comrade simba

Thermal shirts. That’s something I will miss when the power goes out and there’s paper bags on all the gas pumps. Yea, that’s totally off subject but my head is pretty random today.

A friend works for a guy who builds and repairs chicken houses.  The chicken business is a funny thing – “chicken farmers” are really just cogs in a giant agribusiness machine. Say you own twenty or thirty acres and have a good history of paying the creditors and pleasing the boss. You go hat in hand to the big chicken corporations and beg to get in on their grower program. You put the family farm up as collateral and they send in the chicken house builders who slam up a couple of 400 foot long houses. Then the company has their chick makers deliver a shitload of peepers, and they start eating the feed that the company feed people deliver into the automatic feed hoppers. Basically, your job is to make sure the machinery stays running and pick up the dead birds everyday. The company’s computers send out the catcher teams at the appropriate times to load up the chickens and then the shit crew cleans out the barn and lays down new pine shavings in preparation for the new load of chicks on the way from the chick machine. The blessed cycle of all things chicken repeats endlessly… and when your two houses are making the company money they build you two more and two more after that, and when you have 8 houses you make enough money to buy another piece of property and make a new chicken world – with a crappy house slapped up on site to install the alcoholic you scrounge up to pick up the dead birds and call you if the motors stop running. Once upon a time I had a dream of being a chicken farm “manager” hehehe…

Until your chicken houses are almost paid for, then new regulations are implemented requiring an upgrade to the newest equipment that saves a couple of pennies per bird. Upgrade or loose money, and loosing money is not an option, it will be a breach of contract and Chicken Corp owns your farm. Sometimes the compost shed catches on fire and needs rebuilt. Maybe the house needs to be converted into a “black out” house  – total darkness in the daytime and lights on at night. It’s a climate control thing y’know. Keep them inactive during the heat of the day since electricity for lights are cheaper than running the swamp coolers. At any rate the company sends out the builder crews and they gut whatever needs to go and slap in whatever the computer dictates is necessary for shareholder dividends.

This is where I come in.

Since “the farmer” could care less and the company doesn’t have the common sense of, say a flock of chickens, all the old tear out material is strewn all over the place waiting for the farmer to dispose of it. The farmer hates the company by this time and bitches at them to come clean up the mess. The company of course stalls as long as they can. This is a very nice window of opportunity for me to salvage buttloads of 2×4s, lots of 2×6s, metal roofing in damn near perfect shape, boards, chicken wire, odd hunks of wire, cable, rope, hard foam insulation and assorted scrap metal. What in hell I’m going to do with all these piles of tear out is a daunting prospect, but the goats are getting a new house at the very least. I got about 400 square feet of 1×6 pine boards that are going to make beautiful polished wood walls in the garage attached to the guest house. I’m just a junker, I guess. Last year there was a sawmill that went into operation and I hauled truckloads of offcuts and slab wood out of it before the place got torched and burned to the ground. Ha ha… this winter’s firewood is already done.  This year will be shed building until my buddy looses his job or the wife says “no more piles”!

But what bugs me is that every day some bulldozer is digging a big hole to shove some chicken house tear off debris into just to get it out of sight. Thousands of square feet of insulation heading for a landfill. Acres of perfectly good metal sheeting sold off for scrap metal. Miles of board feet of dimensional lumber piled and burned. No fucking vision is suppose. I don’t see anyone else grabbing this free stuff, and my friend says he’s never seen a scrapper out on any of the jobs he’s been on.

Where are the fucking “poor”? Driving the bobcat scrapping chickenshit out of the house for 7.25 an hour. Catching birds for even less and inhaling all manner of foul crap blowing around. Driving some company truck full of some company shit to or fro just to keep the machine running. Waiting for a lucky break that gets you a “manager’s” job so you can send the wife to the chicken processing plant working a gut sucking tube in evisceration while you stay home sucking down beers and watching ESPN… on satellite tv.

