ATTN NIGEL: I've fallen, and I WON'T get up.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

This town is broken.  This town has always been broken.  It was founded by profiteers and failed miners who couldn't hack it in the hills.  It is a city of broken dreams, rampant crime, and filth, and we wouldn't have it any other way.  Hell, a month after I moved here, they shot the Good Humor Man.  Who the hell shoots the Good Humor Man?  I mean, even tweakers were children once, right?

Unemployment has reached 38% reported, and those of us who have jobs have stapled our asses to our seats.  And this job...this job...

This job is driving us all insane.  Our engineer has become a meglomaniac, my boss has turned into Inspector Cleusau's boss from The Pink Panther movies, the warehouse manager has found something vile that he thinks is Jesus...the list goes on and on.  The one sane manager is only sane because of his grief, after The Worst Thing In The World happened to his family and, come to think of it, I'm not sure you can call that sanity.  I honestly think this place is killing us all, and there's no way out.

And me?  Ho ho!  I have lots of pills, and sometimes I sit in my office chair and enjoy the feeling of my bones melting...that is, when I'm not imagining that every conversation I pass by is about me and ways to get rid of me, so they can steal my Jeep.  Then I slam coffee all day, and the combination brings on the distinct feeling that I'll just lose it one day, and the whole world will fall out of my ass.

This job, this town, puts Frank Miller's most dystopian imagery to shame, only it's not physically dark.  The sun bakes everything until it turns into a foul powder, like dogshit left to cook on a sidewalk in August.  All the darkness here is on the inside, where you can't see it until it's too late.

I hate this city.  I hate it for all it's filth and degeneracy, and I hate it for the people who for some reason cling to existence in a city with no soul.  And I love this city, and I'll never, ever leave it.

Or Kill Me.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Dear Roger,

I live in a green Utopia where everyone is intent on making sure we all know that Everything Is Okay. The economic boom of the 1990's that skyrocketed the average price of a 3-bedroom home from $35,000 to $350,000 was GOOD for us... so wages couldn't quite keep up and the cost of living made it impossible for adults to live without roommates, but we were PROSPEROUS, right? So Nike pulled out and Intel pulled out and a few other giants pulled out and took their big factories to Texas where they can pollute at will, and the economy crashed and housing prices never really went down and rents went up because there's no rent control and a flood of recently-foreclosed-upon desperately needing a place to live... but that's OK, because everything's so green here, we're so friendly, and remember, Keep Portland Weird! It's Different Here! We Recycle! Portland, The City That Works!

Unemployment's at 12.5%, but that's not the bad news. The bad news is that if you're just an ordinary working stiff, you can expect to get paid $12/hour for manual labor, while paying $1200/month in rent on that kind of so/so apartment. You can expect to be trying to buy a house for $240k that the seller paid $20k for in 1996, in what used to be the ghetto but is now "gentrified", wherein "gentrified" means the old houses have been bought up by white fake hippies with blond fake dreadlocks. Smugly vegan Prius-driving hippies, who do coding for the few big firms left here and wear $60 hemp T-shirts sewn by the same children that sew Old Navy's $8 cotton T-shirts. They'll tell you, sure enough, with a big white smile, that Portland is Great! We Love it Here! And they won't mention the old lady who used to rent the house across the street, rented it for 22 years, got evicted because the new owners wanted to double her rent and she couldn't pay it, and she had to move out to the new ghettoes in the suburbs where rents are cheap again in the ticky-tacky warrens that were upscale in 1994 but are slowly peeling apart layer by layer now. They won't even think about her.

Everything is great here... it's so green, and friendly, and we recycle. I'll never move.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Yes, it's all become so sterile, so clean, so nice.  They tell me that every day, which makes me wonder why I want to cry when I pass those billboards that exhort me to do things that might make an actual difference.  You know the ones.  One by me shows Washington crossing the Delaware, and it says "By George, We DID It!...Leadership, pass it on".  Another one shows a man running a marathon while pushing his disabled son in a wheelchair, saying "He's been behind his son for 65 marathons...Dedication, pass it on", etc  You've seen them.  

