re in control,

but they ain’t working down in payroll.

The union has been useless,

in that funny sort of way:

some old blokes on high pontificate,

leaving horrible HR to dominate

over tired, backstabbing workers laying prostrate.

Intolerable conditions bowl over you

like a mist of humid brutality.

You can’t see through it as it’s so thick

but Ol’ Occy’ Health has got a good trick:

attend the yoga classes three times a week,

but nobody actually wants to hear you speak.

You are just a nuisance here.

You are just a nuisance here.

Give us your labour just to tread financial water,

then offer self-hating colleagues up to the slaughter.

nurses deserve a pay rise. You do not

The argument that nurses should be happy to accept a dismal 1% pay rise is ridiculous. 

I don’t give a shit if they appear “ungrateful” or that “they should be lucky they still have a job”. 

If you boil down market capitalism to its most basic understanding, that of supply and demand, nurses are currently in more demand than ever before. If neoliberal bootlickers want to play the capitalist card, it’s backfired. Nurses shouldn’t be lucky that they still have a job, neoliberalism dictates that they must have a job. And furthermore, just because it failed for you “losers”, who were unable to keep your jobs, it doesn’t mean it’s failed for everyone else. You lost your job or didn’t get a pay rise because your boss and the consumers don’t care about your lives, just the product or service you provide. If you’re not offering the service, sorry, you won’t be getting anything. So stop bitching and moaning.

If you don’t like the system, have some class solidarity and demand a change. In an ideal world, everyone gets a pay rise. Stop fighting amongst yourselves and get the money that you all deserve. 

Anti-energised

“me-days” overpopulate my weekly schedules. I think the last week I’ve worked my day job and the rest I’ve just lounged around. I’ve not done anything, just lounged around. 

I’ve got plenty to be getting on with, but I just don’t have the energy. There’s a deficit between the energy I put into work and the total I have. It is completely sucked into work (which I can’t stand), and then it’s diverted from the other things I want to do. I’m trapped in sitting around doing nothing. Staying up late, doing even less, more time-wasting, etc etc. 

OK, so what? 

My partner says that you shouldn’t think in terms of output being a major indicator of your standing (or, the self), and that really, I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. I guess the problem with this is that I don’t mind being judged on these things. I want to do the things I plan, the writing I have in my head to a quality I know I’m capable of. Sadly, I only feel that I can write as I am now (sorry, dear readers). I need to actually sit down and focus because I want to and I want to use that time to be creative and constructive. I’m just struggling to do that right now but I’m insisting on self-reifying.

Not really a revelation. There’s just so much out there that I want to do. I don’t want to piss it all away on work and stuff that makes me miserable. I like to kick back and chill out, but not if I feel I’m not getting anything for it and not every damn day I get off. Soon, it’ll be back in the workhouse and it feels like a few hours ago that I picked up my coat and logged off. What is this? Why do we do it? And worse still, maybe if I didn’t even have to go to work, would I do it anyway? 

Superficial PoWow

Cha-ching; pounds tumble

Into cosmetically-

Inflated dollars.

Superficial PoWow

Uncertain Times

Grasping at straws. Man~,

What am I to do? Pulling

Vainly. Uncertain times.

Uncertain Times

Haiku of a Zero-Hour Job (poem/haiku)

Zero hours, *sigh*.

Bills rattle through decaying

Letterbox. Need hope.

Haiku of a Zero-Hour Job

The Best of Bread (poem)

Always having this hazy mind,

From talk of politics, philosophy, or what have ‘ya.

Let’s take it back –

Not quite as far as First Principles –

But just to the little simplicity we have in modernity:

Bread.

Bread – harbinger of the revolution.

Grind the flour down;

Disparate yet concentrated clusters of deep white tyranny,

Grippy and inescapable;

It bores in to any nook, look,

The guerrillas have taken the town.

Christ, my mind just lingers back.

These daily sensations kaleidoscope into the formations

Which torment my head daily.

It is decoration,

It’s synthesis;

Pure reason in overload and I can’t cool it down.

The Best of Bread

Capitalism has Crushed Me (poem)

I’ve had a stomach-full of it, today.

No more I say;

These damn crooks

Watch the wheel go around

But they set the subterfuge.

Y’know,

Just because the system keeps churning on,

It doesn’t mean it works.

Pray for me;

I’m being crushed underneath it.

Capitalism has Crushed Me

Hypothetical: The Negative Utopia

I wonder where we will draw the line with the economic precariousness of life?

Have you tried to look for a job right now, it’s fucking abysmal.

The educated are over-qualified (or under qualified with particular skills), and the under-qualified are, well, under-qualified.

Especially now, you’re hearing that hundreds, even thousands, are applying for the same poorly paid shit jobs.

So what are we supposed to do? Could it conceivable of people refusing to work and finding new ways of existence? What if the upper/middle-middle classes, frustrated by the things which have plagued their inferiors for decades, simply gave up on participating in society?

What if, instead of waiting for a retirement date, they chose early to buy land and farm their own goods? What if their children forgo university and use their trust fund to buy this land. Land again, proving to be the most valuable resource. Not education, that never was.

Maybe we could see a space open up for the lower-classes. The middle class is becoming fatigued and maybe this is necessary. Maybe they need to become the transcendent class, which using it’s privilege, can choose to move out of society. Maybe this will precipitate a greater advancement for us at the bottom?

I don’t know, and this is not to push praise onto the middle class and the government for potentially opening up this new space. This wasn’t a success of the economy or the system, it’s one of their great failures that the middle class, the only demographic they need to worry about, could be pushed to its limits (which are much narrower than how far the lower classes have been pushed), and this could lead to a newer society with more opportunity for those at the bottom.

It would be their catastrophic error; sacrificing those who have already been lost unnecessarily through state and neoliberal economic cruelty, and accidentally leading to the rise of a new middle class. They wouldn’t want it, but they would take the credit, naturally. They just need them to forget of the troubles of the past, and convince this new group that it was worth it – that they are worthy of their damned votes.

These are a lot of hypotheticals, but it’s interesting to consider. What if the state was so inept and unable to deal with the economic crisis, the superstructure which we served was pushed all the way around and it actually led to growth. It had to capitalise on something, so it finally started to capitalise on failure; making one pathogen attack another nasty intruder because the former needs to survive at any cost. That would almost be the perfect metaphor for how this cosmic melodrama could perpetuate.

It feels a little bit like dabbling in accelerationism, which I hesitate to do. No less because I don’t understand it, as well as not really wanting to align myself with it. I think there is a moral duty to not let society to decay to the point that good may come from it, as it would almost feel like the point of building a society would be lost along the way. If it can only improve, why bother in the first place? Why not degenerate right now or just fuel the fire and make it breakdown quicker?

Sorry for the rant. It doesn’t feel comfortable to write. All I can say is that I’m thinking a lot about the economic situation in the UK, and it feels like we’re at a cross roads. Something has to change to make this situation more sustainable. To me, however, it just feels like incompetence and lack of desire to help those who need it will hold us back.

Precisely it. I can see the government giving up and refusing to help, as they may see a clearance through the trees. They may see that society is organic and will right itself, without their interference, or they might just not bother anyway (again, incompetence). When things are bad, we’re always told that “they can only get better”. Things have been bad for a long time but that doesn’t mean that we watch the system re-calibrate and redefine what “better” is, for us. It’s already too far along for that.