Dissed Associate's Open Salon Blog

Steal this tradition.

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:12:32 -0500

My family has a tradition. Five years old, maybe a bit more or less. It doesn't matter, but I'll say five. You can't fact check this.

We don't give Christmas gifts to adults. Period. We have a tree, and spend Christmas Eve and Day together, but we do not give gifts. There is no Christmas shopping, except that which my parents do to give gifts to their godchildren and my mother, to her students.

We figured - there is no dearth of stuff in any of our lives. No absence of things needed, no impossibility of obtaining things desired. Gifts become absent gestures - a holiday exchange of wrapped things that we might not have bought ourselves. Absent gestures that cost money and time.

So what we do, instead, is bake cookies. We get together on Christmas Eve, and we bake many many many cookies, and drink a great deal of red wine, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh. And we spend Christmas Day dropping them off.

This is a radical gesture in these economic times. We are told, as a public, that we should root for the consumer confidence index. That we should be offended at the declining credit limits on our plastic. That we should go and spend and pump dollars through the economy. We should also root for real estate prices to go up. The death of the buyer's market.

We are told that these are the factors that will heal the economy. We are told that this will signal recovery. But we have seen this recovery before -

"the jobless recovery."

"the real estate bubble."

I read something I'd link to if I remembered where it was. The statistic was that real wages have been flat for decades - but that the standard of living kept rising, along with the cost of living, because of the increase in consumer credit that drove spending. We have replaced wages with credit. We replaced jobs with spending. We were told that real estate was increasing in value - when really, it wasn't the value that was increasing, just the price of housing. Then the bottom fell out - and people can't pay their debts. People can't pay for their houses. People can't pay their student loans. Why? Because when you replace money with credit, and wages never do rise - this is what has to happen.

And now they're telling us that the way out is to do it again.

Spend, don't save. Buy, for America. Buy homes. Buy goods. Buy college educations. And forget your job insecurity. Forget the credit balance that grows, and grows, and grows - forget the fact that you may never pay it off.

Consumer spending is not a sustainable way to drive an economy. Wages are the only sustainable way. So stay home.

Spend time. Not money.

Bake cookies with your loved ones. Shovel snow in the winter for people who don't have the time or the health. Babysit for people who haven't gotten out in a while. Get drunk with your mom, and find out what her favorite curse word was when she was twenty.

Figure out how to make donuts, and then bring them to people who have never had homemade donuts. If you've done donuts, try bagels. Or pretzels.

Throw eggs at your sister. Drink gin with your brother. Find out what someone's favorite book is, read it, and then talk with them about it.

We've been taught that things are worth more than our time. That is what our gift-giving culture says; that's what our flat wages say. So fuck it. Turn it inside out. Take a stand.

Don't give gifts this christmas.*

It is a radical thing. It is a dangerous thing. It is a wonderful thing. Steal my tradition. Make it yours. You may never go back.

*To adults.

D. Associate's Home for Wayward Poets and Loose Women Chili

Sat, 5 Dec 2009 19:12:14 -0500

This week, Mr. Cusp's old friend, a writer like Mr. Cusp, was visiting our area to give some readings. The reading I went to was in a bar in the western part of the state, somewhere between the last shreds of farm country, collegeland, and tourism-funded New Englandland.

It was packed. Half locals, half people who'd traveled to see Mr. Cusp's friend and the other poets. It was rowdy and lowd and friendly, and I am beginning to think that any cultural divide can be, if not bridged, muddled, by lager, pilsner, or stout, along with good will and cursing. There was an abundance of all five factors present.

As a houseguest, Mr. Cusp's friend was prime - I was able to indulge one of my favorite hobbies: making cornbread and being praised for making cornbread. Along with the cornbread, we served chili. Here's the recipe - I'm calling it:

Dissed Associate's Home for Wayward Poets and Loose Women Steak Chili.

1 large tough, cheap-ass steak.

1 can cola.

1 large can, black beans.

1 large can, crushed tomatoes.

2 handfuls of tortilla chips, crushed.

8 oz linguica

2 onions, sliced

1 cup, mixed bell pepper strips (I used frozen)

Hot sauce to taste.

Garlic.

Cumin.

Salt.

Smoked paprika.

There is no black pepper. I fucking HATE black pepper. In a large dutch oven, sear the steak on both sides, pour the cola over it. Before you did that, you probably should have preheated the oven to 300 degrees. Sorry. Now you'll have to wait.

Once you have your oven to the right temp., put a lid on the dutch oven and put the oven in the oven.