Nobody's making money from those billboards, and Clearchannel sure as hell isn't donating the space, so someone, somewhere, is at least TRYING to make things better.  But then I hear the radio, and Rush Limbaugh is telling me to hate my fellow citizens...And I see the TV, and Jack Bauer is explaining why torture is the height of heroic American behavior, and it all turns back into filth and shit.

So it's also all so dirty.  I'm told to have pride in my city, while the city does everything it can to fuck me over.  The new police traffic crackdown is actually titled - and I do not kid - "Revenue Enhancement Intiatives", and the money generated isn't spent on schools or the bus system or soup kitchens, it's spent on buying more of those damn robocop cameras to generate MORE revenue.

I'm told to be proud of my country, because we represent the last, best hope of mankind.  Apparently, this hope involves indefinite detention, torture, and a legal system that would make Kafka shit his pants.  We have 5% of the world's population and 25% of its convicts, and we still scream for our leaders to be "tough on crime".  And while it's true that nobody seems to actually starve to death in America (besides those people walking, you know the ones, and they don't count), what we instead do is beat them to death with the low paying jobs and high rents that you describe.  

I'm told to stay clean, to "just say no" to drugs, but every other commercial (no joke) on the TV is for those damned pills.  Those pills that make you hard, those pills that take the edge off, those pills that you NEED because our society has become so fundamentally SICK that we can't even SLEEP anymore, unless we have Lunesta or Ambien CR to bludgeon us unconcious every night.

It's all gone horribly, horribly wrong, and I can't find a way out.  There has to be a way out.  We got into this mess, we should be smart enough to be able to escape it before we drown in the very river of shit we have created.  The Black Iron Prison is no longer a metaphor.  It's real, and it's there, and the bars are too thick to file through, and too narrow to see...until you look closely, and shit, there they are, and they're all engraved with the names of the doomed souls that occupied this hell before us, but I can't bring myself to read the names, because one day I'll see my own name there.

May God have mercy on our souls.

[BabylonHoruv]

I live in Crow Town.  There's only about 15 thousand people here, but there are approximately 20 pizza places.  There are also about 100 churches and every one of them thinks anyone who goes to any of the others is probably going to end up in hell.  The rent here is comparable to the rent in the nearest big city and the only reason this is not a good thing for property owners is because the majority of renters turn the places they rent into roach infested piles of garbage with feces, human, canine, or feline, moldering away in the corners.  For some reason the local white trash have taken to crack use rather than the more traditional small town Meth and the business is profitable enough that periodically Gangs come in from other states just to take over the local distribution network.  

The unemployment rate is 13.7% but that doesn't take into account the families in which the parents have never had a job and simply continue popping out children so that the welfare benefits will continue until they are old enough to collect social security.  It also doesn't cover the fact that the only jobs in town that are widely available that require training are in nursing.  So if you aren't ready to change diapers and gt pissed on by those physically incapable of wiping their own asses you can look forward to making minimum wage.  

The rates for most crimes, murder, theft, rape etc.  Are at the same level you'd find in a large, violent city.  The rates for incest, child abuse and especcially sexual predation on children are much, much higher.  Within 4 blocks of my hours (that being the radius that I am required to be notified if a predator moves into) there are 5 sexual predators.  Incest has a tradition here, so there are people wandering the street who are the product of a few generations of inbreeding who can't really tell just where they are going, or why.

In the next town over, a much smaller town with only 3 stoplights, there lives the grand wizard of the KKK.

I don't love this town, but my wife does, and my daughter does too.  so I am probably stuck here for the rest of my life.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

The rates for most crimes, murder, theft, rape etc.  Are at the same level you'd find in a large, violent city.  

Rural crime rates are always higher than the "big, violent cities", per capita.  Always.