See, I got to that bit after all! I was driving back home with a load of salvage lumber and began to notice that every dumpy house trailer in every dumpy mobile home park had a satellite dish turned towards Mecca 1 or whatever the silver god in the sky is called. Every damn one of them – I drove around in a couple of parks just to make sure. Aw, whatever. Dumping on the Tube Boobs is just too easy.

Ran Prieur said “The Onion nailed it”. I agree:

Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress

November 5, 2008 | Issue 44•45

WASHINGTON—After emerging victorious from one of the most pivotal elections in history, president-elect Barack Obama will assume the role of commander in chief on Jan. 20, shattering a racial barrier the United States is, at long last, shitty enough to overcome.

Enlarge Image Faced with losing everything, Americans took a long overdue step forward and elected Barack Obama.

Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.

“Today the American people have made their voices heard, and they have said, ‘Things are finally as terrible as we’re willing to tolerate,” said Obama, addressing a crowd of unemployed, uninsured, and debt-ridden supporters. “To elect a black man, in this country, and at this time—these last eight years must have really broken you.”

Added Obama, “It’s a great day for our nation.”

Carrying a majority of the popular vote, Obama did especially well among women and young voters, who polls showed were particularly sensitive to the current climate of everything being fucked. Another contributing factor to Obama’s victory, political experts said, may have been the growing number of Americans who, faced with the complete collapse of their country, were at last able to abandon their preconceptions and cast their vote for a progressive African-American.

Enlarge Image After enduring eight years of near constant trauma, the United States is, at long last, ready for equality.

Citizens with eyes, ears, and the ability to wake up and realize what truly matters in the end are also believed to have played a crucial role in Tuesday’s election.

According to a CNN exit poll, 42 percent of voters said that the nation’s financial woes had finally become frightening enough to eclipse such concerns as gay marriage, while 30 percent said that the relentless body count in Iraq was at last harrowing enough to outweigh long ideological debates over abortion. In addition, 28 percent of voters were reportedly too busy paying off medial bills, desperately trying not to lose their homes, or watching their futures disappear to dismiss Obama any longer.

“The election of our first African-American president truly shows how far we’ve come as a nation,” said NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. “Just eight years ago, this moment would have been unthinkable. But finally we, as a country, have joined together, realized we’ve reached rock bottom, and for the first time voted for a candidate based on his policies rather than the color of his skin.”

“Today Americans have grudgingly taken a giant leap forward,” Williams continued. “And all it took was severe economic downturn, a bloody and unjust war in Iraq, terrorist attacks on lower Manhattan, nearly 2,000 deaths in New Orleans, and more than three centuries of frequently violent racial turmoil.”

Said Williams, “The American people should be commended for their long-overdue courage.”

Obama’s victory is being called the most significant change in politics since the 1992 election, when a full-scale economic recession led voters to momentarily ignore the fact that candidate Bill Clinton had once smoked marijuana. While many believed things had once again reached an all-time low in 2004, the successful reelection of President George W. Bush—despite historically low approval ratings nationwide—proved that things were not quite shitty enough to challenge the already pretty shitty status quo.

“If Obama learned one thing from his predecessors, it’s that timing means everything,” said Dr. James Pung, a professor of political science at Princeton University. “Less than a decade ago, Al Gore made the crucial mistake of suggesting we should care about preserving the environment before it became unavoidably clear that global warming would kill us all, and in 2004, John Kerry cost himself the presidency by criticizing Bush’s disastrous Iraq policy before everyone realized our invasion had become a complete and total quagmire.”

“Obama had the foresight to run for president at a time when being an African-American was not as important to Americans as, say, the ability to clothe and feed their children,” Pung continued. “An election like this only comes once, maybe twice, in a lifetime.”

As we enter a new era of equality for all people, the election of Barack Obama will decidedly be a milestone in U.S. history, undeniable proof that Americans, when pushed to the very brink, are willing to look past outward appearances and judge a person by the quality of his character and strength of his record. So as long as that person is not a woman.