<The Reckoner:
21st Century Self-Portrait
(Picasa-Style, 2012)>
Reckoner's Note: There's a saying I've often heard in my travels, I'm not sure of its provenance, but it runs along these lines: "A year in clubland is a lifetime." We've probably heard many, many variations on this phrase, but it's easy to forget how temporary and transitory our life experiences often end up.
Think about it. Bands tour with one, two or (in some cases) no original members, long after the glory days run their course. Beloved stores go belly up, amid whispers and rumors. Favorite clubs close up shop. Friendships founder over threadbare or nonexistent pretexts. Jobs dry up without warning. Newspapers and magazines wind down, after exhausting their reasons for being. Political parties carry on without their founders. We may not care to admit it, but that date stamp on our forehead is often closer than we realize.
Blogs are no different. When we started Ramen Noodle Nation in 2012, we had no great expectations, beyond chronicling our own mounting frustrations with the American system, and its increasingly one-sided division of spoils. Like many blog founders, we figured that, after a year or two, the whole experience would run its course, and we'd move on to other creative pursuits.
That hasn't happened.
Although sociopolitical commentary remains at the dark, snarky heart of Ramen Noodle Nation, our themes have broadened, as our focus has broadened. At various times, the Squawker and I have tackled classic punk records, as well as the digital sweatshop, food insecurity, pay to play culture, and the realities of bringing home the political revolution, to name a few -- all driven by a purely personal slant, as only we can do it.
Along the way, we've also taken time to celebrate outsider art and writing, whether it's our own efforts in those categories, or somebody else that we want to highlight...which just goes to show, that we aren't always in a dark mood here at Ramen Noodle Nation Towers, where the crows and the ravens don't mind keeping us company.
We're still going strong, which means, in short, that this experience is still doing something for us. We hope you feel the same way. The Squawker and I recently sat down to discuss these, and other developments -- the highlights follow below, along with a few of our greatest hits. Here's to the next 300 posts, then. --The Reckoner & The Squawker
<"We Only Had $5 Between Us">
RECKONER: The reason I wanted to do
this with you is because, I just suddenly realized – in looking at
the number of posts, this would be number 300. I thought, “Well,
usually, people do something or other...”
SQUAWKER: I never did on mine,
but...
RECKONER: Well, it seemed appropriate, so...
SQUAWKER: All right. I don't even know what
number of posts I'm on. I think I have a thousand (laughs).
RECKONER: In the case of this particular
effort, what was it that made you want to do it, to begin with, when
we started, back in 2012? Because if I recall, you kind of started
it, and then, I sort of chimed in, once you got into a groove?
SQUAWKER: It was kind of my idea, because I
was talking about doing a book – I actually wanted to write a book
with you, about being poor, and falling down the ladder of American
society. Because I had always struggled in adulthood, and I was
raised upper middle-class, and I had no idea what was waiting for me.
Though, in my case, disability kind of
threw me off the ladder, rather than falling down from my own lack of
effort, or so. But I remember saying to you, “Hey, let's write a
book on being poor in America,” and then, I thought, “Hey, why
don't we do a blog on it?”
But I came up with that name (Ramen
Noodle Nation). Because when I was poor, I always had to eat all
these damn Ramen noodles (laughs), remember?
RECKONER: That's where you got it from?
SQUAWKER: Yeah. Remember, in Chicago, there
was one day, we had $5 to eat the whole day, and we only had $5
between us. And I had to go and buy two of those Ramen noodles to
eat. Then I could eat tuna fish – I wasn't allergic to it yet –
and I made Ramen noodles and tuna for dinner.
RECKONER: Yeah, and I remember when you were
working at that crappy job of yours, you'd give me, I think it was, a
fiver every day, or for the days you were working?
SQUAWKER: Yeah (laughs).
RECKONER: I thought, “OK. I've got just got
enough to get that one really cheap brand of pizza, and I can get,
maybe, a two-liter or two to go with it.”
SQUAWKER: Yeah, and that's all you could get.
RECKONER: That would be my dinner in that era.
