First, the working conditions have improved since I've last posted. There was going to be a possible strike but the company ended up giving in to most but not all of the demands from the union. We've also since added more staff to the front end. And inspiringly, I got promoted to cashier position after many years of toiling in the vineyards.
However, this doesn't mean that the working conditions are optimal. We're still working under covid conditions, there are still a few covid cases every now and then, and most of the customers aren't wearing masks while they get extremely close to our bodies and faces. Covid has been extremely brutal for workers in the retail industry. In addition, now that the weather has become a lot hotter, the masks have become really hot again, but again, I can't take it off, unless I want to risk the wrath of possible covid exposures.
I've mostly been chilling by myself and occasionally with a few friends. It's funny because, two years later, still under covid, I find myself only really going out to dinners with family and friends. It's my favorite social occasion. I've since left a lot of my many much more casual friends/acquaintances, to focus more on doing my own thing, which involves a lot of reading, guitar, and studying languages, mostly Spanish.
I started the morning by reading Machiavelli's Mandrake, a comedy play about a young man who tricks an old scholar fool into letting him fuck his beautiful young wife. Talk about uncomfortable reading. In a way you could say c'est la vie but if it was your wife or your girlfriend what would you do? What if you never find out like our old scholar dude? It's certainly a funny story. Maybe the ends do justify the means, because in the end the wife wants to do it again with the young man, and even befriends him and gives him a room at her and her husband's estate. Talk about the ends justifying the means.
I also found time to read Seneca's Agamemnon tragedy and start reading The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity, a deep thinker for ya, anthropology and sociology.
Lastly, I even found time to jam with my friend Jason who plays the alto saxophone. You can find our most recent live recording here.
Although work has been the norm throughout and around all this activity, I'll be able to rest easy knowing that I'll be getting the better contract raises, and although I'll get less hours as a result of getting paid more, in that process I'll actually get the same and/or more money for less hours of work. Not too shabby! I found 100 rupees!
Although I haven't gone anywhere in a few years and things have stayed relatively the same I feel like I'm on a grand spring break adventure for the moment.
If you're looking for a reading adventure look no further than the beginning of my covid plague journal where I write about the beginning of the pandemic and the working conditions at the gig. There are many posts in the plague journal now after these two covid years. Read all about it here.
Let there be peace and love in the universe as well as within your life.
Re "The Dawn of Everything"
ReplyDelete"The Dawn of Everything" is a biased disingenuous account of human history (www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity ) that spreads fake hope (the authors of "The Dawn" claim human history has not "progressed" in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system... so there's hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book's dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavor geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.
Fact is human history has "progressed" by and large in linear stages, especially since the dawn of agriculture (www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). This "progress" has been fundamentally destructive and is driven and dominated by “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html ) which the fake hope-giving authors of "The Dawn" entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding the nature of humans). And these two married pink elephants are the reason why we've been "stuck" in a destructive hierarchy and unequal class system (the "stuck" question is the major question in "The Dawn" its authors never answer, predictably), and will be far into the foreseeable future.
A good example that one of the authors, Graeber, has no real idea what world we've been living in and about the nature of humans is his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn't know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they've been wanting that for thousands of years (and that's not the only ignorant notion in the title). Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!
"The Dawn" is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked "science," served lucratively to the gullible ignorant underclasses who crave myths and fairy tales.
"The evil, fake book of anthropology, “The Dawn of Everything,” ... just so happened to be the most marketed anthropology book ever. Hmmmmm." --- Unknown
The above comment would be more useful if the author read the book instead of resorting to name calling and misrepresentation. "Fake" and "fake hope porn" seems vocabulary from the nether region of the MAGA universe or left agitprop, and ignorant because it presumes readers to be un-informed and lack conceptual sophistication. Graeber and Wengrow's case is remarkably matter-of-fact: look at the new anthropological and ethnographic evidence instead of the narrow paradigm that underlies much of orthodox materialistic evolutionary theory since the Enlightenment. Hobbes, Pinker, and Diamond are wrong because they're committed to the notion of Western progress, that scale implies stratification and inequality, and that what we have is inevitable. Graeber and Wengrow makes the case that it isn't. Read the book. By the way, I'm not sure Chris Knight read the book either. If you're gonna pontificate from the cheap seats, at least do the homework.
ReplyDeleteThe way you throw around phrases like "gullible ignorant underclasses" suggest you're a doctrinaire radical leftist. Are you?