More people per thousand do drugs, because there's nothing else to do.  More people get drunk and beat their spouses and/or children, because there's nothing to hope for and no reason has ever been given to NOT do it.  More theft occurs, because there's less police resources to stop it.  The schools are worse, even if the buildings are better, poison religion thrives for the same reason drugs do, hell it IS a drug, and racism is an accepted belief system, because they don't KNOW anyone who isn't like them, so they have no counter-examples to contrast against the preachers of hate.  Welfare is rampant because there is no industry, but the recipients of it are the first to rail against those people sucking up "their" tax dollars in the cities.

And there's a Bluebell Ice Cream commercial that uses the word "country" 6 times in 40 seconds, because we've all been taught that the cities are the problem, probably because they're full of smudgy people who have the wrong values.

And the beat goes on.

[Requia ☣]

I live in the Promised Land, except the Chosen People are all trying to get out.  There are no jobs here anymore, and if you're really lucky you can get a house for half a million dollars.  The Chosen people still control it though, they keep just enough people living nearby to make sure you're never more than 2 blocks from one of their churches, and you can't buy booze except from the special government owned stores where they charge 3 times what they do in the rest of the country because there's no competition.

But we have History right, we had the Olympics, and thats Good for the economy..  We have all these new roads and stadiums.  Except people had to build those, and they had bring in even more people from outside the promised land.  Only now there are no more roads and stadiums to build, and all those people are still here, looking for jobs.

Well, I lied about there being no jobs, nobody hires their own employees at least, instead they hire a different companies employees, because then they don't have to notice a job that used to pay 25 dollars an hour now pays 12, and hey, they save a whole 5% once you factor in the higher overhead.  They feel less guilty about the layoffs too.  I mean sure, the people they hired never screwed up, but the managers did, and those people can find a job with the new manager if they just take another dollar an hour less.  If they can get an interview, somewhere along the way it got to the point that they don't even read your resume anymore, they got thousands of them, its a lottery system now.

And I will never get out.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I live in the Promised Land, except the Chosen People are all trying to get out.  

Holy shit, that's news banner worthy if anything ever was.

And, yeah, the Olympics are great for that.  Especially in Bejiing, but anywhere, really.  Attract your prey with juicy jobs, like one of those pitcher plant carniverous thingies, and then let them sit at the bottom, digesting.  Forever.

And just for kicks, sometimes you even get to bulldoze peoples' houses and businesses, all for a cynical few months of pretending that the Olympics are in any way relevant anymore.

Something's wrong, Requia.  Something's terribly wrong, but I can't see what it is, through all the noise and lights and Bluebell Ice Cream commercials that tell me how wonderful everything is, somewhere other than where I am.  You can fool lots of monkeys by telling them that the grass is greener on the other side, and this fact is not lost on people in a position to take advantage of it.

But I am no longer fooled.  I just don't know what to do about it.

[fomenter]

 i am in the city now and have been for five years, the people piss me off there are to many of them, they crowed around in swarms, in the stores and on the highway and my hackles go up i want air, i want a few feet of free space, get the fuck away from me, the constant swarming is on my last nerve and i am about to throw a hard elbow into the fat gut of the next person that pushes past to close, but this is where the jobs are this is where you can make a living.... or can i? i am barley half employed with long-shots and long waits for prospects,  the water smells like ass when i turn on the faucet and i still cant get used to the taste even after five years, but this is where you need to be to have a future....  how can you have a future someplace you cant stand the present? and the ghetto.... i live in a "nice" area but a few blocks away is dangerous not the kind of place you should be alone after dark, but i could walk there in under 5 minutes how can where i am be "nice" in such close proximity to neighborhoods the get featured in gangsta rap?

there is a part of my brain that tells me men were not made to live like this and no pill no job no better neighborhood or bottled water will shut it down

[Requia ☣]

I can see whats wrong, or maybe just part of it.  Somebody stole our language.  'Right to work' now means you have no rights in the workplace, and 'Freedom' means getting your phone calls listened to so we can catch the people who were once responsible for less deaths than our shitty healthcare system causes every month.  'Free Market' stopped meaning open competition, and started meaning letting corporations do whatever they want with government money.