SQUAWKER: Remember, they used to let me eat at
work, but they got annoyed if I ate too much there.
RECKONER: Yeah.
SQUAWKER: So really, all I could ever get was
a sandwich. It's not like I could make myself a complete meal. I
could get away with making myself an egg sandwich in the morning,
before the kids were awake, or eating a turkey bologna sandwich. And
those kids, they were skinny, but they never bought them really good
food there. It was all just really processed, and cheap stuff, and it
wasn't really good at all.
RECKONER: Yeah, the thing I remember about
that era the most was, “Eat everything you can now, because this is
going to have to last you for awhile, till the next time.”
SQUAWKER: Well, I found out later that your
metabolism actually gets worse if you're on a feast or famine (type
of diet), if you're one of those people. Some people, if they have
less food the whole day, they'll lose weight, but I have the kind of
metabolism, where if I starve all day, and then, finally food comes
in, the metabolism's dropped down, I gain weight. That's what happens
to people, easily.
RECKONER: Yeah, well, nobody gave a shit, that
was the problem. And so, it was what it was.
SQUAWKER: Yeah.
<"I Wanted To Provide A Voice">
RECKONER: All right, so that's where we got
the title from – then, what were you were trying to do? Since you
started by yourself, and I joined in, at a certain point?
SQUAWKER: I guess I wanted to provide a voice
for people who were poor. Everyone's always like, “Shut up.” No
one wants to listen. And then, when you're out in society, you always
have to pretend like everything's great. You know what I mean? You
have to hide how poor you are, as much as possible, and I thought,
“Well, what would it be like to actually have a website, where
people talk about what it's like to be poor?”
Now, of course, if you're poor in
America – well, this may not be true forever now, because America
seems to be collapsing – but poverty in America has different
levels. When we lived in Chicago, we were very near the lowest level,
but we weren't at the homeless level.
RECKONER: Right.
SQUAWKER: The homeless level is the worst. And
we were maybe at the step above homelessness. But here, while we've
had money problems and struggles, we at least have stable housing,
we've been able to keep cars running. That's another level of it,
where you're up a little bit. Like in Chicago, we couldn't even
afford the bus, we had no medicine, we only had total, base level
charity medical care – living in fear.
Back then, you couldn't even sit in a
park, without worrying. Here, it's pretty safe in this park, and we
live in the town this park is in. We don't have to worry about
anybody coming up to mug or rob us.
RECKONER: “Accosted,” I believe, is the
police term for it.
SQUAWKER: Yeah (laughs). I mean, we could
probably sit here for four or five hours, and be left alone. Maybe
the cops would come by, if you sat out here too long. But you know
what I mean.
RECKONER: After dark, maybe.
SQUAWKER: Yeah, after dark. No one cares,
so... Generation X and below are falling down the ladder. No one even
lets us talk about (our experiences). It's like, “Baby Boomer this,
Baby Boomer that.” We never even get to hear about anybody else's
reality.
<"There's No One To Talk To...">
RECKONER: OK, so, given the fact that now,
suddenly, almost a decade of this has gone by, how do you feel about
what you've done? Do you feel it has accomplished that goal you set
out to achieve?
SQUAWKER: I think we did succeed, as far as
content, but I do wish it had been able to get more traffic.
RECKONER: Well, I don't know, it's improved
over the last few years. I think that has a lot to do with the way
things are, of course.
SQUAWKER: Yeah. Get more readership out there,
and things like that.
RECKONER: Because, remember, it's hard to get
people to think about these things, when things are deemed to be okay
– it's when it all falls apart, that, suddenly, it becomes more
noticeable to people.
SQUAWKER: That's one thing about being poor in
America. There's no one to talk to about it. It's like, there's no
one I can really call up and talk to, about the reality of my life.
That's the worst part of it. I can find people online.
I mean, right now, as long as I keep
the rent paid, and other bills, I don't care, but it's like, before,
when I was in those positions, no one wanted to hear it. There was
always so much, just silencing through it all.
RECKONER: Okay. So is there something you'd
still like to do, that you haven't done yet? And if so, what?
