De-Bug Writings: A Super Market Story

This piece was written specifically for De-Bug magazine’s forth coming book compiling a combination of best articles, poetry and content appearing in the magainze as well as unpublished original content (though the publishing project seems to be on permanent hiatus for some reason). In oder to bring together my writings for different project I’ve compiled my three pieces written for De-Bug into a “Page” in the right hand bar. Here you’ll also find a page of some of the writings from the Furious Five Revolutionary Collective that I was part of from 2003 until our dissolussion in 2006.

 

A Super Market Story:

Get Out As Fast As You Can 

 

By Adam W.

             Working at a grocery store is a world to its own. Although the customers strolling through the aisles may not see it, the workers at a store can be like a family ­ brothers and sisters, older parent figures, crazy Uncles. And just like a family, there can be generation gaps. At my store, we had mainly two kind of folks, the 20-something-workers, many who were slowly working their way through community college, and the older workers we called the “lifers.” It wasn’t just how the young folks saw them, but how they saw themselves — stuck.
            In the break room was where I would chop it up with the lifers. When the managers would do their paperwork in the early mornings, Gary, a lifer with words of wisdom, would sit across the break room table from me.
            “You gotta get out of that credit card debt, start saving money right away. Are you going to school?”  he would lecture. With a stern look and a pointing finger covered by a rubber glove, he would talk straight to me like an older uncle. He would tell the story about back in his day, working at Safeway was like being a teacher, nurse, or a firefighter. It was a respected job that you could buy a house and send your kids to college with.

The name “machete408”

  Back when I was more on my Mexico kick, I read Barry Carr’s Marxism and Communism in Twentieth Century Mexico (which is the key rendering of the communist movement and has some excellent discussion on the PCM [Partido Comunista de Mexico]on issues of development, its relations with the PRI and anarchism in Mexico generally) and was I stuck on an excerpt of a poem by poet and actress Graciela Amador:

“The machete serves to cut cane, to open up paths in shady woods, to decapitate snakes, to cut down weeds, and to humble the pride of the impious rich” (37)

 

  The poem describes the choice of name for a publication Amador and other artist and intellectuals surrounding the PCM launched. El Machete was formed by artist/intellectuals Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco (and I imagine Khalo, but she always is brushed to the way side in history) as a fortnightly publication of their Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors. It waas the de facto unofficial organ of the PCM in the early twenties and with its original artwork, the most successful Communist publication in Latin America at its time. I once read of a 1960’s Chicano movement paper in San Jose of the same name as well. 

 

  Moving away from historical digression, I was caught by the imagery evoked in the name and the brief poem. The machete is used for daily work, to cut down the oppressor, clear your path when surrounded by obstructions and to uproot and kill the snakes that block your way and the weeds that stop your seeds from growing. What could be more revolutionary?

 

  The numbers 408 is of course because “machete” by itself was taken and what better to complement that than a little of my San Jose nationalism.

 

 

Magical Thinking is Time Standing Still

Well now we have an explaination thanks to my sister who forwarded this to me. I’ve worked hard to get better on this. Time has always been problematic for me. It is true that I consistently underestimate the amount of time it will take me to do even the most mundane task. This is the reason why if you look carefully around my house you can see a clock in nearly every room. And 5 minutes ahead for good measure.

I’m Not Really Late,
I’m Just Indulging
In Magical Thinking

Wall Street Journal,

November 13, 2007; Page B1

The problem with lateness is that it’s more contagious than punctuality.

When James Connelly worked on a public-utilities commission, one of the five commissioners would be late, invariably triggering others to make phone calls and sharpen pencils while they waited. “What started as four out of five [attending], and then briefly became five, had dwindled to three,” he says. “It was like some kind of Marx Brothers skit.”

He tried to reform it by starting the meeting anyway. But he found that attendees would recap the issues for the tardy person, thereby erasing the penalty. He never succeeded in reforming the chronic laggards.

My quotation, poem and fortune cookie wisdom collection

Scattered around my room, on my bulletin board and my hall way are collections of sayings and quotes that I’ve picked up over the years. Each of them have inspired me (even if momentarily like the fortune cookies), meant something to me at a particular moment in life, hold a memory or even represent an ideal of sorts.

The fortune cookies I’ve collected for a long time, but the quotes I remember the specific moment I started collecting them. Back when my sister was in high school the furnace closet was in the hallway right out side the doors to our rooms. One day she put up some type of quote, maybe it was from Maya Angelou and I had a feeling she picked it up from school. Now if you’ve been in a Hallmark store lately they have a whole series of cards with her poetry. Its decently poetic, much more substantive than the usual greeting card fluff you’ll find out there and a little bit on the conscious and empowering tip. Well, this quote my sister put up was something along these lines. I didn’t think it was bad, but it just wasn’t the type of stuff I wanted to wake up and be the first thing I read as walked to the bathroom in the morning. So decided to put up a competing set of quotes right next to it. I think it first started with Mao’s pear quote, Gramsci’s maxim and Nietzsche one on the abyss that Mumia prefaces his history on the Black Panther’s with. It began as one page, but has grown to a closet wall of cut outs. -AW

 

Revolution is a “resistance movement agsinst the destruction of love in social reality.“

-Pual Tillich, as quoted by Eric Fromm in “Marx’s Conception of Socialism”

Men [and women] are the producers of their conceptions [and] ideas. … In direct contract to German philosophy which ascends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven.

 -Karl Marx, The German Ideology 

As long as there is in our land a heart with pain or an eye full of years, my dream and my vision will have to survive.

 

-Ricardo Flores Magón

The more I raise my eyes to it, the higher it seems; the more I bore into it, the harder it becomes. I see it before me, but suddenly it is behind me. … even if I wanted to stop, I could not do so. Having exhausted me ability, I still seem to find something standing high above. Though I wish to follow it, there is no way to do so.

 –The Analects of Confucius, Book nine, verse eleven  

The begining

So, I decided to start up a blog. I haven’t completely decided what all I would use this for, so I imagine a running work in progress. I hope to lay out ruminations on life, pressing realities and the sublime (or just the funny and mundane). I won’t set this up as a very public blog. Rather it will start private and I’ll slowly share it with friends. Forgive my spelling and grammer mistakes. If you are picky you will find many.

-A. Weaver 

Sunday, November 11, 2007