Cut the sausage into itsy pieces. Put it in the bottom of a large pot with the onions and a touch of oil. Cook until the onions go soft, then add the garlic. Then, after the garlic has had a moment, add beans, tomatoes, and peppers. Allow everything to cook together for a bit, then season to taste with hot sauce (or chili powder - but I like hot sauce), salt, cumin, and smoked paprika.

Let the steak cook in the oven for at least an hour and a half, until you can just shred it with a fork, then add to the chili. Finally, add the corn chips and simmer until the juices thicken.

Congratulations - you've made dinner for six dollars, at the most. It'll feed at least six, more if you make cornbread. Your cornbread, however, will not be as good as my cornbread.

I want to fuck your ratio - why I'd rather be doing P.I.

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:11:38 -0500

People always like to talk about tort reform. Malpractice reform is the sub-species currently in season, but tort will come back. We just need a spilled-McDonald's coffee lady for this generation. (Scroll to the second paragraph if you think hers was a nuisance suit - she was 79, suffered third degree burns, spent eight days in the hospital, underwent skin grafts and was originally offered just $800 towards her $20,000 in medical bills).

This is what I want you to think about the next time a middle-aged man in a grey suit with a neck as wide as his head tells you about tort reform, and how it's in your best interest. Particularly, I want you to think about this part:

On March 6, 2007, Torres-Gomez, a seven-year Cintas employee, climbed onto a slow-moving conveyor to clear a jam of wet laundry, instead of shutting off the machinery as he was supposed to do.

He jumped up and down on the clump and fell into the 300-degree dryer. Twenty minutes later, another employee heard his burned body banging around in the dryer and made the grisly discovery.

Now, before you get too caught up on "supposed to", read this part:

Torres' suit claims her husband and his co-workers were encouraged by Cintas managers to climb onto the conveyors to dislodge clumps of uniforms to keep up with production.

Last year, an Associated Press investigation found that in the year and a half after the accident in Tulsa, at least eight Cintas plants in six states had been cited by OSHA and state authorities for hazards similar to those that led to Torres-Gomez's death.

A man died. This is not an incident that does not get reported to corporate. Yet, in the 18 months after a man was baked to death in an oven, federal regulators discovered that the practices that lead to his death were still going on.

Deaths are sometimes not enough to make factories, products, lives, safer. Why? Because sometimes deaths, maimings, explosions and all other business casualties are more cost-effective than safety measures.

Workers' comp premiums increase a bit, or you settle small for lost earning capacity, loss of consortium, (loss of consortium - a fun claim, meaning money paid to your spouse or sometimes your children to the damages to family relationships caused by your horrific fiery death). And as long as the ratio of baked-laundrymen to efficiency gains is correct, they'll never stop putting workers in danger.

Unless you fuck their ratio.

And that's what big tort awards do. A multi-million dollar settlement for a dead laundryman may be a windfall to his family, and to his lawyers, considering that if he'd died of swine flu or fell in the bathroom they'd be left with insurance or nothing. But that multi-million dollar settlement may make people think again about safety in the workplace - it makes it less efficient to play with worker's lives.

It makes us all safer.

I love my current job, at a small business litigation practice in a wonderful building, with a brilliant and humane and mentoring boss; I'm crazy for litigation and most people consider our kind - employment discrimination and suits between businesses, pretty sinless. Clean.

But sometimes, I wanna be a ninja. Sometimes, I'd rather do personal injury.

The Chiropractor's Wife.

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:09:03 -0400

I have not written a story in ten years. I started a novel and I stopped. I got busy with five hundred thousand things. A job. A life. A kitten. A mystery with eyebrows.

I was scared. For a lot of reasons, to write a story, but. It's just a game. And because it is just a game, and I mean to return to blogging, at least weekly, I figured, why not share.

And, damn, fuck me, because I will be anything but taken seriously, it's a mystery. So. Without further ado:

The Chiropractor's Wife is Dead

The chiropractor's wife hurt her shoulder on Tuesday morning.

She was a terrible patient. She did not believe in chiropractic medicine. She had blonde hair short enough and long enough to cover all parts of her head a motorcycle helmet would. There was just enough hair that if she stood in a doorway, and the light was behind her, it looked like she had the enormous and misshapen head of a dwarf.

They met because she was a terrible patient. Her doctor gave up on her lower back pain. She tried him after acupuncture and before the little round pills. Those killed it.

On Tuesday night, she asked him to look at it. She showed him how she couldn't twist her right arm to touch her back. It was a strain. Nothing more. She wouldn't put an ice pack on it. She wouldn't add heat. She wanted him to just fix it. It wasn't a subluxation. Just a strain.