SQUAWKER: I'd like to get more guest bloggers
in here, and tell their stories.
RECKONER: Yeah, I've had that same thought,
too.
SQUAWKER: I also think, maybe we should
provide some voices, in terms of how coronavirus might affect lives.
We're actually in a better position, because I get a disability
check, and you work from home, so you know, there's at least little
bit coming in every week, though you lost a lot of your newspaper
freelance work, but we could survive. But I wonder about all of these
people who are gonna become homeless.
<"Everybody Wants The Same Amount Of Money">
RECKONER: Right, because I believe all the
temporary mortgage and rent exemptions are about to be lifted in
three weeks, or something (like that)? I think I read that somewhere.
SQUAWKER: While we've paid our rent on time
every month, how many of these people have three or four months worth
of rent piled up, and then, they got the next month's to pay? I mean,
it just seems insane to me, that they expect people to pay all these
bills, and they aren't making any money.
And I noticed that everybody wants the
same amount of money, and even the cable company raised their prices
on us, during a global pandemic. “Oh yeah, your bill was 160, but
now it's going to be 220 a month.”
RECKONER: Yeah, I feel fine about what we're
doing, and I've tried to develop some other themes, like the stuff
about food insecurity, and the creative class, and such.
SQUAWKER: I do think we're gonna be having a
Great Depression, especially if they're not able to stop the virus.
If you think about it, all the social discourse has basically been
destroyed, and everybody that decides to say, “To hell with it,”
they're all taking a gamble with their lives, immediately.
RECKONER: That's very true.
SQUAWKER: So that's not the environment where
everybody wants to go out to eat, and spend money, and have the
economy humming. I mean, even we eat out a little bit, at cheap
places we want to (have) stay in business. I don't feel like eating
inside restaurants yet.
RECKONER: There was a consultant in a news
story who put it beautifully – and his answer was something along
the lines of, “You can throw as much money at me as you want. But
that doesn't mean I'm going to take a vacation, or go on an
airplane.” And I suspect that's the mood that a lot of people may
be in, even if they had money.
SQUAWKER: Yeah. Well, I've been hospitalized
before, for lung problems, and I suffer a disability where I don't
have normal breathing capabilities – and I think a lot of people
who've never been sick, they don't take this into consideration.
RECKONER: Well, I think the other fascinating
thing, to me, about this, is – people never really thought about
how everything was so intertwined. Because your ability to pay rent
is directly intertwined, to your ability to earn money, or what
little money you get, to pay it. And once that's taken away, there
goes that money. There goes all those things that you used to take
for granted.
SQUAWKER: Oh, one thing they're not talking
about is, with medical care – most people who have decent jobs,
they get all their medical care through their employer. But now, all
the jobs are gone, all the medical care is gonna end.
And of course, we still have two fools
that are against Medicare For All. I know a lot of people are voting
for Biden are only doing so, because they think the Orange Demented
Sociopath is gonna be the death of us all. They don't like Biden.
Biden is kind of being forced on us, and while he has shown
concession to a couple of things, he's not Bernie.
RECKONER: Well, who could be, though? We want
to build from that, because he's not going to be around forever.
<"People Just Don't Have The Connections...">
SQUAWKER: The American lifestyle is kind of
screwed up, too, and many people have figured that out. We all live
in our own little boxes, and people just don't have the connections
and community that they used to have anymore. Me and you, we've found
community in a few places – but it's either been short-lived, based
on this club, and this club – we've found it in the UU Fellowship
that we have now. But even that's been stripped down, by coronavirus.
Sometimes, I wonder about my life. It's
been like, a collapse life. I get sick and disabled in my late
twenties. I have the economic bottom fall out. I have no medical
care, it takes years to get diagnosed. We live in Chicago, try to
make it there, and don't have it work out there, partially because of
my health.
Then we move to this little boondock
town in the middle of nowhere, and even that place, while it seems
stable when we move there, it falls apart in 2004, with the few
factories they had.
RECKONER: Because, if I remember correctly,
there were three major employers that closed. I think there were a
thousand jobs went out, between the three of them – that's what I
remember. And all of a sudden, you had abandoned houses, blocks of
them, and businesses closing, left and right.