Everything gets twisted up so bad that you can't actually say anything unless its what They want you to say.  Only I don't know who They are, so I can't fight Them, or find Them.

But I think I might start stealing Their words.

[LMNO]

Well, fuck.  The sirens woke me up again last night.  Turned on the news this morning to find out a little girl had been shot, playing on her front porch.  Of course, no one saw nuthin'.  

This city hates itself, and like a cutter who decides to go just that much deeper, its life is seeping out all over the concrete.  They call it "civil pride" but it's more like Urban Blight vs. Urban Sprawl.  Each year, another swarm of graduated rich white kids with daddy's trust fund spill out of the dorms and into the streets like a popped siphilitic boil, looking to hang around and suck off of whatever remnants of culture the city desperately clings to... And they need somewhere to stay.  So the people who work for $7 a day to keep this town running, to clean the puke out of the gutters and keep the gears turning, they have to squeeze in a little tighter.  They can't afford to live in the neighborhoods they grew up in.  They can't afford to send their kids to a school where there aren't bars on the windows, and not enough textbooks to go around.  They see their dreams of "making it better for my kids" shatter like their car's window so some crackhead can look under the seats for spare change.  And so the sirens call out into the night, too late on purpose, the final sound of a city only pretending to care.





And the worst part is, no one even asked what a 7-year old kid was doing outside on the porch at 3 am in the first place.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

there is a part of my brain that tells me men were not made to live like this and no pill no job no better neighborhood or bottled water will shut it down

Me, too.  But then another part of me remembers then ending of Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano.  Monkeys made this shit, and if it all disappeared tomorrow, we'd just build it again, because monkeys are slow learners and besides, you need our newest pill.  It's purple.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Here in my beautiful green paradise, here where the housing boom never really quit and the unemployment boom never really took off and everyone works for a temp agency and no one has insurance and no one works full time, here in the land of the eccentric, the land of individualism, the land of the setting sun, here where the eastern horizon is marked with massive mountains that used to be snow-capped all summer but now are gray, here where the western horizon is still a wall of green but soon may become a wall of identical upscale housing developments, here where two of the most massive rivers in the country flow together and one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city lies at the tip of the peninsula, where there used to be vast beauty but now is only vast plains of shipping containers and unwanted brand-new cars, here where the summers are unbearably beautiful and the winters are mild, here in Utopia.

We drink more here than anywhere else, drink until we forget that we don't make enough to pay the mortgage and we forget that love keeps coming and going but mostly going and we missed opportunities or threw them away, we should have spent that money on fixing the furnace instead of strippers and now it's getting cold and everyone's taking happiness pills, everyone's not supposed to drink because they're taking happiness pills but they drink anyway and sometimes the happiness pills and the strippers and the alcohol don't work and they walk the short walk out to one of our 14-soon-to-be-15 convenient bridges and drop over the railing and off the face of the earth and sometimes someday a corpse is found but most of the time it never is.

Or they use guns or pills or alcohol or razors and sometimes those work, too, in Utopia. You keep hearing that's all wrong, there's nothing wrong, the stories aren't right they're misinterpreting people are happy this is the best place on earth, we love it here it's so beautiful friendly environmental most habitable city on earth there's nothing wrong but I can feel the edge and I know THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG and I can't

get

out.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I can see whats wrong, or maybe just part of it.  Somebody stole our language.  'Right to work' now means you have no rights in the workplace, and 'Freedom' means getting your phone calls listened to so we can catch the people who were once responsible for less deaths than our shitty healthcare system causes every month.  'Free Market' stopped meaning open competition, and started meaning letting corporations do whatever they want with government money.