The chiropractor was indicted.

He didn't know what to do.

On Thursday morning, she was dead in their bed.

On Wednesday morning, he felt terrible. Impotent. She woke up and her hair was a mess and her shoulder was worse.

She'd tossed all night. She wouldn't take an anti-inflammatory. She took an extra little white one. With wine. Her lips were red from the shiraz and he thought of her liver. He thought of how her silly squat feet looked lost at the end of her long bare legs the first time he saw her in the tub. He thought of how the analgesic alone wouldn't do anything for the swelling in her deltoid. And how the poor muscles would be even worse off in the morning, because the alcohol is so dehydrating. And worse still, because she would sleep, as always, tied in a tight little knot with the bedsheet between her legs like a model in a life drawing class, tipped over.

If he said any of this, she'd curl in a tighter knot, like a pillbug, leaving him and the rest of the bed with only her bony spine and new red swollen shoulder. And it would be three glasses of wine. And she'd invent a new cruel observation of a lack in his life he had always suspected but never noticed. He'd sleep alone and dream of liver toxicity.

On Wednesday morning, she looked worse, and she was worse. And because he thought so much and said nothing, he felt terrible. When she was in the shower, he drove to the Starbucks down at the corner. She went there every morning, after her shower. He didn't know her order, because she went alone.

He looked in the kitchen trash for the cup, but Tuesday had been trash day.

The chiropractor found the trash empty. Her car was clean. None of the detritus of a long commute and all her business travel. He smiled. She knew it bothered him to open the door and find gum wrappers and coffee cups in the passenger seat.

If he couldn't fix her shoulder, he could make her smile. Save them ten minutes to sit across the table and drink coffee, like they did on the first morning she wasn't his patient anymore.

So he went to the coffee shop and he described her and described her and described her, to all the baristas. He described her dressed for work. He described her in her gym clothes. He described her in her work clothes. A barista with long red braids and dirtier fingernails than he'd like remembered his wife and her drink.

He came back with her drink as she was getting out of the shower. Non-fat, no-water, extra-hot chai.

She wrapped herself in a bathrobe, came to the kitchen and drank her drink. She smiled and they talked as her hair began to dry. She would put a heat pack on it, she said. She would go to her morning meeting, and then she'd go to the gym. And then she'd come back, and put a heat pack on it, then ice.

Just the treadmill, the chiropractor suggested. And try not to lean. Spare your shoulder.

She would.

He was pleased. He didn't feel so bald, suddenly, or short-fingered. He helped her dress for her meeting. She couldn't twist her arm to zip the back. He zipped her dress and kissed the back of her neck, and watched her get ready and leave for the day.

He thought of her in that dress all morning in the office. His cheeks were red and burning when he adjusted a fireman.

It was a gorgeous dress. Made her look like some secret golden-haired Hepburn. A black cotton sheath. Scoop neck. Tight pencil skirt. It left her arms bare. She wore flat ivory colored shoes with pointed toes that almost made her feet look regular sized.

He counseled a retired woman that he could not adjust her back so that she wouldn't have allergies, and cancelled the rest of his appointments for the day. He would take care of his wife when she got home.

He raced home, bringing enough rubs and ice packs and gels and pills for an aging rugby team. She opened the front door just as he was coming from the garage.

The black dress was as gorgeous as he remembered it. Her hair was wet from the gym. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks were rosy like a stereotype of a woman in love. He felt lush-haired, long-fingered, and tall.

He helped her out of her dress. He applied heat and ice and smelled the shampoo in her hair.

He couldn't sleep that night. Not well. He thought of only her lovely black dress, her poor red shoulder, the smell of shampoo and menthol together as he rubbed the balm into her shoulder.

On Wednesday night, almost Thursday morning, the Chiropractor strangled his wife.

He was indicted.

Smiling, she sneaks back into the room.

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:08:28 -0400

Dear Everyone,

I am back.

Graduated. Two bar exams under my belt.

I couldn't stay away.

The reason for my triumphant return: I have a job. So, my fears of never being employed because people have learned that I say "motherfucker" quite often, have been assuaged. Now, all I have to do is not say motherfucker to a client.

Keep looking. And I'm glad to be back.

Need maybe a new name. HoboSmallTownLawyer? Maybe after passing. HoboEsquire? Or shall I keep the law student. It's a bit branded.

First order of business: going back to sleep. Second, catching up with reading. Third, finishing the chip on my shoulder.

Love, love, love, love, love, love, love,

Me.