Why i'm voting for Bernie

I don’t like to blog about politics, but whatever.

I’m a 2008 college graduate. A 2008 grad in journalism no less. When I got my diploma the world wasn’t ending, it had ended and ceased to exist months before I even walked onto the podium. Everyone in our tiny J-school had been warned for years that journalism jobs were dwindling, that we would have to work harder than we ever had in our lives just to get one grubby foot in the door. We almost certainly would have to move out to the middle of nowhere and report on local Little League games for several years before getting in somewhere that wouldn’t make you want to place a .22LR cartridge on your clapboard desktop and press your forehead down on it until it fired. And yet I persisted.

I didn’t have a full-time salaried job with insurance until 2012. By that time I was 25. The job was not in journalism.

OK that sounds dramatic. I was privileged. Nine times out of ten luck isn’t a function of cosmic serendipity so much as having the luxury to sit back and wait until the gacha game of the universe delivers a five-star rarity pull that makes you forget about the 200+ trash pulls you made minutes prior. I had the luxury of moving back home and pursuing various deadend dogshit internships (all unpaid), including a weekly paper run entirely by one man renting an office in the basement of a Bank of America who kept one corner permanently occupied by a full set of conga drums and dissected entire Safeway rotisserie chickens at his desk every afternoon to prepare for his dinner. I made the mistake of letting slip that I lived at home, which he then used as rationale for why I didn’t need to be paid a stipend for copyediting endless reams of local community events calendar snippets.

(If I hadn’t had that luxury, if I’d needed money right then and there, I would’ve had to take one of those “shit jobs” so many of my generation had to take straight out of school and had my life similarly derailed.)

Eventually I pursued the idea of going back to school. A master’s degree in mass communications at the same school where I got my B.S. My adviser said he’d endorse me on the condition that I “look at Columbia or Medill School of Journalism” first. I told him I’d consider it if he volunteered to pay for it.

Around the same time I landed an internship with a stipend at a county-level daily newspaper. I felt like I’d made it. I was an out-of-touch fat fuck getting angrier and angrier about life and the world, but things were looking up. What kept me going was the potential for a new staff writer position opening up, expanding the writing staff from five to a massive six. About a year in I was informed by the editor-in-chief that they had hired someone else, but that I was free to “continue the internship” I wanted. I accepted.

A couple months into my second-year internship (in retrospect, do those still exist? Did they ever?) my dad got laid off from his sales job and suddenly the luxury of working virtually unpaid was more like Cristal than Courvousier. I leveled with the editor and said I simply needed money. He said there might be an opening for a job with a proper hourly wage, but not on the news staff. And so I became the receptionist/office manager of the local county newspaper by day, member of a five-person master’s program by night. My new boss was the publisher of the paper, a guy who told his salespeople he needed to have a word with them in private before walking to the middle of the sales floor to bawl them out in front of the rest of the staff for whatever petty infraction they’d made wringing a 1x4 black-and-white ad deal out of Mary Kanclebiter’s 24-Hour Dry Cleaning. One day when I’d arrived late he took me aside and told me that he needed me at work the exact time he stipulated.

“Hey one thing, when I say 7:30 I mean 7:30. Not 7:40, not 7:28. 7:30.” The words and numbers are scorched into my brain to this day.

I got fatter and angrier. My relationship with my dad, who was even more of an inherent bum loser than me, and which was always poor, got worse as the long-term unemployment bug sank its teeth into him. I continued to work at the paper for another year and a half. While I was there at my desk I wrote a 10,000-word short story about a cyborg soldier who befriends a sentient pyramid in the post-apocalyptic desert and fights scavengers who ride Heavy Gear-esque powered armor. I’d work from 7 to 4:30 then drive 40 miles south to campus for three hours of class starting at 6pm. One of my most vivid memories of this era is sitting alone in my car in a Century 21 parking lot eating In n’ Out at 9:30pm, laughing hysterically at two-year-old back episodes of an anime podcast that was talking about anime I’d never watched and never would watch. I remember those moments better than any conversation with my dad past the age of 12.

Some time before I graduated my mom kicked my dad out. She paid for his plane ticket back to the Philippines. This was one of the greatest things that ever happened in my life. Not too long after we almost lost our house. We held on somehow through a combination of dogged persistence and luck so unbelievable that accountants who look at the terms of the refinanced mortgage insist “the bank must have made a mistake. NO ONE got terms like these, not at the height of the recession.”

It was on the day of my graduation ceremony that I got a phone call. It was from a tiny online marketing company I’d interviewed at a month prior. (somewhere along the line I’d given up on journalism. I wasn’t that good at it, the local job prospects were nonexistent, and I didn’t feel like relocating to Oddhaploid Kansas to make a pittance reporting on the skull shapes of the three cousins running for town comptroller) They’d turned me down on account of my having zero practical experience, but now it turned out the person they’d hired over me had been a disaster. He hadn’t done a single thing since starting and had now disappeared to the Bahamas without a word to anyone about when he would be back. They needed a backup pitcher and they needed him fast. This would become a recurring theme in my life.