Everything gets twisted up so bad that you can't actually say anything unless its what They want you to say.  Only I don't know who They are, so I can't fight Them, or find Them.

But I think I might start stealing Their words.

Okay.  But not on Their networks.  They own the ball AND the ballpark, Requia, but the price of admission to their ball clubs is cheap.  Cheap as dirt, cheap as a smile, cheap as your soul.

But you're on to something, here.  I have to think about this, but things are a little fuzzy right now.  I'll get back to this later, when my head is a little less twisty.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Well, fuck.  The sirens woke me up again last night.  Turned on the news this morning to find out a little girl had been shot, playing on her front porch.  Of course, no one saw nuthin'.  

This city hates itself, and like a cutter who decides to go just that much deeper, its life is seeping out all over the concrete.  They call it "civil pride" but it's more like Urban Blight vs. Urban Sprawl.  Each year, another swarm of graduated rich white kids with daddy's trust fund spill out of the dorms and into the streets like a popped siphilitic boil, looking to hang around and suck off of whatever remnants of culture the city desperately clings to... And they need somewhere to stay.  So the people who work for $7 a day to keep this town running, to clean the puke out of the gutters and keep the gears turning, they have to squeeze in a little tighter.  They can't afford to live in the neighborhoods they grew up in.  They can't afford to send their kids to a school where there aren't bars on the windows, and not enough textbooks to go around.  They see their dreams of "making it better for my kids" shatter like their car's window so some crackhead can look under the seats for spare change.  And so the sirens call out into the night, too late on purpose, the final sound of a city only pretending to care.





And the worst part is, no one even asked what a 7-year old kid was doing outside on the porch at 3 am in the first place.

Where is the Good Reverend Jeremiah Wright, now that we finally need him?  He was right, you know.  He was right about everything, and everyone laughed.  Everyone except me...I understood him.  I feel his rage, though with cosmetic differences. 

And that little girl, LMNO...she was "in the wrong place at the wrong time", because apparently, the shooter was Johnny on the fucking spot.

She was lubrication, LMNO.  She was a little 7 year old cannister of open gear lube.  We can't let the machine's gears go dry.  The Machine is a tree that requires the blood of little children.  It is its natural manure.

Forgive me, Thomas Jefferson.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Here in my beautiful green paradise, here where the housing boom never really quit and the unemployment boom never really took off and everyone works for a temp agency and no one has insurance and no one works full time, here in the land of the eccentric, the land of individualism, the land of the setting sun, here where the eastern horizon is marked with massive mountains that used to be snow-capped all summer but now are gray, here where the western horizon is still a wall of green but soon may become a wall of identical upscale housing developments, here where two of the most massive rivers in the country flow together and one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city lies at the tip of the peninsula, where there used to be vast beauty but now is only vast plains of shipping containers and unwanted brand-new cars, here where the summers are unbearably beautiful and the winters are mild, here in Utopia.

We drink more here than anywhere else, drink until we forget that we don't make enough to pay the mortgage and we forget that love keeps coming and going but mostly going and we missed opportunities or threw them away, we should have spent that money on fixing the furnace instead of strippers and now it's getting cold and everyone's taking happiness pills, everyone's not supposed to drink because they're taking happiness pills but they drink anyway and sometimes the happiness pills and the strippers and the alcohol don't work and they walk the short walk out to one of our 14-soon-to-be-15 convenient bridges and drop over the railing and off the face of the earth and sometimes someday a corpse is found but most of the time it never is.

Or they use guns or pills or alcohol or razors and sometimes those work, too, in Utopia. You keep hearing that's all wrong, there's nothing wrong, the stories aren't right they're misinterpreting people are happy this is the best place on earth, we love it here it's so beautiful friendly environmental most habitable city on earth there's nothing wrong but I can feel the edge and I know THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG and I can't

get

out.

Wow.  Just...wow.