ben's journal

"Do all the right things."
      Johanna Wagner Natkin (Jean)
      4 June 1925 – 28 February 2005

Hi Cathy (and anyone else out there in LiveJournal land, but this entry is mostly addressed to Cathy),

I'm still without a computer of my own (I'm going over to the other side: an Apple iBook), so it's easier to communicate over the web right now than by e-mail. I'm writing this at work (and retyping), which is one of the benefits of overnight stocking: way too little supervision. Heck, the store manager is here right now, after six-thirty a.m. The other benefit is that instead of thinking about work at home I think about other stuff at work.

In non-work work I am, among other things, involved with and running for the board of directors of a new arts center and screaming into the nothingness against a (possibly) stolen election.

I've been getting more and more into modern country music, which I hold Cathy fully responsible for. That, and so much of the rest of the radio's playing Christmas music. But WCTK let me down recently with a barely countrified version of Frosty the Snowman. Nevertheless, I've completely added modern country to all the different music I like. I really respect the way country music sings about actual life. Most marriages end in divorce now I think, and most music doesn't sing about either divorce or marriage. (My uncle just left my aunt after some twenty years.) Coming to work I listened to "Home Sweet Holiday Inn," one of quite a few country songs about living with divorce, not just breaking up or something. I can think of maybe one rock or otherwise song about this.

I miss the smell of barn.

Cathy, I'm sorry house-sharing relationship failed with your hosts, but I'm glad you found a great escape!

And I need your and everyone's help to get midnightcoder to OK the transfer of the midnight-coder.com domain from Yahoo to my DomainSite account, so we can get his ASCII comic strip back on-line. (I can immediately transfer the domain to him if he's smart enough not to trust me.)

Hey everybody, post a comment or write me (anything at all sent to melanconent.com should reach me-- don't tell the spammers).

-ben

The good news: I'm a professional journalist for the first time in three years. I went to the Million Worker March and wrote an article about it. It was in Friday's Natick Bulletin & TAB and I am to get $60 for it. Woohoo! That pays the cost of the bus ticket.

I also keep publishing things at a web site where I don't get paid.

The bad news: While trying to post to LiveJournal a couple weeks ago to make clear that I had not driven 140 MPH to do a Massachusetts to West Virginian round trip in 10 or 11 hours (one way only; the impressive part is that the first hour is on tiny back roads), my laptop computer had a stroke (Windows registry goes bye-bye). In mistakenly trying to administer CPR (another permanent-seeming crash a few weeks ago had been fixed by pushing above the hard drive) I broke the hard drive. I have taken over my mother's computer and looking into a new laptop, and a cheap if risky way to get my data off the hard drive I murdered.

And tomorrow I go to New Hampshire to get people to the polls! Wave goodbye, Georgie.

And I'm working 40+ hours a week at the Christmas Tree Shops. Anyone want a 20% discount? I can give ten away that will work for three days in mid-November.

Hello all!

Thank you for finding my journal, via Brian's.

Bolivia was really, really, incredible, the country, the people who lived there, and the crazy people who came to learn from each other about real reporting on what matters to peoples lives. Narco News and its NarcoSphere are where the articles I wrote ended up (I began and ended by covering events in Spanish, a language 'yo no entiendo').

I paid twenty dollars today to appeal a traffic violation to see if a judge will care more than a stupid magistrate about the distinction between running a red light and turning left on red (literally stupid magistrate: arguing about the basic facts of the case used up most of my thrilling visit to court today). Roughly every other time I take a car instead of my bike (very rarely) I get a traffic ticket. Fortunately, the first one caused me to so hate traffic laws that I disobey them every chance I get, allowing me to make it back from my younger brother's place in West Virginia (and bringing my older brother up) in less than 11 hours. So there's a silver lining of increased criminality on the cloud of every bogus charge.

I haven't slept today and I work tonight at 9 p.m., for a 10 (and a half) hour shift after working six nights straight. On Shabbat. In violation of religious, moral, and practical principles. But I was asked, and starting after next week I get my 4-day, 10-hour-a-day schedule as requested. And then after Christmas I go part-time, and join the ranks of people without health insurance (not to mention the 93% of people who do not want to be a statistic). Hence my attempt to ruin my health now, and determine if my insanity is a cause or effect of my not, technically speaking, sleeping.

Lemme figure out what I'm actually working: I worked Saturday night Sunday night Monday night Tuesday night Wednesday night Thursday night, will work Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night. Eleven days straight! Whee!

Then I'm taking a couple extra days off to go to Washington D.C. for the Million Worker March.

Anyone who wonders, I'm working for Christmas Tree Shops, $10.23 an hour (hence the desire to work overtime to actually earn anything), you want cheap junk for 20% cheaper I'm your man, and let all of you take warning: graduate on time, even if you don't want a career you'll end up with a job which is pretty much the same thing but not paid as well.

Hence my more-personal-than-before interest in forming an association or union of workers in, say, retail, to help save this country from economic injustice and, eventually, economic decline resulting from the inequality and injustice.

Peace, love, and what's cooking with all you old UMassers out there in the livejournal world?

I doubt this LiveJournal will work out any better than any of my dead journals: an introduction perhaps, maybe a few entries, and then occasional sporadic entries, until finally I forget where my journal is and the journal project degenerates to half-written accounts in the margins of free newspapers and in my scheduling book. Also if past history is any guide, major events and things that are important to me will almost certainly go unnoted.