I started at $34,000 a year. For a 2008 liberal arts grad with no practical experience this was like becoming a millionaire overnight. The sense of cosmic luck, of “holy fucking shit, the improbable series of events that led to this fortunate outcome” was overwhelming. It became the hinge on which my character turned. Even as I drifted further into contrarian sociopolitical dabblings -- your standard “what if Prussian state capitalism and traditional etiquette are GOOD?” riffing that would land squarely in a certain infamous category later in the decade around 2016 -- the hinge would be there to pull me back from the brink of ever thinking that what little I was able to achieve was the result of anything other than a tenuous string of random events held together by privilege and unbelievable dumb luck.

The place was an utter fly by night. The office was two rooms with no air conditioning. The company never employed more than nine people at any given time. The boss was a hard partying ex-software sales guy who couldn’t focus on one concept for more than 45 seconds (we timed it) and spent half his desk time monitoring BMW motorsport parts on eBay. In a drunken aside as some social event he opined for the dog days immediately following the recession, when so many places were closing up shop that “you could get office furniture basically for free. You could get employees basically for free too.” One time I had to drive him home in his own Z3 because he was too drunk to get back from the enterprise software expo we’d attended that day. I hated him, but I was terrified of losing my job and returning to the choking directionless miasma of long-term unemployment. This would become another recurring theme in my life.

I survived several upheavals at the office -- when your team is nine people, every departure is an upheaval. It got to the point where I gained a reputation as a bulwark, the immovable, eternal presence in the office. I think this was the only reason the boss gave me two pay bumps in quick succession, once to $40,000 and then to $48,000. In a field full of tempestuous weirdos, he liked loyalty. Someone younger than me, who I had hired into the company, got promoted and became my boss. I stuck around because money is more important than pride.

Around the same time I started interviewing at other places. It was a shotgun blast trial-and-error numbers game process for me, as it continues to be to this day. The pellet that got through was one of the biggest marketing agencies in the area. They needed someone to edit content and handle freelance writers for a sliver of the metric fuckton of zombie websites in their portfolio. Again, they turned me away in the last round because of lack of experience. A month later the recruiter called me up again and asked if I was still in the market. Later I found out that the person they’d hired over me was prone to not showing up in the office and not providing any reason as to why. Eventually, he’d disappeared with a chunk of cash advance money and hadn’t been heard from since. Enter, me.

The big agency made me. I moved up to $52,000/yr. I got real health insurance, not HMO 0.005B, where you’re entitled to one mumps shot a year in the parking lot of the local Kaiser. I was surrounded by genuinely smart and nice people and the company was huge enough for me to comfortably sink into middle contributor status as I feverishly attempted to teach myself all the things I’d bluffed them into thinking I already knew. I’ve never taken a business class in my life, so I’m pretty sure I learned the vast majority of what I know about marketing by eavesdropping on conversations in that office. My slide into right-adjacent leanings continued, but I was happier than I ever had been since 2008. I played D&D campaigns with coworkers in an unused conference room on the engineering floor.

I stayed there almost four years. I might still be there today had the company’s core business not imploded. In fact, it had been imploding long before I started working there.

I was brought in as part of a mass hire to attempt to turn that implosion around. Half of those people were laid off less than a year into my tenure. Two years in another round of layoff cut the remaining staff in half. By that time I’d jumped from my editing job into something more akin to digital marketing. This, again, was luck, an epic SSSR gacha pull that should not have happened in a rational universe. Someone on the team who I’d worked with closely was leaving and I begged him to recommend me to backfill his role. The team around me was nice enough to let me do it, and even nicer to let me suck ass at my new job for a year as I learned how to do it. Once again the weight of cosmic luck and happenstance beared down on me. I’d made that jump purely for job security -- something that was more technical and more tied to revenue was bound to have more security -- and far better career/pay prospects than anything with “editor” in the title.

I came to the realization that I wasn’t particularly skilled or proficient at anything. My strength was infinite resilience, the ability to take world-ending professional white class uppercuts with a smile and keep rolling into work every morning. I was learning everything as I went on. Nothing I did had any polish and the gaps in knowledge were blatant, but pride is a frivolous luxury compared to having an office job and drawing a reliable paycheck. None of this was supposed to happen, I wasn’t supposed to be here, but fuck it, I’m going to run with it and see where this train takes me.

By that time it was 2016. November came around and everyone in the office was talking politics. I stayed up late on election night and felt the prop walls of kayfabe’d contrarian politics fall apart around me. I’d always been left economically, but the not-quite-right social concepts, bred like mold around lingering feelings of alienation and perceived emasculation, were exposed for the grabassery they were. All of the media I consumed up until that point was unequipped to address what was happening. I looked for answers in my go-to sources and found none, like a man dying of thirst pouring his canteen into his mouth only to realize it’s filled with his own piss.

The next morning I got to the office to find my desk dusted and scrubbed as it never had been since I’d started working there. At 11am an “emergency all-hands” was declared via email and employees were told to report to various conference rooms. I went into the one where everyone was informed that their positions were eliminated. The hinge had swung all the way back around to hit me in the dick. When we left the room the office was utterly empty. Those who’d survived were sent home half an hour before we were allowed out. I got a box to pack my desk with and was escorted to the exit by rent-a-cop. When I got to my car and put the key in the ignition the battery was dead. America was great again.

Anyways that’s why I’m voting for Bernie.