Hello, everyone!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3NyHISwV8g&t=1097s&ab_channel=MegaFigueroa007
This is a livestreamed performance from yesterday featuring Jason Tomas on alto saxophone and yours truly, Orlando Figueroa on guitar. We played some improvisations and jazz standards. Take a listen to the music, leave a comment, and make sure to like and subscribe to my channel.
Thank you!
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.
https://www.facebook.com/orlando.figueroa.3150/videos/503683607883879
Orlando Figueroa, Guitar
Jason Tomas, Alto Saxophone
Recorded on a brand new Fender Squier with better tuners on them, given to me for free from a customer at work, going through my Marshall avt 275 on the clean channel setting. This was recorded yesterday, 2/25/22. Enjoy, thanks for listening.
https://www.facebook.com/orlando.figueroa.3150/videos/1141118989992125
This performance was done with a Fender Squire guitar that a customer from work gave me. Cheers, here's to a happy, healthy 2022!
Okay, so for starters, if you haven't kept up to date on my writings about what retail grocery has been like, be sure to go back and read this most recent most on the subject, here. Thumbs up if you have a thing for the common working class man like myself.
There's a deep sense of animosity at this point in the pandemic. Americans are more divisive than ever. Customers want to fight me at the checkout line for almost anything nowadays. My most trusted friends, family, and associates are all in the dull drums, saying that they're owed much more in this world. That their jobs, their social circles, their vast quality of "stuff," isn't good enough, and that things are quote, "shitty,". Well, to play up to the satire, "was their whole lives anything else but that?"
But let's be kind. But no, seriously, none of the people I associate with have really been heavily impacted upon by the pandemic. Rather, almost all of them has flourished and seem to be in perfect health. Oh, fancy that!
But there seems to be this endless dread going on everywhere around me. It's possible that these people simply aren't happy, they simply lack the capacity for happiness, or the satirist in me will sometimes go on to believe that it could simply be a ruse or charade, one meant to simply fit in and be conformist. Hey, everybody's miserable, I should pretend to be miserable like them to see if they like me more! Misery loves company! I'm a miserables! I like to believe I haven't lost my sense of humor out of these some 700 posts.
Things are getting better all the time. My life is awash with high culture: music, books, nature, good health, good demeanor, and general happiness and well being. Now, I'm not a guy who's particularly rich in anything in particular, except possibly a capacity for happiness. So what's wrong with all these other people? Well you know what Sartre says about that. "Hell is other people."
Covid America has taken on a sly fake sardonic smile. Every customer at the checkout line has become a hooligan. Even some of my friends, coworkers, and associates have become hooligans. In a world where everybody says everything "sucks," or its "shitty," how can you stay cool and level headed when the world outside your house is super negative and shitty themselves? I think they're probably out to lunch [Frank Zappa].
In other news I've been reading Orlando Innamorato. A classic romance knight errantry story from Italy during the 16th century. I happened to read Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, which is the sequel to Orlando Innamorato. I liked it so much I decided to back and read the first installment, written by Matteo Maria Boiardo. And tonight a customer from work is donating to me a Fender Stratocaster guitar. Oh, happy day!
But now I've come to the end of this story. A new tale awaits in the next coming days. Watch this space, eight days a week!
If you want to read about what it was like at work during the worst of times, make sure to read this post here. That was the worst of it. But things aren't perfect the way things are now either.
A lot has changed in the world of retail grocery in the beginning of 2022. The place is being run less like a business-employee-bosses-customers routine and more of a sweatshop. Our union is fighting to get us employees a better contract. It remains to be seen if it will really be that much better, but it is guaranteed that our wages will get a slight boost. Modest progress. Slow hand clap.
The departments and the front end department is being run by skeletal crews. Most of the time overtime is being rejected and refused and a lot of hours across the board have been cut severely, despite the fact that the store needs more help and needs more boots on the grounds to get the job done.
Because of the fact that the departments are more and more being run with fewer and fewer people, the building has taken on the image of more of a sweatshop style environment. You have be very fast paced and not make too many mistakes. It's almost like Amazon or something now. Management demands it.
In the morning, the front end gets three people to work with until 10 am, and later at the evenings, say 8 pm or later, its being run in the same fashion. This has created a sweatshop environment where one employee is forced to take care of tens of dozens of customers singlehandedly, oftentimes with no baggers, so not only are they ringing up the orders, they're greeting the customers, cash handling, as well as bagging the items-whew!
As if that wasn't enough, upper management seems to have taken up the stiff upper lip direction of managing workers. They're rude, they're pushy, they don't respond when you say hello, how are you, they're pushing employees to do more work during their eight hour shifts but insist on no overtime, they're in support of cutting hours, they don't give much leeway in terms of calling out sick for colds or covid, the list goes on and on. In a way, in short, I want to say that they've engendered a work environment where they try to dehumanize the employees, and sadly, from what I see from my coworkers, they've succeeded sometimes.
But there's a light at the end of the tunnel isn't there? Of course. Although this industry seems to have been dehumanized and turned into a sweatshop by upper management and their meandering response to the pandemic, for me, the job has only become better.
You see, I've become simpatico with lots of customers and while I've walked the Earth I've engendered reciprocity, made friends, and influenced people. Its not even about the money. Its about making friends and influencing people. Hard lesson. But well earned and deserved.
Covid cases are down at the store but there's always at least a good six to seven cases on the board. Meaning there aren't too many new ones but there are still a few infections still getting into the store. Got to be safe and be careful.
Customers have become especially unruly and offensive with ignoring the mask mandate and being pushy, aggressive, and rude.
A long time customer is donating to me a Fender Stratocaster. Even if it really was the worst of times, it doesn't get any better than that. The satire here is that we're living during a modern plague, and its still the best years of our lives.
queue Dehumanizer by Black Sabbath
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, hello world. How are you? It's good to be writing on a good day off work today on a Saturday. Here, ...