SQUAWKER: Yeah. I remember, we had all these
restaurants close, that had all these people leaving town. That place
could get depressing, because, remember, we left Chicago to be there
– and these people still saw big cities as dream life, and they
hated the town. They were always saying, “This town sucks, why the
hell did you ever move here?” And I was thinking, “Well, my life
in Chicago was even worse, with all the crime.” And I wanted to
settle there for life, and it's like, I just didn't get to. There was
nothing to depend on anymore.
I don't think the center's even holding
in American society – we could be collapsing. I know you don't
agree with this, but I do believe that there could be a full societal
collapse soon.
RECKONER: Well, there'd be a few more things
that would have to happen – because, typically, if you look back at
the ones (collapses) that have happened, there were several different
knock-on effects that had to take place. They will, I think, at some
point throw more money at it. They have already done it once or
twice, and I don't think they're going to be avoiding that a third or
fourth time, even.
Because, as I've said, the people that
are deemed to be in jeopardy will want to take something back home,
to show the folks back home: “OK. It wasn't everything you wanted,
but you got something.”
SQUAWKER: Yeah.
RECKONER: People will tend to cling to that
idea of, “Well, something...”
<"They Gave Us A Penny (Oh, Gee, Thanks...)">
SQUAWKER: I question capitalism. I don't
believe in the capitalist system anymore. Which, I know, anyone who's
a Boomer – a lot of conservative Boomers, they're all ready to get
out the smelling salts when you talk that way. But they have to
realize, this system isn't working for most people anymore.
I know I'm disabled, I'm kind of out of
it, but the jobs, for the people I know, who are working – and I
remember my years, where I had to piece together four and five
part-time, crummy temporary jobs. Even the full-time ones I got here
and there, they never lasted forever. It wasn't because I was fired,
it was often because the money ran out, or they cut back business.
What do you think, though, of all these
efforts to consider a whole new system? We're old, so I doubt we're
gonna enjoy the benefits, but if people were able to turn things
around, at least, maybe the young here, today's Millennials and down,
would be able to at least enjoy a different type of life.
RECKONER: I'm old enough to remember the days
when banks competed on the interest rates they would give you.
SQUAWKER: Yeah, I remember that. I remember
having little savings accounts, when I was young – like Kid, and
Teenager – and I had 3% (interest), and you actually could watch
your money grow, if you left it alone. And we know that doesn't
happen anymore. Even used to get a few dollars a month added to our
bank accounts.
RECKONER: Actually, you know what we got, not
too long ago?
SQUAWKER: What?
RECKONER: A penny.
SQUAWKER: That's sad (laughs).
RECKONER: When I went to look at the account
the other day –
SQUAWKER: They gave us a penny. Oh, gee,
thanks (laughs).
RECKONER: It's always been one cent, or two
cents, yeah. I always laugh about that, because I thought, “Well,
we've certainly come a long way from what you just described.”
SQUAWKER: Oh, wow.
<Feast Or Famine, Boom Or Bust>
RECKONER: That's one of the things we've sort
of gotten into. It's all or nothing, basically. Feast or famine, boom
or bust.
SQUAWKER: Well, that's how this society is,
either for the very rich, or, “Forget the poor.”
RECKONER: The biggest thing, I think, that
needs to happen, is – if they're going to pass anything, they need
to pass ways that people could actually create wealth for themselves.
Because, as I've said, Annie's Adjunct Army isn't going to be able to
do that. Not on a part-time wage.
Well, let's wrap this up in a neat
little bow.
SQUAWKER: Okay.
RECKONER: What do you hope to see for the next
300?
SQUAWKER: Well, I think we should explore,
maybe, more coronavirus (themes), and surviving – where things
could go – one thing I've thought about writing about is talk about
the intersection of, intersectionality, of economic justice, and
other forms of it, such as racial justice, disability rights,
different issues like that, that I wanna explore.
RECKONER: All right. Well, here's to the next
300, or whatever it ends up being.
