... But What Can I Do?

Okay, fellow drunks, I'm out of here for a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I recommend watching Charlie Booker's Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque take on our abusive relationship with the television, computer, and smartphone screens that put us in touch the terrible world all around us. One episode has recently been optioned for a film by Robert Downey, Jr., so if you watch it now, you can say you were on board with it before it became popular State-side.

I'll write at you soon. And remember to Love Each Other. 

Doorman review

Full disclosure: I donated $20 to the Indiegogo for this project. I also stand to gain nothing from it's potential success, save some measure of pride. So take this review as you will. 

A person toiling much below the upper-middle class strata assumes a sponge-like experience, absorbing abuse and humiliation as an understood aspect of earning room and board on this cosmic rock of ours. Some among us use that fodder to fuel outside projects that, at bottom, provide a catharsis and a bonding point with our fellow drones. At the other end, a select few create something like art. Doorman is closer to the latter.

It's hard to do a spoiler-free review of a ten minute film. So if this seems short, there's the reason. The Doorman project is best understood as a pilot, introducing the world to the filmic version of Doorman's truly excellent blog, with more to follow, should the festival scene prove fair. The pilot is funny, stuffed with pathos, and even features a touch of redemption toward the end--the kind of minor, fleeting victory that provides working slobs with just enough energy to keep us coming back for more. Minor nitpick: that redemption comes a bit too easily. But within the time constraints, Doorman gives the story all the breathing room he can. The blog has too much material for a feature length, so one must temper expectations (and I would watch a three-hour epic of this).

In a world stocked with Sharknadoes and Adam Sandler's Fuck It, They're Paying Us Anyway 2, it's beyond refreshing to get a project that has a more than a few sprigs of heart thrown in. You can't watch it yet. But I hope one day you can.

Grade: A-

Dogfish Head Sixty-One

Dogfish Head Sixty-One, essentially their famous 60-Minute IPA tossed with Syrah grape must, pours dark red, almost purple in the right light.

It smells softly of grapes (there's red wine DNA in there, after all), but lacks a strong nose.

Those grapes are apparently saving themselves for the mouth, hitting the tongue first and last, with dashes of sweet malt in between.

Sixty-One has a pleasantly dry finish and borders on the thick-bodied, but its hop character is disappointingly low, given its roots in the "continuously hopped" IPA (and being from a brewery that's never feared hops... or anything else, really).

Dogfish Head once again earns points for an appealing idea, but the final result is flat enough to leave the drinker wanting for the original 60-Minute IPA.

Grade: C+

The Student Loans Grotesque

There's nothing like starting the week in a boiling rage over this country's surrealistic student loans situation. For me, it actually started last week, when a friend of mine posted this Seattle Times article to Facebook, describing how, once upon a time, summer jobs could pay for college because college costs were stunningly low. And how that experience taught an entire generation--the awesomely responsible people who are in charge today--that hard work and elbow grease were the ticket out of debt, so they can comfortably look the other way on the debt their children have incurred. They graduated debt-free (or debt-negligible, anyway) and then shut the door behind them. As Danny Westneat writes,

[L]ast week The Seattle Times featured a crop of harried UW students looking rueful and broke. The story said skeptical state legislators often say how “they worked their way through college. And then they ask: Why don’t students do that today?”

Of all our delusions, we old farts cling to this bootstrap one the most. We worked our way up on sweat and chicken grease, we say. Can’t this generation? What’s wrong with them?

What’s wrong is that after we got ours, we cut it off for them.

And then this morning, Salon's Joan Walsh explores the toxic student loan culture, aided and abetted by, yep, Congress, those lovable scamps. On one end of the Hill, we have a Senate that apparently refuses to stop the coming student loan interest rate hike from 3.4% to 6.8% (which goes into effect today). On the other end, the House has a bill that introduces market based reforms. This is presumably the same market that's going to take a staggering blow when an entire generation can't buy houses or cars, or generally engage in the "consumer economy" market-obsessed wonks think about when they masturbate.

Walsh links to this piece by David Dayen, who describes how student debts are lot more like indentured servitude than traditional debts. They can't be altered, refinanced, or even forfeit via bankruptcy. Even those who don't graduate end up paying their tab, which would be a reasonable rule, if not for the fact that we're taking about 17- and 18-year olds doing what they're told to do and signing on for ballooning tuition costs. Dayen, after highlighting various congressional proposals, says that "this entire system must be overhauled," which is a terrifying revelation in our current problem-solving climate.

I ended up lucky among some of my fellow private school alums, amassing merely $16,000 in debt. And my wife didn't have any. But now she's just finished grad school and I'm going to start in the fall (at an in-state public school this time). When all is done, she and I could be looking at six figures of debt and can anticipate paying that off for the next thirty years--or longer, if interest rates rise again. And why the hell shouldn't we expect that?

If you want to tell us that the problem is ours, just for having gone to school, you can--politely--fuck right off. We live in a part of the country that all but requires post-graduate degrees, particularly for people whose career prospects have dwindled in a stagnant economy that crippled our generation's prospects before we even entered into it. Maybe we can blame ourselves for buying too much into the allure of education as the silver bullet, and for (speaking only for myself here) not taking school as seriously as I should've. But even those admissions are distractions, shouted into the maelstrom in an effort to downplay the very real concerns about spiraling costs and an economy that still demands college diplomas. The conversation is driven into the quagmire of lazy talking points, from which no problem emerges solved.

This is the problem with issues that affect other people. In the future. As long as the media has aberrational Joe Mihalic figures to point to, student debt will never seem severe enough and it will never garner the attention it deserves. Never mind the fact that it deeply affects a rising generation that has enough problems averting lost generation status, with belittlement and patronization flying at us from newsstands. Student loans will, by extension, impact everyone in the not too distant future. But we can't deign to fix these problems, to examine why college is so expensive, to reinvest in public education, perhaps even to explore debt forgiveness. We can't do those things.

Because... money, I guess.

I'm not even entirely joking when I say that global warming and a post-apocalyptic future suddenly don't sound so bad. As I stalk the wastelands, fending off the hungry fangs of the über-mutants, hoarding the half-gallon of fuel that I wrested from the stiff fingers of a small child--my only currency save my poor, worn out asshole--I will take significant solace in the knowledge that no one will be left to extract student loan payments from me.