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Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Fitchburg, MA: The bombed out mess

One does not need to go as far as West Virginia or the backwaters of the interior of Maine to find the armpit of America. The armpit of American can be found right in Boston’s backyard in Fitchburg, MA. The photo below that I took from Wikipedia of Fitchburg doesn’t do the dreariness of this bombed out mess justice. Unfortunately, I was too busy doing recon to take photos on this trip.

File:Fitchburg.jpg

The photo above is of downtown Fitchburg, about 50 miles west of downtown Boston. What used to be the main strip of Fitchburg is a ghost town. An economic scourge ravished this city, but one can’t help thinking when looking at this place that there must have been a nuclear disaster or plague. Huddled around the eye sore of the carcass of the commercial zone are the tiny, cramped houses of the working class suburbs. There are people there, but one still gets the feeling that most of the people have either escaped or died trying to escape. It is so hilly in some of these suburbs. I read in Wikipedia that Fitchburg is the second hilliest city in the country. Second only, of course, to San Francisco. But San Fran doesn’t get snow. I scare myself shitless imagining it being winter and icy and snowy and sliding down these steep hills in my shitty little Toyato Corolla at tremendous speed into traffic.

Where do the people of Fitchburg work in order to pay rent and property taxes and food? Maybe it was in Gardner, 12 miles to the west of Fitchburg. (The photo below of Gardner was stolen from Pitchertakin’.)

Gardner was richer, but not rich. It too had its share of deserted factories, but one had to look harder to find them. Gardner was almost as depressing as Fitchburg. It was barren, a town with no center and no soul. There were suburbs but no people in them. It was as if someone had exploded a neutron bomb. While one did not see signs of intelligent life in these suburbs, one saw signs of unintelligent life, which included oversized American flags draped over undersized houses and the ubiquitous Romney-Ryan signs. I did not see a single sign for a Democrat. This is a land lorded over by angry white men in denial, rotting away in an anemic economy that exported their jobs long ago. Unlike the impoverished Lewiston-Auburn area of Maine that I recently visited, which had many signs of culture, including public art – real art, not that corporate shit, the people of Gardner exhibited no signs of culture whatsoever. Even in the Paleolithic age people had cave art. There is nothing to suggest that the people of Gardner had evolved beyond their chimpanzee cousins.

Where did these people in Gardner work? They couldn’t all have home businesses? Maybe they worked in Leominster?

Leominster (above) borders Fitchburg and lies to its southeast. Leominster is much richer than Fitchburg, though far from rich. It looks a lot like Gardner, only Leominster still seems to have some element of an economy left. It has several strip malls and a fairly substantial mall-like area which includes a Macy’s and a number of other big commercial retail and food chains. Maybe those who could not escape Fitchburg and Gardner survived the shipping of their factory jobs to the American South and then to China by taking the shit retail and service jobs in Leominster. Housing is too expensive for me in Leominster, but maybe I could commute to Leominster while living in the depressing shithole of Fitchburg.

image

I stopped to take a piss at the Wendy’s in Leominster, right before getting on Route 2 back to Boston. I decided to reward myself with the $1.00 small frosty they were offering. The girl at the counter was new. She had trouble with the register. I was patient. She rewarded me by calling me hon. I sat down in the back of the restaurant under the glass roof to eat my ice cream. There was one other customer, who appeared to be an off-duty employee. There were flies buzzing around. They really bothered me. I was afraid that they were going to fly into my ice-cream. I hated this area. I much preferred the Lewiston-Auburn area of Maine over this desolate and depressing angry white male mecca, but I would probably end up applying for a job in this very Wendy’s and trying to scratch out an existence in this shithole. Massachusetts offers me subsidized healthcare via Romneycare. If I get hurt in Maine I’m dead, or at least fucked. Getting hurt in Massachusetts is not necessarily a showstopper. Maybe I should go to Maine. Maybe dying or being compelled to hang myself because I can no longer work and pay the rent because of an injury would be the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ll probably stay in Massachusetts. I am far from a winner, but I am a survivor. I am the evolutionary equivalent of that pink shit that grows in your bathtub that you can’t get rid of, no matter how hard you try to rub it out.

