Daily Briefs: Memorial Day Edition
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By CHRIS PACKHAM
If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains/Every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains. Ever since my co-workers appointed me as their union delegate, I have to go to the weekly Friday night IBEW Local 124 meetings while they go out, get drunk and accumulate the socially embarrassing experiences that will make for such great reading when they write their recovery memoirs. When the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers agreed to let The Pitch join, it was with the understanding that (A) None of us would actually try to touch anything electrical and (B) I had to bring refreshments to the meetings. With my thin, flapping wrists and my beret, I don’t completely fit in with all the beefy, sweating electricians, but there’s still a certain camaraderie down at the Union Hall that helps us overcome the sacrifice of an entire Friday night.
What with the downtown renaissance, there’s been a lot of work for members, so they’re always happy to see the kind of raw corporate boosterism exemplified by this editorial in The Kansas City Star, even though they’re sort of vaguely suggesting that we’ve reached the end of the line with tax-increment financing. I’m nothing if not honest and also extremely sexy, so I’m just telling you this whole story so you’ll see my obvious bias when I call for more downtown TIFs. They put food on my table and cars in my garage, and someday I’m hoping they’ll put a yacht on the trailer behind my Ford F-350. Speaking of which:
Rising gasoline prices hit the rich in the crotches of their diamond-encrusted pocketbooks: It’s M. Night Shyamalan’s Memorial Day weekend, and in a shock surprise twist that will leave you gasping, the price of gasoline went up yesterday. To $3.73 per gallon, which is about the cost of the GPC cigarettes you West Virginians pick up with all your scratchers every Friday after cashing your paycheck. I’ve got enough worries in my life, from the talking lump in my shoulder to hiding my car from the repo man in a different place every single night. Now KMBC Channel 9 wants me to worry about how expensive it is for the fucking aristocrats to operate their boats when gas costs $4 at the marina. It’s hard out there for a Posh, what with the high cost of sea-urchin caviar. And after you spend all week bossing around the help in Harvard-accented Spanglish, I know you just want to gas up your Stratos and run down poor people on their rented jet-skis. But you know what this is? The world’s tiniest fucking Microsoft Zune, playing compressed violin music just for the Rockefellers. So, enjoy your lakeside resort, fancy. I’ll spend the holiday weekend doing what I do every weekend, which is working my third job down at the payday loan office in midtown.
Let them eat ramen: The foie gras-slurping patricians at Channel 9 also have some advice for the poors who can’t afford to go on cocaine-fueled yachting vacations with their 20-year-old “assistants” over Memorial Day Weekend, which is basically: Suck it, Untouchables. After a brief preamble about planting gardens, the story abandons all egalitarian pretense and just talks about how regular people can’t even afford food these days. As a public service to poor folks, The Pitch suggests spending Memorial Day weekend huffing jenkem from a mayonnaise jar and wandering around the Power & Light District with the hallucinatory ghosts of your dead relatives.