Driving back on Route 2, a very nasty and crowded two lane highway that runs across the eastern half of Massachusetts, a highway on-ramp snuck up on me out of nowhere, with a driver trying to get on. I didn’t have to yield, but I yielded. I did not have enough time to react, and I did not want to deal with the scenario where this driver didn’t yield. As I slowed down, the driver behind me closed in like a menacing shark. He got so close. Very soon I was going to hear the explosive sound of metal clashing as my body jerked violently. There was going to be shards of plastic exploding through the air and mangled pieces of car everywhere. I didn’t hope that he wouldn’t hit me because I knew he was going to hit me; the question was when he would hit me. I didn’t think I was dead. I wasn’t worried about getting hurt. All I could think about was the thousands of dollars of damage this was going to cause and the horrible, miserable inconvenience of it all. I don’t know how I didn’t get rear-ended, but somehow I didn’t.

I thought about this later. I never heard the squeal of the brakes of the driver behind me. The driver behind me probably was an exceptionally good driver and psychotic asshole who was able to get incredibly close to me at a high speed while decelerating, without hitting me. This was done in order to terrorize me as punishment for my yielding, which slowed him or her down and robbed him or her of about five seconds of his or her life.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Red Sox wives

Red Sox wives at a 2012 event. Good crap, you’d think that major league baseball players could find better looking women than these; even I could. And what’s with all the blondes? I’m sorry, but the Red Sox are just so gay.

 Katie Miller, Jamie Neistat, Sarah Atchison, Adair Bard, Farrah Lester, and Anne McGuire

I’m following Gina Rinehart’s advice

You want how much?

Gina Rinehart, world’s richest woman, is a fucking pig, in more ways than one, but in some ways she’s right.

“There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire. If you're jealous of those with more money don't just sit there and complain, do something to make more money yourself. Spend less time drinking, smoking and socializing and more time working.”

Rinehart doesn’t understand capitalism. Not everyone can be a millionaire; only a few. Capitalism needs people at the bottom to exploit, as evidenced by Rinehart’s recent bitching moaning about having to pay a minimum wage. She’s also wrong about the poor socializing too much. The poor don’t socialize very much. They’re too busy working or too depressed about being poor. Rinehart is right about the drinking and smoking – especially the smoking. This is an incredibly expensive habit. Fortunately, I was able to give this up 15 years ago. Drinking can get expensive too. I’ve needed to curtail my drinking considerably in order to cut costs. I am saving a lot, probably about $75 a month. I’m probably going to cut my Netflix and my cable internet, which will save me another $75 a month. (I cancelled my television a long time ago.) I’ve switched from $11 coffee beans to $6 packaged ground coffee. It really tastes like shit. I’m considering cutting coffee altogether. That’d probably save me about $20 a month. I have also switched to much cheaper and healthier protein sources and am on a 2300 calorie maintenance diet. I didn’t do this to save money, but I am amazed by the vast amounts of money I save by not eating like Gina Rinehart. I stopped drying my clothes. I bought a clothes drying rack -- a good one -- for $30. The dryer kills your clothes. They don’t use dryers in Hungary. They’re not necessary. The drying rack saves me about $50 a year. I don’t use the 150 watt torch lamp anymore to light my room. This was not intentional. It’s on its last leg. Now I use a 15 watt reading lamp to light my room. The darkness really closes in sometimes, but it’s the price you pay for poverty. I only have the air condition on a few hours a day now. It gets hot, really hot.

Over the last twenty years, what have I pissed away? Maybe $10,000 on smoking during the years that I smoked. Probably between $5,000 to $10,000 thousand on gambling, if you include all the poker books I bought and the motel rooms I stayed at in order to gamble. I have probably easily consumed about $10,000 dollars worth of alcohol. I’ve probably spent the same amount on coffee. I’ve consumed, through overeating, about $20,000 worth of calories. I haven’t even factored in the money I spent on entertainment such as Netflix, Astroglide, and Hungary. (Forgive me, Hungary for putting you in the same category as Astroglide. Hungarians are not the wankers that we are.) With all the money I pissed away on vices I could have exploited the housing meltdown and bought a junk foreclosed house to live in a nice bad neighborhood. There, having low expenses, I could have drunk myself and eaten myself into oblivion.

Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Coffee Jedis and rock stars

From craigslist:

Coffeehouse Hiring Coffee Jedi

“Do you see customer service as an art? Pulling espresso as a ninja craft? Can you stand on one leg, pull and espresso, and wax both on and off at the same time?”

Coffee Jedi? They don’t even post their wages and they expect enthusiastic workers. Nobody wants to be a fucking coffee Jedi.

I get so tired of junk, low-wage job ads looking for “rock stars.”  “Rock star” is apparently a new term that has entered the job ad lexicon. It does not mean a rock star musician. It means someone who is going to really give the employers a big bang for their buck, like a coffee Jedi.

Real rock stars get paid well. They get some good benefits also, like their genitals sucked and licked by their groupies at no cost. They also get free drugs from their fans. It’s not full drug coverage, but it’s something. Minimum wage jobs advertising for rock star workers offer no drug coverage whatsoever. You get nothing from these assholes. You’re just fucking cattle to these people, and they want you to be a rock star.

Another thing I notice from looking at these junk jobs is that the ads often start out like this: “XYZ company was rated number 1 in customer service by….” What they don’t understand is that minimum wage workers don’t give a flying fuck about what a wonderful business their potential employer has.

Sunday, September 02, 2012

Are these ads for sex workers?

I’ve been seeing the craigslist ad below for a while now. “Janatorial” is spelled wrong, the job description is vague, and there is this very strange thing that they’re looking for:

“You must like to dance and drink.”

I’ve never heard of employers wanting workers to drink on the job. This sounds very fishy.

 

Lady Attendants and Promotional workers for Nightclubs (Boston)


Date: 2012-09-01, 7:25PM EDT
Reply to this post

Last chance to join our team!
We are currently hiring Female Restroom Attendants and Promotional workers. You would be working at our client The Estate, located in Boston and also at nightclub located at Casino in CT and fill-ins in 2 Providence clubs as well. The shifts are Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday from about 9:30pm until 2am. For the route to Casino, we offer a FREE carpool to work from Providence, RI with pickups from Boston area Tuesday and Friday nights only. So a vehicle is not necessary as long as you live within 8 miles of Boston. Please know that you must be available to work at both venues in order to be hired. The work is fun in a music-filled atmosphere. WE ARE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO START WORKING IMMEDIATELY! Please be serious if you apply for this job.
Cash bonus if you start Sunday, September 2nd!
This job is non-janatorial. We are looking for attractive ladies that are hard workers, reliable, on-time, great people skilled, and you must have a nice appearance keeping in mind you will be working in an upscale casino environment. If you are seriously interested in these positions please reply with a resume and make sure a contact number is included. Experience is not necessary as we will train the right person. You must like to dance and drink. Interviews will be conducted Sunday and need you to begin working immediately! No questions will be answered via email. If you think you are a great candidate you may call owner's cell at 415-250-3362 to discuss your qualifications. Resumes or Bios with PICS are appreciated for serious consideration. You may call between 11am and 12 midnight. Serious inquiries only please! Thank you.

  • Location: Boston
  • Compensation: $10-$15 per hr. worked. Bi-weekly check +tips. Excellent pay for right candidate
  • This is a part-time job.
  • This is a contract job.
  • Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
  • Phone calls about this job are ok.
  • Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

PostingID: 3244439457


Copyright © 2012 craigslist, inc.

http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/fbh/3244439457.html

Saturday, September 01, 2012

The bastards of SUMMER SHACK

I hate craigslisters and the crap jobs they post.

In the ad below, when they say “Come in any time before 6:00 to fill out an application,” do they mean 6:00 a.m. or p.m.? People who do not revolve around their asshole little universe need to know this.

Also, “bring a pen?” What the fuck is that? Are they such miserly, petty fucks that they are afraid that someone is going to walk off with one of their precious disposable pens? I hate people.

 

SUMMER SHACK -help wanted (Derby St Hingham)


Date: 2012-08-31, 1:24PM EDT
Reply to this post

• Summer Shack in Hingham at the Derby Street Shoppes
• Host Positions, Bus Persons, food Runners
Come in any time before 6:00 to fill out an application, bring a pen
• No experience necessary
• Full and Part time positions available

http://boston.craigslist.org/sob/fbh/3241644831.html